MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by selridge | 2026-02-22 02:20:51+00:00
>But I guess it's about why so we associate those with spiky shapes

I think the why just got a lot tricker than we imagined. Because we failed to replicate this experiment on other primates, we couldn't avoid a semantic suspicion about those associations. Now we probably have to set semantics aside or let it get a lot weirder, because we can replicate across ~300My.

>surely it's because they represent sharp immediate changes in frequency?

Maybe, and I think "multi-sensory signal processing" is the best framing, but the representation could also carry harder to think about things like "harm".

It's also super cool because the bouba-kiki effect framing was chosen due to methodological convenience for linguists and cultural anthropologists and their experimental bounds, not neuroscientists or signal processing folks. We could potentially find other experiments quickly, since chicks are a model organism and the mechanism is clear.

Things could move fast here.
by sarchertech | 2026-02-22 02:21:11+00:00
If we’re talking about “can we ignore the code the way we mostly ignore assembly and treat prompts as the new high level language”, determinism isn’t the hard problem.

The real issue is prompt instability (chaos). A one word change to a prompt/spec will produce a drastically different program. Until that is solved there’s no world where we just check in the prompt and almost no one ever has to worry about the code.
by RHSeeger | 2026-02-22 02:21:20+00:00
> Most developers type a prompt, sometimes use plan mode, fix the errors, repeat.

> ...

> never let Claude write code until you’ve reviewed and approved a written plan

I certainly always work towards an approved plan before I let it lost on changing the code. I just assumed most people did, honestly. Admittedly, sometimes there's "phases" to the implementation (because some parts can be figured out later and it's more important to get the key parts up and running first), but each phase gets a full, reviewed plan before I tell it to go.

In fact, I just finished writing a command and instruction to tell claude that, when it presents a plan for implementation, offer me another option; to write out the current (important parts of the) context and the full plan to individual (ticket specific) md files. That way, if something goes wrong with the implementation I can tell it to read those files and "start from where they left off" in the planning.
by jldugger | 2026-02-22 02:21:49+00:00
> What makes the most sense is transition from "fuckin". But why not simply use fuckin?

Indeed, you have a community that wants to be family friendly but high energy, and so the technique is to start with "fucking", one of the top tier swears, and replace its root word with the lowest tier swears. And part of the charm is that "hell" is barely a taboo topic -- it's part of the Apostle's creed and plenty of sermons, and there's no commandment against its use[1], yet it gets minced to "heck"!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_not_take_the_name_o...
by eichin | 2026-02-22 02:21:58+00:00
Even the specific example in the article, the non-determinism was treated as a bug and was fixed (since by 2004 that was definitely a regression - we put a lot of work in, in the mid to late 1990s, to get bit level reproducibility - and even before that, those little details like timestamps were still deterministic variations, we had binary diff tools that could filter them out.)
by econ | 2026-02-22 02:22:45+00:00
They will eventually eat everything while they laugh at us. Why would you build a rail network if it isn't profitable? Why build anything if it isn't profitable? Why would you even house people if the profit isn't guaranteed to be as big as other sectors?

Everyone wanted denarius then escudos then guilders then pounds then dollars and soon yuan. They make stuff over there, you can buy it with yuan.

I think India might come after that but Africa is sure to follow. Give it a few hundred years.
by measurablefunc | 2026-02-22 02:22:47+00:00
Data races are undefined behavior¹ so in that case the compiler is still technically preserving semantics but if you use the proper primitives to remove undefined behavior (atomic operations, locks) for any shared state then the compiler will not generate code w/ undefined behavior & all modifications/mutations will be serialized in some order. You can then further refine the code if you want the operations to happen in a certain order. At the end of the day you must assume that the compiler will preserve your intended semantics otherwise we'd still be writing assembly b/c no high level specification would ever mean what it was intended to mean for the low-level executable machine model/target of the compiler.

¹https://cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/multithread.html
by alun | 2026-02-22 02:22:48+00:00
> "You have this innovation bazooka with these models. Why would you point it at rebuilding payroll or ERP or CRM"

Most SaaS companies are just expensive wrappers on top of existing tools. For non-VC-funded companies, SaaS tools are a serious cost. If you can re-create them in-house with AI, why wouldn't you? The result is saving capital (which you can then employ to do the more innovative things), and being in control over your own data.
by gilfaethwy | 2026-02-22 02:23:27+00:00
On the one hand... the operator who started the agent is responsible. If you fire a gun into the air, the bullet will probably not land on anybody. It's pretty unpredictable what will happen unless you have perfect data and forecasting. But it's still your fault if it kills someone when it comes back down.

But on the other hand, with so many tech companies pushing their ICs to use AI - and pushing more and more to use agentic tools - I'm generally in agreement that the fault lies more with the employer than the employed. You can't tell someone to use a tool, then punish them when the non-deterministic tool they didn't want to use in the first place misbehaves.

Maybe if we had decades of history showing these tools could be operated safely this would be different. But asking an entire industry to adopt new tools with minimal training and real-life experience, and asking them to adopt them at scale and in production, is not the same as asking them to use DynamoDB instead of RDS.
by mauvehaus | 2026-02-22 02:24:06+00:00
One of the absolute treasures of our time is The History of English Podcast. 186 episodes in, and he's just gotten past Shakespeare. The first 30 or so episodes might run a little slow for you for lack of written sources, but it really does pick up and has been hours of joy.
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/

For the prurient, Chaucer's Vulgar Tongue is a great place to dip a toe into it:

https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2019/09/25/episode-129-c...
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-22 02:26:17+00:00
The ACLU has a good overview (https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/police-should-n...). A number of state-level supreme courts have ruled that the protection you're describing exists, but others have ruled against it, and on the federal level AFAIK only the DC Circuit has made a clear ruling about it.
by Betelbuddy | 2026-02-22 02:27:25+00:00
Its very logical and pretty obvious when you do code generation. If you ask the same model, to generate code by starting with:

- You are a Python Developer...
or
- You are a Professional Python Developer...
or
- You are one of the World most renowned Python Experts, with several books written on the subject, and 15 years of experience in creating highly reliable production quality code...

You will notice a clear improvement in the quality of the generated artifacts.
by yowayb | 2026-02-22 02:28:31+00:00
So many websites and apps are still broken in so many little ways. Maybe broken isn't the right word. But all kinds of annoyances and breaches still happen all the time.

I generally don't complain/review, and just learn the workarounds/shortcuts, but I very much welcome the increased (albeit perhaps less skilled) workforce leverage, because I think in a year or so we'll see steady improvements accumulating.
by chipotle_coyote | 2026-02-22 02:28:50+00:00
It's the same challenge as picking an email server, which is why no one does that.

...

Seriously, joining Mastodon is not particularly difficult; people just freaked out a few years ago at being asked to pick a server to join. The joinmastodon.org website has gotten a lot better at explaining what that means and just directing people to mastodon.social if they don't want to pick something more specific, but the "oooh, this extra step makes Mastodon super super scary, if you pick wrong YOU ARE DAMNED FOREVERRRRRRRR" vibe persists.
by xantronix | 2026-02-22 02:32:11+00:00
Curious, which part is reinventing the wheel? If you're referring to the /bin/login hack, imagine instead, it's BBS software. (I had a lot of fun accessing my home computer from across town with a Psion 5mx and a Kenwood TH-D7! No practical value, just a good challenge.) As for the APRS-IS bridge, that would be quite useful for bridging relevant APRS-IS traffic within a given radius to LoRA, and vice-versa.

Also, I'm quite aware of IP over AX.25: I generally prefer to avoid that extra overhead for my intended applications. The stack I wrote exposes a BSD sockets-like interface to make it easy to make lots of software able to participate in the AX.25 fun, and even compiles on PowerPC Macintoshes for what it's worth.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-02-22 02:32:17+00:00
A related property is whether particular kinds of changes to the inputs have proportionally sized changes to the output. Adding a print statement shouldn't change the behavior of the function it's in (sans I/O), for example. Using calling the same function from two different callsites shouldn't change the behavior either. A new compiler version shouldn't change the observable behavior. Etc.

I think this is the more important property and I'm not sure if it has a well-known name. The article obliquely calls it reliability, but regardless it's the key difference from LLMs. Compilers mostly achieve it, ignoring an endless list of exceptions you learn with experience.

LLMs usually don't, even with 0 temperature and floating point determinism.
by sometimes_all | 2026-02-22 02:32:35+00:00
The Call of Cthulhu seemed to have a bit of language construction and world-building, if you are into that. But my knowledge of Lovecraft lore is limited, so I wouldn't know all details; I just read his short stories from Standard eBooks a few months ago, which was my first exposure to his work.

I'm sure S. T. Joshi might have a bit to say about the topic. Personally speaking from very limited exposure and knowledge of language games, and me not being from an environment which has European language roots, I might have missed quite a bit of such easter eggs in the atmosphere and writing. Like, for example, your comment prompted me to find out what "rue d'auseil" (from The Music of Erich Zann) meant, I didn't bother to find out until today.

I do recommend rereading Lovecraft in English either way, since you never know what gets lost in translation!
Show HN: Slack as an AI Coding Remote Control
by DiscreteTom | 2026-02-22 02:32:45+00:00
Built a new toy project that lets me remote control Kiro/OpenCode from Slack.

Now I can code from anywhere... even when I should be relaxing

Inspired by various "claw" projects.

Open source on GitHub: DiscreteTom/juan

---

What this does:
• Control AI coding assistants through Slack
• Write and modify code remotely
• Perfect for when you're away from your desk
by atmanactive | 2026-02-22 02:33:48+00:00
Very interesting, thanks. I would like to contribute to make it usable on windows (spare time permitting). I've noticed that the design proposes Windows OCR for recognition purposes. Judging by my decade long use of Microsoft PowerToys which does have a built-in screen-snip-OCR tool which also uses Windows OCR under the hood, that's barely usable. More times than not, I get maybe 50% accuracy which I then need to fix up using my own eyes and brain. So, from a get-go I would say Windows OCR is a no-go for this purpose.
by hibikir | 2026-02-22 02:34:13+00:00
The issue comes from situations where the insiders can alter the answer to help their own bets. The simple example is the bet on how long a press conference will be: It's a ridiculous bet when the person giving said press conference can bet and fleece the market.

Will X country invade another before or after day X? A large enough market changes the answer, as the agent can change the decision. And we can see this kind of thing in many interesting questions.
by 01100011 | 2026-02-22 02:35:22+00:00
Yeah, GPUdirect should allow you to dma straight to a storage device.

I wonder... what if the m.2 storage was actually DRAM? You probably don't need persistence for spilling a model off the GPU. How would it fare vs just adding more host memory? The m.2 ram would be less flexible, but would keep the system ram free for the CPU.
by idle_zealot | 2026-02-22 02:36:00+00:00
> For example Apple uses their big stick to ensure that apps can't simply refuse to work if you enable privacy setting that limit them. If Facebook refuses to work until you give it full access to your photos and exact location even when the app isn't running the realistic outcome will be that everyone will just give them what they want rather than not using the service

Apple also stops you from installing third-party apps for the service that circumvent those and other limitations. In an open system you can intercept the app's requests and feed it fake responses, spoof your photo album, GPS, whatever. They can try to detect spoofing, but at the cost of making their services flaky for normal users. This is a cat-and-mouse game that the mice (that's you) win. Except you can't play it on an iPhone, because it breaks the service's (probably illegal) Terms of Service, and Apple will use their Big Stick to ensure nobody can commit acts that risk their partners' business models.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-22 02:36:04+00:00
> most requirements (ime anyways) are usually barely half-baked and incomplete causing re-testing and re-work over and over which are the real bottlenecks...

> ai/vibe coding may make that cycle faster but idk it might actually make things worse long-term

By making the cycle faster it reduces the impact while also highlighting issues within the process - there are too many incompetent PMs and SWEs.

Additionally, in a lot of cases a PM won't tell you that you might actually be working on checkbox work that someone needs to do but doesn't justify an entire group of 2-3 SWEs.

A good reference for this is how close is the feature you are working on directly aligned with revenue generation - if your feature cannot be directly monetized as it's own SKU or as a part of a bundle, you are working on a cost center.

The reality is that perfection is the enemy of good, and this requires both Engineers and PMs working together to negotiate on requirements.

If this does not happen at your workplace, you are either working on a cost center feature that doesn't matter or you are working at a bad employer. Either way it is best for you career to leave.

In my experience, if you've actually chatted with executive leadership teams in most F500s, when they are thinking about "AI Safety" they are actually thinking about standard cybersecurity guardrails like zero-trust, identity, authn/z, and API security with an added layer of SLAs around deterministic output.

But by being able to constantly interate and experiment, companies can release features and products faster with better margins - getting a V1 out the door in 1 sprint and spending the rest of the quarter adding guardrails is significantly cheaper than spending 1 quarter building V2 and then spending 1 more quarter building the same guardrails anyhow.

Basically, we're returning to the same norms in the software industry that we had pre-COVID around building for pragmatism instead of for perfection. I saw a severe degradation in the quality of SWEs during and after COVID (too many code monkeys, not enough engineers/architects).
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-22 02:36:27+00:00
huh I was looking through it again and I noticed what I think is a typo

"Þe sayde Maiſter, what that hee apperid bifore me"

I believe should be

"Þe sayde Maiſter, what Þat hee apperid bifore me"

Or were there situations in the 1400s when the thorn would not be used for representing th?

on edit: or is it a representation of the changeability of spelling choices in individual texts, which admittedly this text seems a bit less changeable and random than many authors of that time period.
by red_hare | 2026-02-22 02:36:29+00:00
I use Claude Code for lecture prep.

I craft a detailed and ordered set of lecture notes in a Quarto file and then have a dedicated claude code skill for translating those notes into Slidev slides, in the style that I like.

Once that's done, much like the author, I go through the slides and make commented annotations like "this should be broken into two slides" or "this should be a side-by-side" or "use your generate clipart skill to throw an image here alongside these bullets" and "pull in the code example from ../examples/foo." It works brilliantly.

And then I do one final pass of tweaking after that's done.

But yeah, annotations are super powerful. Token distance in-context and all that jazz.
Show HN: ThreadKeeper – Save and restore Windows working context with Ollama
by tatsube | 2026-02-22 02:37:19+00:00
Hi HN,

I built ThreadKeeper, an open-source Windows app to solve a problem I constantly face: losing my working context due to interruptions.

When testing local LLMs or building AI agents, I usually have multiple terminal windows, IDEs, and 20+ browser tabs open. If I get interrupted, recovering that exact state takes immense cognitive load.

How it works:
You hit Ctrl + Shift + S. It instantly captures your open windows, browser tabs, and clipboard (first 200 chars), and saves the state entirely locally (%APPDATA%). It then uses an LLM to auto-generate a summary of what you were doing. Later, 1-click restores all those apps and tabs.

Privacy First (Ollama Support):
I didn't want my code or private keys going to the cloud. You can use external APIs (Gemini/Claude) via BYOK, but it fully supports Ollama for 100% offline, local summarization. Zero data leaves your machine.

The elephant in the room (SmartScreen):
This is a free, MIT-licensed MVP. I haven’t purchased an expensive EV code signing certificate yet, so Windows SmartScreen will show a warning. I know this is a friction point, but the source code is fully open on GitHub for anyone to inspect or build themselves.

Website: https://www.thethread-keeper.com/
Github: https://github.com/tatsuabe69/thread-keeper

I’d love to hear your feedback or roast my code!
by JuniperMesos | 2026-02-22 02:37:30+00:00
I actually avoid using VSCode for a number of reasons, one of which is its performance. My performance issues with VSCode are I think not necessarily all related to the fact that it's an electron app, but probably some of them are.

In any case, what I personally find more problematic than just slowness is electron apps interacting weirdly with my Nvidia linux graphics drivers, in such a way that it causes the app to display nothing or display weird artifacts or crash with hard-to-debug error messages. It's possible that this is actually Nvidia's fault for having shitty drivers, I'm not sure; but in any case I definitely notice it more often with electron apps than native ones.

Anyway one of the things I hope that AI can do is make it easier for people to write apps that use the native graphics stack instead of electron.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-22 02:38:40+00:00
It isn’t slower. I use my personal ChatGPT subscriptions with Codex for almost everything at work and use my $800/month company Claude allowance only for the tricky stuff that Codex can’t figure out. It’s never application code. It’s usually some combination of app code + Docker + AWS issue with my underlying infrastructure - created with whatever IAC that I’m using for a client - Terraform/CloudFormation or the CDK.

I burned through $10 on Claude in less than an hour. I only have $36 a day at $800 a month (800/22 working days)
by AutoJanitor | 2026-02-22 02:39:04+00:00
This is the text inference issues I was alluding to. We had several hurdles to overcome. 1 llms were trained on little endian. Mips for n64 is big endian. 2 we had python to c issues. 3 we had quantization issues. all being resolved.
This is a tech demo to honor LOZ and also the code can be used for n64 devs to add ai style npcs in the future. So did we achieve it yes we are the first to do llm inference on n64. I am just trying to give you guys the proper video.

Scott
by skydhash | 2026-02-22 02:39:18+00:00
> Yesterday I had Claude write an audit logging feature to track all changes made to entities in my app. Yeah you get this for free with many frameworks, but my company's custom setup doesn't have it.

But did you truly think about such feature? Like guarantees that it should follow (like how do it should cope with entities migration like adding a new field) or what the cost of maintaining it further down the line. This looks suspiciously like drive-by PR made on open-source projects.

> That would've taken me at least a day, maybe two.

I think those two days would have been filled with research, comparing alternatives, questions like "can we extract this feature from framework X?", discussing ownership and sharing knowledge,.. Jumping on coding was done before LLMs, but it usually hurts the long term viability of the project.

Adding code to a project can be done quite fast (hackatons,...), ensuring quality is what slows things down in any any well functioning team.
by tempaccount5050 | 2026-02-22 02:41:13+00:00
You know I tried this exact thing a few months back, sans the ESP32. You just end up writing a state machine and defining a bunch of constants anyway or the LLM just kinda gets stuck in a loop. Hm, it doesn't seem to know when to eat. I'll add a hunger variable... Etc etc until you're not even sure what you want the LLM to do.
by kannanvijayan | 2026-02-22 02:41:28+00:00
I've encountered this failure mode, and the opposite of it: thinking too much. A behaviour I've come to see as some sort of pseudo-neuroticism.

Lazy thinking makes LLMs do surface analysis and then produce things that are wrong. Neurotic thinking will see them over-analyze, and then repeatedly second-guess themselves, repeatedly re-derive conclusions.

Something very similar to an anxiety loop in humans, where problems without solutions are obsessed about in circles.
by Rychek4 | 2026-02-22 02:42:03+00:00
Abstract
Long-running AI agents suffer from coherence degradation as context accumulates. This paper describes an architecture in which the context window is treated not as a container that fills over time but as an assembled result — combining a bounded sliding window of recent conversation with retrieved memories, autonomous agency subsystems, and self-monitoring mechanisms. A single-agent deployment using this architecture has operated continuously for 1100+ turns across 90+ days with two hallucination events (0.18%), both attributable to infrastructure bugs rather than model drift. The system incorporates a rolling context window with periodic memory integration, a multi-factor weighted retrieval system with session-scoped warmth boosting, natural language memory tagging with epistemic attribution, dual-timescale self-monitoring, and multiple autonomous agency subsystems including persistent working memory, forward-looking intentions, and periodic reflective pulses. These results suggest that coherence degradation in long-running agents is primarily an architecture problem, not an inherent limitation of large language models.
by jjmarr | 2026-02-22 02:43:29+00:00
From the main article, I2P has 55,000 computers, the botnet tried to add 700,000 infected routers to I2P to use it as a backup command-and-control system.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46976825

This, predictably, broke I2P.