MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xp84 | 2026-02-17 19:04:03+00:00
This doesn't address my point though. You're talking about how it's okay if we lose all our factories to make the cars, computers, and whatever else is in the Crates. And sure, if all those workers can find new careers like they did when we industrialized farming, that's all well and good.

I'm talking about how our usage of the "Crate Goods" makes us incredibly vulnerable to a disruption in Crate delivery.
by acuozzo | 2026-02-17 19:04:10+00:00
At least in the US, yes. Check out general1465's reply to me.

The problem, I think, is that there are many competent hardware design engineers available abroad and since hardware is usually designed with very rigorous specs, tests, etc. it's easy to outsource. You can test if the hardware design engineer(s) came up with an adequate design and, if not, refuse payment or demand reimbursement, depending on how the contract is written. It's all very clear-cut and measurable.

Software is still the "Wild West", even with LLMs. It's nebulous, fast-moving, and requires a lot of communication to get close to reaching the maintenance stage.
by bikenaga | 2026-02-17 19:04:27+00:00
Abstract. "Pluralistic ignorance—the systematic misperception of others’ attitudes—can entrench suboptimal norms, yet its dynamics remain poorly understood. We develop a mathematical model of the coevolution of actions, private attitudes, and beliefs about others, with societal tightness as a central parameter. Our framework integrates theories of spirals of silence, preference falsification, and cultural mismatch into a single dynamic system capturing the effects of material payoffs, cognitive forces, and social influence. The model shows that pluralistic ignorance can arise from lags between attitude change and belief updating, even without silence or deception. Dynamics unfold faster in loose cultures and slower in tight ones: loose societies display sharp but transient peaks of pluralistic ignorance, while tight societies sustain slower, persistent mismatches. Both can experience cultural evolutionary mismatch but through distinct pathways—internalized norm adherence in loose cultures vs. conformity pressure in tight ones. These mechanisms may help explain global patterns where private support exceeds perceived support, such as climate action, women’s rights, and abortion attitudes. Interventions must therefore be culturally tailored: accelerating attitude change through highlighting benefits is effective in loose cultures, whereas lowering expression costs (via anonymity or legal protections) empowers norm entrepreneurs in tight cultures. Our framework identifies policy levers and clarifies when apparent opinion stability conceals underlying shifts, offering insights for democratic societies navigating rapid social change."
by JuniperMesos | 2026-02-17 19:04:47+00:00
And this is a good thing, if you think that the billionaires running large businesses like CNN will generally act in their own selfish self-interest and that they need the government to hold regulatory leverage over their businesses in order to make them act in a socially-beneficial way.

But then you have to trust the government that manages the regulatory agency to act in a socially-beneficial; and only at most half the US population does at any given time.
by storystarling | 2026-02-17 19:05:30+00:00
Thanks for the blunt feedback - genuinely appreciate it.

You're right that children's books can be excellent, and for generic topics a well-reviewed book from a skilled author and illustrator will beat what we generate. No argument there.

Where we see real value is in the gaps the publishing industry doesn't serve. Bilingual families who can't find books in Maltese/English or Estonian/German. A child with an insulin pump who wants to see a superhero like them. A kid processing their parents' divorce. A child with two dads, or being adopted, or starting at a new school in a country where they don't speak the language yet. No publisher will print a run of one for these families - but these are exactly the stories that matter most to them.

On the UX points - you're right on both. We should localize the showcase to your language, and the signup wall before trying is too much friction. Working on both.
Show HN: Orange Cheeto Browser extension that replaces Trump with nicknames
by philco | 2026-02-17 19:05:39+00:00
I built a browser extension that does text replacement across all websites -- specifically replacing "Trump" with rotating humorous nicknames.

The interesting technical bits:

- TreeWalker for DOM traversal (skips scripts, inputs, contenteditable, iframes)

- MutationObserver with debouncing for SPAs and dynamically loaded content

- Fisher-Yates shuffle bag for even nickname distribution (no repeats until all are used)

- Case preservation via regex (TRUMP -> MANGO MUSSOLINI, Trump -> Mango Mussolini)

- CSS-only animations with prefers-reduced-motion support

- Zero dependencies, plain JS, Manifest V3

The architecture is generic enough to fork for any text replacement use case. All the replacement logic lives in a single file.

No external requests, no analytics, no data leaves the browser. Settings sync via Chrome Storage / browser.storage.

Available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Free.

Feedback on the implementation welcome -- the code is straightforward and I'd rather someone tell me my MutationObserver setup is wrong than find out the hard way.
by reify | 2026-02-17 19:05:45+00:00
Dont tell me, let me guess.

You vibe coded them.

its a promo. must have been paid handsomely for this one.

He quotes Dazzer.

the guy only does a blog post every 3-4 years.

AI can now do 70% of the coding on a project.
With better specs and a way to verify, will it get to 80%? 90%?
Dario (CEO of Anthropic) expects AI to do SWE jobs 100% end to end by the end of the year.
There’s still a ways to go, but the real bottleneck isn’t coding.
It’s a clear vision and purpose.
by helloplanets | 2026-02-17 19:05:51+00:00
Yea that's true, it's a pretty overloaded word. From what I remember though, even the top players thought that there wasn't anywhere left to go with chess engines, before Alpha Zero basically ripped the roof off with a completely different play style back in 2017, beating Stockfish.

And the play style of Alpha Zero wasn't different in a way that needs a super trained chess intuition to see, it's outrageously different if you take a look at the games.

I guess my point is, that even if the current situation is basically a 'deadlock', it's been proven that it's not some sort of eternal knowledge of the game as of yet. There's still the possiblity that a new type of approach could blow the current top engines out of the water, with a completely different take on the game.
by margalabargala | 2026-02-17 19:05:59+00:00
Great. So if that pattern matching engine matches the pattern of "oh, I really want A, but saying so will elicit a negative reaction, so I emit B instead because that will help make A come about" what should we call that?

We can handwave defining "deception" as "being done intentionally" and carefully carve our way around so that LLMs cannot possibly do what we've defined "deception" to be, but now we need a word to describe what LLMs do do when they pattern match as above.
by sscg13 | 2026-02-17 19:06:10+00:00
Engines like Stockfish might have over 100 "search parameters" that need to be tuned, to my best knowledge SPSA is preferred because the computational cost typically does not depend on the number of parameters.

Or, if attempting to use SPSA to say, perform a final post-training tune to the last layers of a neural network, this could be thousands of parameters or more.
by eshaham78 | 2026-02-17 19:06:41+00:00
Good question. The key is sharing the full prompt chain/workflow rather than single prompts - think of it like sharing a Makefile instead of a single shell command. For LLM apps, that means exporting the conversation history, system prompts, and any context files. Tools like Claude Code already support this - you can export full session transcripts. The 'prompt' becomes the reproducible artifact, not just the instruction text.
by chaps | 2026-02-17 19:06:44+00:00
I tried using it, but I don't understand what it wants me to do! It says scroll, but when I do it just zooms in. Which is the same as clicking? I tried scrolling to the left but that just moved me to where I am now.

Love the idea, but strange UX.

Edit: tried it again and I think the problem is that there's no feedback during scrolling during transition screens. When I scroll, I expect it to scroll with me, not go on its own path. So by the time it's possible to scroll again, I already tried everything and gave up. Made more confusing by the instructional text disappearing between transitions. Give a little bit more feedback during those transitions and I think the problem goes away.
by isleyaardvark | 2026-02-17 19:06:44+00:00
> Still, few people pursue the option because of a “pervasive” myth that the loans can’t be included in the proceeding

It also says nothing about whether the person actually goes bankrupt, just which debts are discharged, which is one of the key parts of the bankruptcy process. Certain debts are discharged because the person can’t pay them back, which is the point of going into bankruptcy court.
by gordonhart | 2026-02-17 19:06:45+00:00
> Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model. As an experiment in responsible disclosure, we are instead releasing a much smaller model for researchers to experiment with, as well as a technical paper.

I wouldn't call it rewriting history to say they initially considered GPT-2 too dangerous to be released. If they'd applied this approach to subsequent models rather than making them available via ChatGPT and an API, it's conceivable that LLMs would be 3-5 years behind where they currently are in the development cycle.
by justin66 | 2026-02-17 19:06:46+00:00
Revisited the game in greater depth (I made an earlier comment below). I'd forgotten entirely that Simon leaves behind a copy of himself at one point while proceeding on his journey, and gets pretty spazzy about it. If you were going to do this game as a proper immersive sim instead of an "on a rail" story, the decisions a player had freedom to make could involve the player's beliefs and predisposition when it comes to creating copies of themselves.

There are definitely different ways of viewing having copies of oneself in the world, but they pretty broadly divide into the angsty Simon's "If there’s an afterlife, is my place taken?" or a more fun sort of "hey look, there's two of us." [0] And I suppose a particularly interesting scenario might involve having the player make peace with the situation after making a copy, at which point you'd have the angsty version and one or more cool versions wandering around the same environment. But that would be a very different game.

[0] https://youtu.be/egjNuZahFq0?t=144
by Aachen | 2026-02-17 19:06:51+00:00
Not sure if I'm understanding you right, but I wasn't saying that my experience is the only one that matters. Just that it's not a thing one notices in practice, at least not under conditions I've experienced (I figure a reader can fill in that last bit for a comment written in the first person). Saying AOSP's is "much, much faster" suggests it would be noticeable and afaik it's not (at human timescales), so I wanted to add that info to the thread

Good point about the USB thing btw. It's obvious to me and the reason why I go one step further and leave USB debugging always enabled now that there's this private key authorisation method anyway (it asks for computers whose key it doesn't yet trust), but indeed a lot of users might follow GrapheneOS' advice without realising
by ck2 | 2026-02-17 19:07:04+00:00
I had to live through a year of endless replays of "go at throttle up"

it's still traumatizing to this day, please don't screw this up

> hydrogen leaks have plagued the SLS since the beginning. That’s partly because liquid hydrogen is a notoriously tricky fuel to work with, as these tiny molecules can slip through miniscule gaps in seals and joints. It’s also extremely cold (-423 degrees Fahrenheit, or -253 degrees Celsius), which can cause hardware to become brittle and crack
by the_duke | 2026-02-17 19:07:19+00:00
An Anthropic safety researcher just recently quit with very cryptic messages , saying "the world is in peril"... [1] (which may mean something, or nothing at all)

Codex quite often refuses to do "unsafe/unethical" things that Anthropic models will happily do without question.

Anthropic just raised 30 bn... OpenAI wants to raise 100bn+.

Thinking any of them will actually be restrained by ethics is foolish.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46972496
by ainch | 2026-02-17 19:07:20+00:00
Knowing a couple people who work at Anthropic or in their particular flavour of AI Safety, I think you would be surprised how sincere they are about existential AI risk. Many safety researchers funnel into the company, and the Amodei's are linked to Effective Altruism, which also exhibits a strong (and as far as I can tell, sincere) concern about existential AI risk. I personally disagree with their risk analysis, but I don't doubt that these people are serious.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-17 19:07:35+00:00
>As they say, the rules are written in blood

Basically nobody ever died from leaky pipes or substandard weatherproofing. The code is as much about a) homogenizing the industry so big business can statistically reason about it at scale b) turning the subjective into the quantitive so that things can be done, checked, sight off on, etc, etc, without anyone using "judgement" as it is about protecting life and limb. Just about every professional has a laundry list of complaints about their area of code that boil down to it being theoretically useful but at great "not worth it" expense or a similar "not worth it" expense being incurred in lieu of very basic judgement. Arc fault breakers, and engineering requirements for small retaining walls come to mind as oft cited examples. And of course there's the myriad of wrangling that goes on wherein things get looser/stiffer requirements depending on whether their use is deemed worth incentivizing (this stuff usually lives in local addendums to the code).

I'm not saying there isn't value in there, but this habit people have of acting like it's all relevant to safety and screeching about "written in blood" is exactly what creates room for unrelated stuff to exist in the code.

>However, when you start reading, it is clear that much of the work is empirical, heavily localized and based on a great deal on the experience of the builder. I found very little in the way of solid theoretical modeling, but lots of measure, adjust, etc.

Which is a point very much in favor of the amateur.
by VorpalWay | 2026-02-17 19:07:39+00:00
Arch Linux have used their own gitlab instance for a long time (though with mirrors to GitHub). Debian and Fedora have both run their own infra for git for a long time. Not sure about other distros. I was surprised Gentoo used GitHub at all.

Pretty sure several of these distros started doing this with cvs or svn way back before git became popular even.
by tverbeure | 2026-02-17 19:07:55+00:00
I added the following at the top of the blog post that I wrote yesterday: "All words in this blog post were written by a human being."

I don't particularly care if people question that, but the source repo is on GitHub: they can see all the edits that were made along the way. Most LLMs wouldn't deliberately add a million spelling or grammar mistakes to fake a human being... yet.

As for knowing what I'm talking about. Many of my blog posts are about stuff that I just learned, so I have many disclaimers that the reader should take everything with a grain of salt. :-) That said: I put a ridiculous amount of time in these things to make sure it's correct. Knowing that your stuff will be out there for others to criticize if a great motivator to do your homework.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-17 19:08:22+00:00
You are making a point that is in favor of my argument, not against it. I make the same argument as you do routinely against people trying to over-simplify things. LLM hypists frequently suggest that because brain activity is "just" electrochemical signals, there is no possible difference between an LLM and a human brain. This is, obviously, tremendously idiotic. I do believe it is within the realm of possibility to create machine intelligence; I don't believe in a magic soul or some other element that make humans inherently special. However, if you do not engage in overt reductionism, the mechanism by which these electrochemical signals are generated is completely and totally different from the signals involved in an LLM's processing. Human programming is substantially more complex, and it is fundamentally absurd to think that our biological programming can be reduced to conveniently be exactly equivalent to the latest fad technology and assume that we've solved the secret to programming a brain, despite the programs we've written performing exactly according to their programming and no greater.

Edit: Case in point, a mere 10 minutes later we got someone making that exact argument in a sibling comment to yours! Nature is beautiful.
by surgical_fire | 2026-02-17 19:08:32+00:00
This is marketing. You are swallowing marketing without critical throught.

LLMs are very interesting tools for generating things, but they have no conscience. Deception requires intent.

What is being described is no different than an application being deployed with "Test" or "Prod" configuration. I don't think you would speak in the same terms if someone told you some boring old Java backend application had to "play dead" when deployed to a test environment or that it has to have "situational awareness" because of that.

You are anthropomorphizing a machine.
by lich_king | 2026-02-17 19:08:36+00:00
> "NEVER use generic AI-generated aesthetics like overused font families (Inter, Roboto, Arial, system fonts), cliched color schemes (particularly purple gradients on white backgrounds), ...

Now, imagine what happens when this prompt becomes popular?

Keep in mind that LLMs are trying to predict the most likely token. If your prompt prohibits the most likely token, they output the next most likely token. So, attempts to force creativity by prohibiting cliches just create another cliche.

Several days ago, someone researched Moltbook and pointed out how similar all the posts are. Something like 10% of them say "my human", etc.
by so-cal-schemer | 2026-02-17 19:08:39+00:00
On the quality of CS education at Khoury:

I've seen more praise than criticism from employers.

I've seen more positive reflection than regrets from students.

(also true of Scheme based 6.001 and CS61A and HtDP)

This discussion at lobsters suggests the decision to change the curricula was political and business driven, not based on the merits of the "Fundies" course series:

https://lobste.rs/s/els8k7/northeastern_s_redesign_khoury

See also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
by atomic128 | 2026-02-17 19:08:48+00:00
Exactly. Prose, code, visual arts, etc. AI material drowns out human material. AI tools disincentivize understanding and skill development and novelty ("outside the training distribution"). Long-term, this is will do enormous damage to society and our species.

The answer is that you declare war and suffocate the enemy with a stream of slop training data ("poison"). You inject vast quantities of high-quality poison (inexpensive to generate, expensive to detect) into the intakes of the enemy engine.

LLMs are highly susceptible to poisoning attacks, see Anthropic's research: https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

We create poisoned git repos on every hosting platform. We feed poison to web crawlers from dozens of sites (hopefully many more in the future). We fill the corners of social media with poison snippets.

There is widespread support for this hostile posture toward AI. For example, see: https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/1r55wvg/poison_fou...

Join us. The war has begun.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-17 19:08:52+00:00
They're copying one of Khan Academy's implementation models [1] and rebranding it as AI. It's certainly not new besides the "help yourself to AI" part (which, full disclosure, Khan Academy is working on as well with their "Khanmigo" assistant [2]). Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, did a TED talk [3] on this.

[1] https://en.khanacademy.org/khan-for-educators/

[2] https://www.khanmigo.ai/

[3] How AI Could Save (Not Destroy) Education | Sal Khan | TED - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJP5GqnTrNo - May 1st, 2023
by jacobgadek | 2026-02-17 19:09:00+00:00
Hey HN. I'm a solo dev who could never figure out what to actually do with my analytics data. I'd open Mixpanel, look at charts, and close the tab. The data was there but I didn't have the expertise to turn it into decisions.

So I built Lurnna. You add a 3.5kb script tag (vanilla TypeScript, zero dependencies, no cookies). It auto-captures page views, clicks, sessions, and JS errors. Every morning at 6 AM it analyzes the last 24 hours and sends you 3-5 plain-English insights with specific actions.

The insight engine works in four stages:

1. SDK captures events and batches them every 5s (uses sendBeacon on unload)
2. Events go into Supabase PostgreSQL with monthly partitioning
3. Daily cron aggregates into structured summaries
4. Summary gets sent to Claude Sonnet with a system prompt tuned for growth analysis. Returns categorized insights (retention, acquisition, engagement, anomalies) each with a specific action item

The SDK respects Do Not Track, uses sessionStorage instead of cookies, and never stores IPs. 3.5kb gzipped.

Stack: Next.js 14, Supabase, Claude API, Resend for email delivery, Vercel for hosting.

Still in private beta. Looking for devs with live web apps who want to test it. The main thing I need to validate is whether the AI insights are actually useful or just noise.

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or the prompt engineering approach.
by bikenaga | 2026-02-17 19:09:27+00:00
Abstract. "More than 100 historically, archaeologically and ethnographically attested numerical notations have been used over the past 5,000 y; however, because most of those systems are no longer used, experimental investigation is challenging. Prior research often assumes, rather than demonstrates, the inferiority of notations like Roman numerals. Gradience is a principle whereby the length of numeral phrases correlates with the magnitude of the numbers being represented. In general, but inconsistently, larger numbers require more signs, just as larger sets of abstract dot patterns occupy more space. This study compares the gradience of 13 numerical notations varying in phylogenetic family, linguistic family, and structural properties, using two indices, inversion (how often N + 1 requires fewer signs than N) and jitter (the mean length difference between successive numbers). Place value systems are highly gradient; i.e., their length indexes numerical magnitude more accurately than other systems. The relationship between the structural properties of notations and the two indices of jitter and inversion is complex. Next, a cultural-evolutionary analysis compares the older additive Roman numerals to the eventually predominant subtractive variant (e.g., XIX = 19). Subtractive Roman numerals are more concise and have a lower jitter than additive ones, but at the cost of a significantly higher inversion ratio. This analysis permits the evaluation of cultural-evolutionary hypotheses grounded in the representational properties of attested notations, even when cognitive tests are not feasible. Several avenues for future experimental investigation using attested or constructed notations of varying properties are proposed."