MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wps | 2026-02-22 01:48:48+00:00
Hello. I use copyparty on my LAN hosting the kdbx file. It is exposed via webdav for my phone's client (keepassium). It is always available for KeePassXC (you can use rclone or just webdav in the file explorer). This is backed up to b2 every hour. I use WireGuard to access the LAN when I am not home. My phone autoconnects to WireGuard as soon as it is on any network that is not my home network.
by SoleilAbsolu | 2026-02-22 01:49:06+00:00
I run IT for a nonprofit and have 120 "real users" doing "real work" on "low-end machines "providing "real mental health, foster care, and social services" to "real communities".

These workers complain about performance on the machines we can afford. 16GB RAM and 256GB SSDs are the standard, as is 500MB/sec. internet for offices with 40 people, and my plans to upgrade RAM this year were axed by the insane AI chip boondoggle.

People on HN need to understand that not everyone works for a well-funded startup, or big tech company that is in the process of destroying democracy and the environment in the name of this quarter's profits!

BTW Teams has moved away from Electron, before it did I had to advise people to use the browser app instead of the desktop for performance reasons.
by tptacek | 2026-02-22 01:49:09+00:00
Just have the courage of your convictions and extend this logic of culpability to everybody who works for the United States Government. Otherwise, it just sounds like you don't understand that a huge fraction of the work of intelligence is preventing wars.

I don't think the CIA is broadly a force for good. I think that the presumption that most people working there are evil is unfounded, though. It's a huge organization with a big portfolio, most of which isn't telegenic or activating.
by eqvinox | 2026-02-22 01:49:31+00:00
> or good oldshool USB 2.0 Cypress FX2LP CY7C68013A or its Chinese clone Corebai CBM9002A

I intentionally did not suggest those because dealing with an 8051 isn't something I'd inflict even on my worst enemy, let alone an open source hobby project.

That said if it's vibe coded I guess the AI can deal with it? shrug
by jacquesm | 2026-02-22 01:51:16+00:00
The problem is that CF operates in a highly dynamic environment and you can't really do that if the minds of those hundreds of developers relied for the major decision making on a key individual.

This is the key individual paradox: they can be a massive asset and make the impossible happen but if and when they leave you've got a real problem unless you can find another individual that is just as capable. Now, I do trust JGC to have created an organization that is as mature as it could be, but at the same time it is next to impossible to quantify your own effect on the whole because you lack objectivity.

And in this case the problem is even larger: the experience collected by the previous guru does not transfer cleanly to the new one, simply because the new one lacks the experience of seeing the company go from being a tiny player to being a behemoth. I've always been of the opinion that without JGC Cloudflare did not stand a chance, irrespective of those hundreds of developers. And that's before we get into things like goodwill.

And of those hundreds of developers you have to wonder how many see the writing on the wall and are thinking of jumping ship. The best ones always leave first.

I would not be surprised at all if this whole saga ends with Google, Microsoft or Amazon absorbing CF at a fraction of its current value.
by orwin | 2026-02-22 01:51:39+00:00
- "This is a known good state; write tests to enforce this state" is something that takes minutes now instead of days. That is incredibly powerful for understanding and maintaining a system.

Not if you don't describe the tests before. AI will generate absolutely useless tests, and since it seems even the latest version have difficulties to generate working test doubles (which i'm _still_ surprised about, but i took 4 hour generating a dogshit test double i could have written in half the time. To me this should be a something AI should be absolutely great at, and it's not), if your test are AI-only, understanding of the underlying system will be hard.

On bugfixing I agree with your message, but disagree on the scope: bugfixing changed for some categories of bugs (most of them tbh), but some will still have you dig deep into the database or the transaction history/monitoring.

On enhancement i agree 100%, i think this is the biggest benefit of AI. Even new hires can land a few enhancement a week without any domain knowledge. Our backlog is almost empth, and only the largest enhancement are up (basically performance improvement)

Sorry i wanted to nitpick, I do that very often when i think i mostly agree with someone except on very specific points.
by jamesmcq | 2026-02-22 01:51:54+00:00
I want to be clear, I'm not against any use of AI. It's hugely useful to save a couple of minutes of "write this specific function to do this specific thing that I could write and know exactly what it would look like". That's a great use, and I use it all the time! It's better autocomplete. Anything beyond that is pushing it - at the moment! We'll see, but spending all day writing specs and double-checking AI output is not more productive than just writing correct code yourself the first time, even if you're AI-autocompleting some of it.
by nojito | 2026-02-22 01:52:09+00:00
>I've never seen it develop something more than trivial correctly.

This is 100% incorrect, but the real issue is that the people who are using these llms for non-trivial work tend to be extremely secretive about it.

For example, I view my use of LLMs to be a competitive advantage and I will hold on to this for as long as possible.
by ChadNauseam | 2026-02-22 01:52:37+00:00
The disconnect might be that there is a separation between "generating the final answer for the user" and "researching/thinking to get information needed for that answer". Saying "deeply" prompts it to read more of the file (as in, actually use the `read` tool to grab more parts of the file into context), and generate more "thinking" tokens (as in, tokens that are not shown to the user but that the model writes to refine its thoughts and improve the quality of its answer).
by saberience | 2026-02-22 01:53:10+00:00
Does he?

Claw is a terrible name for a basic product which is Claude code in a loop (cron job).

This whole hype cycle is absurd and ridiculous for what is a really basic product full of security holes and entirely vibe coded.

The name won’t stick and when Apple or someone releases a polished version which consumers actually use in two years, I guarantee it won’t be called “iClaw”
by NamanChetwani | 2026-02-22 01:53:49+00:00
Our goal is to help bring you the information that is un-googleable. The principle is that great ideas come from unexpected places, so we should encourage people toward more unexpected endeavors. So every morning, we send 10 high quality, niche pieces of long form content, that you would have never assumed you cared about. And when your interests change, you send an email back to the newsletter, and your recommendations grow with you!
by jacquesm | 2026-02-22 01:53:53+00:00
It matters a lot. For instance, many compilers will put time stamps in their output streams. This can mess up the downstream if your goal is a bit-by-bit identical piece of output across multiple environments.

And that's just one really low hanging fruit type of example, there are many more for instance selecting a different optimization path when memory pressure is high and so on.
by Guestmodinfo | 2026-02-22 01:53:58+00:00
I can already browse hacker news on the terminal using the links2 text browser. I can login, upvote, unvote, write comments from my terminal itself. Only thing is that terminal browsing is not "fresh" . I mean when I browse on fone or computer then the "new" is more fresh than what I get with browsing on the terminal using links2 browser. I haven't tried it with other terminal browsers because I keep forgetting how to use them even though I have several installed. Links2 is the most intuitive.
by brandall10 | 2026-02-22 01:54:13+00:00
I go a bit further than this and have had incredible success with 3 doc types:

- Specs: these are generally static, but updatable as the project evolves. And they're broken out to an index file that gives a project overview, a high-level arch file, and files for all the main modules. Roughly ~1k lines of spec for 10k lines of code

- Plans: these are the output of a planning session with an LLM. They point to the associated specs. These tend to be 100-300 lines and 3 to 5 phases.

- Working memory files: I use both a status.md, which points to a latest plan, and. a project_status, which tracks the current state of the project

I have a planner skill I use w/ Gemini Pro to generate new plans. It essentially explains the specs/plans dichotomy, the role of the status files, and to review everything in the pertinent areas of code and give me a handful of high-level next set of features to address based on shortfalls in the specs or things noted in the project_status file. It generates a plan, updates a clean status.md that points to the plan, and adjusts project_status based on the state of the prior completed plan.

I have an implementer skill in Codex that goes to town on a spec file. It's fairly simple, it just looks at status.md, which points to the plan, and of course the plan points to the relevant specs so it loads up context pretty efficiently.

I've tried the two main spec generation libraries, which were way overblown, and then I gave superpowers a shot... which was fine, but still too much. The above is all homegrown, and I have much better success because it keeps the context lean and focused.
by eru | 2026-02-22 01:55:26+00:00
> This comes up now as “is vibecoding sane if LLMs are nondeterministic?” Again: do you want the CS answer, or the engineering answer?

Determinism would help you. With a bit of engineering, you could make LLMs deterministic: basically, fix the random seed for the PRNG and make sure none of the other sources of entropy mentioned earlier in the article contribute.

But that barely impact any of the issues people bring up with LLMs.
by selridge | 2026-02-22 01:56:10+00:00
And? So what?

What really am I to conclude by the mere fact that they used electron? The AI was not so magical that it overcame sense?

Am I to imagine that the fact that they advertise AI coding means I therefore have a window into their development process and their design choices?

I just think the notion is much sillier than all of us seem to be treating it.
by hashmap | 2026-02-22 01:57:09+00:00
these sort-of-lies might help:

think of the latent space inside the model like a topological map, and when you give it a prompt, you're dropping a ball at a certain point above the ground, and gravity pulls it along the surface until it settles.

caveat though, thats nice per-token, but the signal gets messed up by picking a token from a distribution, so each token you're regenerating and re-distorting the signal. leaning on language that places that ball deep in a region that you want to be makes it less likely that those distortions will kick it out of the basin or valley you may want to end up in.

if the response you get is 1000 tokens long, the initial trajectory needed to survive 1000 probabilistic filters to get there.

or maybe none of that is right lol but thinking that it is has worked for me, which has been good enough
by jamesmcq | 2026-02-22 01:57:14+00:00
The key part of my comment is "correctly".

Does it write maintainable code? Does it write extensible code? Does it write secure code? Does it write performant code?

My experience has been it failing most of these. The code might "work", but it's not good for anything more than trivial, well defined functions (that probably appeared in it's training data written by humans). LLMs have a fundamental lack of understanding of what they're doing, and it's obvious when you look at the finer points of the outcomes.

That said, I'm sure you could write detailed enough specs and provide enough examples to resolve these issues, but that's the point of my original comment - if you're just writing specs instead of code you're not gaining anything.
by its-kostya | 2026-02-22 01:58:35+00:00
Just ask it what naturally draws your curiosity and use it to build your mental model.

What does this program accomplish? How does it accomplish it? Walk me through the boot sequence. Where does it do ABC?

I work in a company where I frequently interact with adjacent teams' code bases. When working on a ticket that touches another system, I'll typically tell it what I'm working on and ask it to point me to areas in the code that are responsible for that capability and which tests exercise that code. This is a great head start for me. I then start "in the ball park".

I would not recommend to have it make diagrams for you. I don't know what it is but they LLMs just aren't great at coveting information into diagram form. I've had it explain, quite impressively, parts of code and when I ask it to turn that into a diagram it comes up short. Must be low on training data expressing itself in that medium. It's an okay way to get the syntax for a diagram started, however.

I wish you an auspicious time in your new role!
by cowlby | 2026-02-22 01:58:36+00:00
I recently discovered GitHub speckit which separates planning/execution in stages: specify, plan, tasks, implement. Finding it aligns with the OP with the level of “focus” and “attention” this gets out of Claude Code.

Speckit is worth trying as it automates what is being described here, and with Opus 4.6 it's been a kind of BC/AD moment for me.
by NucleusOS | 2026-02-22 01:58:40+00:00
Technical FAQ: Nucleus MCP

Q: Why not just use a local SQLite DB for memory?
Nucleus isn't just a database; it's a Governance Layer. While engrams are stored locally, the value is in the Hypervisor that mediates agent access to that data based on the current task's context.

Q: How is the Audit Trail "Tamper-Proof"?
Every decision and tool invocation is cryptographically signed at the protocol level. If an agent (or an attacker) tries to alter the narrative ledger, the signature check fails.

Q: Does this require a specific LLM?
No. Nucleus is model-agnostic. It works with Claude (via Windsurf/Cursor), GPT-4, or local Llama instances via Ollama. It sits at the MCP (Model Context Protocol) layer.

Q: Is this really "Local-First"?
Yes. No telemetry, no default cloud syncing. The "Agentic Brain" lives in your ~/.nucleus directory. You own the engrams; you own the audits.
by qsera | 2026-02-22 01:58:54+00:00
It is not. That `GOTO` makes things hard does not shift it to some unrelated category.

> The funny thing is that exceptions are just fancy goto

Not even close.

>I like to compare it to building a shed with power tools versus only a screwdriver.

That analogy is completely wrong in the context.

> it's not intuitive at all.

It is completely intuitive, while the "modern" languages with "helpful" magic is not.

>C is a language that already makes use of implicit control flow A LOT.

> implicit

I don't think it means what you think it means. At least the examples you mention does not justify it.
by a_e_k | 2026-02-22 01:59:26+00:00
Author here. I have a JavaScript port of my automated test suite (https://github.com/a-e-k/canvas_ity/blob/main/test/test.html) that I used to compare my library against browser <canvas> implementations. I was surprised by all of the browser quirks that I found!

But compiling to WASM and running side-by-side on that page is definitely something that I've thought about to make the comparison easier. (For now, I just have my test suite write out PNGs and compare them in an image viewer split-screen with the browser.)
by abetusk | 2026-02-22 01:59:46+00:00
Thanks for the clarity, I think I have a more consistent view of your ethics now.

I'm not sure if it's cultural, but in the US there's a strong sentiment for freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is most important not when people are saying things that one agrees with, but when they are saying things for which one disagrees.

The FSF's stance on software freedom is almost surely well thought out and deeply ideological. On one hand, it means that for every bad case scenario, the freedom allows the option for other good case scenarios. On the other hand, it identifies how difficult and fickle it is to enforce a purity test for usage and that any organization involved in such a decision is bound to be corrupted.

Note that MIT is one of the more permissive libre/free licenses, allowing for commercial re-use without a copyleft component, network usage without providing source or patent exemption. At the very least, you might want to consider GPL or AGPL as they might help some of the bad use cases you're trying to guard against.
by saberience | 2026-02-22 02:00:37+00:00
Can we please move past this whole OpenClaw hype?

Yes it’s an llm in a loop and can call tools. This also existed six months and a year ago, and it was called an ai agent.

And yes we can all vibe code them in 1000, 2000, or 10000 lines of code in zig, rust, or even c.

Game over man. Game over.
by nickelpro | 2026-02-22 02:01:07+00:00
Dumb.

Compilers aren't deterministic in small ways, timestamps, encoding paths into debug information, etc. These are trivial, annoyances to reproducible build people and little else.

You cannot take these trivial reproducibility issues and extrapolate out to "determinism doesn't matter therefore LLMs are fine". You cannot throw a ball in the air, determine that it is trivial to launch an object a few feet, and then determine a trip the moon is similarly easy.

The magnitude matters, not just the category. Ignoring this is a massive red flag that the speaker has no idea what they're talking about.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-22 02:01:15+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaeI9YgE1o8

Yes I know how much a kilobyte is. But cutting down to 2 million 3 bit parameters or something like that would definitely be possible.

And a 32 bit processor should be able to pack and unpack parameters just fine.

Edit: Hey look what I just found https://github.com/DaveBben/esp32-llm "a 260K parameter tinyllamas checkpoint trained on the tiny stories dataset"
Free, local-first barcode generator (No server uploads)
by BarcodX | 2026-02-22 02:02:06+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m the developer behind BarcodX (https://barcodx.com). I built this to solve a recurring headache I saw with small businesses and e-commerce sellers trying to print inventory labels.

The current landscape for generating bulk barcodes (like Code 128 or FNSKU labels for Amazon) is pretty bad. You either have to pay a hefty monthly subscription for enterprise software (like BarTender), or you have to use free online generators that force you to upload your sensitive CSV inventory/customer data to their servers.

I wanted to build a "local-first" alternative.

BarcodX is a bulk barcode generator and visual label designer where 100% of the data processing happens client-side in your browser. You can upload a CSV with thousands of rows, map your fields to a drag-and-drop label template, and export a printable PDF. Because it all runs locally using standard web APIs, it’s fast, and your data never touches an external server.

It currently supports standard formats like Code 128, UPC, EAN, and QR codes. It is completely free, and there is no sign-up required to try it out here: https://barcodx.com

I’d love to get your feedback on the UX, the label designer, or any edge-case barcode formats I should add next. Happy to answer any technical questions!
by fud101 | 2026-02-22 02:02:34+00:00
I won't read the article but I think this is the role that will remain for humans, to be the 'fall guy' when the vibes go wrong. You will have to live in chronic stress, on call so to speak, so when prod goes down, you will take the blame. Maybe that vibe coded PR you didn't and couldn't read contained a serious bug or security lapse, maybe the system design you didn't do but approved contained a RCE you never knew about. Fun times ahead.
by cbdevidal | 2026-02-22 02:02:36+00:00
In Christian circles some people are KJV-only, only reading from the 1611 KJV. But articles like this demonstrate that languages change dramatically over time.

Thus I regard KJV-onlyism to be a passing fad; for if another 400 years passes, the writing in the 1611 will go from being strange to our eyes, to being unreadable in the future by anyone but trained scholars.
by 1ark | 2026-02-22 02:02:41+00:00
This is so amazing! I am so stunned and deeply interested on how you set it up and your workflow. To me it sounds like you are already in the future many of us sighted people imagine with AI.

I am not sure if you are able to use it, but I saw Droidrun.ai (https://www.droidrun.ai/) the other day, and agents should be able to drive the phone.
by Findecanor | 2026-02-22 02:03:04+00:00
C and C++ compilers are limited to preserving semantics for data-race free code only, though.
They are allowed to turn a single load into multiple loads, or even a store into multiple stores: things that won't affect anything if you have only one thread accessing memory but for multithreaded programs, changing compiler or just making seemingly unrelated changes and recompiling can make existing data-race bugs have effects or not.

Attempting to get consistent results from floating-point code is another rabbit hole. GCC and clang have various flags for "fast math" which can enable different optimisations that reduce precision.

Before SSE, fp on x86 was done by the "x87" FPU which always had 80-bit precision, even if the type in the source code was 32 or 64 bits — and it used to be accepted to sometimes get more precision than asked for.
Java got its "strictfp" mode mainly because of x87.
by dnlzro | 2026-02-22 02:03:06+00:00
The only reason why you regard JavaScript as “fundamental” is that it’s built into the browser. Sure, you can draw that line, but at least acknowledge that there’s many places to draw the line.

I’d rather make comparative statements, like “JavaScript is more fundamental than React,” which is obviously true. And then we can all just find the level of abstraction that works for us, instead of fighting over what technology is “fundamental.”
by wtallis | 2026-02-22 02:03:27+00:00
Four channels of DDR4-3200 vs two channels of DDR5-6400 (four subchannels) should come out pretty close. I don't see any reason why the DDR4 configuration would be consistently faster; you might have more bank groups on DDR4, but I'm not sure that would outweigh other factors like the topology and bandwidth of the interconnects between the memory controller and the CPU cores.
by Izkata | 2026-02-22 02:04:01+00:00
> so either you ask AI to do it

I dunno, AI tools love adding not only useEffect but also unnecessary useMemo.

> I don't know why people think the virtual DOM is a performance boost.

It was advertised as one of the advantages when React was new, due to the diffing browsers would only need to render the parts that changed instead of shoving a whole subtree into the page and the having to do all of it (because remember this came out in the era of jquery and mustachejs generating strings of HTML from templates instead of targeted updates).