MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crystal_revenge | 2026-02-18 18:38:39+00:00
> not suitable for anywhere near production

This is what I've been increasingly understanding is the wrong way to understand how LLMs are changing things.

I fully agree that LLMs are not suitable for creating production code. But the bigger question you need to ask is 'why do we need production code?' (and to be clear, there are and always will be cases where this is true, just increasingly less of them)

The entire paradigm of modern software engineering is fairly new. I mean it wasn't until the invention of the programmable microprocessor that we even had the concept of software and that was less than 100 years ago. Even if you go back to the 80s, a lot of software doesn't need to be distributed or serve a endless variety of users. I've been reading a lot of old Common Lisp books recently and it's fascinating how often you're really programming lisp for you and your experiments. But since the advent of the web and scaling software to many users with diverse needs we've increasingly needed to maintain systems that have all the assumed properties of "production" software.

Scalable, robust, adaptable software is only a requirement because it was previously infeasible for individuals to build non-trivial systems for solving any more than a one or two personal problems. Even software engineers couldn't write their own text editor and still have enough time to also write software.

All of the standard requirements of good software exist for reasons that are increasingly becoming less relevant. You shouldn't rely on agents/LLMs to write production code, but you also should increasingly question "do I need production code?"
by butterbomb | 2026-02-18 18:38:56+00:00
Parrot “user-agency” all you want. We’ve seen what outsourcing solutions to “user-agency” does.

Over half the population lacks the self stewardship to not eat themselves into being a fat pig. If “user-agency” was any sort of solution, I wouldn’t be paying for the negative externalities of all you fat fucks.
by esseph | 2026-02-18 18:39:20+00:00
> I always ask people, in the past year, how many AI-coded apps have you 1) downloaded 2) paid for?

In the past 5 years, the only "new" app I've added to my phone has been Claude.ai.

Before that I guess DoorDash. And that probably covers the past 7ish years of phone use.

There's just too much shit in the store, a lot of it is scammy or has dark patterns.
by filoleg | 2026-02-18 18:39:32+00:00
> Your package can explode, these torrents cannot (as far as I am aware).

Sure, but what if the scenario was slightly modified, with explicit 100% guarantees regarding rhe package you would receive in the maile:

1. It could only contain either an SSD/hard drive or a usb drive. The storage device has not been tampered with. It was only ever used as a regular storage device out of the box.

2. There is no malware or any malicious executables on the storage device. The only types of data that it could contain would be text/html, structured data/document files (json, csv, office suite files, pdf, etc.), and media files (audio, video, images, etc.). None of those files will exploit any vulnerabilities in the software that opens them (neither through the parser nor anything else)

This makes it nearly a perfect 1:1 analogy to the torrenting scenario, both involving the exact same set of imo the most important dangers.

Which, for me personally, is the fear of ending up with illegal content (CSAM, stolen credit card dumps, etc.) on a storage device in my possession through no fault of my own.

Even if it could be a winnable battle in the end, it would be pretty much over reputationally way before it gets to the legal resolution. Just being accused of having any illegal content of that nature is not something I would want to ever deal with at all.

You gotta realize how it would sound and how you would appear to most uninvolved average people in real life, when your legal defense isn’t even something like statement #1 below, and is way closer to the statement #2:

> “I am not guilty, the accusarions are false, those files were never present on any of my storage devices.”

> “I am not guilty, despite those files being actually present on a storage device in my possession. That’s all due to how torrents inherently work, so, let’s start from the basics…” [and now we gotta explain simplified basics of torrent technology and how it works to the DA, the judge, as well as anyone else observing the trial, and pray they will try to actually understand]
by pmontra | 2026-02-18 18:39:39+00:00
> Creation used to be the scarce thing, the filter. Now attention is. Most of us are on the wrong side of that trade.

"Wrong side" means that people on that side have to work harder to reach us. The terms of the trade did not change because creators are not starting to pay us to get our attention. Well, it happens sometimes: free trials, free tiers, coupons, etc. but it's a well established practice. The post contains a reference to "do more marketing".
Show HN: Keystone – configure Dockerfiles and dev containers for any repo
by thad_imbue | 2026-02-18 18:40:00+00:00
We kept hitting the same wall: you clone some arbitrary repo and just want it to run without any configuration work. So we built Keystone, an open source tool that spins up a Modal sandbox, runs Claude Code inside it, and produces a working .devcontainer/ config (Dockerfile, devcontainer.json, test runner) for any git repo.

We build on the dev container standard, so the output works with VS Code and GitHub Codespaces out of the box.

Main use cases: reproducible dev/CI environments, self-describing repos, and safely sandboxed coding agents.

Our goal is to encourage all repos to self-describe their runtime environment.

Why the sandbox? Running Claude directly against your Docker daemon is risky. We've watched it clear Docker config and tweak kernel settings when iterating on containers. Containerization matters most when your agent is acting like a sysadmin.

To use it: get a Modal account and an Anthropic API key, run Keystone on your repo, check in the .devcontainer/ directory. See the project README for more details.
Ask HN: Why are there no talks about Seedance 2.0 on Hacker News?
by ElectroNomad | 2026-02-18 18:40:05+00:00
Generated videos that I see from ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 model are pretty ground breaking (compared to Sora, Google Veo and such).

Genuinely surprised not to see a lot of chatter about it on HN!
by wseqyrku | 2026-02-18 18:40:41+00:00
> When I began in software in the 1980s I was dismissed as an “object guy” by database folks and as a “data modeler” by object folks. I've since been dismissed as a “patterns guy”, “agile guy”, “architecture guy”, “java guy”, “ruby guy”, and “anti-architect guy”. I'm now a past-it gray-beard surviving on drinking the intellectual blood of my younger colleagues. It's tasty.

I don't think you can find that level of ego anywhere in the software industry or any other industry for that matter. Respetc.
by tranq_cassowary | 2026-02-18 18:41:30+00:00
> /e/OS focuses on privacy (i.e. reducing data leakage to adtech)

/e/OS literally sends STT data straight to OpenAI...

/e/OS uses priviliged MicroG, which connects to Google for some of its functionality

/e/OS doesn't keep up with updates properly, making its security suffer, making yoru phone easier to compromise, increasing the likelihood of amongs other things sandbox escabes which open up possibilities to data leakage.

> GrapheneOS recommends running all the proprietary Google apps in a locked "sandbox"

They don't recommend this. The user can choose to do so.

> but obviously Google still gets to see everything you do in their apps

Indeed, obviously. So, obviously, also the case on any other OS.

> e/OS tries to provide [largely but not entirely FLOSS] alternatives (e.g. their own Maps app, their own email, their own calendar) that make your phone usable out of the box without Google software.

You can install apps you need on GrapheneOS providing those alternatives yourself. Android has a large FOSS app eecosystem.

Much of the things /e/OS bundles for services are just using Nextcloud and their services have been very unreliable in the past, making people unable to access their data for months. Also, Nextcloud isn't end to end encrypted.

GrapheneOS also makes their own apps, like Vanadium, PDF viewer and Secure Camera.
by bunderbunder | 2026-02-18 18:41:59+00:00
I would guess It depends on how thoroughly the organization doing the censorship can exert control over information.

For example, I’ve been pretty impressed by the extent to which the Chinese government is able to influence public discourse within its borders when they want to. But China is also home to over 90% of the world’s Chinese speakers, and it has its own domestic social media industry with very few users from outside the country, the Great Firewall, less of a culture of anti-authoritarianism, etc.

I’m not sure how feasible it would be for the US to get to a comparable position. The US is nowhere close to being a supermajority of the world’s English speakers, and it might be hard for the government to impose an isolationist policy on the country’s tech industry without inciting a revolt by its tech oligarchs.
by RIMR | 2026-02-18 18:42:18+00:00
Hey, so this pretty much looks like a Tailscale rip-off. Not a competitor, but a straight-up ripoff in the worst possible way.

Tailscale has LONG used Pangolins as a mascot (https://tailscale.com/blog/network-pangolins). They even run a "Pangolin Enthusiast" website (https://tailandscales.com/) that is essentially a demo site for their tutorials. This is an animal with a tail and scales! The branding is very good.

You clearly chose this name to deliberately create brand confusion with Tailscale, and to derail some of their marketing and community branding in your favor. That's scummy behavior by developers who don't have anything to offer but a copy of someone else's work.

If am going to choose between Tailscale, and a project opportunistically attempting to impersonate Tailscale, why would I ever choose the scummy impersonator?
by Bender | 2026-02-18 18:42:22+00:00
For cloud managed environments there must be a configuration management or configuration deployment mechanism already in place for distributing secrets or one would hope and that should be the tool to deploy keys. Tracking both private and public keys to me would suggest they belong in a secret management tool ideally backed by an HSM somewhere. Each public and private key should be mapped to an identity both are equally important since anyone can shove their public key into the authorized_keys file or directory. My preference is to save all of those under /etc/ssh/keys/ and preserve ownership to the owner or service owner and ensure that if someone manually adds a public key into /etc/ssh/keys/username that it triggers a security alert and clobbers it with what is supposed to be there per some git configuration. This will require re-training or unlearning bad habits on the part of the team members and this should be reviewed, approved and communicated by the CSO so that people know what is expected for service and human trust relationships in the cloud in my opinion.

sshd_config would need to be updated with:

AuthorizedKeysFile /etc/ssh/keys/%u

so that keys under home directories are ignored. Each username or service account name in /etc/ssh/keys can have multiple public keys but each of those keys must be mapped in a security management repo or security management tool. If anything is manually added the secrets management tool should get a diff then restore only the public keys that are in the secrets management tool.
Open Game Development
by avafe | 2026-02-18 18:42:31+00:00
At some point in the video game life cycle — especially in live service games — they reach a sort of “maintenance” stage. In this stage, the game still benefits from content updates, but the core gameplay is more or less complete.

This stage of development is tedious, and takes away from the time developers could spend creating new games. Despite developers already having moved on, players remain hungry for content updates.

I believe the solution is an open model of game development. Not necessarily open-source, but rather open-contribution. Players themselves should be able to contribute to the game’s continuation through user-generated content updates.

You’d be right to point out that this model already exists through modding. But modding isn’t enough. Developing mods requires significant technical skill, and installing them is far from frictionless for the average player. In live service, it’s virtually nonexistent.

You’re already systematizing the content in your game. If players can earn cosmetics, you have a system to register those cosmetics and handle their functionality. Expose this to your players. Allow them to submit their own content.

As your game scales, consider developing an in-game editor and submission system. Keep reducing the barrier to entry, and community contribution will keep growing. Hold events and competitions around it. Engage your community with creativity.
by chad1n | 2026-02-18 18:42:45+00:00
Anyone who has some experience with native apis knows that a standard library should never rely on unstable apis. Ntdll is not "stable" as in Microsoft can change it at any time since they expect anyone to use kernel32. It's questionable that they referenced a random book on this top claiming that ntdll is more performant than kernel32 which is doubtful. There are some specific cases where this is true (the ntfs stuff), but, in general, it's not, at least not in a significant matter. A standard library should never do this, it might break binaries for no reason, other than making a cool blog post. I, as a developer, can choose to use ntfs, but a standard library should never.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25997506
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/68678
by bobbiechen | 2026-02-18 18:42:46+00:00
Being first matters :')

I wrote a font for these, which does use the triangle-5 and the vertical layout: https://bobbiec.github.io/cistercian-font.html (recent discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46939312)

And my associated writeup: https://digitalseams.com/blog/making-a-font-with-9999-ligatu... .

As mentioned in the blog, I think the horizontal layout makes more sense too (in terms of writing order). But just like the triangle-5, the vertical layout is more commonly seen, so that's what I stuck with.
by Lammy | 2026-02-18 18:42:50+00:00
> How does Tailscale make money?

They spy on your network behavior by default, so free users are still paying with their behavioral data. See https://tailscale.com/docs/features/logging

“Each Tailscale agent in your distributed network streams its logs to a central log server (at log.tailscale.com). This includes real-time events for open and close events for every inter-machine connection (TCP or UDP) on your network.”

They know what you're doing, when, from where, to where, on your supposedly “private” network. It's possible to opt out on Windows, on *nix systems, and when using the non-GUI client on macOS by enabling the FUD-named “TS_NO_LOGS_NO_SUPPORT” option: https://tailscale.com/docs/features/logging#opt-out-of-clien...

It is not currently possible to opt out on iOS/Android clients: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/13174

For an example of how invasive this is for the average user, this person discovered Tailscale trying to collect ~18000 data points per week about their network usage based on the number of blocked DNS requests for `log.tailscale.com`: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/15326
by srejk | 2026-02-18 18:42:50+00:00
Ling is okay, but a bit formal. My partner is Cambodian as well so having her help with what's "valid" or not helps a lot.

The best resource is a personal tutor, they're really affordable on Italki or Preply ($10-15/hr). I can recommend one in particular if you're interested - it's actually the same person as this youtube channel (which is also a good resource): https://www.youtube.com/@Dara-TheKhmerLesson
by sreekanth850 | 2026-02-18 18:43:05+00:00
Are you saying sending money via Wire transfer is unethical? Its a standard way to send money in cross boarder transactions. Please do note that India is highly regulated for financial transaction that go outside the country so, please don't spread something like they are doing it illegally. Zerodha is a well known firm they are open about this funding. 1 Million every year just because they used many oss project. That is not un ethical.
by coredog64 | 2026-02-18 18:43:38+00:00
> Despite being so massive, their retail operation makes almost no money

You misunderstand the point of retail. It's now a marketplace where they use their name recognition and (alleged) consumer friendliness to collect fees from sellers. It costs to list, it costs to do FBA, and it costs to run ads so that your products appear in search results. Amazon ads is incredibly profitable.

That's also why Prime has such a grab bag of benefits. By keeping Prime membership sticky, the overall value of that marketplace supports the fees charged to sellers.
Show HN: A browser-based search engine with 25ms query latency
by lipzo14 | 2026-02-18 18:43:39+00:00
I stumbled onto this repo JustaNormalComputer-Guy.github.io claiming sub-0.1 second load times—averaging around 0.025s in my initial tests.
Is this just aggressive caching, or is the client-side indexing logic actually that efficient? It seems way too fast for a standard web search. I’ve checked the Network tab and it stays under 100ms even on a throttled connection. Can someone help me verify if I'm missing something or if this is legit?
Show HN: Q12 – A constraint-based 2D drawing tool
by Evenedric | 2026-02-18 18:43:40+00:00
Q12 is a new web-based 2D parametric drawing tool built specifically for geometric problem solving, for playing interactive "what if" games with drawings, and for the design and optimization of mechanisms.

Q12 has the usual set of drawing constraints found in other CAD tools (e.g. "lines are parallel") but also supports inequality constraints, area constraints, and arbitrary expressions between geometric quantities. We built Q12 to solve problems like those below, after finding that existing CAD systems couldn't handle them well:

* Given dimensions on a surveyor's map, figure out if the stated land areas are correct. If there's not enough information, show the extra measurements that are needed to pin things down.
* In a backyard design project, the volume of a swimming pool must be more than 20,000 gallons but its perimeter paving must be under 400 square feet. Drag the pool shape around to quickly explore the possibilities within these constraints.
* A 5-bar mechanism to clamp a workpiece must not push it sideways when contact is made. Animate the motion to get an intuitive feel for how design changes affect its behavior. Optimize to determine the best part dimensions.

This is the first public release - still early, but already useful. More features will come, including 3D support at some point. Suggestions big and small are of course welcome.

-Russ
by subscribed | 2026-02-18 18:43:48+00:00
Thank you, I'll pass then.

I don't have my disposable Google account at hand, and I'm not willing to provide my real name to the random project in the unspecified country (unknown regulatory constraints). Especially since you were collecting phone numbers as well (?).

Chat logs are also stored, presumably not encrypted at rest, so in case the unspeakable happens, someone gets my and my kid's real email addresses, names, and their complete chat logs.

It would be also no go, because I don't want to start from violating your terms of use:

```

01. Prohibited Activities

- Bypassing safeguards [...]

- Misrepresenting identity, age, or intent (e.g., a child posing as an adult to bypass filters).

Enforcement

Violations may result in immediate suspension or permanent termination of access without refund, at our sole discretion.

```

You invite our kids to try to break free from the interface's rails, and if in the process they claim they're me, this grounds for termination :)

Thanks but no, thanks :)

But I wish you success, a tool like this would be amazing to have.
by ncphillips | 2026-02-18 18:43:49+00:00
> the primary branching model the vast, vast majority of people use on Git.

> it's just a historical fact that's not really debatable.

Over my last 15 years of software dev, I have _never_ heard of anyone actually using Gitflow in their codebase.

I'm not saying you're wrong. My experience is anecdotal. But I don't know why you say it's a "fact". Was there surveys or anything?
by mlubin01 | 2026-02-18 18:43:52+00:00
Covers Mem0, Letta, Cognee, Graphiti, Hindsight, EverMemOS, Tacnode, and Hyperspell. Built a small prototype with each and traced open-source implementations end-to-end from API through storage through retrieval. Tacnode is closed-source; Hyperspell is a managed platform — both analyzed from documentation and open-source client code.

A few threads in there:

- The design spectrum from minimal structure (Mem0: two LLM calls, no schema) to rich structure (Graphiti: bi-temporal edges, two-phase entity dedup, per-edge contradiction detection)
- Hindsight running 4-way parallel retrieval with cross-encoder reranking on a single PostgreSQL database
- Hyperspell prioritizing data access over knowledge construction — 43 OAuth integrations, zero extraction. Not a different approach to the same problem, a bet that the bottleneck is upstream.
- Structure without selection pressure is art. Many of these systems build elaborate relationship schemas with no mechanism to decide what's worth remembering.
- Tacnode thinking from the infrastructure layer up — ACID, time travel, multi-modal storage. Nobody else is really working from that depth. Both layers matter.
- The article also asks what memory actually is for agents that need to plan and adapt, not just recall. Most systems converge on extract-store-retrieve. Some are hinting at something deeper.

All systems at pinned versions. Point-in-time, not a ranking.
by drannex | 2026-02-18 18:44:16+00:00
Latency, FPS, efficiency. The LSPs while beefy, are not part of the overall efficiency and are used as sub processes, so if they fail or are sluggish, they won't affect how the editor runs, if you don't want to use LSPs, then you can go ahead and disable those.

Zed is one of the few editors, that like Sublime, are really focused on efficiency, using minimal resources (when needed) and the latency and FPS of the editor is bounds better than VS Code. It just works, better.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-18 18:45:25+00:00
Exactly! And yes - you are seeing the developing of a concept similar to India or China 1/2/3 in Western markets now.

The reality is, America1 or France1 has tastes and sensibilities closer to India1 or China1 instead of America3. As such, there's no point targeting America3 or France3, because it doesn't dramatically grow your TAM the same way India1 or China1 could.

This is why Walmart and Amazon began pivoting heavily into the India and China consumer market in the mid-2010s.

The India 1/2/3 concept the Blume Ventures came up with is a modified version of a similar mental model we used to analyze China back in the 2000s and 2010s which itself is was forked from the principle of market segmentation.