MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lioeters | 2026-02-28 19:09:01+00:00
The best political insight in this thread. This is the planet of the apes. If any future historians are reading, some of us primates were aware of the absurdity of the situation, horrified by the senseless violence that erupts again and again, led by sociopathic chimps that somehow managed to organize whole societies against each other and profit from the whole primitive enterprise. What a waste of human potential.
by googamooga | 2026-02-28 19:09:05+00:00
When you let compiler generate code for you, you're not a real programmer... That's what opcode coders was ranting in early 60s about FORTRAN programmers.

Product managers can't produce viable programs ready to be deployed in production (yet). But maybe the will able to do it in the future. We don't know how far or close this future is. But I don't think it's not a bad idea in general.
by bradbeattie | 2026-02-28 19:09:32+00:00
I spend a lot of time side by side with other devs watching them code and providing guidance. A trend I'm starting to sense is that developer velocity is just as much hindered by unfamiliarity with their tools as much as it is wrestling with the core problem they really want to solve.

When to use your mouse, when to use your keyboard, how to locate a file you want to look at in your terminal or IDE, how to find commands you executed last week, etc. It's all lacking. When devs struggle with these fundamentals, I suspect the desire to bypass all this with a singular "just ask the LLM" interface increases.

So when orgs focus on a "devs should use LLMs more to accelerate", I really wish the focus was more "find ways to accelerate", which could more reliably mean "get more proficient with your tools".

I think there's a lot of good that can be gained from formalizing conventions with templating engines (another tool worth learning), rather than relying on stochastic template generation.
by dextrous | 2026-02-28 19:09:53+00:00
My team has experienced this over the past 6 months for sure.

The core of the article is “ AI-assisted development potentially short-circuits this replenishment mechanism. If new engineers can generate working modifications without developing deep comprehension, they never form the tacit knowledge that would traditionally accumulate. The organization loses knowledge not just through attrition but through insufficient formation.”

But is it possible this phenomenon is transient?

Isn’t part of the presumed value add of LLM coding agents in the meta-realm around coding; e.g. that well-structured human+LLM generated code (green field in particular) will be organized in such a way that the human will not have to develop deep comprehension until needed (e.g. for bug fix/optimization) and then only for a working set of the code, with the LLM bringing the person up to speed on the working set in question and also providing the architectural context to frame the working set properly?
by thisislife2 | 2026-02-28 19:10:01+00:00
There are some factors - this is an offensive being done to prop up Netanyahu's regime in Israel and distract the Americans from the Espstein files. The US thus means to keep it short-term. Moreover, in the middle-east, the American logistic chain runs through its Arab allies in the middle-east, and Iran has explicitly said that it will not hesitate to target its Arab neighbours, hosting American military bases, if the US attacks it. (And that's why it has retaliated against these American allies when it was attacked). Except for Saudi Arabia, these countries do not wish to get into a war with Iran for Israel, and have no interest in joining the war because Iran's missiles are quite precise and effective at short ranges (meaning they and their people will be facing the brunt of the war that they have no interest in). Thus, the US military is actually hampered because it cannot do anything without the host governments permission. (For example, during the last Iran attack, some allies did not allow the US to implement a nationwide jam of the GPS over its airspace). All this highlights the really hard balancing the US has to do to even agree to bomb Iran for a few days - one wrong move and the whole of middle-east can explode, and both the US and Israel will find itself on the receiving end as American and world public opinion turns against it.
by ben_w | 2026-02-28 19:10:12+00:00
It is hard.

I moved to Germany in 2018, and only just this month reached B1 level in the language; and that was a pre-Brexit move so I don't need to care about visa.

The EU has a "blue card" scheme modeled on US green card: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Card_(European_Union)

If language is your biggest barrier, pick a country whose language you already speak. As this clearly includes English, Ireland if you want specifically EU, and UK if you just want the continent (mainly London, but I spent a long time in Cambridge tech sector).

Germany may still be an option even without being a native speaker (depending on your skills), but with all the difficulty everyone has today with AI messing with job hunting, get the contract before considering a move.
by relaxing | 2026-02-28 19:10:37+00:00
I picked the “Attention is All You Need” example at the top, and wow it is not great!

Didn’t take long to find hallucination/general lack of intelligence:

> For each word, we compute three vectors: a Query (what am I looking for?), a Key (what do I contain?), and a Value (what do I give out?).

What? That’s the worst description of a key-value relationship I’ve ever read, unhelpful for understanding what the equation is doing, and just wrong.

> Attention(Q, K, V) = softmax( Q·Kᵀ / √dk ) · V

> 3 Mask (Optional) Block future positions in decoder

Not present in this equation, also not a great description of masking in a RNN.

> 5 × V Weighted sum of values = output

Nope!

https://nowigetit.us/pages/f4795875-61bf-4c79-9fbe-164b32344...
by Bender | 2026-02-28 19:10:47+00:00
I highly doubt the US would be willing to send boots to the ground to blow up their missiles manually - urban warfare takes a heavy toll and I doubt if the Trump administration can withstand the criticism if body bags start coming home.

You could be entirely right. Honestly I hope you are right. We lost far too many in Iraq and Afghanistan. I was probably just being cynical. I trust the decisions of the senior leaders in the military but their commander and chief tends to trust the wrong advice.

The only possible correction I might add is the Air Force probably will not drop bombs but would have to fire missiles. The openings are on the sides of mountains and require horizontal access or I suppose incredibly massive bombs. Earth shattering bombs. Something closer to tactical nukes which the US has not stockpiled in a long time AFAIK.
by rovr138 | 2026-02-28 19:11:05+00:00
Everything has issues reading the content of PDFs natively. It's a format for displaying/rendering. Not for storing format in a way that's easy to parse for the text/content inside.

Is this one storing text or storing coordinates for where to draw a line for the letter 'l'? Is that an 'l' or a line?

The best way to do this is rendering it to an image and using the image. Either through models that can directly work with the image or OCR'ing the image.
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-28 19:11:12+00:00
> If you were a customer, what would you do?

If I was “one of the largest companies”, as was raised upthread as being impacted in all of their business, then I would be used to having many large public and private customers with different and conflicting contracting requirements and segregating support for those contracts, and for US defense contracts specifically, probably have a dedicated business unit for those that probably a subsidiary legal entity and which, in any case, is almost completely walled off in practice dedicate to defense contracts, provides all the shared services consumed by individual defense contracts independently of the parent corporation, and which adheres strictly to defense contracting rules and charges the compliance costs back to those defense contracts at a healthy profit, while having basically no impact on how the rest of the company does business.
by unsupp0rted | 2026-02-28 19:11:19+00:00
Another aspect of a WW3 is that people- pretty much ALL people everywhere- who have nothing to do with the war will find their lives threatened or completely changed by it.

I'm less concerned about nuclear escalation than about biological escalation.

It's quite hard to destroy the human world with nukes: you can only blow up big chunks of it, maybe take out enough power plants and supply chains to drop us into a multi-decade or multi-century dark age, or maybe cause a nuclear winter, although the actual risk of that is unclear.

Whereas a year into a major war a kid in his/her basement can release something that is functionally the end of the human species.

We currently have no real safeguards against this. If we ever have descendants, they'll think we were insane during this time period and they'll be right.
by zahlman | 2026-02-28 19:11:22+00:00
GET and POST are merely suggestions to the server. A GET request still has query parameters; even if the server is playing by the book, an agent can still end up requesting GET http://angelic-service.example.com/api/v1/innocuous-thing?pa... and now your `dangerous-secret` is in the server logs.

You can try proxying and whitelisting its requests but the properly paranoid option is sneaker-netting necessary information (say, the documentation for libraries; a local package index) to a separate machine.
by Grosvenor | 2026-02-28 19:11:30+00:00
My Bona fides: I've written my own Mathematica clone at least twice, maybe three times. Each time I get it parsing expressions and doing basic math, getting to basic calculus. Then I look up the sheer cliff face in front of me and think better of the whole thing.

There is an architectural flaw in Woxi that will sink it hard. Looking through the codebase things like polynomials are implemented in the rust code, not in woxilang. This will kill you long term.

The right approach is to have a tiny core interpreter, maybe go to JIT at some point if you can figure that out. Then implement all the functionality in woxilang itself. That means addition and subtraction, calculus, etc are term rewriting rules written in woxilang, not rust code.

This frees you up in the interpreter. Any improvements you make there will immediately show up over the entire language. It's also a better language to implement symbolic math in than rust.

It also means contributors only need to know one language: woxilang.
No need to split between rust and woxilang.
by shykes | 2026-02-28 19:11:52+00:00
This reminds me of the Al-Ahli hospital incident in Gaza, when a mysterious explosion at a hospital was immediately blamed on an Iraeli strike - first by Hamas, then by the international press. A precise death toll was immediately available: 500 killed. Israel urged caution as they investigated, but were ignored.

Eventually, it was established that 1) the casualty number had been a fabrication, 2) the explosion was in the parking lot, 3) it was NOT caused by an Israeli strike, but by a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that had fell short.

Soon the press was forced to issue corrections - New York Times [1] , Le Monde [2], BBC [3]...

This incident looks VERY similar. Which is not surprising, since Hamas was trained in information warfare by the IRGC. Note that Al Jazeera (the media arm of Qatar, who funds Hamas and hosts their leaders in Doha) is enthusiastically amplifying this story with no apparent effort to cross-examine Iran's official source.

I predict that this story will turn out to be fabricated as well.

UPDATE: preliminary reports from the OSINT community seem to indicate that the story was indeed a fabrication... https://x.com/tarikh_eran/status/2027784301840846939

[1] https://www.poynter.org/commentary/2023/the-new-york-times-e...

[2] https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2023/10/24/a-no...

[3] https://deadline.com/2023/11/bbcs-international-editor-grill...
by getnormality | 2026-02-28 19:11:55+00:00
Or maybe people who like talking much more than they like code are now very excited about the possibility that talking has eaten software development.

This is exactly backwards. For many tasks, formal languages are better, more real, more beautiful than English. No matter how many millions of tokens you have, you will never talk the formulas of Fermat, Euler, and Gauss into irrelevance. And the same is true of good code.

Of course, a lot of code is ugly and utilitarian too, and maybe talking will make it less painful to write that stuff.
by codybontecou | 2026-02-28 19:12:16+00:00
I built a one-time purchase solution that might help you.

- https://isolated.tech/apps/syncmd

- https://isolated.tech/apps/syncmd/blog/obsidian-git-ios-setu...

You can git clone directly to your iOS file system which fixes the Obsidian git plugin issue so you can use the Obsidian git plugin on your computer and mobile devices.
by kristopolous | 2026-02-28 19:12:42+00:00
Some kind of elegant unixy syntax would be nice

[ ... Inputs ] | command | [ ... Outputs ]

Basically select(1) as a cli syntax.

I've done quite a bit of unix historical work ... Not enough for a talk at the CHM but decent enough that I have interviewed dozens of people.

I really think some basic stuff was just left in a hacky state and we never revisited the primitives right.

I've been trying to do that in my own projects

For instance I should be able to do something like

Command || processor

And not have processor hijack the input without hacky pty stuff. I am intentionally using || here.

There's lots of use cases to this: llms are the best, logging, rendering text, readline, translation, accessibility, it'd be a very useful primitive and it's impossible to do without a full pty wrapper or some kind of voodoo heuristic wrangling.

Currently you have to do things like this https://github.com/day50-dev/ESChatch/blob/main/eschatch.py#...

It should be easy

I know that some esoteric shells do it but I want everything to be traditional with better i/o features
by ezfe | 2026-02-28 19:12:53+00:00
If you don't have a window open, then VSCode opens with no active workspace. There are no workspace settings at all, and there is no file tree. But since VSCode has user level settings, these are what is used, including theming/etc.

If you have a window open, the file is opened to the workspace for that window. You can see this in action because the "Trust" dialog specifically says that you're trying to open untrusted files into a trusted workspace.
by erelong | 2026-02-28 19:12:57+00:00
I think you could probably identify different "risks" and then just code in such a way as to mitigate them; I don't personally think there would have to be much of a risk of atrophy of skills if this is done.

I guess it reminds me of someone switching from a manual labor job to a desk job: you become at risk of physical issues from being more sedentary, but you can exercise after work or even some people have things like standing desks and such to keep active during the job

So there can be real risks but there should be ways to manage them
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-28 19:13:06+00:00
Exactly this. Looks like we had the same conclusion. I really am inclined to believe that OpenAI given that its IPO'ing (soon?) would be absolutely decimated and employees would be leaving left and right if they proclaimed that, yes OpenAI is selling DOD autonomous killing machines.

But we all know how OpenAI is desperate for money, its the weakest link in the bubble quite frankly burning Billions and failed at Sora and there isn't much moat as well economically.

DOD giving them billions for a deal feels like a huge carrot on the stick and wink wink (let's have autonomous killing machines) with the skepticism that you, me or perhaps most people of the community would share.

I for what its worth, don't appreciate Anthropic in its whole (I do still remember perhaps the week old thread where everyone pushed on Anthropic for trying to see user data through API when they looked at the chinese models whole thing) but I give credit where its due and Enemy of my Enemy is my friend, and at the moment it seems that OpenAI might be more friendlier to DOD who wishes to create autonomous killing machine and mass surveillance systems which is like Sci-fi level dystopia rather than anthropic.
by nickysielicki | 2026-02-28 19:13:11+00:00
> the existing contract included the language on usage. Other companies also have such language about usage.

The existing contract is only a few dozen months old. It didn’t hold up to scrutiny under real world usage of the service. The government wants to change the contract. This is not the kill shot you think it is. It’s totally normal for agreements to evolve. The government is saying it needs to evolve. This is all happening rapidly and it’s irrelevant that the government agreed to similar terms with OpenAI as well. That agreement will also need to evolve. But this alone doesn’t give Anthropic any material legal challenge. The courts understand bureaucracy moves slowly better than anyone else, and won’t read this apparent inconsistency the same way you are.
Show HN: Monohub – a new GitHub alternative / code hosting service
by tbayramov | 2026-02-28 19:13:18+00:00
Hello everyone,

My name is Teymur Bayramov, and I am developing a forge/code hosting service called Monohub. It is at a fairly early stage of development, so it's quite rough around the edges. It is developed and hosted in EU.

I have started developing it as a slim wrapper around Git to serve my own code, but it grew to such extent that I decided to give it a try and offer it as a service. It doesn't have much at the moment, but it already has basic pull requests. Accessibility is high priority.

It will be a paid service, but since it's an early start, an "early adopter discount" is applied – 6 months for free. No card details required.

I would be happy if you give it a try and let me know what do you think, and perhaps share what you lack in existing solutions that you would like to see implemented here.

Warmest wishes,
Teymur.
by ravila4 | 2026-02-28 19:13:28+00:00
Nice! I rely on Obsidian a lot for syncing knowledge while working with Claude agents, such as storing research and daily logs to catch up on the prior day’s work. It already works quite well with a custom skill that I build, but this may make the workflow smoother.

I also built a cli tool to index embeddings in LanceDB and do semantic search. It helps agents create better internal links between notes. https://github.com/ravila4/obsidian-semantic-search
by reese_john | 2026-02-28 19:13:48+00:00
This seems to be a short range (290km) anti-ship cruise missile. Definitely not an unstoppable carrier killer

What could threaten US carries are China’s DF-21D/26D – anti-ship ballistic missiles with reported ranges of > 2000km – and Iran is not getting them

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/chinas-carrier-killer...
by crazygringo | 2026-02-28 19:14:32+00:00
> Why are these big insider bets being placed within hours of the event actually occurring?... It also makes them largely useless

They're not, usually. The more the outcome seems unlikely at first, the more you're incentivized to place your big bet earlier, when the odds seem worse, because you'll make a ton more money.

When these bets are placed only a few hours beforehand, that's often because the actual decision hasn't actually been made until then.

And there are plenty of areas where having notice of an hour or two is still hugely vulnerable.
by Supernaut | 2026-02-28 19:14:36+00:00
Okay, that's interesting. I was in my early teens when it was released. Absolutely everyone I knew had either a Spectrum or a C64, aside from the one rich kid who owned a BBC Micro.

I just had a look at Wikipedia, which says, "the NES performed less well in Europe, where it faced strong competition from the Master System and home computers such as the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum."
by jeremyjh | 2026-02-28 19:15:30+00:00
IronClaw’s security architecture sounds plausible, but I have not audited it. Plugins can only access remote endpoints you’ve specifically allowed it for. Secrets aren’t available to the LLM - they are injected where the LLM requires it but only secrets authorized for that plugin are available to it. Together those two things provide an answer to a huge range of the most common prompt injection vulnerabilities, such as credential extraction. So you can give it access to your bank account and email and it can’t email your bank password to an attacker. But it could still transfer money to them.

The only secure way to use any of these tools is to give them very limited access - if they need a credit card give them a virtual card with a low limit, or even its own bank account. They can send email but only from their own account; like a human personal assistant. But of course this requires careful thought and adds friction to every new task, so people won’t be doing it.
by fernly | 2026-02-28 19:15:46+00:00
Not that hard if you are in young to middle years and have any job experience. I asked Perplexity "If an American citizen, a trained engineer with some experience, desired to work abroad in the EU or an English-first nation, what are some good websites to check?"

I suggest you do the same -- the reply lists a dozen promising sites.

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/if-an-american-citizen-a-tr...
by ViewTrick1002 | 2026-02-28 19:15:52+00:00
The difference is the checking, and actual enforcement of it.

Go and use get_unchecked if you want to and get C like behavior. But the safety note tells you the potential issues:

Safety

Calling this method with an out-of-bounds index is undefined behavior even if the resulting reference is not used.

You can think of this like .get(index).unwrap_unchecked(). It’s UB to call .get_unchecked(len), even if you immediately convert to a pointer. And it’s UB to call .get_unchecked(..len + 1), .get_unchecked(..=len), or similar.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/vec/struct.Vec.html
by fakedang | 2026-02-28 19:17:10+00:00
The only way unification can ever happen will be with Chinese blessing, with or without democracy. That would mean a full exit of US forces from the peninsula, and substantial pandering to the CCP and influence in Seoul. Which isn't that far off a thought honestly - for the most part, Korea was a tributary of China. With rapidly changing demographics and economic heft in both countries, it's even more likely SK will gravitate towards China, to the point that the Chinese will find more persuasion in unification and predictability.
by EnPissant | 2026-02-28 19:17:15+00:00
> Yeah, but, as it turns out with modern migration trends, the revealed preference is that they would want to, given an opportunity. Being European, I would also prefer to live like a European.

The revealed preference is that they want to continue to live the same way, but to do it in European countries as they are nicer places to live.

The problem is that they are nicer places to live because "living like a European" is what produces these nicer places to live.