MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dakiol | 2026-02-21 20:06:03+00:00
No joke. In my company we "sabotaged" the AI initiative led by the CTO. We used LLMs to deliver features as requested by the CTO, but we introduced a couple of bugs here and there (intentionally). As a result, the quarter ended up with more time allocated to fix bugs and tons of customer claims. The CTO is now undoing his initiative. We all have now some time more to keep our jobs.
by sowbug | 2026-02-21 20:06:14+00:00
Another pattern would mirror BigCorp process: you need VP approval for the privileged operation. If the agent can email or chat with the human (or even a strict, narrow-purpose agent(1) whose job it is to be the approver), then the approver can reply with an answer.

This is basically the same as your pattern, except the trust is in the channel between the agent and the approver, rather than in knowledge of the password. But it's a little more usable if the approver is a human who's out running an errand in the real world.

1. Cf. Driver by qntm.
by stego-tech | 2026-02-21 20:06:27+00:00
Adding my POV from a former National Security perspective:

Author is 100% on point. The point of a polygraph is three-fold: weeding out the dipshits; exerting power over the powerless; and identifying the valuable assets (typically sociopaths). It does not - cannot - identify liars, deceit, or bad actors on its face (that comes from the manual the author linked). It's not scientific assessment, it's psychological torture.

Would I take a polygraph to reactivate my clearance? Yeah, if I had to. Would I pass? That's up to the examiner, because much like the author I won't tolerate being called a liar, nor will I capitulate to power games. I'll be honest, forthcoming, and cooperative - and if that's not enough to pass, then I don't want to work for you.
Show HN: See – searchable JSON compression (offline 10-min demo)
by Tetsuro | 2026-02-21 20:06:51+00:00
Hi HN, I’m building SEE (Semantic Entropy Encoding): a searchable compression format for JSON/NDJSON.
Goal: reduce the “data tax” (storage/egress) and “CPU tax” (decompress/parse) by keeping JSON searchable while compressed, with page-level random access.

I just published a proof-first evaluation release:

Offline DEMO ZIP (~10 min): prints compression ratios + skip rates + lookup latency (p50/p95/p99)

DD pack: audit/repro evidence (decode mismatch=0, extended mismatch=0, audit PASS)

Latest release: https://gitlab.com/kodomonocch1/see_proto/-/releases

Direct DEMO ZIP: https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/79686944/packages/generic...

OnePager is included in the release assets.

I’d love feedback on:

what workloads you’d try this on, and

what integration path would make this compelling vs Zstd + external indexing.
by vincentvandeth | 2026-02-21 20:06:52+00:00
Great questions. I've been running ~2,400 multi-agent dispatches across 4 terminals (different AI models) for about 6 months, so I'll share what I've hit in practice rather than theory.

On RFC 3161 vs. multi-witness anchoring: For most production agent systems today, RFC 3161-style timestamping is overkill — and so is multi-witness anchoring. The practical threat model isn't a sophisticated adversary backdating entries. It's your own agents producing self-consistent but wrong output, and you not being able to reconstruct the sequence after the fact. The real defensibility problem is completeness, not tamper-proofing. Can you prove nothing was omitted? That's harder than proving nothing was altered. I use an external watcher process that observes agent output independently — the agent doesn't write to the log, so it can't selectively omit entries. That separation does more for defensibility than any cryptographic anchoring would at my scale.

On replayability: It breaks down the moment you involve external state. An agent that reads a file, calls an API, or queries a database — the inputs to that decision are gone unless you explicitly snapshot them. Git shows what changed, but not what the agent saw when it decided to change it. Chat sessions expire. CoT gets truncated. I capture pre-state and post-state per dispatch, but the reasoning trace between them is still the weakest link. Nobody I've seen solves this cleanly yet. The best workaround I've found: treat the agent's self-reported reasoning as one input, but verify it against an independent quality check (separate process the agent can't influence). You can't replay the reasoning, but you can independently verify the outcome.

On the overengineering threshold: For me it became necessary after about 200 dispatches. One of my agents hallucinated a dependency, a second agent "fixed" the resulting test failures by creating the missing module, and by morning I had three rewritten files with clean commits built on something that should never have existed. The scary part wasn't the mistake — it was that I couldn't reconstruct why it happened. At single-agent scale, you can eyeball diffs. The moment you have agents responding to each other's output, forensic reconstruction stops being optional. I'd say the threshold is: if agent A's output can trigger agent B's action without human review, you need defensible logs. Not because of litigation risk, but because you literally can't debug cascading failures without them.
by hamburglar | 2026-02-21 20:07:13+00:00
The computer nerds understand how to isolate this stuff to mitigate the risk. I’m not in on openclaw just yet but I do know it’s got isolation options to run in a vm. I’m curious to see how they handle controls on “write” operations to everyday life.

I could see something like having a very isolated process that can, for example, send email, which the claw can invoke, but the isolated process has sanity controls such as human intervention or whitelists. And this isolated process could be LLM-driven also (so it could make more sophisticated decisions about “is this ok”) but never exposed to untrusted input.
by lpedrosa | 2026-02-21 20:08:45+00:00
I fully agree with your sentiment, and it also drives me crazy sometimes.

I wonder if the main problem was all the min maxing interview patterns that rewarded algorithm problem solvers back in the 2010's onwards.

People applied for software engineering jobs because they wanted to play with tech, not because they wanted to solve product problems (which should have a direct correlation with revenue impact)

Then you have the ego boosting blog post era, where everyone wanted to explain how they used Kafka and DDD and functional programming to solve a problem. If you start reading some of those posts, you'll understand that the actual underlying problem was actually not well understood (especially the big picture).

This led the developer down a wild goose chase (willingly), where they end up spending tons of time burning through engineering time, which arguably could be better spent in understanding the domain.

This is not the case for everyone, but the examples are few.

It makes me wonder if the incentives are misaligned, and engineering contributing to revenue ends up not translating to hard cash, promos and bonuses.

In this new AI era, you can see the craftsman style devs going full luddite mode, IMO due to what I've mentioned above. As a craftsman style dev myself. I can only set up the same async job queue pattern that many times. I'm actually enjoying the rubber ducking with the AI more and more. Mostly for digging into the domain and potential approaches for simplification (or even product refinement).
by refulgentis | 2026-02-21 20:09:04+00:00
Correct - more or less, I love BenQs but haven't had one in a few years. Dunno what exactly their blue light filter does. A software-based nightlight is usually going to turn whites offwhite, i.e. the yellowing you see is effectively darkening / lowering brightness. Its just, its accidentally fixing it and the fix is much less than it would be by directly lowering brightness.
by LTL_FTC | 2026-02-21 20:09:51+00:00
Toyota restricted the sale of its hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to specific, qualified customers who lived or worked near existing, functional hydrogen refueling stations. I remember looking into them when first released but realized I wasn’t eligible and the fact that Toyota restricted the sale meant there was a huge risk in buying them.

With all the resent outrage and lawsuits, I wonder how many buyers actually did their due diligence and weighed the risk before committing to them? Or maybe the huge fuel subsidy was seen as a win even if this event played out? Idk but I commend Toyota for taking the risk and going for it.
by holoduke | 2026-02-21 20:10:17+00:00
I am creating a claw that is basically a loop that runs every x minutes. It uses the Claude cli tool. And it builds a memory based on some kind of simple node system. With active memories and fading old memories. I also added functionality to add integrations like whatsapp, agenda. Slack and gmail. so every "loop" the ai reads in information and updates it's memory. There is also a directive that can decide to create tasks or directly message me or others.
It's a bit of playing around. Very dangerous, but fun to play with. The application even has self improvement system. I creates a few pull requests every day it thinks is needed to make it better. Hugely fun to see it evolving.
https://github.com/holoduke/myagent
by flaminHotSpeedo | 2026-02-21 20:10:26+00:00
Theoretically, the easiest way is to use a sub address (more commonly/colloquially known as email aliases or plus addresses, they're described in RFC 5233). You should be able to add a separator character (usually a plus, sometimes other characters instead/in addition) and arbitrary text to your email address, i.e. "myemail+somecompany@example.com" should route to "myemail@example.com"

In practice, this works about 95-99% of the time. Some websites will refuse the + as an invalid special character, and the worst of the worst will silently strip it before persisting it, and may or may not strip it when you input your email another time (such as when you're logging in or recovering your password).

I also suspect spammers strip out subaddresses frequently, very little of the spam I receive includes the subaddress.

So the only 100% reliable way is to use your own domain, but you don't need to run your own custom mail server
by zahlman | 2026-02-21 20:11:07+00:00
Oh, man, I'd forgotten about these negated .gitignore patterns entirely. It actually hadn't occurred to me that they could override the behaviour of ignoring empty directories.

This is potentially actually useful for me, because I have a project with test data that consists of miniature filesystem sub-trees — that should include empty directories to ensure edge cases are covered. I've been zipping them up and having the test harness unpack them in the test environment, but that's an unnecessary extra point of failure (and it stuffs undiffable binary files into the commit history).

Edit: Ah, no, if this doesn't work from the project-global .gitignore (specifying a folder to keep, even though it's empty and doesn't even have its own .gitignore) then it doesn't solve the problem. :(
by albedoa | 2026-02-21 20:11:49+00:00
> Interestingly enough, if there's even the smallest suspicious that you smoke weed, they'll put you through the wringer. I've seen more people lose their clearance for pissing hot, than those with six figure debts or drinking 5 days a week.

I have to defer to you here since it sounds like my experience is more limited, but this is not my understanding at all. The agencies care a lot about financial indiscretions, as those applicants are most susceptible to compromise. And indeed, if you look at the lists of denials and appeals, you might think that money issues are the only reason anyone is ever denied.

Lying about having smoked weed is another story.
by alecco | 2026-02-21 20:11:57+00:00
Taiwan dominates the global motherboard industry. (ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, ASRock, etc. and MediaTek etc)

The big Taiwanese manufacturers are chasing the AI dragon.

https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20251021PD219/ai-server-asro... (Oct 2025)

OTOH, now I read small Taiwanese manufacturers who are left out of the Nvidia supply chain are reverting to DDR4 motherboards because of the DDR5 shortage. Strange times.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-02-21 20:12:02+00:00
Dew point and relative humidity, along with temperature and wind, are crucial measures to predicting how you will feel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dew_point

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humidity#Relative_humidity

In the US, the 100th meridian is a popular demarcation for the half of the country that experiences high humidity versus the other half that experiences low humidity. It is why 100F in Phoenix, Arizona is much more tolerable than 100F in Atlanta, Georgia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100th_meridian_west
by ben_w | 2026-02-21 20:12:15+00:00
Sensible people would do that (asking for just the features they need), but look at us, are we sensible?

Most of us* are working for places whose analytics software transitively asks the user for permission to be tracked by more "trusted" partners than the number of people in a typical high school, which transitively includes more bytes of code than the total size of DOOM including assets, with a performance hit so bad that it would be an improvement for everyone if the visitor remote desktop-ed into a VM running Win95 on the server.

And people were complaining about how wasteful software was when Win95 was new.

* Possibly an exaggeration, I don't know what business software is like; but websites and, in my experience at least, mobile apps do this.
by BadBadJellyBean | 2026-02-21 20:13:09+00:00
I don't think hydrogen will ever be a thing for personal cars. Apart from the abysmal "well to wheel" efficiency it's also just such a hassle to create a fuel network for it. Gasoline is bad enough but a gas that will just leak away whatever you do seems like a stretch. It is just so much simpler with electricity. Pretty much every gas station already has it. No driving it around with trucks. Just maybe once install a bigger cable or a battery/capacitor.
by haunter | 2026-02-21 20:13:22+00:00
Beautiful car but for example I live in Hungary and there is a grand total of one charging station in the whole coutry in Budapest. Yes it's free to charge but probably only makes sense to get a Mirai if you are a Bolt or Uber driver. Nice tech demo though.

Here is the european charging station map https://h2.live/en/ Benelux countries, Switzerland, and the Ruhr area are most likely the best places to own this car
by munksbeer | 2026-02-21 20:13:29+00:00
The irony is that in our experience, if you're old or a child, you're far more likely to be treated quickly on the NHS.

Perhaps that isn't the whole story, maybe old people tend to have more life threatening conditions, so triage puts them first. But from my perspective, private health insurance is now mandatory in the UK if you're not old or a child, and I am even going to put my children on private health insurance. So now I'm paying a fortune in taxes for a health system I can no rely on, so must pay for private too.
by the_gastropod | 2026-02-21 20:13:29+00:00
I'm studying Chinese (Taiwanese style, so traditional characters), and my understanding is anything back to about the Han Dynasty (~200 BCE) is intelligible to an educated Chinese speaker.

Resiliency is one of the weird beneficial side-effects of having a writing system based on ideas instead of sounds. Today, you've got a variety of Chinese dialects that, when spoken, are completely unintelligible to one another. But people who speak different dialects can read the same book just fine. Very odd, from a native English speaking perspective.
by theowaway213456 | 2026-02-21 20:14:38+00:00
> Unless you think they secretly run it which is a conspiracy

tbh this doesn't sound like a conspiracy to me at all. There's no reason why they couldn't have an internal subsystem in their product which detects math problems and hands off the token generation to an intermediate, more optimized Rust program or something, which does math on the cheap instead of burning massive amounts of GPU resources. This would just be a basic cost optimization that would make their models both more effective and cheaper. And there's no reason why they would need to document this in their API docs, because they don't document any other internal details of the model.

I'm not saying they actually do this, but I think it's totally reasonable to think that they would, and it would not surprise me at all if they did.

Let's not get hung up on the "conspiracy" thing though - the whole point is that these models are closed source and therefore we don't know what we are actually testing when we run these "experiments". It could be a pure LLM or it could be a hybrid LLM + classical reasoning system. We don't know.
by cptroot | 2026-02-21 20:14:40+00:00
Neat! I think the website could use a bit more information about how the "global" Effect handlers work, and whether it's possible to opt-in to that functionality yourself when writing Effects.

That being said I took a look at the roadmap and the next major release is the one that focuses on Effects, so perhaps I'm jumping the gun a tad. Maybe I'll whip this out for AoC this year!
by ninkendo | 2026-02-21 20:14:47+00:00
Was this translated automatically from C? I picked a spot totally at random and saw in https://github.com/Ragnaroek/iron-wolf/blob/main/src/act1.rs in place_item_type:

let mut found_info = None;
for info in &STAT_INFO {
if info.kind == item_type {
found_info = Some(info);
break;
}
}

When typically in rust this is just:

let found_info = STAT_INFO.iter().find(|info| info.kind() == item_type);

Now I want to go through and feng shui all the code to look more like idiomatic rust just to waste some time on a saturday...
by conartist6 | 2026-02-21 20:15:05+00:00
In this case the tool is meant to parse programming languages, so once I write some parser grammars every valid code file in existence is a test case. Seen that way I have more test cases than I know what to do with.

We've come a ways from 2 + 2. This week my goal is to feed our own whole codebase through the JS parser, and I should be able to. I managed to parse a few hundred lines of real JS last week before running into Automatic Semicolon Insertion trouble that I needed to tinker with the core to fix.

While I get that our low profile smacks of vapor, we actually have working packages published: bablr and @bablr/cli. I'd consider them to be beta quality right now, having gone through many previous releases that I'd only consider alpha-quality, and even more releases before that.
by johng | 2026-02-21 20:15:34+00:00
Yet he was never charged or convicted of any crimes related to the supposed insurrection. So, you want banks to be able to decide to debank anyone, even without their day in court? So much for the presumption of innocence?

He urged people to protest peacefully. The clips that lots of the news outlets used was chopped up and made to specifically sound incendiary even though that's not what it said... so, they broke the law while doing that.

So, hate the man all you want but it is clear that the entire system broke laws, bent laws, even changed laws just to go after him.

NY passing a law that allowed sexual harassment cases that had passed the statue of limitations to be valid is another example. Let's make these old cases allowed, charge Trump, then they reversed that opening after he was charged. That's lawfare. They just wanted to get Trump no matter what.
by acomjean | 2026-02-21 20:16:06+00:00
This happened to my mom when being interviewed when coming over here in the 60s.
During verbal questioning she said something like “of course”. The government agent turned deep red and asked her if she understood the question (English isn’t her first language and she hadn’t). She’s been here since.

I kind of get that the agent is looking out for the applicant in this story. You have no idea what’s going to happen when you do a security clearance thing and they ask about this and that. How serious is the wrong answer.

Excepting my favorite question which something like “have you ever tried to topple the government?”

The system is messed up when screening for honesty encourages people to lie.
by geoka9 | 2026-02-21 20:17:31+00:00
> The EU is right now talking about becoming a great military force _to fight Russia_ (emphasis mine)

Correction: to not have to fight Russia. The EU falling apart is Putin's wet dream because he's very afraid of a confrontation with the whole bloc, and wants to subjugate the small European countries piecemeal (and yes, on their own, they would have to submit or face missiles/drones or, even worse, human meatwave attacks by a foe that has been whipping its populace into a death cult for decades for exactly that eventuality).
by dataflow | 2026-02-21 20:17:52+00:00
1400 seems fine except for the one big hurdle being "Þ", which I feel like I'd seen at some point but did not recall. ("ȝ" is useful but that's somewhat easier to guess and not too critical. "ſ" is also easy to guess and I'd seen it before.)

1300 is noticeably harder and needs some iterative refinement, but once you rewrite it, it's surprisingly not too bad:

> Then after much time spoke the master, his words were cold as winter is. His voice was the crying of rauenes(?), sharp and chill, and all that heard him were adrade(?) and dared not speak.

> "I deem thee(?) to the(?) death, stranger. Here shall you die, far from thy kin and far from thine own land, and none shall known thy name, nor non shall thy biwepe(?)."

> And I said to him [...]

1200 is where I can't understand much... it feels like where the vocabulary becomes a significant hurdle, not just the script:

> Hit(?) is much to saying all that pinunge(?) hie(?) on me(?) uroyten(?), all that sore(?) and all that sorry. No scar(?) is never hit(?) forgotten, not uuhiles(?) is libbe(?).

It gets exhausting to keep going after these :-) but this was very fun.
by spwa4 | 2026-02-21 20:17:55+00:00
> Maybe, but the uneducated masses shouldn't be making these decisions, which is why democracy is the real problem here.

Do you seriously think progressives will come out on top, or even have much of a say at all, in a non-democratic system? I mean, really?

... which suggests that if you can't lift up and convince "lower class" people, racist or otherwise, you should just get out of the way. Because if that's the case the only outcomes are bad, and worse.
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-02-21 20:18:01+00:00
Just to add further color: I’m a teacher, and at my school, we use the “feels like” temperature to decide whether to send kids outside for recess. Without that metric, we’d need to either ignore the wind chill, create our own formula, or leave it up to the judgement of the individual teacher running recess that day. Much better to have a number.
by testing22321 | 2026-02-21 20:18:52+00:00
To trick people into thinking hydrogen cars are the future so they don’t buy an EV now.

I’ve driven my own vehicles through 65 countries on 5 continents, and even the most remote villages in Africa and South America had electricity of some form.

I’ve never seen a hydrogen filling station in my life.
The idea we can build out that infrastructure faster than bolster the electric grid is laughably stupid. Downright deceptive.