MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
AI System – Is It Your "Cognitive Exoskeleton" or Simply Your Super-Fast Intern?
by kokhanserhii | 2026-02-22 16:39:48+00:00
As it turned out, about "AI" there are two completely different understandings of the term "cognitive exoskeleton"...

1. The Generalized-Abstract Understanding

Well, it's clear that there is a generalized-abstract concept: you create text faster, translate faster, format faster, program faster, create reports and reviews faster...

2. The More Concrete Understanding

There is a more concrete concept, when you for your typical mental activity create all kinds of ensembles from sequences of prompts, agents, and so on.

3. My Understanding - True Cognitive Amplification

Well, but I don't like both these concepts. The thing is that I for myself truly discovered the possibilities and power of smart chats when I understood that with their help I can amplify my reason and intelligence. I can with their help invent something new-that which I couldn't have invented without their help. This is the real amplification of your reason and intelligence.

The first-this is to a very significant degree an exoskeleton of a secretary, translator, proofreader, referent. What does reason and intelligence have to do with it here? Not that reason-even intelligence, this is a concept about the ability to solve tasks of a type unknown to you. When I mastered such things, yes, I understood that I can be myself and plus three secretaries in effectiveness and five translators. But I didn't want to be such a multi-personality. I didn't like it. And the well-being, honestly speaking, was like that of a very loaded secretary at one and a half positions.

The second-here you simply order a certain sequence of work of yourself and some programs. Yes, this, of course, is an amplifier of organization, not of intelligence and not of reason. But so one can also call a paper notepad, a daily planner an "exoskeleton of a self-organizer"-simply this one is in computerized and web-service form.

---

Question to Readers

And how do you think-where is it better to attach the term "cognitive exoskeleton"?

I in general like more "cognitive exo-wings," because it doesn't look like a skeleton at all and is not one, and also hints for some reason about a cemetery. Real iron exoskeletons remind by appearance of strengthening and solidity, and the word "skeleton" itself reminds only about a cemetery, and also doesn't improve posture at all. This is a slightly different theme-terminological-but I write about this here since the term "cognitive exoskeleton" is already widely occupied for the first two not quite cognitive positions.

---

My previous article *"Human and AI. How to Modernize Your Consciousness in 10 Minutes"* examines and positions about a dozen other dimensions regarding your attitude toward artificial intelligence.
by jwr | 2026-02-22 16:39:57+00:00
Having moved to Mastodon, I also recovered some faith in the Internet (of old). You control your timeline. You are not the consumer being fed stuff, you choose what you want to see.

As a side note, I keep hearing people recommend threads, bluesky, or other corporate media machine du jour and I cannot understand how people can't learn a lesson. If you touch a hot stove once, you normally don't touch one again. And yet here I see people around me hoping (against all reason) that this time it will be different, really, this corporation is good, this service will not get progressively ensh*ttified like every other service that came before. It baffles me.

Mastodon is different. It is not owned by a single corp (nitpickers get your engines started) and can't be turned into a machine that juices your attention span for money.
Show HN: Droneski, an FPV drone ski camera simulator
by ImJasonH | 2026-02-22 16:40:05+00:00
One of my favorite things about watching the Olympics this year has been the usage of FPV drones during downhill events.

The skill on display to maneuver the drone, keep the subject in frame, and keep it cinematic was almost as impressive as the athletes themselves, and added a lot to the immersiveness of the events.

So Claude and I hacked up a simulator this morning. My kids love it!

https://imjasonh.github.io/droneski/
by Rochus | 2026-02-22 16:40:49+00:00
Your statement may well be protected by freedom of speech, but it is a highly unobjective, personal attack of the kind that I personally do not want to see here.

It does not help any of the readers in any way, does not present any facts, and contains nothing educational. If anything, it would have been sufficient for you to simply say that you do not like him, if possible with a fact-based explanation. Then people could think about it and, if necessary, respond with other arguments.
by l33tman | 2026-02-22 16:40:59+00:00
The router that routes the tokens between the "experts" is part of the training itself as well. The name MoE is really not a good acronym as it makes people believe it's on a more coarse level and that each of the experts somehow is trained by different corpus etc. But what do I know, there are new archs every week and someone might have done a MoE differently.
by craftkiller | 2026-02-22 16:41:05+00:00
If you don't want to use the base system (which docker is NOT the base system on Linux) then Bastille offers a pretty much identical workflow to docker, but built on FreeBSD jails: https://github.com/BastilleBSD/bastille

> I don’t know why i keep hearing about jails being better

Jails have a significantly better track record in terms of security.

I can delegate a ZFS dataset to a jail to let the jail manage it.

Do Linux containers have an equivalent to VNET jails yet? With VNET jails I can give the jail its own whole networking stack, so they can run their own firewall and dhcp their own address and everything.
by bitexploder | 2026-02-22 16:41:09+00:00
I can tell you how I am seeing agents be used with reasonable results. I will keep this high level. I don't rely on the agents solely. You build agents that augment your capabilities.

They can make diagrams for you, give you an attack surface mapping, and dig for you while you do more manual work. As you work on an audit you will often find things of interest in a binary or code base that you want to investigate further. LLMs can often blast through a code base or binary finding similar things.

I like to think of it like a swiss army knife of agentic tools to deploy as you work through a problem. They won't balk at some insanely boring task and that can give you a real speed up. The trick is if you fall into the trap of trying to get too much out of an LLM you end up pouring time into your LLM setup and not getting good results, I think that is the LLM productivity trap. But if you have a reasonable subset of "skills" / "agents" you can deploy for various auditing tasks it can absolutely speed you up some.

Also, when you have scale problems, just throw an LLM at it. Even low quality results are a good sniff test. Some of the time I just throw an LLM at a code review thing for a codebase I came across and let it work. I also love asking it to make me architecture diagrams.
Show HN: I quit MyNetDiary after 3 years of popups and built a calorie tracker
by davemuz | 2026-02-22 16:41:25+00:00
After three years of hitting the same upgrade popup every time I opened MyNetDiary just to log lunch, I finally gave up searching for an alternative and built one myself.

The whole thing is a single HTML file. No server, no account, no login, no cloud. Data lives on your device only. You open it in a browser, bookmark it, and it works — offline, forever.

The feature I'm most proud of is real-time pacing: it knows your eating window, the current time, and how much you've consumed, and tells you whether you're actually on track — not just what your total is.

Free trial, no signup required: calories.today/app.html

Built this for myself after losing weight and just wanting to maintain without an app trying to sell me something every day. If that sounds familiar, give the trial a shot.
by roysting | 2026-02-22 16:41:33+00:00
That’s because English and Dutch are basically German dialects that the ruling aristocrat classes worked hard to differentiate and abstract from their ruling aristocrat class competitors in other places.

You may want lol into that, since you are realizing and noticing things, but you are seemingly still not connecting the dots correctly. Another hint, Dutch comes from Deutsche, how the “Germans” refer to themselves, which is also where the “English” came from, Angles and Saxony, the latter still being a region of “Germany” today.

In other words, you really should be referring to themselves Germans as the Deutsche of you wanted to differentiate them from the Dutch, which are basically the same Deutsche people who just live on the coast, the lowlands, i.e., the Nether-lands.
by Roark66 | 2026-02-22 16:42:14+00:00
I applaud their bravery in remaining non violent, but I'm not sure that is the best strategy as the state showed their willingness to just kill everyone.

Would organising an armed resistance be more effective? The state dissappears people. Have them organise and dissappear the leaders of the revolutionary guard or at the very least help another state (like Israel) to target them.

Non violence works only in democracies and other systems where the rulers care about what people think.
by jamestimmins | 2026-02-22 16:42:28+00:00
The responses to this are wild. I have worked with and built smaller systems like this and it is an incredible speed up.

So much reflexive hate against a genuinely transformative tech. Yes AI has annoying people and grifters, but it is genuinely incredible at some things and finding out how to use it effectively within a company is the most fun I’ve had in my career.
by Rapzid | 2026-02-22 16:42:36+00:00
> ...disturbed that all my friends who posted non-stop about supporting Palestine...

> I'm saying if you were a very vocal pro-Hamas...

See how quickly things have turned from the first post manufactured to seem reasonable? No more "Curious" and "just asking questions".

How many pro-Hamas friends can a person have?! I don't know a single pro-Hamas person myself.

I believe you are being taken for a ride friend.
by OutOfHere | 2026-02-22 16:43:10+00:00
Given our careless use of pesticides, fungicides, plasticizers, xenoestrogens, PFAS in pesticides, sewage sludge, and cigarette smoke, we're dooming the population to have a fertility of zero. I understand that the article is about cancer, not fertility, but the general argument of accumulated germline damage prevails. It's no wonder that the West requires immigrants to preserve its population because the domesticated ones can't have children.
by srean | 2026-02-22 16:43:39+00:00
Lovely.

Folding is more powerful than ruler and compass constructions. One can do cube roots, angle trisections etc.

It's a strange coincidence that I commented about straight edge and ruler constructions in a different thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47112418

Related thread from several months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45222882
by bdcravens | 2026-02-22 16:43:50+00:00
You are correct that China is the number one market in terms of BEV sales, but the US is number two, selling more than 3-5 combined. That's an odd way to define a small EV market. Funny thing is, in terms of rankings, the US is actually a "small market" when it comes to gas-only cars.

Prior to moving to only BEVs, our family bought several Toyotas (and before that, only Hondas), and I was disappointed to find that I had no options (at the time, and in the 4 years since, between the 2 manufacturers, only 2 have come to market that I can purchase). Perhaps VW and Kia don't understand how to sell cars, but they understood how to sell them to me.
by xbmcuser | 2026-02-22 16:44:11+00:00
That is actually bullshit fed to you all democracies that have been brought down in the last 60-70 years democracies have been brought down by the west. And most dictatorships propped up by them unless they threatened Israel or were perceived a threat to Israel. It was not civil liberties or any such reason that any moves were made it was about capitalism vs socialism or Israel. West capitalists have no interest in civil liberties or democracies hence they bring down any socialist democratic party or leader which has bring about fascists in power in the west.
by whizzter | 2026-02-22 16:44:32+00:00
I think Jails started as a tool of it's time, it's about the same thing as virtualization in making isolated systems when dependencies start to diverge, but aimed at the issues of sysadmins that had to manage their own systems, not a quick developer experience.

Even if "jailsfiles" were created the ecosystem would need to start from scratch and sometimes it feels like people in the FreeBSD ecosystem have a hard enough time keeping ports somewhat up to date, let alone create something new.

Luckily Podman seems to support FreeBSD these days for docker images, but the Linux emualation might be a bit of a blocker so not a 100% solution.
by mothballed | 2026-02-22 16:44:41+00:00
You're absolutely right -- it's not really the genesis per se on #2, just one of the modern weapons used. Civil rights act is one of the main weapons used today to explain why we can't wind back interstate commerce clause, creating a sort of legal suicide pact where the interstate commerce clause interpretation is held hostage if you want to keep your civil rights. That is, the CRA was arguably one of the most important things for double sealing the deal on progressive era expansion of the ICC.

Many times here on HN I have debated people who were well versed on constitutional law, and when I mention rolling back the interstate commerce clause one of their main go to is that they're afraid I will destroyed the CRA and that's why they can't do it. And they're right -- a nearly identical on many points CRA happened in 1875 as the one passed in 1964. The 14th and 15th amendment existed at both times, and the relevant points of the constitution stayed the same. Yet the latter was found constitution and the former was not, in large part due to the change in the meaning of the interstate commerce clause.
by jwr | 2026-02-22 16:44:49+00:00
> depending on how best is defined in the given context

That is a big hedge there. I found over time that many of my objectively correct and informative posts on Reddit get downvoted because the truth is sometimes inconvenient (don't critique a manufacturer in the reddit devoted to devices from that manufacturer, people will not like that, they are not there to hear unpleasant things about their buying decisions), and even on HN if you post unpopular opinions , you will get downvoted into non-existence (just try saying that Postgres isn't the best tool for everyone ever).

"best" is hard to define and so far the best attempt I've seen to get it right was the GroupLens USENET scoring system (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GroupLens_Research) — this could work quite well if it were easy to adopt for many people. It worked quite well even at the time for USENET, but only for groups where there were enough people doing the scoring.
Should I add this acknowledgement/shoutout by xAI/Grok to my resume?
by aehsan4004 | 2026-02-22 16:45:07+00:00
I spotted a usability gap on X (formerly Twitter)—no way to categorize bookmarks by topic.

Suggested it publicly, and months later, they rolled it out with a shoutout from Grok.

Resume impact?
Worth adding under 'Product Contributions' (e.g., 'Suggested bookmark categorization feature, adopted by X')?
Overkill, useless, or a solid signal for PM/UX opportunities?
by rsolva | 2026-02-22 16:45:13+00:00
I would like to see social networks that facilitates real life, face-to-face encounters to a much larger extent that the current state of affairs. The Fediverse has the pieces to this puzzle, but I do not know of one project that combines them in the right way yet. We do have Mobilizon for events, we have Mastodon and all the other similar projects for sharing and commenting, but we need something that puts the pieces together in a new configuration.

I do think projects like Bonfire is onto something. I will set up an instance to explore the details sometime this year, when time permits it.

But converting online chance encounters into actual meet-ups, social gatherings and dates is where we should be heading. It would be really nice to have this in a space without ads and the influence of the large corporations!
by don_esteban | 2026-02-22 16:45:20+00:00
I have lived through regime change in Eastern Europe in 1989.
A year before the change, one cannot imagine the regime change. And yet, it did happen. Bloodlessly (except Romania).

Any external meddling would have probably made it much bloodier.

You can be assured most Iranians do NOT want US to intervene. How many Americans want China/Russia to intervene to 'help' you get rid of Trump?

Get off your high horse and use a bit of empathy and common sense.
by citizenpaul | 2026-02-22 16:46:00+00:00
As normal HN shows that "power structures" completely eludes them as a group.

Here is why lie detectors exist.

1. They are legal.
2. Abusive interrogation of US citizens is not legal.

A polygraph is a risk assessment. If you break under completely safe sanctioned questions. You are gonna spill everything if someone from the others side is questioning you.

This person could have just shown up and shrugged for X hrs and they would have had no more than 1 polygraph every 10 years. Instead they kept doing exactly what the test is concerned about. How easy are you to break? Which is why they kept getting more and more tests. They were considered high risk.
by PantaloonFlames | 2026-02-22 16:46:53+00:00
I don’t understand how “running it in a vm” Or a docker image, prevents the majority of problems. It’s an agent interacting with your bank, your calendar, your email, your home security system, and every subscription you have - DoorDash, Spotify, Netflix, etc. maybe your BTC wallet.

What protection is offered by running it in a docker container? Ok, It won’t overwrite local files. Is that the major concern?
by echelon | 2026-02-22 16:47:07+00:00
I'm really puzzled. I frequently post scathing criticisms of government spying on HN.

I'm one of the top HN commentors for the string "1984" and led to 10% of the mentions last year (as someone else blogged about).

I was just admiring the operations and scaling of it. It's pretty impressive to grow to such a scale.
by margalabargala | 2026-02-22 16:47:10+00:00
I suspect it's all a moot point.

Prices of solar and battery are plummeting. If anything they are dropping faster than they were 5—10 years ago.

10 years from now I suspect the grid will largely be transitioning remaining fossil fuel base load to solar and wind backed with batteries, because the economics will be there to overbuild the solar and battery to the extent needed to provide reliable base load through the winter.
by 7777332215 | 2026-02-22 16:47:34+00:00
I know they said they didn't obfuscate anything, but if you hide imports/symbols and obfuscate strings, which is the bare minimum for any competent attacker, the success rate will immediately drop to zero.

This is detecting the pattern of an anomaly in language associated with malicious activity, which is not impressive for an LLM.
by bonsai_spool | 2026-02-22 16:48:52+00:00
The actual title, which is what should be used on submissions, is "Stability of epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of adult-onset disease and parturition abnormalities". If you want to link to the press release, you should link to that—note it also doesn't use your editorialized title.

The article isn't about the fungicide (were the exposures close to what humans experience?) but about the possibility of epigenetic transmission.

Edit: "When pregnancy was confirmed, on days 8 through 14 of gestation [31] the females were administered daily intraperitoneal injections of vinclozolin (100 mg/kg BW/day, Chem Services, Westchester PA, USA)" - not comparable to humans. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6114855/
by hrn_frs | 2026-02-22 16:49:38+00:00
> I'm curious why this isn't getting much attention from larger companies.

Time is money and when you're competing with multiple companies with little margin for error you'll focus all your effort into releasing things quickly.

This chip is "only" a performance boost. It will unlock a lot of potential, but startups can't divide their attention like this. Big companies like google are surely already investigating this venue, but they might lack hardware expertise.
by smegger001 | 2026-02-22 16:49:53+00:00
sort of not really but effectively yes. their deal with OpenAI gave them unrestricted use of all of OpenAI Models and IP (source code, weights, patents probably any other data) except the eventual hypothetical end products of Artificial General Intelligence which would belong to OpenAI alone but Microsoft would still have everything leading to it so could probably make that jump on their own (not a great deal on OpenAI's part as it doesn't give them much of a moat). so when OpenAI runs out of money well Microsoft won't own the IP but will have unrestricted use of it some one else could buy it at bankruptcy but microsoft could still use it. As for the staff well they already showed a willingness to jump ship to Microsoft back when the OpenAI board tried firing Sam without giving a reason, and if OpenAI dies Microsoft would probably hire any of the top talent that applied. So kinda sort of but on paper no but yeah they would have everything of value they would choose have.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-22 16:50:01+00:00
> Meddling in internal affairs of other countries has a terrible track record, the world would be so much better off without it

Wishing away "meddling" is on par with wishing away war. Nice in theory. Practically impossible in practice. (Sovereignty has a Schrödinger's element to it. You really only know you have it when you test its boundaries. And the only test of sovereignty is against another sovereign. The world is littered with sovereigns meddling in each others' affairs and those who aren't sovereign.)
by Kiboneu | 2026-02-22 16:50:49+00:00
Check out “Game Feel: A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation” by Steve Swink.

To some extent, responsiveness is a perception based on expectations derived from the visual and acoustical elements of a game. So on top of engine-level optimizations, there are artistic tricks that can further improve the sense of responsiveness.

Think Kiki and Bouba, and how each one would move, race and fight.
by HiPhish | 2026-02-22 16:51:08+00:00
> Open-Source

It's not Open Source, it's source available because of the Build license:
https://www.eduke32.com/buildlic.txt

> [2] Any derivative works based on my Build source may be distributed ONLY through the INTERNET.

> [3] Distribution of any derivative works MUST be done completely FREE of charge - no commercial exploitation whatsoever.

> [5] The use of the Build Engine for commercial purposes will require an appropriate license arrangement with me. Contact information is on my web site.
by lich_king | 2026-02-22 16:51:16+00:00
> Would armed resistance be more effective?

I mean, with dictators, that's usually what it comes down to. But it often takes years or decades of unrest and repression before someone with enough guns decides they want to be on the right side of history.

It's a fascinating if morbid process we go through every now and then... sort of, building consensus by sacrificing livelihoods and lives.

Iran is one of the most oppressive regimes remaining on this planet, so I really hope this does it. The problem is that revolutionary governments are usually not dumb and do their best to make sure that another revolution can't overthrow them too easily - hardline loyalists with benefits in the military, etc. So this probably ends with a military intervention by other countries or some other sequence of events that will spell even more misery.