MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alephnerd | 2026-02-17 01:51:55+00:00
> I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here

Facebook/Meta only began rolling out DeepFace [0] in 2015 [1]

Squire mentioned in the article that this case was early in his career and that Lucy is now in her 20s but was abused when she was 10-12.

This means this case was probably around 2010-14 when facial recognition was not yet a solved problem.

Heck, VGG-Face wasn't released until 2015 [2].

> Facial recognition is very powerful these days.

Yes. But it is 2026, not 2011-2014.

[0] - https://research.facebook.com/publications/deepface-closing-...

[1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-can-recognize-you-just...

[2] - https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/data/vgg_face/
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-17 01:51:57+00:00
From my POV (30 or so years working on the same FLOSS project), AI isn't "destroying Open Source" through an effect on contributions. It is, however, destroying open source through its ceaseless, relentless, unabatable crawling of open source git repositories, commit by commit rather than via git-clone(1).

Project after project reports wasted time, increased hosting/bandwidth bills, and all around general annoyance from this UTTER BULLSHIT. But every morning, we wake up, and its still there, no sign of it ever stopping.
by zer00eyz | 2026-02-17 01:52:00+00:00
The house is poorly put together cause the carpenter used a cheap nail gun and a crappy saw.

LLMs are confidently wrong and make bad engineers think they are good ones. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

If you're a skilled dev, in an "common" domain, an LLM can be an amazing tool when you integrate it into your work flow and play "code tennis" with it. It can change the calculus on "one offs", "minor tools and utils" and "small automations" that in the past you could never justify writing.

Im not a Lawyer, or a Doctor. I would never take legal advice or medical advice from an LLM. Im happy to work with the tool on code because I know that domain, because I can work with it, and take over when it goes off the rails.
by sathish316 | 2026-02-17 01:52:07+00:00
To build your own STT (speech-to-text) with a local model and and modify it, just ask Claude code to build it for you with this workflow.

F12 -> sox for recording -> temp.wav -> faster-whisper -> pbcopy -> notify-send to know what’s happening

https://github.com/sathish316/soupawhisper

I found a Linux version with a similar workflow and forked it to build the Mac version. It look less than 15 mins to ask Claude to modify it as per my needs.

F12 Press → arecord (ALSA) → temp.wav → faster-whisper → xclip + xdotool

https://github.com/ksred/soupawhisper

Thanks to faster-whisper and local models using quantization, I use it in all places where I was previously using Superwhisper in Docs, Terminal etc.
by WaitWaitWha | 2026-02-17 01:52:36+00:00
I am personally aware that Washington DC, same areas of Maryland, Virginia and Delaware have been tracking car Bluetooth (and EZ-Pass) for decades for "traffic management". The more BT detected the heavier tracking. The longer time between detectors for the unique BT/EZ-Pass, the slower the traffic. Adjust traffic lights down the road to improve traffic flow. (when I write Ez-Pass, i mean the toll transponder, but not detected by a toll booths or overhead arches.)
Show HN: OpenEntropy – 47 hardware entropy sources from your computer's physics
by amentiflow | 2026-02-17 01:52:37+00:00
I built this to study something most security engineers wave off: whether external factors can nudge hardware entropy sources.

Here is why. Princeton’s PEAR lab ran RNG work for about 28 years and shut down in February 2007. People in the lab tried to shift random event generator output, and they reported small deviations after tens of millions of events.
https://www.pear-lab.com/

The Global Consciousness Project took a similar idea outside the lab. It has run a distributed network of hardware RNGs since 1998 and looks for correlated deviations around major world events.

Most people looking at hardware entropy want true randomness for crypto. I want to treat entropy like a sensor. I want to see what might perturb the underlying noise, not just consume a final stream.

So I built OpenEntropy. It samples 47 physical-ish sources on Apple Silicon, like clock jitter, thermal beats, DRAM timing conflicts, cache contention, and speculation timing. Raw mode gives you unprocessed, per-source bytes so you can run your own stats on each channel.

The PEAR-style question is: does output shift when “intention” is the experimental condition? With 47 sources, I can run intention vs control sessions and ask if multiple unrelated channels drift the same way at the same time. If thermal and DRAM timing both shift during intention blocks, that’s the kind of pattern I want to measure.
by kerkeslager | 2026-02-17 01:53:18+00:00
The argument you're making is known as a "perfect solution fallacy".

I don't even know for sure whether I think cereal boxes displaying their contents is advertising--I'm not going to make a snap opinion on that--but it's completely irrelevant. We're drowning in advertising, advertising where it isn't ambigious whether or not it's advertising. We know that YouTubers "sponsored by" scenes are ads--this isn't ambigious, and we can write legislation that bans it.
Watching an elderly relative trying to use the modern web
by ColinWright | 2026-02-17 01:53:18+00:00
Watching my elderly mother trying to accomplish something on the internet and I have to say ...

Modern website "design" amounts to abuse of the elderly.

It's horrific ... genuinely horrific.

I've now seen her driven to tears, knowing that she should be able to do something, trying everything that seems to be the right thing, and frustrated at every turn.

It makes me so angry.

So. Angry.
by Onavo | 2026-02-17 01:54:04+00:00
You should pay attention to the fact that his parents are rich and educated enough to figure out submarine marketing for him. Winning a major national level science fair plays a pretty big role in college admissions and having the press trumpet his achievements ensures that he will have an easier path to get future internships and other type of prestigious if-you-know-you-know type of positions (who knows, maybe he might apply to YC too in a few years).
by threekindwords | 2026-02-17 01:54:05+00:00
i've used macwhisper (paid), superwhisper (paid), and handy (free) but now prefer hex (free):

https://github.com/kitlangton/Hex

for me it strikes the balance of good, fast, and cheap for everyday transcription. macwhisper is overkill, superwhisper too clever, and handy too buggy. hex fits just right for me (so far)
by mifydev | 2026-02-17 01:54:44+00:00
Frankly, I don't like this kinds of takes. Yes, people are seeing more spam in their pull requests, but that's just what it is - spam that you need to learn how to filter. For regular engineers who can use AI, it's a blessing.

I'm a long time linux user - now I have more time to debug issues, submit them, and even do pull requests that I considered too time consuming in the past. I want and I can now spend more time on debugging Firefox issues that I see, instead of just dropping it.

I'm still learning to use AI well - and I don't want to submit unverified slop. It's my responsibility to provide a good PR. I'm creating my own projects to get the hang of my setup and very soon I can start contributing to existing projects. Maintainers on the other hand need to figure out how to pick good contributors on scale.
by ColinWright | 2026-02-17 01:54:51+00:00
Trying to pay a bill. On the website ... it took 24 minutes to navigate to the right place. Then they needed 2FA, so they emailed it to her.

Now she's supposed to open her email while keeping the web page open. It took 5 minutes to do that, find the email, copy down the code, close the email ...

Web site has timed out.

Just one of many examples.
Show HN: An Open-source React UI library for ASCII animations
by zekejohn | 2026-02-17 01:55:30+00:00
Hey HN :)

I made Rune, a composable React library for ASCII animations. It lets you drop in animated ASCII the same way you would an icon component.

Rune converts video into grids of colored ASCII characters that render directly as text in the browser. Brightness maps to character density (@ -> .), and output can be tuned for different levels of detail.

It’s designed to be lightweight and very performance focused, so animations stay smooth even at higher resolutions or if there many playing at a time!
by lkoczorowski | 2026-02-17 01:56:02+00:00
Does this not assume that Claude can pick out the best of what it knows?

Claude's training data is the internet. The internet is full of Express tutorials that use app.use(cors()) with no origin restriction. Stack Overflow answers that store JWTs in localStorage, etc.

Claude's probability space isn't a clean hierarchy of "best to worst." It's a weighted distribution shaped by frequency in training data.

So even though it "knows" stuff, it doesn't necessarily know what you want, or what a professional in production environment do.

Unless I'm missing something?
by JSR_FDED | 2026-02-17 01:56:46+00:00
“If you're no longer posting online — whether that's because you need a break from social media or … you … die — your followers' user experience will be affected. In short, they'll miss you.”

What a weird messed up bubble these social media companies live in. They’re absolutely convinced that AI is as good as human communication, and see no problem mixing the two in their platforms. Sheer coincidence that this benefits their business model. Just like how the Ad companies convince themselves they’re “helping users discover products”.
by pezezin | 2026-02-17 01:57:00+00:00
Yes, that list is quite old and lists some games that are not available anymore, while missing some others like the retro floor of Gigo 3 in Akihabara.

Anyway, Mikado in Ikebukuro has the standard F-Zero AX cabinet, and it is great. I have never visited their game center in Takadanobaba though, it is still in my TODO list...
by bpolania | 2026-02-17 01:57:05+00:00
Yes! You are right about the three primitives and that's basically Bulwark's core loop.

On idempotency: right now Bulwark observes but doesn't enforce dedupe. Every request gets a unique event ID in the audit log, and you can see retries in the session timeline, but there's no automatic "this looks like the same create_issue call from 2 seconds ago, block it."

It's on the roadmap and I think it needs to be two things: (1) a configurable dedupe window per tool pattern (you want it for create_charge but not for list_issues), and (2) content-aware hashing so it's not just "same tool + same action" but "same tool + same action + same arguments within N seconds."

The tricky part is that some tools are intentionally non-idempotent, posting the same Slack message twice might be deliberate. So it probably needs to be opt-in per rule rather than global. Would love to hear what patterns you've seen cause the worst double-fires.
by sarchertech | 2026-02-17 01:59:11+00:00
1. You can already do that it just costs more than $10.

2. Even assuming the AI can crap out the entire feature unassisted, in a large open source code base the maintainer is gonna to spend a sizeable fraction of the time reviewing and testing the feature as they would have coding it. You’re now back to 1.

Conceivably it might make it a little cheaper, but not anywhere close to the kind of money you’re talking about.

Now if agents do get so good that no human review is required, you wouldn’t bother with the library in the first place.
by wakawaka28 | 2026-02-17 02:00:09+00:00
Everybody is signalling, especially the people who think they aren't. We could sit here all day and game out all the possible interpretations that could be made from anyone's appearance, with respect to who they actually are, and it won't change much.

My take on it all: Programmers and other hot shot types often eschew formalities and conventions for dress and such, as a way of asserting status. "I'm professional and important enough to assert that my preferences supersede the ordinary" is what they want to signal. Of course, some are just childish enough to insist that dress codes don't matter in the slightest, and everyone must put up with their goofy graphic t-shirts. Others are willing to tolerate that stuff because most programmers are not customer-facing. But they still look like adult children when they insist on that crap.
by rfv6723 | 2026-02-17 02:00:17+00:00
> The argument I cite is from complexity theory. It's proof that feed-forward networks are mathematically incapable of representing certain kinds of algorithms.

Claiming FFNs are mathematically incapable of certain algorithms misses the fact that an LLM in production isn't a static circuit, but a dynamic system. Once you factor in autoregression and a scratchpad (CoT), the context window effectively functions as a Turing tape, which sidesteps the TC0 complexity limits of a single forward pass.

> AGI can solve quantum mechanics problems, but verifying that those solutions are correct still (currently) falls to humans. For the time being, we are the only ones who possess the robustness of reasoning we can rely on, and it is exactly because of this that fragility matters!

We haven't "sensed" or directly verified things like quantum mechanics or deep space for over a century; we rely entirely on a chain of cognitive tools and instruments to bridge that gap. LLMs are just the next layer of epistemic mediation. If a solution is logically consistent and converges with experimental data, the "robustness" comes from the system's internal logic.
by p_ing | 2026-02-17 02:00:26+00:00
Correct title: AI Sprite Generator

Pixel artists dominate the indie scene, these aren't the people losing their jobs to AI. Major developers at the behest of fans dissuade the use of AI for art generation (at least the art that gets published with paid games), and Steam requires developers to flag when AI art is used.

Game devs are losing their jobs for plenty of other reasons, but AI art isn't one of them.

Is this simply to plug another AI site?
by parineum | 2026-02-17 02:00:34+00:00
> On various occasions did he sympathize with the war and terror that Russia is doing in Ukraine.

I'm not a devotee of his but I've listened to a few of his podcasts when I like the guest. I have an idea of how someone would come away with your impression given lex's interview style but I'd be pretty surprised if anything he said would, to me, fit your impression.

That said, I'd like an example if you have something specific to point to that might change my mind or if it's just a general takeaway you've gotten from a corpus of interviews on the topic (which would be totally valid but wouldn't change my mind).
by calf | 2026-02-17 02:00:43+00:00
It's individualist exceptionalism taken to modern extremes. I remember having these sorts of science assignment in middle school, with dried pasta and then with egg boxes. Invariably the winners won (me and my partner) because our dads had "advice" when we got home and they saw what we were playing with. Winning in my experience was the most corrosive part of those experiences because I literally did not come up with the solution.
by reitzensteinm | 2026-02-17 02:00:54+00:00
Loom does exhaustive search, with clever methods to prune it. On real world programs, you have to set a limit to that because it obviously grows extremely quickly even with the pruning.

I've built something similar to Loom, except it's more focused on extensively modeling the C++11/Rust memory model (https://github.com/reitzensteinm/temper). My experience is that fairly shallow random concurrent fuzzing yields the vast majority of all concurrency bugs.

Antithesis (https://antithesis.com/) are probably the leaders of the pack in going deeper.
by ktoo_ | 2026-02-17 02:01:41+00:00
I apologise for you misunderstanding my example as a strict definition?

For anyone who hasn't understood my meaning:

Indulge is a word that implies that you're allowing yourself something that you might not ordinarily. The point being: it is (or should be) silly to suggest that a child can be said to indulge in a hobby. This is because the further implication is that an eight year old might show some restraint and focus on their book learning and networking.
by bpolania | 2026-02-17 02:01:49+00:00
Fair question. Yes, you can absolutely generate a basic proxy with an LLM, the gap is in the stuff that's hard to get right and boring to maintain. Policy hot-reload without dropping in-flight requests (ArcSwap, not "restart the process"). Tamper-evident audit with blake3 hash chains, not just append-only logs. Credential injection where the agent process literally never sees the secret, not env vars. Content inspection that runs bidirectionally without buffering entire responses into memory. Correct TLS MITM for the HTTP proxy mode with dynamic per-host certs. An LLM will generate something that works for a demo. We created 409 tests including property-based testing with proptest, because the failure modes in a security proxy are subtle, off-by-one in glob matching, race conditions in policy reload, Content-Length mismatches after redaction. Same reason, for example, you use nginx instead of asking your AI to write an HTTP server. The first 80% is easy. The last 20% is where credentials leak.
Show HN: Constrained DSL for Reliable LLM Decisions
by madawei2699 | 2026-02-17 02:02:33+00:00
Hi HN,
Personal notes on a constrained DSL to make LLMs generate reliable decision logic for quant (no arbitrary Python, no hallucinations). Schema-driven prompts, validation loop, deterministic execution.

Article + diagrams + public schema:
https://github.com/myinvestpilot/ai-architecture/blob/main/d...

Repo (complete 4-article series, EN/ZH): https://github.com/myinvestpilot/ai-architecture

Feedback welcome!
by kylecazar | 2026-02-17 02:02:54+00:00
I'm wondering the same thing. I keep seeing examples like "book your plane tickets" and "reschedule your meetings". I don't know who does these relatively high stakes things often enough to automate them.

I see the value for managing software projects, but the personal assistant stuff I don't get. Then again, I would never trust a model to send an email on my behalf, so I'm probably not the target audience.
by shshshsjjjj | 2026-02-17 02:03:17+00:00
> no locks in you backend

PG is still handling the locks for you, so this isn’t like a bulletproof solution and - like always - depending on your use case, scale, etc this may or may not work.

> No matter the load and concurrent users it will work like magic

Postgres will buckle updating a single row at a certain scale.

————-

Regardless, this article was about testing a type of scenario that is commonly not tested. You don’t always have a great tool like PG on hand that gives you solutions so this testing isn’t needed.
by lovich | 2026-02-17 02:03:29+00:00
Yea, that’s the ideologically not aligned part I referenced.

If AI can make features without humans why would I, as a profit maximizing organization, donate that resource instead of keeping it in house? If we’re not gonna have human eyes on it then we’re not getting more secure, I don’t really think positive PR would exist for that, and it would deny competitors resources you now have that they don’t.
by ricksunny | 2026-02-17 02:03:54+00:00
Imagine how much unanticipated historical perspectives might become uncovered if everyone uploaded paraphenelia of long deceased ancestors like this; after indexing, and searched as one hyper-amalgamated crowdsourced knowledge graph, can show who was where doing what in say the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s in a way that mainstream history might fall short of capturing.
by sneak | 2026-02-17 02:04:14+00:00
> People are really attracted to using LLMs on deep thinking tasks, off shoring their thinking, to a "Think for me SaaS". This won't end well for you, there's no shortcuts in life that don't come with a (huge) cost.

I, too, watched The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. The problem is that I, too, shipped a fuckton of working, reviewed, reworked, tests-and-lint-passing, properly-typed code implementing brand new features from scratch in the last 48 hours, that would have taken me 48 days a year ago.

“thinking” means a lot of different things, and you can indeed outsource a lot of it to other things that can think at different levels of ability than you. This is effectively what an engineering organization does.

Perhaps I haven’t fully offshored my thinking in the sense you mean in that I review all the code and give feedback on the PRs—I still steer. But I think the SOTA will continue to improve until we can indeed oneshot larger and larger tasks.
by sarchertech | 2026-02-17 02:04:21+00:00
Well that’s the problem. AI is really good at making things that bypass people’s heuristics for spam.

Someone can spam me with more AI slop than I can vet and it can pass any automated filter I can setup.

The solution is probably closed contributions because figuring out good contributors at scale sounds like figuring out how to hire at scale, which we are horrible at as an industry.
by api | 2026-02-17 02:04:24+00:00
Beat me to it. Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, Google/YouTube, and TikTok have done quite a bit more damage to the Internet than AI.

The future of the net was closed gated communities long before AI came along. At worst it’s maybe the last nail in the coffin. But the coffin lid was already on and the man inside was already dead.

AI is, I think, more mixed. It is creating more spam and noise, but AI itself is also fascinating to play with. It’s a genuine innovation and playing with it sometimes makes me feel the way I did first exploring the web.
by theptip | 2026-02-17 02:04:49+00:00
Not a silver bullet. When you use serializable you have more opportunities for deadlocks (cases which would otherwise be logic errors at weaker isolation levels).

Serializable just means that within the transaction your logic can naively assume it’s single threaded. It doesn’t magically solve distributed system design for you.

“Just use random testing” isn’t really an answer. Some race conditions only show up with pathological delays on one thread.
by MBCook | 2026-02-17 02:04:58+00:00
> Unfortunately, all of these issues come from humans.

They are. They’ve always been there.

The problem is that LLMs are a MASSIVE force multiplier. That’s why they’re a problem all over the place.

We had something of a mechanism to gate the amount of trash on the internet: human availability. That no longer applies. SPAM, in the non-commercial sense of just noise that drowns out everything else, can now be generated thousands of times faster than real content ever could be. By a single individual.

It’s the same problem with open source. There was a limit to the number of people who knew how to program enough to make a PR, even if it was a terrible one. It took time to learn.

AI automated that. Now everyone can make massive piles of complicated plausible looking PRs as fast as they want.

To whatever degree AI has helped maintainers, it is not nearly as an effective a tool at helping them as it is helping others generate things to waste their time. Intentionally or otherwise.

You can’t just argue that AI can be a benefit therefore everything is fine. The externalities of it, in the digital world, are destroying things. And even if we develop mechanisms to handle the incredible volume will we have much of value left by the time we get there?

This is the reason I get so angry at every pro AI post I see. They never seem to discuss the possible downsides of what they’re doing. How it affects the whole instead of just the individual.

There are a lot of people dealing with those consequences today. This video/article is an example of it.