MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by otherme123 | 2026-02-19 17:38:42+00:00
They all suck. OpenAI ignores scanning limits and disabled routes in robots.txt, after a 429 "Too Many Requests" they retry the same url half a dozen of times from different IPs in the next couple of minutes, and they once DoS'ed my small VPS trying to do a full scan of sitemaps.xml in less than one hour, trying and retrying if any endpoint failed.

Google and others at least respects both robots.txt and 429s. They invested years scanning all the internet, so they can now train on what they have stored in their server. OpenAI seems to assume that MY resources are theirs.
by permo-w | 2026-02-19 17:38:46+00:00
These are minor tweaks. You could remove these and the speedrunning community/HC would lose little. A second account in spectator mode is a slightly less convenient version of freecam and the speedrunning community is kidding themselves in the first place allowing any tweaks to RNG whatsoever. They could ban that tomorrow and there'd be some grumbling but nothing would change viewership-wise
by chadders13 | 2026-02-19 17:39:28+00:00
Hi HN,
I built SheepCat-TrackingMyWork originally to solve my own daily struggles with staying organized and remembering what I actually achieved by 5 PM.
I've spent my career heavily focused on C#, SQL, and JavaScript, using traditional, rigid enterprise ticketing systems. The problem is those tools clash with how my brain processes tasks. Dealing with executive dysfunction and context switching meant I needed a tool that actively helps me track my day without requiring me to constantly manage a complex UI. I built this primarily for myself, but I'm sharing it in the hopes that it might help other "neurospicy" folks who find standard tools overwhelming.
How it works:
Instead of a giant, static to-do list, the app runs in the background and gently prompts you every hour: "What task have you done?" You can also manually add tasks in the meantime.
If connected to a local Ollama instance, the app takes those entries, generates an hourly summary, and saves everything to a local CSV. At the end of the day, the local LLM reads through your daily logs and generates a full summary of all tasks and main takeaways. It basically handles your time-tracking and daily stand-up prep automatically.
The Tech & Privacy:
I stepped out of my usual stack and built the core application in Python. Because work logs are highly personal, keeping data private was a strict requirement. The app is containerized with Docker and hooks into an external Ollama setup to run the LLM locally. Not a single byte of data goes to a third-party API.
The License:
I’ve open-sourced it under the GNU AGPLv3 so anyone can use, modify, and self-host it for free. However, I am also offering a paid commercial license for enterprise teams looking to implement neuro-inclusive tools without the network-copyleft restrictions of the AGPL.
I’m currently transitioning from just building this for myself to being an open-source maintainer, and I'd love your feedback:
Does the hourly prompt + CSV logging sound like a good balance between actively tracking work and minimizing cognitive load?
Thoughts on the Python/Docker architecture and how it manages the external Ollama hooks?
For those who have gone the AGPL/Commercial dual-license route, what were your biggest hurdles converting enterprise users?
Website/Docs: https://chadders13.github.io/SheepCat-TrackingMyWork-Website...
Happy to answer any questions about the code, the Ollama integration, or the design choices!
by Isamu | 2026-02-19 17:39:30+00:00
>All that "foreign aid" wasn't for charity or the goodness of anybody's heart, it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives.

You are not familiar with “win-win”, it did in fact fund a wide variety of charity out of the goodness of people on the ground who were motivated to help people. The justification for people saying “why are we doing this” is that it serves US interests to be a benefactor.

It was not a monolithic psyop to trick people, it was funding helpful programs in return for goodwill, and not that expensive to boot.

It was killed because we want tax cuts NOW and this is not a tax cut.
by chankstein38 | 2026-02-19 17:39:35+00:00
I ended up adding a "NEVER REMOVE LOGGING OR DEBUGGING INFO, OPT TO ADD MORE OF IT" to my user instructions and that has _somewhat_ fixed the problem but introduced a new problem where, no matter what I'm talking to it about, it tries to add logging. Even if it's not a code problem. I've had it explain that I could setup an ESP32 with a sensor so that I could get logging from it then write me firmware for it.
by scarecrowbob | 2026-02-19 17:39:49+00:00
Having an excuse for why you still haven't filled out the fourth-quadrent "unknown unknowns", doesn't make you "better".

It's entirely possible to dislike BHO for racist reasons, just like it's possible to think both he and the Bushes are literal war criminals for consistent reasons.

I think GWB is a war criminal who had a better understanding of North/South migration than BHO. I still think both of them, and about anyone who supports DJT for any reasons, are pretty vicious.

And, like I said, literal all folks who like DJT and dislike BHO are birthers of various stripes. That's my lived experience. Maybe you're some kind of unicorn, who knows.
by AuryGlenz | 2026-02-19 17:39:56+00:00
So we shouldn’t try? Just let the budget expand forever?

If I were king for a day I’d make it so the government agencies somewhat regularly (say, every 5-10 years or so) would be subjected to significant budget cuts (without stopping with the yearly increases they already get). That would make it similar to many businesses, and force the management at the agencies to actually figure out how to do things efficiently.

Of course, people would whine incessantly as we saw with DOGE the second those cuts hit a program where the media can cause an uproar about hungry children or health programs or whatever.
by jcranmer | 2026-02-19 17:40:33+00:00
> The justification is to force people to work until they are too old to do so.

Actually, the justification is to prevent old people from having to work. Retirement didn't really exist until the creation of pension systems in the late 19th century, and the modern social security system was a poverty alleviation measure introduced in the 1930s. Hell, social security was initially resented by older workers because of the cover it gave employers for firing them for being too old.
by just6979 | 2026-02-19 17:40:43+00:00
It only takes a cursory knowledge of what LLMs really are to understand why recreating tutorials is easy, but making actual new stuff that is well engineered (takes way way more than "passes the test suite") is difficult.

Actual novel stuff is so far out on the long tail of iterations that it's a gamble: it might pop up in an early run, or might take 2000 prompts and $20,000 worth of tokens. And it's still not really engineered, it's 10,000 monkeys with typewriters copying random shakespeare snippets off the chalkboard. At some point you'll get all of Hamlet, but most of the time you'll get garbage, and sometimes you'll get Romeo & The Taming of The Tempest.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-19 17:41:13+00:00
And health insurance as soon as the ACA is gutted and you have a pre existing condition? Sure I could retire to Costa Rica or Panama. One of those are a plan B and we will be in CR for six weeks and we are both learning Spanish - I am. decent at it.

I bet you also your idea of upper middle class is not statistically valid.

https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/
by apwheele | 2026-02-19 17:41:22+00:00
IMO Google Vertex is not any harder than AWS. AWS biggest pain is figuring out IAM roles for some of the services (batching and S3 Vectors -- I actually cut out Knowledge Bases in the book because it was too complicated and expensive). Have not personally had as big an issue figuring out Vertex.

I do have a follow up post planned on some reliability issues with the APIs I uncovered with compiling the book so much -- I would not use Google Maps grounding in production!
by Onavo | 2026-02-19 17:41:39+00:00
The attraction is that it's like the early versions of Android, you can do whatever you want with your hardware and there's nobody to tell you no.

The app store is delightfully quirky and adding a watchface is just a matter of drag and drop. There's no Gatekeeper, or hundred of pages of Terms of Services and Privacy Policies and GDPR disclaimers you have to fill out. You don't have to sacrifice your first born child to Big Tech and nor do you have to beg for root permissions on your own hardware. Whatever goes, caveat emptor. If you install malware and brick your device (a very difficult thing to do given that it's a watch), well, that's also entirely on you.

It's similar to why OpenClaw went viral; you can do whatever the fuck you want with it, nothing is wrapped up in carefully sanitized corporatism, with everything locked down to a t and filled with cover-your-ass privacy and permissions declarations that are not worth the pixels they are displayed on.

Nobody's around to nanny you and play authoritarian daddy with what you do with your watch. If you want to share offensive, pirated, or DMCAed watchfaces — go wild. If you want to build a protest app to track government thugs and civil servants — all the power to you! If you want to turn it in to a sex toy controller to use during long boring church services — well, that's between you and your faith, there's no Big Tech between God and your bedroom. It's just like the old days of Android and APKs and jailbroken iPhones. A return back to simpler days of open computing.

Your grandma won't get as much out of this watch versus an Apple Watch, but if you are a real hacker at heart, this is the device for you.
by bitwize | 2026-02-19 17:41:47+00:00
I'm glad you enjoy it. I fucking hate it. Working directly with code is part of how I approach solving software problems.

What's worse, the more I rely on the bot, the less reinforced my internal model if the code base is reinforced. Every problem the bot solves, no matter how small, doesn't feel like a problem I solved and understanding I'd gained, it feels like I used a cheat code to skip the level. And passively reviewing the bot's output is no substitute for actively engaging with the code yourself. I can feel the brainrot set in bit by bit. It's like I'm Bastian making wishes on AURYN and losing a memory with every wish. I might get a raw-numbers productivity boost now, but at what cost later?

I get the feeling that the people who go on about how much fun AI coding is either don't actually enjoy programming or are engaging in pick-me behavior for companies with AI-use KPIs.
by runjake | 2026-02-19 17:41:58+00:00
This service has already existed for centuries.

You would use an engraving service. Almost every town has one[1]. There are also online options[2].

1. https://www.google.com/search?q=brick+engraver+name_of_town&...

2. https://www.etsy.com/market/brick_engraver
by marsten | 2026-02-19 17:42:32+00:00
IMHO the EU is the best place to live if you're a rank-and-file worker, and the US is the best place to live if you're ambitious.

EU integration brings some advantages but it also becomes harder to experiment. Ideally you'd have a few member states vying to become the Shenzhen of Europe but that won't happen under EU integration.
by zhyder | 2026-02-19 17:42:33+00:00
Agree, can't wait for updates to the diffusion model.

Could be useful for planning too, given its tendency to think big picture first. Even if it's just an additional subagent to double-check with an "off the top off your head" or "don't think, share first thought" type of question. More generally would like to see how sequencing autoregressive thinking with diffusion over multiple steps might help with better overall thinking.
by ericmcer | 2026-02-19 17:42:47+00:00
The military is a huge jobs program though, it does provide a way out if you are low income. Some of my good friends had bad childhoods and 4 years in the military (navy, marines) did work out a lot of their issues, pay for their college and get them on some kind of path.

It would be way better if we had jobs programs that built infrastructure and improved public works, but I don't know if converting from `military` -> `direct handouts` would be an improvement.
by nick__m | 2026-02-19 17:43:08+00:00
I actually like the forced saving of Québec. I also have a defined benefit pension plan, a TFSA and RRSP but I am happy to be forced to contribute the RRQ for the general welfare of the province even though I know how manage my portfolio.

Considering that they also have to consider economic development in their investment decisions, the RRQ funds are well managed by the CDPQ.
by atonse | 2026-02-19 17:43:11+00:00
Not just coding. everything else I do.

I hate writing proposals. It's the most mind numbing and repetitive work which also requires scrutinizing a lot of details.

But now I've built a full proposal pipeline, skills, etc that goes from "I want to create a proposal" (it collects all the info i need, creates a folder in google drive, I add all the supporting docs, and it generates a react page, uses code to calculate numbers in tables, and builds an absolutely beautiful react-to-pdf PDF file.

I have a comprehensive document outline all the work our company's ever done, made from analyzing all past proposals and past work in google drive, and the model references that when weaving in our past performance/clients.

It is wonderful. I can now just say things like "remove this module from the total cost" and without having to edit various parts of the document (like with hand-editing code). Claude (or anything else) will just update the "code" for the proposal (which is a JSON file) and the new proposal is ready, with perfect formatting, perfect numbers, perfect tables, everything.

So I can stay high level thinking about "analyze this module again, how much dev time would we need?" etc. and it just updates things.

If you'd like me to do something like this with your company, get in touch :) I'm starting to think (as of this week) others will benefit from this too and can be a good consulting engagement.
by onion2k | 2026-02-19 17:43:29+00:00
Why bother at all?

AI stops coding being about the journey, and makes it about the destination. That is the polar opposite of most people's coding experience as a professional. Most developers are not about the destination, and often don't really care about the 'product', preferring to care about the code itself. They derive satisfaction from how they got to the end product instead of the end product itself.

For those developers who just want to build a thing to drive business value, or because they want a tool that they need, or because they think the end result will be fun to have, AI coding is great. It enables them to skip over (parts of) the tedious coding bit and get straight to the result bit.

If you're coding because you love coding then obviously skipping the coding bit is going to be a bad time.
by WaitWaitWha | 2026-02-19 17:43:39+00:00
I split step 4 in their "high level, this is the general flow for data migrations".

4.0 Freeze old system

4.1 Cut over application traffic to the new system.

4.2 merge any diff that happened between snapshot 1. and cutover 4.1

4.3 go live

to me, the above reduces the pressure on downtime because the merge is significantly smaller between freeze and go live, than trying to go live with entire environment. If timed well, the diff could be minuscule.

What they are describing is basically, live mirror the resource. Okay, that is fancy nice. Love to be able to do that. Some of us have a mildly chewed bubble gum, a foot of duct tape, and a shoestring.
by atomicnature | 2026-02-19 17:43:43+00:00
If you read the article carefully -- I've dealt with an alternative scenario as well -- where we may have smaller codebases with larger blast radius. As to disposable software, it's harder to get traction/adaption when things constantly break or are slow or the experience is crappy in general. To make it simpler - all else being equal - as a user would you use highly reviewed software, or otherwise?
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-19 17:44:10+00:00
> doesn't have the ability to generate images but it is so good at making SVG that it basically doesn't matter at this point

Yeah, since the invention of vector images, suddenly no one cares about raster images anymore.

Obviously not true, but that's how your comment reads right now. "Image" is very different from "Image", and one doesn't automagically replace the other.
by thisislife2 | 2026-02-19 17:44:19+00:00
Same here. Bought an Apple Keyboard a long time ago. Spilled some juice on it. Some keys stopped working. That's when I learnt that a $200+ Apple Keyboard isn't even water resistant unlike the previous $25-50+ keyboard I had. That was the first major red-flag about Apple I had. The soldered RAM and SSDs, and locked bootloaders on the Mac were the last straw. Will never purchase an Apple device again.
by munk-a | 2026-02-19 17:44:31+00:00
I'm actually all for automated measures of program correctness and I think that manual testing is the last resort of tight budgets outside of highly complex integration issues. Adding more automated test cases that are built in to the CI pipline from the unit level to the highest levels (as long as they're not useless fluff) usually ensures a much lower level of defects. AI can help with that process, but only if we're diligent in checking that it isn't just building pages and pages of fluff ineffective tests - so we still end up needing to check the code and the tests that AI has written and I am still concerned that that ends up being more expensive in the long run.
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-02-19 17:45:07+00:00
<< I was pointing out how Trump is targeting and killing US citizens in America for peacefully protesting and your "both both sides do it!" attempt was a U.S. citizen literally fighting against the U.S. in a warzone.

Huh? ICE is targeting illegal aliens. Protesters try to interfere ICE targeting illegal aliens.. you know their mandated duties and you are surprised at the results? For comparison, if I were to block FBI/DEA from conducting their operations by using a car, would that be acceptable from your perspective?

Naturally, the whole conversation is kinda silly, because if you know anything about this issue, then you know part of the reason 'sanctuary cities' are called that way is because local police is expected not to coordinate with ICE, which is kinda how the shitshow that you saw in twin cities is not a real issue in jurisdictions that follow federal law..

<< ICE had a specific mandate under Obama (and every other President) to go after only criminals.

And they did. Now, it certainly was something of a surprise how many are willing to protect criminals ( I am sorry, 'protect the community'. If Good actually stayed home and tended to her kids maybe she would have been alive today. But she chose badly. She should have chosen taking care of HER kids. ICE didn't do great, but I can't really fault them here.

<< You are too smart to think that either party is better than the other.

I am smart enough to distance myself. If you have any survival skills left in you, you should consider doing the same. I can't tell if you really believe the tripe you wrote, but it does not really matter. I said it before. The mood has shifted in ways you may have not noticed.
by saezbaldo | 2026-02-19 17:45:39+00:00
The bigger gap isn't time vs tokens. It's that these metrics measure capability without measuring authorization scope. An agent that completes a 45-minute task by making unauthorized API calls isn't more autonomous, it's more dangerous. The useful measurement would be: given explicit permission boundaries, how much can the agent accomplish within those constraints? That ratio of capability-within-constraints is a better proxy for production-ready autonomy than raw task duration.
by steve1977 | 2026-02-19 17:45:44+00:00
I love that story. It illustrates perfectly what fascinated me so much about visual effects as a kid, and maybe also why I lost some of that fascination when CGI took over. Even though I was also very interested in computers back then (and I really loved Tron).

There was so much creativity involved and out of the box thinking about physics and time and optics, to craft something that in the end resulted in a nice optical illusion. Like a magic trick (interestingly, in German visual and special effects are (or were) also called "Filmtricks").

Now with CGI, everything is possible and paradoxically, that makes it more boring somehow. And sometimes practical effects still look better IMHO.
by saezbaldo | 2026-02-19 17:46:06+00:00
This measures what agents can do, not what they should be allowed to do. In production, the gap between capability and authorization is the real risk. We see this pattern in every security domain: capability grows faster than governance. Session duration tells you about model intelligence. It tells you nothing about whether the agent stayed within its authorized scope. The missing metric is permission utilization: what fraction of the agent's actions fell within explicitly granted authority?
by nkassis | 2026-02-19 17:46:37+00:00
This feels like the same moment for me when I realized I couldn't keep using Gentoo and needed to move on to a Linux distribution that was ready to go without lots of manual effort. I have a family and kids I need those hours. I had the same feeling as OP of losing a fun learning activity. No longer progressing on Linux knowledge just maintaining. Granted it was good enough level to move on but it's still a loss.

I do the same as you with AI now, it's allowing me to build simple things quickly and revise later. Sometimes I never have to. I feel similarly that I'm no longer progressing as a dev just maintaining what I know. That might change I might adapt how I approach work and find the balance but for now it's a new activity entirely.

I've talked to many people over the years who saw coding as a get shit done activity. Stop when it's good enough. They never approached it really as a hobby and a learning experience. It wasn't about self progression to them. Mentioning that I read computer books resulted in a disgusted face "You can just google what you need when you need it".

Always felt odd to me, software development was my hobby something I loved not just a job. Now I think they will thrive in this world. It's pure results. No need to know a breath of things or what's out there to start on the right foot. AI has it all somewhere in it's matrix. Hopefully they develop enough taste to figure out what's good from bad when it's something that matters.
by vchuravy | 2026-02-19 17:47:00+00:00
I am very interested in improving the user-experience around precompilation and performance, may I ask why you are creating a sysimage from scratch?

> I would opt into prebuilt x86_64 generic binaries if Julia had them

The environment varial JULIA_CPU_TARGET [1] is what you are looking for, it controls what micro-architecture Julia emits for and supports multi-versioning.

As an example Julia is built with [2]:
generic;sandybridge,-xsaveopt,clone_all;haswell,-rdrnd,base(1)

[1] https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/environment-variable...

[2] https://github.com/JuliaCI/julia-buildkite/blob/9c9f7d324c94...