MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Droidctx – generate Markdown docs from your prod infra for coding agent
by TheBengaluruGuy | 2026-03-06 17:24:18+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm Siddarth, co-founder at DrDroid. We build tooling for engineering teams to detect and debug production issues faster. Our product is an always-on autonomous AI agent that listens to alerts, investigates issues and escalates where necessary, before an engineer even picks them up.

While building that, we noticed something: our agent debugged issues significantly faster (and more accurately) when it had pre-built context about the infrastructure. Which services exist, which dashboards track what, what the DB schema looks like. Without it, agents spend the first stretch of every session re-exploring things they should already know. We kept hitting the same thing with Claude Code and Cursor internally when using it with MCP servers.

So we extracted that idea into droidctx, an open source CLI that connects to your production tools and generates structured .md files capturing your infrastructure. Run droidctx sync and it pulls metadata from Grafana, Datadog, Kubernetes, Postgres, AWS, and 20+ other connectors into a clean directory. Add one line to your CLAUDE.md pointing at that directory, and your agent starts every session already knowing your stack.

Outcome to expect: fewer tool calls, fewer hallucinations about your specific setup, and lesser context to share every time. We've had some genuinely surprising moments too. The agent once traced a bug to a specific table column by finding an exact Grafana query in the context files, something it wouldn't have known to look for cold.

It's MIT licensed and pre-built with 25 connectors across monitoring, Kubernetes, databases, CI/CD, and logs. It runs entirely locally. Credentials stay in credentials.yaml and never leave your machine.

Curious whether others have hit this problem with coding agents, and whether "generate context once, reuse across sessions" feels like the right abstraction or if we're solving this the wrong way. Happy to hear what's missing or broken.
by exceptione | 2026-03-06 17:24:27+00:00
Those people didn't already come to the USA for starters, NYC has been crazily expensive for years.

There are many reasons people might have, none are good. There is for instance also a risk factor of being harassed and detained by ICE. Cruelty and incompetence are a feature of authoritarian governance, not a coincidence. So anyone going there takes a kind of risk. As has been shown, even Europeans aren't safe from the whimsical paramilitary.

EDIT: I don't think that tourism is a big factor, but as I said elsewhere, it could well be the proverbial canary in the coal mine.
by thinking_cactus | 2026-03-06 17:24:53+00:00
> If no one works on defence systems then all the things we have could become jeopardized, perhaps not this week but in 5 years. Therefore I can reconcile the idea of working for defence related r&d.

I am not saying this line of thinking is completely absurd. But I think every individual considering this should reflect a lot. (1) Is your country using its ""defense"" systems wisely? (2) Won't the technology be replicated by adversaries anyways? (3) etc..

Overall, the number of people and resources spent on Weapons R&D is probably significantly more than people working on things like diplomacy, ethics, or activism for international human rights (assuming human rights violations are the only legitimate reason for war).

It's significantly safer for individual nations and humanity as a whole if we're not all armed to the teeth constantly on the brink of large conflict, and instead are more or less ethically aligned, all respect basic human rights, and respect other nations.
by Aachen | 2026-03-06 17:25:19+00:00
I thought it was a typo but I see you've replied elsewhere that these really are the two options

> I've seen it go both ways where children with freedom [turn bad] and sheltered kids turn [good]

So you've seen it one way, as in, each approach leading to one specific outcome? "Both ways" would be sheltered leading to different outcomes in different cases, or unsheltered leading to different outcomes in different cases

I don't feel like I've been sheltered. My parents literally proposed that I drink some alcohol and encouraged that I go out partying at some point. Both things still don't interest me. (At least they didn't tell me to smoke, lol. But alcohol seems to be considered normal and potentially even healthy in small doses so they thought I should try it.) Online, I later learned that their opinion was that I'll just not look up things which I don't want to see, and in my case that has been true. I'm sorry to tell you I never had a porn addiction

Someone else pointed out that such anecdotes are survivorship bias: you might not see the people that didn't turn out alright. In my case that's certainly true, I'm not sure that I know anyone who didn't turn out okay. We take different paths through life but if you can provide for yourself and dependents, and are happy most of the time, I'd count that as success (also dependent on age: I'm not counting that my 90yo grandpa is currently often unhappy due to bad health)
by btilly | 2026-03-06 17:25:21+00:00
More precisely than "plausible deniability", it is plausible EMOTIONAL deniability.

When you put enough bafflegab around it, you can almost ignore that you said something unpleasant. Because the part of our brains that processes for emotional content, doesn't process complex language very well. Hence the example with ten paragraphs of complexity to hide the pain of a major lay-off.

After I noticed this, I found that I did this. I reliably use complex language when I don't like what I'm saying. So much so that I could use readability checkers to find discomfort that I was not aware that I had!

And I'm not the only one to notice this. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpVtJNv4ZNM for George Carlin's famous skit on how the honesty of the phrase "shell shock" over time got softened over time to "post-traumatic stress disorder". A phrase that can be understood, but no longer felt.

Corporations have just developed their own special complex language for this. And you're right. It is emotionally dishonest. That's why they do it.
by ninth_ant | 2026-03-06 17:25:32+00:00
Yes this is a common release practice.

However this is a different situation as we’re talking about running arbitrarily found third-party scripts. I can’t imagine that was ever intended to be done in production.

Fun story, when I worked at Facebook in the earlier days someone accidentally made a change that effectively set the release flags for every single feature to be live on production. That was a day… we had to completely wipe out memcached to stop the broken features and then the database was hammered to all hell.
by deaux | 2026-03-06 17:25:38+00:00
> it's pretty culturally inevitable, I think, to have an in-group signalling their strategies using coded language.

Pretty shocking belief when you're of courseing all "ICs".

If it was inevitable than the amount and degree of corporate BS would've been stable over the last 5 decades, and across countries and languages.

In reality, it has been anything but, instead showing massive differences across both.
by meowface | 2026-03-06 17:26:38+00:00
Correct, this is the way. A year or two ago lots of people were saying to do the opposite, but at least now and probably also even then, this is better. Claude is a more sensible and holistic designer, planner, debater, and idea generator. Codex is better at actually correctly implementing any large codebase change in a single pass.
by serf | 2026-03-06 17:26:49+00:00
>Curious about the sector-based delta sync — how do you avoid packet bursts when a player enters a busy area with lots of items and mobiles?

doesn't look like there is much going on to protect packet bursts there aside from smart-ish proximity sector loading. the work is done at boundry.

dove into it because i have been recently working on frustrum spawning to reduce net burst in a similar project, was kind of curious if something similar was used as a method to pre-warm the upcoming sector but I didn't catch anything.

fun and easy to read. thanks op and parent for getting me to look through it.
by ModernMech | 2026-03-06 17:26:50+00:00
“I like taking the guns early, like in this crazy man’s case that just took place in Florida … to go to court would have taken a long time,” Trump said at a meeting with lawmakers on school safety and gun violence.

“Take the guns first, go through due process second,” Trump said.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/376097-trump-tak...
by epistasis | 2026-03-06 17:26:55+00:00
Well the clear implication is that the class of "criminal" has been expanded. It used to be that you had to be convicted of a crime by a jury to be a criminal, now it's just anybody that Trump dislikes. Execution without investigation has been normalized and accepted, and that's exactly the intent.

Trump fears the people, but if it were slightly more popular there would be even more people hired by ICE and we would be seeing the consitutional abuses that happen today in Minnesota in far more places across the country.
by shlip | 2026-03-06 17:26:57+00:00
Well of course a DSLR will be better than a phone camera for most things, since you can control more features. That's also the point of OpenCamera; get as much controls as you can back, compared to the stock app that might be lacking. It wont do miracles if your phone camera is not good to begin with.

I've found OpenCam to be useful because of the various optional features ( onionskin, levelmeter, locking settings ). You can also set the bitrate/size/duration of videos, etc. Lots of useful stuff.
Show HN: Code Jump Tracker – Never get lost after "Go to Definition" again
by tominaga-h | 2026-03-06 17:27:25+00:00
Hi HN,

I build a VS Code extension called Code Jump Tracker.
https://github.com/tominaga-h/code-jump-tracker

I created this because I was constantly getting lost in large codebases during code reviews. I use "Go to Definition" (F12) a lot to trace logic. While VS Code has a native "Navigate Back" shortcut, it operates blindly—you can't see your stack history, making it hard to jump back to a specific file after exploring multiple branches.

Code Jump Tracker solves this by acting like `pushd/popd` for your editor.

Key features:
- Auto-tracking: Automatically logs your jumps (Go to Definition, Outline clicks) into a clean, native-looking Webview table in the sidebar.
- Manual Pinning: Found a core function you need to revisit? Pin it. It adds a persistent marker icon to your gutter.
- Unique Locations: Keeps a deduplicated list of your visited symbols.
- Persistent: State is saved per-workspace using `workspaceState`, so your history survives editor restarts.

I built the UI using VS Code's native CSS variables within a Webview to ensure it perfectly matches your theme and aligns columns beautifully (something the standard TreeView couldn't do well).

I'd love to hear your feedback, bug reports, or feature requests!
by justin66 | 2026-03-06 17:27:37+00:00
> If all of the undocumented people in the US spent this much time trying to emigrate legally

Many of the "undocumented people" (what an Orwellian phrase) that have been rounded up by ICE are picked up during court hearings or immigration interviews. An easy way for agents to meet their quota without doing any actual investigative work. Say what you will about them but there's no denying those people were by definition "trying to emigrate legally." This has been widely reported.
by dehrmann | 2026-03-06 17:27:44+00:00
What are the current theories about why the perceived(?) healthy unemployment rate is lower post-covid? 4.4% is spectacularly good by historic standards. This has also been the slowest medium-term upswing in unemployment since WWII.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE

I'd ignore the headline number and wonder what the longer term trend means because this isn't normal.
by mschuster91 | 2026-03-06 17:27:54+00:00
> The math just doesn't work out for someone relatively young and with no major health issues.

The thing is, bad and expensive health issues can literally come upon you over night. You can get hit by a vehicle or get beaten up with no perpetrator to be held accountable, you can develop an aneurysm, get food poisoning, get pregnant unexpectedly (with all the risk that comes with, including healthcare not being accessible because of anti-abortion BS), or you can simply fall over a step in your own house.
by wizzwizz4 | 2026-03-06 17:28:10+00:00
Factories are staffed by people. Those people have the physical capability to change the way the factories operate. Any individual person attempting to modify / replace the factory equipment against their line manager's will would quickly find themselves out of a job, but collective action among factory workers (e.g. unions) might work. So might getting the line managers on board with the proposal, if you can get enough buy-in that "we used our discretion" is an acceptable answer: it's not like most companies actively want to pollute, rather that it's usually cheaper to do so, and they don't care about not. Being able to say "this move reduces turnover among our workers, slashing training costs; and you can probably use it in the B2B / B2C [delete as appropriate] marketing, since environmentalism sells in some markets; and this way, we're prepared for future legislation expected in jurisdictions A, B and C" may be sufficient justification. Alternatively, there may be ways to exploit the principal-agent problem.

I'm sure there are people who've specced out detailed proposals for this sort of thing. There might even be previous cases where they've succeeded, which we can learn from. Neither of those "two ways" you mentioned are things that I can do, but I may be able to slightly reduce the intensity of the opposition. (Companies tend to like when regulations require their competitors to do things they're already doing, after all.)
by h2zizzle | 2026-03-06 17:28:21+00:00
I just want everyone to understand that part of why everything is so expensive today is because our elite funneled the surpluses from the electronic revolution into boondoggles that not only didn't make back what they cost, but that demand even more labor, to this day, to cover maintenance and interest.

>Yeah, screw DEI!

lmao I'm talking about wars; sprawl; advertising and consumerism; wasteful or gatekept luxuries; feet-dragging on any number of technologies and policies that could have mitigated the damage, just to please incumbents.

We temporarily made life spectacularly better for like 5-10% of the population, and doomed everyone to either generations of toil, or a hard reset in the form of a "burn it all down" revolution.
by betaby | 2026-03-06 17:28:34+00:00
> But when this happens to the educated professional class, all hell breaks loose.

If the programmers fall into the "educated professional class", then no, not in Canada. I personally know people with engineering/science degrees who became "warehouse sorters", baristas, metal workers, parcel deliverers, cooks in cafeteria. Some of them eventually found programming jobs again, others are still employed in blue collar/service jobs after 3+ years.
by skandersab | 2026-03-06 17:28:37+00:00
Hi HN

I built *DataNest Analytics* — a tool that lets you upload your sales Excel file and instantly get a full analysis of your business.

https://www.datanestanalytics.com

## The problem

Many small businesses track their sales in Excel.

But when it comes time to actually understand the data, it becomes painful:

* building pivot tables
* creating charts
* trying to find trends
* manually calculating metrics

Most analytics tools require integrations, databases, or technical setup.

For many people, the data already exists — it's just trapped inside spreadsheets.

## The idea

What if you could simply upload your sales Excel file and immediately see:

* revenue trends
* best-selling products
* sales by category
* growth patterns
* key business metrics

No setup, no integrations, no technical skills required.

Just upload → analyze.

## How it works

1. Upload your sales Excel file
2. DataNest automatically processes the data
3. You get an instant analytics dashboard showing business insights

The goal was to remove all the friction between *having data* and *understanding it*.

## Who it's for

* small businesses
* online sellers
* Shopify / marketplace sellers exporting reports
* founders tracking revenue in spreadsheets
* anyone analyzing sales data in Excel

## Why I built it

I noticed many businesses export reports from their platforms but never actually analyze them.

Either they stay in Excel forever or people spend hours building manual reports.

I wanted to create a *zero-setup analytics layer for spreadsheets*.

## Looking for feedback

I'm still improving the product and would love feedback from the HN community.

Some questions I'm exploring:

* What metrics would you expect automatically?
* Should the tool support more file formats?
* Would automated recommendations be useful?

If you'd like to try it:

https://www.datanestanalytics.com

Happy to answer questions or share more about how it works.
by asdff | 2026-03-06 17:28:45+00:00
I think there is a level of working class poor where it hardly makes a difference what goes on to the world around your life as you are working paycheck to paycheck with much of your available time regardless. How worse it could get doesn’t look appreciably different than how bad it can get already.

A little higher up the economic pole is who stands to lose the most. Those are the people who will see actual quality of life reductions and not be able to afford to return to old norms.
by skyberrys | 2026-03-06 17:28:55+00:00
The slanted library lining the attic of his home is to die for. I could easily see this happening to myself in my old age. I love books and it's quite a challenge to keep and collect all of them. Why haven't I thought of slanted ceiling book cases before? And 70k books by the time you are 88, that's only 1000 books per year after age 18. Okay that does work out to more than 3 books a day, so reading every single one is challenging, but in your old age an unread book is something to look forward to. I'm sad to read that he's passed away.
by epistasis | 2026-03-06 17:29:05+00:00
Mass deportations are being conducted mostly on the basis of race. The accusation of blatant racism, come from police chiefs, from judges, as well as everybody experiencing the mass deportation. And the accusation of racism isn't that immigrants are a race, but the exact racial discrimination in who gets kidnapped and disappeared by masked men that are indistinguishable from criminals.
by groby_b | 2026-03-06 17:29:14+00:00
Humans tend to not breathe in a lot of stratospheric aerosols, on account of that being pretty high up.

As they sink down, they grow larger (condensation & coagulation). Once they reach the troposphere, they usually get down via precipitation, which also isn't really affecting a lot of breathing.

They can absolutely have other effects (see SO2/acidification, e.g), but air quality isn't really the main concern. For SO2 specifically, there's actually very little mortality sensitivity: https://www.giss.nasa.gov/pubs/abs/wa01010x.html

You're right that the research isn't there yet to make statements with confidence, but that applies to the air quality claim as well.
by hombre_fatal | 2026-03-06 17:29:30+00:00
You can read as much or as little of the code as you want.

The status quo was that I have no better understanding of code I haven't touched in a year, or code built by other people. Now I have the option to query the code with AI to bootstrap my understanding to exactly the level necessary.

But you're wrong on every claim about LLM capabilities. You can ask the AI exactly why it decided on a given design. You can ask it what the best options were and why it chose that option. You can ask it for the trade-offs.

In fact, this should be part of your Plan feedback loop before you move to Implementation.
by mikkupikku | 2026-03-06 17:29:37+00:00
I have long been skeptical of the "or later" clauses. I can imagine a not terribly distant future where RMS has passed away and GNU gets taken over by disinterested corporate psychos like happened to Mozilla, who then release GPL-4.0 without the copyleft, set up for industry looting of any GPL project that left in the "or later" clause.
by nancyminusone | 2026-03-06 17:29:43+00:00
Anyone else remember the brief time in the mid 2000s that these were called "smileys" and damn near every webpage ad wanted to install a questionable IE 6 toolbar so you could "get more smileys"?

Quality kid memory for me. I also remember watching another kid click on an ad for a free ipod and then enter in his home address and other personal info.
by mapt | 2026-03-06 17:29:58+00:00
They're by no means equally compelling. But they are viable ways to generate currency, you progress in them over time as a specialist, they feed back into the player economy performing tasks that other people want performed, and they are, importantly, in the same world, on the same shard. I know not to go near Orc Camp because there's a group of player killers down there, despite the fact that there's a rich Agapite vein running through the mountains near the entrance that I would love to mine and make armor out of. Back to the relative safety of Minoc for me, however crowded. In some timeline two weeks in the future, I band together with a bunch of other players (most of whom just want to farm orcs) to kick them out. Territorial control, even without any formal mechanics of territorial control, is closely correlated with narrative and socialization; I wouldn't have met any of those players if we were all on our own separate instance.

Eve Online accomplished something a little more combat-focused, but similarly diverse in playstyle, mostly by dint of having a single large persistent world-shard with minimal functional instancing.
by mesrik | 2026-03-06 17:30:16+00:00
NiMH batteries are surprisingly robust.

I've long had Palm Pilot Vx which I bought 2001 and used daily till 2011 when I switched my phone to iPhone 4s. Then I did factory reset and put it back in box it was sold and shelved it. End of January this year I was thinking I need to start clearing up what I've saved and see if would recycle, sell or send something to a museum.

I put Vx charging on its docking thing and left it there overnight (first checking it was not getting any warm) and next day I picked it up to see if it still works. It does, battery status did show full. I fiddled it perhaps almost half an hour and battery status was still full. So I left it on desk and thought to check it daily how long does battery charge last if idle. I think it was fourth of fifth day when change was only perhaps 10% percent. I have no real recollection of how much standby idle days was left after that 10 years in use, it's too long back and I didn't take any notes of it then. Just wrote in note date when I put it back in box.

I'm genuinely surprised that 25 years old darn thing still works, when it had been 10 years in use and then 15 years shelved batteries completely drained.

Now that's something we've lost when moved Lithium batteries, which don't survive being years completely empty. NiMH's just don't care, they seem to sustain capability to charge and keep charge after long periods of time unused.

I've had few NiMH triple-A batteries in use 12 years and I thought that was a stretch, but no. That Vx blew my mind how robust device and it's battery are.