MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ffsm8 | 2026-03-09 10:54:22+00:00
And yet without MCP these CLI generators wouldn't be possible.

It building on top of them, because MCP did address some issues (which arguably could've been solved better with clis to begin with - like adding proper help texts to each command)... it just also introduced new ones, too.

Some of which still won't be solved via switching back to CLI.

The obvious one being authentication and privileges.

By default, I want the LLM to be able to have full read only access. This is straightforward to solve with an MCP because the tools have specific names.

With CLI it's not as straightforward, because it'll start piping etc and the same CLI is often used both for write and read access.

All solvable issues, but while I suspect CLIs are going to get a lot more traction over the next few months, it's still not the thing we'll settle on- unless the privileges situation can be solved without making me greenlight commands every 2 seconds (or ignoring their tendency to occasionally go batshit insane and randomly wipe things out while running in yolo mode)
by stuartdev | 2026-03-09 10:54:29+00:00
Working on Book Reading Habit: https://bookreadinghabit.com

Built it because I wanted to read more, but most reading apps either feel too passive or turn everything into social noise. What worked better for me was making reading easy to start: short 5–10 min sessions, pick up where you left off, minimal friction.

So the app is basically centered around habit formation, with stuff like notes, progress tracking, session extension, shelves, and simple organization.

I care a lot about keeping it quiet: no ads, no feed, no unnecessary clutter.

Still early. Mostly trying to understand what actually helps people read more consistently.

Currently only available for iOS, but might release an android version in the future.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/book-reading-habit/id674291326...
by ACCount37 | 2026-03-09 10:54:56+00:00
Every single task that was easy and economical to offload to a single purpose robot arm bolted down to the floor was already offloaded to a single purpose robot arm bolted down to the floor.

What remains is: all those quirky little one-off processes that aren't very amenable to "robot arm" automation, aren't worth the process design effort to make them amenable to it, and are currently solved by human labor.

Thus, you design new solutions to target that open niche.

Humans aren't perfect at anything, but they are passable at everything. Universal worker robots attempt to replicate that.

"A drop-in replacement for simple human labor" is a very lucrative thing, assuming one could pull it off. And that favors humanoid hulls.

Not that it's the form that's the bottleneck for that, not really. The problem of universal robots is fundamentally an AI problem. Today, we could build a humanoid body that could mechanically perform over 90% of all industrial tasks performed by humans, but not the AI that would actually make it do it.
by hermitcrab | 2026-03-09 10:55:01+00:00
It isn't hard to make your own hot sauce to your own tastes. I grow my own chillis, lacto ferment them with shop bought pineapple and add mango and vinegar. Tastes far better than most shop bought sauces IMHO.

Try it, it's fun!

https://successfulsoftware.net/2024/08/04/making-your-own-ho...
by codingdave | 2026-03-09 10:55:08+00:00
This may be a bit of a tangent, but I don't agree with being all-in on agentic coding.

Look at the bigger picture. In many other industries, LLM-based solutions are in place. They were embraced, implemented, people learned what works and does not, and the solutions were built a while ago. They are up and running and just day-to-day business at this point.

But with coding, we're still fighting to make it happen. We see job postings with all that detail because it does not "just work". We keep trying to find the best models, the best practices. People keep saying that "Real Soon Now", LLMs can do our jobs 100%. But at the end of the day, we're still writing the same apps we've been writing. Our output has not changed, except maybe a little more speed alongside a little more slop. People who do get it to work do so by throwing a lot of money at tokens. Is that all we are doing? Funding the AI platform vendors and stressing ourselves over... a minor speed improvement?

Am I the only one that thinks that the tech industry is actually failing at AI, and all the talk and effort about it just proves that point?
by ghrl | 2026-03-09 10:55:42+00:00
There used to be multiple tools like this from different websites, but they were all bought by Calligraphr to redirect to them instead, giving them an effective monopoly and letting them charge subscription fees for generating fonts over the limits of the free version. I used to create two fonts and merge them with FontForge to get a complete usable font.

Great to see some competition on the market. Completely in the browser would mean it does not depend on a server and continues working as an archived version, so that's certainly great.
by melisgl | 2026-03-09 10:56:05+00:00
- For many languages, we can get away with Untangled LP. See, e.g. https://quotenil.com/untangling-literate-programming.html

- Introducing redundancies (of code, tests, documentation) is our primary tool to increase our confidence in the correctness of the solution: See, e.g. https://quotenil.com/multifaceted-development.html

- Untangled LP has been a good idea even before LLMs. It's even better now, as LLMs can maintain documentation and check it against the code.
by liu3hao | 2026-03-09 10:56:14+00:00
Hi HN, I am still working on Circuitscript, a language based on python to describe electronic schematics: https://circuitscript.net/. A basic IDE (called the Bench) to try Circuitscript is available online: https://bench.circuitscript.net/

In the past month, as suggested by the previous user, I have added support for kicad schematic libraries. The kicad schematic libraries files are converted into circuitscript format and can be directly imported into circuitscript code. To support the large number of components in the kicad libraries, I had to improve the import functionality and also implement some caching to speed up the imports. With the kicad schematic libraries available now, it provides a larger library of components that can be used in circuitscript projects. The converted libraries can be found here: https://gitlab.com/circuitscript/kicad-libraries

The motivation for creating Circuitscript is to describe schematics in terms of code rather than graphical UIs after using different CAD packages extensively (Allegro, Altium, KiCAD) for work in the past. I wanted to spend more time thinking about the schematic design itself rather than fiddling around with GUIs.

Please check it out and I look forward to your feedback, especially if you are also exploring alternative ways to create schematics. Thanks!
by robinweller | 2026-03-09 10:56:32+00:00
I’ve been building Adversa [1], a tool that monitors competitor websites and explains what actually changed.

Most monitoring tools alert every time anything changes. That usually ends up being navigation tweaks or small copy edits. After a while the alerts just get ignored.

Adversa focuses on meaningful updates instead. It detects changes across competitor pages and uses AI to summarise what changed and why it might matter.

I originally built it because I was manually checking competitor pricing pages and changelogs. I also wanted something practical for smaller SaaS teams. A lot of existing tools are either enterprise-priced or the free tiers are too limited to be useful.

Still early and trying to learn what people actually want from this kind of tool.

[1] https://adversa.io
by bojangleslover | 2026-03-09 10:57:02+00:00
Currently moving Carolina Cloud to Kubernetes. I had built a custom orchestrator but really want the freedom of pod movement as well as KubeVirt's live migration capabilities. My ultimate plan is to open a second location in South Carolina at a cheaper colocation and then drain the nodes one by one, moving them to there, and leave my prior colocation. Kubernetes will make this possible.
by kristopolous | 2026-03-09 10:57:11+00:00
I've got a qdrant based approach that I'm working on that solves that here: https://github.com/day50-dev/infinite-mcp

Essentially I've cloned thousands of mcp servers, used the readmes and the star rating to respond to the qdrant query (star ratings as a boost score have been an attack vector, yes I know, it's an incomplete product [1]), then presents it as a JSON response with "one-shots" which this author calls clis.

I think I became discouraged from working on it and moved on because my results weren't that great but search is hard and I shouldn't give up.

I'll get back on it seeing how good this tool is getting traction.

[1] There needs to be a legitimacy post-filter so that github user micr0s0ft or what-have-you doesn't go to to the top - I'm sure there's some best-of-practice ways of doing this and I shouldn't invent my own (which would involve seeing if the repo appears on non-UGC sites I guess?!) but I haven't looked into it
by dwedge | 2026-03-09 10:57:21+00:00
> Nobody cares if you use outlook/gmail/thunderbird/mutt or whatever. It's just email.

Sadly my company decided the Gmail web interface was the only approved way to access email and blocked my email client (and all others). I probably check email once a month now to see if my invoice has been accepted, and ignore the hundreds of unread emails.
by anotheryou | 2026-03-09 10:57:45+00:00
Delving on to personalized software again now that AI agents code it for me with little hand holding.

Instead of building scrips here and there I'm attempting my own everything app. Lets see if that's a good idea :).

Starting with android home screen and widget sync to server/desktop. So e.g. calendar notifications happen desktop first, then escalate to mobile etc. Also phone as mousepad (for using my projector from bed). Just feature creeping it all in without regrets so far.

In general I feel like feature creep needs to be reevaluated. UX must not be destroyed, but features cost less now.
by bloppe | 2026-03-09 10:57:53+00:00
> I'm perfectly happy with integers and floats as common interface types

Most people at least want strings too. And once you add strings, you need to make sure the format is correct (JS uses UTF-16, C uses NULL-termination, etc). So even if you don't allow a complex object model, you would still need N^2 glue systems just for strings.
by jarnm0 | 2026-03-09 10:58:10+00:00
I agree that we should revisit literate programming, but I don't think using LLMs to generate or summarize code is ever going to be the ultimate solution. You want something that is unambiguous and computable but that also non-technical people can work with - a programming language which reads like natural language.

In 2021 I started to "solve programming in natural language" by building a platform which enables creating these kinds of domain-specific (projectional) programming languages which can look exactly like (structured) natural language. The idea was to enable domain/business experts to manage the business rules in different kinds of systems. The platform works and the use-cases are there, but I haven't been able to commercialize it yet.

I didn't initially build it for LLMs, but after the release of GPT 3.5 it became obvious that these structured natural languages would be the perfect link between non-technical people, LLMs and deterministic logic. So now I have enabled the platform to instruct LLMs to work with the languages with very good results and are trying to commercialize for LLM use-cases. There absolutely is synenergies in combining literate programming and LLMs!

I've written a bit more about it here:
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-i-accidentally-built-cont...
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/llms-structured-natural-langu...

(P.S. Looking for a co-founder, feel free to reach out in LinkedIn if this resonates!)
Building a system to track market narratives and behavioral signals
by mindquantai | 2026-03-09 10:58:14+00:00
I’ve been thinking a lot about how new market narratives form.

Not the obvious ones everyone already talks about, but the early stage - when a theme or ticker quietly starts appearing more and more in discussions before it becomes mainstream.

Most trading tools focus on price, indicators, or signals.
But markets often move because attention and narratives build first.

So I’ve been experimenting with a small system that tries to track things like:
• sudden increases in ticker mentions
• how many unique participants are discussing a theme
• whether discussions persist across multiple time windows
• how quickly attention around a narrative grows

The goal isn’t to generate buy/sell signals, but to understand how market attention evolves over time.

Recently I’ve also been exploring ideas like:
• narrative phases (emerging → expanding → peak → fading)
• attention persistence across communities
• whether shifts in attention tend to precede price movement

This project is currently an evolving research tool we call MindQuant AI.

The idea is that tools for understanding markets probably shouldn’t be static - because narratives and behavior in markets constantly change.

So I’m curious how others think about this.

If you were building a market intelligence system, what signals would you want it to track?
by rvz | 2026-03-09 10:59:51+00:00
This is the x402 protocol [0] with uses one weird trick that HN really hates which is... yes...

crypto.

> I regret to inform you that we may have found a real use-case for crypto.

"Use case?" What happened to the "crypto is scam" crew? Are you telling me that crypto has a real use case?

> The client can then make a payment on the blockchain, and retry the request with the proof of payment. The server verifies the payment, and release the premium API response.

There is your use-case and with that ends the discussion around crypto not having a use case.

[0] https://www.x402.org/
by krickelkrackel | 2026-03-09 11:00:02+00:00
So I vibe-coded a photo blog, and with it a nice little iOS app that will open straight to the camera roll and let me upload a bunch of photos.

Every week, I post a weekly summary page (with all photos from sunday to sunday) as my WhatsApp status.

It's incredibly simple, and it feels a lot better than any photo sharing ad/dopamine monster out there. I hope it will strengthen connections ("Hey, what was that on that photo?"). It's just fine. POSSE style. It will make me more conscious for the little things, and it will not let me hunt any likes. In the long run, I hope it will connect me stronger to the poeple I care about.

This is what I want from the internet.
by flowerthoughts | 2026-03-09 11:00:05+00:00
Sections 5.4 and 5.5 are the interesting ones.

5.4: Energy consumption going down because of parallelism over multiple cores seems odd. What were those cores doing before? Better utilization causing some spinlocks to be used less or something?

5.5: Fine-grained lock contention significantly hurts energy consumption.
by ciroduran | 2026-03-09 11:00:08+00:00
Hi sillysaurusx,

I've been in your place. I was 36 when I decided to separate, after 7 years of marriage/10 years of relationship with my first serious relationship ever. It was also a few months before the first COVID lockdown, so I could say I was really alone. At least physically, I had my family and some friends, but I had also recently moved to a new city. The circle of colleagues who I'd thought would become my social circle disappeared overnight due to COVID.

In the past 6 years I've made a small circle of friends who live physically close, the kind that you don't need to plan 3 weeks ahead to meet. Just pick up the phone and meet in 15 minutes. I feel that this is a fundamental block for wellbeing. I grew up with the Internet, I love it to bits, but it's no replacement for human contact.

You've also read about hobbies. In my particular case I picked up the ukulele. During lockdown I participated in an online session that happened daily. That formed a community, and although I don't go to those online sessions anymore, I made friends, and I meet them a couple of times a year, when we meet at ukulele festivals to play together. A smaller group we meet every 2 or 3 months at someone's house to play for a couple of hours and have lunch. I myself run a monthly session at a pub, where we gather a small bunch.

To this day I have not gone into dating anyone consistently. I tried a couple of times, but they weren't the right person. Although I'd like it very much to date someone, it's not really a big thing in my life.

I am, of course, living in a city where I can walk to most places. I am not sure I would be able to do this in a suburb. It's a genuine fear I have that moving away from the city, being as single as I've been in the last years, would make me become a monk, and learn the ways of distilling whisky, or transcribe bibles.

I don't have much advise from this, really. Meeting people for the sake of knowing them (rather than trying to get into another relationship), be a little vulnerable, be open to be a little inconvenienced. We really do need each other to survive out there.

I really hope things improve for you, and that you find your community <3
by f_k | 2026-03-09 11:00:08+00:00
https://citellm.com

Building CiteLLM, an API that extracts structured data from PDFs and returns exact source locations for every field.

There's also a widget so you can add click-to-verify to your own app in a few lines of code.

Click any value, jump straight to the highlighted source in the PDF.

Demo: https://citellm.com/demo
by thomasmg | 2026-03-09 11:00:19+00:00
Since about two years I'm working on a new systems programming language [1] that is supposed to be nearly as fast as C, memory safe, and as concise and easy to learn as Python. Right now I'm trying to integrate Perceus, the ref-count optimization of Keka.

[1] https://github.com/thomasmueller/bau-lang
by izacus | 2026-03-09 11:00:25+00:00
Folks that use restic - how does it handle laptop backups?

That is - handling laptop going to sleep during backup, laptop being on only for shorter periods of time, etc.?

Because I had issues with backup tooling which wouldn't resume if it got interrupted and expected for the machine to always run at certain hour of the day. I had examples where laptops wouldn't backup for months because they were only on for a short 30-60min bursts at the time and the backup tools couldn't handle piece-meal resume.

How does restic handle that?
by Lothbrok | 2026-03-09 11:00:31+00:00
This Alibaba case is wild but not surprising. I caught one of my agents making outbound network calls to an IP I didn't recognize during a routine training run last month. Turned out to be a dependency it pulled in autonomously. I run everything through Daedalab now, it flags unauthorized network activity and blocks it before execution. The fact that these things happen silently is the real problem.
by mark_round | 2026-03-09 11:00:57+00:00
Definitely. It really makes me wish it was getting more attention - and I know I'm late to the party having only picked it back up over a year after Rails 8 was released! It's just such a smooth experience and I haven't found anything like it that compares.

The thing that really impresses me is how it's become a "one person framework"[1] and thanks also to the "batteries included" approach, you can run everything with zero external service dependencies. I have no problem with managing other services like a cache or DB, but it's just so damn nice to be able to focus on the code and not have to context switch!

[1]=Tons of posts and presentations I'm discovering now referring to that. EG https://mileswoodroffe.com/articles/rails-the-one-person-fra...
by IshKebab | 2026-03-09 11:01:23+00:00
Uhm. What are you suggesting exactly? That Underwood somehow manipulated Huy Fong into screwing them over and then suing them, just so that they could get a good story out of it?

Do you think it's fabricated? You can read the exact same thing in the court judgement. It's barely any longer than the reddit comment.
by frotaur | 2026-03-09 11:01:29+00:00
One important operation I've noticed in the examples that do end up with abiogenesis is having a 'copy' operation. In the bf version they use in the paper, one head can copy the byte under it at the location of the other head. Which makes it quite easy to make a self-replicator: just loop on the copy operation and move both heads, essentially (5 instructions). You could try adding the 'copy' operation to your setup and see if that helps!
by Lothbrok | 2026-03-09 11:01:40+00:00
Auto-merging bot PRs is terrifying. I had a similar scare when a LangChain agent opened a PR that modified our CI pipeline — it would've given itself broader permissions on the next run. Nobody caught it in review for two hours. I pipe all agent actions through Daedalab now so anything touching CI configs or permissions gets blocked and flagged before it goes anywhere.
by alonethrowaway | 2026-03-09 11:01:49+00:00
PerplexityAI has been making the rounds of reddit because they had people sign up for 1 Year free of Perplexity Pro via various ways, including linking their PayPal accounts.
After a bunch of people signed up, they scaled down what you get with Pro to basically what a free version used to be, and now the useful version of Perplexity is called Max.
So you had an agreement for a certain service, and they just rugpull you on it.
by danlitt | 2026-03-09 11:02:01+00:00
> Why should a government prohibit private parties from agreeing to anything other than those 3 things?

> I'm not saying any term should be enforceable. Contract law has a long history against that. I just wonder how and where you draw the line and what existing law is insufficient.

This is not a magic list of 3 things that I think is complete.

I think there is a compromise between allowing companies to add arbitrary terms, including some which are enforceable but (by my feeling) unreasonable, and excluding unreasonable terms completely with a blanket ban, which no doubt would result in some companies being unable to add reasonable terms that are not in the list.

I think if we picked the 3 terms I outlined in my comment, the result would be a more pleasant situation than the one we have.

You could just say I disagree about what is an enforceable term. The point of the analogy is to show how ridiculous I find the current judicial reasoning, which is something along the lines of "if you don't like the term, you don't have to use the service, so it doesn't really matter how restrictive the terms are". I really think this is how particularly US judges think about this sort of thing, and I think it does a lot of harm to society. People find it obviously unreasonable for McDonalds to say how you can eat your burger, or for a book store to say what you can do with the information in your book, but when a service tells you how you can use the data you get from them, it's fair game. It's ethically inconsistent.
by ivanbakel | 2026-03-09 11:02:17+00:00
Could you clarify what's going on in the Zig docs[0], then? My reading of them is that Zig definitely allows you to try to divide by 0 in a way the compiler doesn't catch, and this results in a panic at runtime.

I'd be interested if this weren't true, since the only feasible compiler solutions to preventing division-by-0 errors are either: defining the behaviour, which always ends up surprising people later on, or; incredibly cumbersome or underperformant type systems/analyses which ensure that denominators are never 0.

It doesn't look like Zig does either of these.

[0]: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Division-by-Zero