MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 4corners4sides | 2026-02-07 13:08:55+00:00
A compiler is another thing whose honor and pride that the models have taken from the nerds. In the past, people would debate for hours about the “dragon book” v.s. “writing interpreters” and present their cool bespoke compilers in Show HN articles. Now models can produce 100,000 lines of code over two weeks with no human intervention that actually work and can compile significant project. Which way now nerd? The models are getting better, are you?

The article has some really odd low level descriptions of bash orchestration which I suppose are important to illustrate how barebones it was. However I always feel it odd when we’re talking about agents that are lauded as borderline super intelligence and there is still low level bash being slung around – feels like we’re talking about things at the wrong level.

The point about writing extremely high quality tests reminds me a bit of the “hot mess theory of AI” (https://alignment.anthropic.com/2026/hot-mess-of-ai/) also made by anthropic where they essentially say that long horizon tasks are more likely to fall to incoherency than for a model to purposefully pursue incorrect results. This is phrased in the article as “Claude will work autonomously to solve whatever problem I give it. So it’s important that the task verifier is nearly perfect, otherwise Claude will solve the wrong problem”.

The author also observes something that I’ve realised after the initial joy of seeing an agent one shot a task wore off – for a 30 minute agent task, 25 minutes may be spent doing exploration of the environment. While it would be an offence to give a human unvetted model generated documentation and runbooks (I’m looking at you emoji ridden README.md files becoming more common across Show HN), models should commit things like this to memory for themselves to avoid repeatedly paying the “discovery tax” on every new action. Errors, hallucinations or changes cause the generated docs to fail create more busywork for the agent but agent time is less valuable than finite human life.
by 112233 | 2026-02-07 13:08:58+00:00
"If X is here to stay, as a thing that permanently increases productivity" - matches a lot of different X. Maintaining persons health increases productivity. Good education increases productivity. What is playing out now is completely different - it is both irresistible lust for omniscient power provided by this technology ("mirror mirror on the wall, who has recently thought bad things about me?"), and the dread of someone else wielding it.

Plus, it makes natural moat against masses of normal (i.e. poor) people, because requires a spaceship to run. Finally intelligence can also be controlled by capital the way it was meant to, joining information, creativity, means of production, communication and such things
by exe34 | 2026-02-07 13:09:16+00:00
underpowered machines? the only reason it needs "powerful machines" is because it's a shitty react app in the terminal. I've never seen anything else flicker like that. it's not like it's running the llm on the "underpowered machine".

kilocode runs fine. opencode runs fine. qwen code runs fine. what exactly is Claude code doing that requires so much power? I'm sorry but it sounds like you're speaking from the wrong end.
by irondhoti | 2026-02-07 13:09:34+00:00
Take a look at this https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3341301.3359640 ; shows how newer kernels are slower. I have seen supercomputers like `summit` use linux 2.xx .

There are two performance problems presented here. One is the fact that the OS waits till a static memory bank water-level before triggering a cleanup.

The second is the one you pointed out; here again one thing to consider is cassandra's compression chunk size `chunk_length_in_kb`. readahead value less than chunk size makes cassandra slow in general. take a look at this https://thelastpickle.com/blog/2018/08/08/compression_perfor... for more info on it.
by somewhereoutth | 2026-02-07 13:09:35+00:00
I suspect a lot of this is due to large amounts of liquidity sloshing around looking for returns. We are still dealing with the consequences of the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) and QE (Quantitative Easing) where money to support the economy through the Great Financial Crisis and Covid was largely funneled in to the top, causing the 'everything bubble'. The rich got (a lot) richer, and now have to find something to do with that wealth. The immeasurable returns promised by LLMs (in return for biblical amounts of investment) fits that bill very well.
by throw0101c | 2026-02-07 13:10:04+00:00
> I was in school in Wisconsin when they got rid of the teachers union; schooling improved drastically.

[citation needed]

There are all sorts of folks saying all sorts of things on the topic. Right wing publications have said it's been great:

* https://www.city-journal.org/article/wisconsin-act-10-consti...

Others are saying it reduced test scores:

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
by 4corners4sides | 2026-02-07 13:10:21+00:00
Large scale AI deployment has led to a complete change in what signal code actually conveys and what it means for maintainers. Code is no longer a yardstick for effort, care or expertise. If anything a large amount of it can be the opposite.

I read an article a while ago about how “taste is a moat” (https://wangcong.org/2026-01-13-personal-taste-is-the-moat.h...) and it kind of applies here. In that article a technically correct kernel patch was rejected since it actually just re-implemented functionality htat was available elsewhere. In the tldraw repo, users seem to clone the repo, spin up claude and then make a PR without any kind of “taste” involved.

What confuses me is the fact that tldraw is actually very good for trying to get the best out of models, and indeed, internal to tldraw, models are expected to be used and the author gets value out of them. And yet, people leave sloppy unvetted PRs. This is a social issue that we didn’t really have before since it was producing code was the difficult part. Now producing code and PRs is easy the signal v.s. Noise ratio has collapsed completely and it’s just not worth it for people to actually review this stuff.

It would be better for people to leave one line issues with video demonstrations and allow the internal team to /fix them: “In a world of AI coding assistants, is code from external contributors actually valuable at all? If writing the code is the easy part, why would I want someone else to write it?”. Is code really needed to convey problems with open source repos or is it something unnecessary that we are now unshackled from? In the case of tldraw a lot of the PRs are just the result of people running claude on issues and therefore they add absolutely zero value.
Show HN: LoKey Typer – A calm typing practice app with ambient soundscapes
by mikeyfrilot | 2026-02-07 13:10:33+00:00
I built a typing practice app for adults who want focused sessions without gamification or leaderboards. It has four modes (Focus, Real-Life, Competitive, Daily Set), an ambient sound system with 42 non-rhythmic soundscape tracks, and personalized daily exercises. All data stays on your device — no accounts, no cloud, no tracking. Works offline after first load. Open source (MIT): https://github.com/mcp-tool-shop-org/LoKey-Typer
by lazide | 2026-02-07 13:10:57+00:00
Wow, what a way to conflate consenting adults making rational economic choices (which, btw, the finger wagging in the article and here doesn’t actually PROVIDE BETTER ECONOMIC CHOICES) with…. child prostitution?

The reality is that I’m not seeing anyone proposing actually making the situation better, or addressing why people might consider these jobs better than their alternatives.

Rather people trying to shut down these jobs - and defacto pushing other people into what those people clearly seem to consider to be worse alternatives?

Having actually seen up close and personal the alternatives many of these people are facing, while I think everyone would of course prefer the nice comfy joys of an office programming job, no one here seems to be offering those people those jobs are they? In fact, people are scrambling to keep those jobs.

Instead, those folks would end up taking a similar job elsewhere, or even more fun - something likely far worse. Which is why they are applying for those jobs in the first place.

Can we make the jobs a bit better? Likely, and we should.

Does it change the nature of those jobs? Or make the alternatives better? Not a bit.
by 4corners4sides | 2026-02-07 13:11:10+00:00
This is OpenAI taking the concept of AI coworkers seriously down to the level of “identity” for these agents.

This reminded me of Kairos which came up a few days ago (https://www.kairos.computer/) however I actually feel much better and more inspired at the angle OpenAI took than the angle kairos took. OpenAI’s genuinely feels like a platform for a coworker while Kairos is yet another cool landing page, yet another agent platform with X amount of data integrations. The use cases in OpenAI’s article also felt more concrete and impressive to be honest.

The fact that “as agents have gotten more capable, the opportunity gap between what models can do and what teams can actually deploy has grown.” is definitely true. I think the analogy whose source I have forgot commented that we have F1 cars driving at 60/kmh so for a lot of enterprises they are not even at the deployment limit where improving benchmarks matter. They are still at the level of not being able to provide the right info, not having the right evaluation and improvement frameworks .etc.

Using “Opening the AI Frontier” as a heading would be in really poor taste before OpenAI released their OSS models (earning their ClosedAI moniker) but I guess it’s a bit less offensive now. I think this product combined with OpenAI FDEs is going to make a lot of large industries inaccessible to startups but there may still be value in companies like Kairos watching what OpenAI does in this space and copying them.
by 4corners4sides | 2026-02-07 13:12:04+00:00
The benchmarks look good. Slide decks and spreadsheets look better. The people must use Claude Cowork and have their Claude Code moment and figure out the consequences. It will be really interesting to see articles like this (https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey) written by people who actually care about accuracy in places like KPMG to get their perspective on things.

I remember over hearing some normal people on the bus talking about essentially orchestrating some agent scraper to pull and summarise news from 40 different sites he identified as important which put him quite ahead of his peers. These were non-technical people orchestrating an agent workflow to make them better at work.

Though there’s not much that tickles my software brain here. But the agents are coming for us all.
by gf000 | 2026-02-07 13:12:30+00:00
It's absolutely trivial to make a very strict sandbox - just a simple, mathematical Turing machine is 100% safe.

The hard part is having actual capabilities, and only WASI (which is much smaller than WASM) helps here, and it's not clear why would it be any better than other options, like LiteBox. Especially that wasm does have a small, but real overhead.
by muzani | 2026-02-07 13:12:47+00:00
I've had a zombie project running on this for many years now. I used to charge people about $25 for 'lifetime', but there's only about ~10 regular users on it, so I try to keep it alive.

Decided this is the time to make the switch over to AWS. They've been rather painful with cancellation. They required all dynos be downgraded to "Eco". Fine.

But this downgrade also incurred another $5 charge which they now required me to pay to remove the credit card. It's not much, but this is shady af.

The billing language has become increasingly shady over the years. Basic is "~$0.010/hour, Max of $7 per month". Eco is "~$0.005/hour, Flat fee of $5.00/month". But in reality, you're just being charged a flat $7 or $5 either way. Eco is visually shown as the "free" option, except it's not free at all.

I'd love to just keep using Heroku and paying some flat rate; we were talking about putting some more work & funding into the project and maybe scaling it up to thousands of users. But I have no idea what Heroku can actually scale to and how much it costs. AWS etc are also not that clear on costs, but at least their specifications is a little more detailed than "Superior performance for your very large-scale, high traffic app"
by llm_nerd | 2026-02-07 13:13:48+00:00
> Apple will make users think you're a hacker trying to trick them

Apple will make users know that there are loads of hackers trying to trick them. The threat is extremely real.

> 10,000 are gaslit into thinking you were trying to harm them

Gaslit? Again, many are absolutely trying to harm users. Pretending this is some fake threat is perverse.

As much as people like to complain about downloaded software having restrictions, or encouraging the developer to be verified by Apple, we had already entered a world where users were told to never, ever run any software not by one of the bigs. I mean, I've told relatives that, for good reason after they installed malware and other nonsense repeatedly. It sucks having to get an Apple account and sign your executable, but for any normal user outside of the foolish, that was the only way they were ever going to run your app.

And honestly, for the case given this should be a web app. People shouldn't be trusting some random executable by some random group.
by rexpop | 2026-02-07 13:14:23+00:00
Religion has always been political.

The very language of religion is rooted in political and economic struggle. Concepts such as "guilt," "sin," and "redemption" originally emerged from ancient debates regarding debt, law, and social obligation. During the "Axial Age," major world religions like Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam developed specifically to address the social dislocations caused by the rise of markets, coinage, and professional armies. For example, the biblical "Law of Jubilee"—which mandated the cancellation of debts and freedom for bondservants—was a direct political intervention into the economic sphere. Similarly, the Christian concept of "redemption" was originally a financial term referring to buying back something (or someone) held as security for a loan.
by RobertSerber | 2026-02-07 13:14:57+00:00
This makes a lot of sense — especially the “LLMs as nondeterministic services” framing. I agree that versioned prompts, schema validators, regression evals, and contract tests are essential if you're shipping LLM-powered systems.

What I’m wrestling with is a slightly different failure mode though.
Even if:
prompts are versioned
outputs conform to JSON schema
contract tests pass
…you can still end up with semantic drift inside the application model itself.

Example:
Entity field renamed
Metric still references old semantic meaning
Relationship cardinality changes
Permission scope shifts
All technically valid JSON.
All passing structural validation.

But the meaning of the system changes in ways that silently break invariants.

So the question becomes:
Should lifecycle control live only at the “LLM output quality” layer (prompts, evals, CI), or does the runtime itself need semantic version awareness and invariant enforcement?

In other words:
Even if the AI is perfectly guarded, do we still need an application-level planner that understands entities, metrics, relationships, and permissions as first-class concepts — and refuses inconsistent evolution?
I am definitively into this.

Curious how you think about that boundary.
by sam345 | 2026-02-07 13:15:24+00:00
I agree with the normalcy comment re screen printing. But the video does seem too high resolution from what I would expect. And why doesn't author discoose the source or a reason video was taken. Odd that there's very little chatter between employees but they were in front of a camera. Otherwise very interesting video. We loved battlezone.Way cooler than any other game at the time.
by flohofwoe | 2026-02-07 13:15:48+00:00
The sad state of the 'science fiction corner' in German book chains is completely real though. Over the last two decades or so you could literally see it shrink on each visit and what little remains is filled with mass produced trash (Star Wars novels etc). The fantasy section right next to it has been eating into the science-fiction shelf space but is filled with the same trash, just replace your laser-toting space troopers with vampires, werewolves and dragons.
by bagacrap | 2026-02-07 13:15:58+00:00
One day if openai becomes a real company (and public), like the kind that takes money from customers and employe accountants and turns a profit, etc, there may be downward pressure on the "costs" side of the equation.

Also while the thirst for training may be insatiable, I could see the energy cost of "hey chat can you check the basketball score" coming down.
by alemonti06 | 2026-02-07 13:17:49+00:00
I’m an independent researcher. I’ve developed a framework that treats NP-complexity as entropic noise ($\mathcal{N}$) rather than a mathematical barrier.Using a 'Void-Filtering' operator (S), I’ve achieved polynomial-time stability on RSA-2048 structures, with precision at 10^{-11}.Live Demo & Code (Google Colab):https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1z2ueXS_4BrpqY5UH3y4...

I am releasing this for open peer review. I am particularly interested in feedback on how the operator (S) isolates the deterministic skeleton \Gamma from the complexity manifold.
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-07 13:18:14+00:00
the papercut argument jstanley made is valid but there's a flip side - when you're running AI-generated code at scale, every capability you give it is also a capability that malicious prompts can exploit. the real question isn't whether restrictions slow down the model (they do), it's whether the alternative - full CPython with file I/O, network access, subprocess - is something you can safely give to code written by a language model that someone else is prompting.

that said, the class restriction feels weird. classes aren't the security boundary. file access, network, imports - that's where the risk is. restricting classes just forces the model to write uglier code for no security gain. would be curious if the restrictions map to an actual threat model or if it's more of a "start minimal and add features" approach.
by EagnaIonat | 2026-02-07 13:18:48+00:00
I was in the same mindset until I actually took the Claude code course they offer. I was doing so much wrong.

The two main takeaways. Create a CLAUDE.md file that defines everything about the project. Have Claude feed back into the file when it makes mistakes and how to fix them.

Now it creates well structured code and production level applications. I still double check everything of course, but the level of errors is much lower.

An example application it created from a CLAUDE.md I wrote. The application reads multiple PDF's, finds the key stakeholders and related data, then generates a network graph across those files and renders it in an explorable graph in Godot.

That took 3 hours to make, test. It also supports OpenAI (lmstudio), Claude and Ollama for its LLM callouts.

What issue I can see happening is the duplication of assets in work. Instead of finding an asset someone built, people have been creating their own.
by codenstuff | 2026-02-07 13:19:04+00:00
Quite interested in this space - good idea and I think agent commerce will grow.

If I understand correctly, at least for Shopify I can already find products using:
https://shopify.dev/docs/agents/catalog/mcp

and if I want to checkout I can use https://shopify.dev/docs/agents/checkout/mcp.

Although I think at least currently I need to request approval from Shopify to even use the checkout API - I believe they are rolling it out slowly (?)

Is it correct to say that your tool looks allows me to skip Shopify APIs and create my own AI agent to speak UCP directly to merchants?
by 0x008 | 2026-02-07 13:19:18+00:00
This is such an usually low signal FUD post for HN. I know I am not adding anything of value here either, but I couldn’t help myself. Please post something with more substance here.

We all notice a shift in the general perception of the SaaS industry. People are afraid, massive change is coming. But that is obvious from all the posts in news outlets, on x, on Reddit etc.

Thus far it’s just a massive hype. The technology has the potential to switch up the business, for sure, but now apart from frontier labs for everyone else it’s just eating money. No company has lost clients due to being replaced by some autonomous agent.

Don’t get me wrong, the technology has the potential, and it will improve, and we will see massive changes. Money will flow to different entities (cloud providers? New players? Who knows). But technology still needs to be shaped into a useful product. Even for coding (undoubtedly the most mature use case for AI agents) the agents still have to demonstrate they actually safe time and money in the long run. So far it looks like they mostly create more work.
by dollylambda | 2026-02-07 13:19:27+00:00
I love the ethos of this movie. That it was about hacking and building things for fun, not for money and profit. This to me is what hacking and programming has always been about. It's too bad that overinflated salaries and the hype that if you go into software you will make a lot of money has watered down the culture to an extent. And now, with the advent of AI and vibe coding, it's been increasingly difficult (for me) to maintain that sense of newness and enjoyment in the craft when I see million line AI diffs.

Along the lines of ethos, there's also the narrative of freedom of information and anti big money corporation (the plague). I hope that this energy to fight the system and tyranny of control the system represents never dies. Particularly as we watch the darkness of a tyrannical government continue to unfold here in the U.S.
by nyxdevelopment | 2026-02-07 13:20:00+00:00
Hey HN,

I built this after one-too-many times pasting production data into random online tools. These 14 utilities run 100% client-side — no server processing, no logging, no tracking.

Includes: JSON formatter, JWT decoder, regex tester, hash generators, timestamp/color converters, code minifiers, and more.

Technical choices:
- Vanilla JS (no framework bloat)
- Static hosting on Cloudflare Pages
- Machine-readable catalog at /tools.json for CLI/API integration
- Schema.org markup for discoverability

Intentionally kept simple. No build pipeline complexity, no unnecessary dependencies.

Would love feedback, especially on:
1. Tool accuracy/edge cases
2. Missing tools you'd use
3. UX improvements for mobile

Thanks for checking it out.
by Spivak | 2026-02-07 13:20:05+00:00
Sure, but Google isn't maintaining two sets of documentation here, the MCP server is just a thin wrapper around the webpage with a little search tool. So it's still the docs for humans just with a different delivery mechanism. Which is fine, but you can understand when hypertext exists largely for this exact purpose folks would find it odd and over complicated to reinvent the web over jsonrpc for robots.
by mattgreenrocks | 2026-02-07 13:21:02+00:00
> Plus, it makes natural moat against masses of normal (i.e. poor) people, because requires a spaceship to run. Finally intelligence can also be controlled by capital the way it was meant to, joining information, creativity, means of production, communication and such things

I'd put intelligence in quotes there, but it doesn't detract from the point.

It is astounding to me how willfully ignorant people are being about the massive aggregation of power that's going on here. In retrospect, I don't think they're ignorant, they just haven't had to think about it much in the past. But this is a real problem with very real consequences. Sovereignty must be occasionally be asserted, or someone will infringe upon it.

That's exactly what's happening here.