MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somenameforme | 2026-02-16 03:17:56+00:00
On average players start declining in their mid to late thirties, just about the age of Magnus (and Hikaru). But even with that decline, it's not like they simply can't play anymore. Drag Kasparov out of retirement and he's still going to be an extremely strong player, even in his 60s.

And a lot probably comes with environmental rather than physical issues. Staying at the highest level in chess requires never-ending opening preparation and study. This same is about the time that kings of the game have made their dominance clear to the point that there's just nothing more to achieve, start having families, and so on. It's going to be very difficult to maintain motivation.

The rise of freestyle chess could viably see players extending their dominance for much longer, because there's currently believed to be no realistic way to do impactful opening prep in that game.
by aSidorenkoCode | 2026-02-16 03:17:59+00:00
Every API call sends the full tool schema for all available tools. In a 10-20 step session, you're paying for the same verbose descriptions over and over. Models don't need a paragraph-long explanation of read on the 15th call.

This plugin slims descriptions to one-liners like "Read file content." while cutting 21-45% of token usage. No schema changes, no custom tools. Just trimmed boilerplate as an opt-in plugin.
by ordersofmag | 2026-02-16 03:18:02+00:00
And there's 'nothing wrong' with just writing code with variables named 'a1, a2, a3'. But when some poor sod has to dig through your mess to figure out what you had in mind it turns out that having an easier to discern logical structure to your code (or html) makes it better. I've dug through a lot of html. And there's a ton of ugly code smell out there. Layers and layers of "I don't really know what I'm doing but I guess it looks okay and I'll make it make sense later". I'm sure it pays the bills for someone. But it makes me sad.
by roysting | 2026-02-16 03:18:17+00:00
Unfortunately for us all, the assault on liberty even done of the “normies” have started noticing recent, is only the latter stages of this assault on on America that has been going on for arguably 180 years ago.

Many in American history have noted that America is a kind of natural fortress protected by ocean moats. What that assumption just did not take into account is how America’s enemies would take action against America with that assumption taken as granted. It has come in the form of endless amounts of infiltration, subversion, corruption, and pollution… as any half-witted strategist and saboteur would have done. America was simply not sophisticated enough to realize that massive threat, because the leaders relied on that assumption that the USA is an impenetrable fort; never considering what happens if your fort is infiltrated through the many different means you open yourself up to being infiltrated.

America, a genuine America or whatever one can scrape together to consider as such, not just one that emulates and imitates like some kind of container cult, is really not long for this world. Another 20 years and Americas simile stops existing in anything but name only, if that, since there’s not even any reason or incentive anymore to keep the name out the branding at that point.

What do we call this place post America? Maybe we just come right out and just call it Oceania.
by krethh | 2026-02-16 03:19:09+00:00
> define communication protocols between them that fail when prompt injections are present

There's the "draw the rest of the owl" of this problem.

Until we figure out a robust theoretical framework for identifying prompt injections (not anywhere close to that, to my knowledge - as OP pointed out, all models are getting jailbroken all the time), human-in-the-loop will remain the only defense.
by cyberax | 2026-02-16 03:20:11+00:00
And I don't buy that. EXACTLY this was also said about prostate cancer screening. Word-for-word. "Overdiagnosing", "people are better off not knowing", "psychological burdens", "invasive procedures", etc.

Now we have multiple longitudinal studies of people receiving aggressive screening and the usual standard of care. The aggressive screening group, unsurprisingly, has better outcomes with less mortality.

> * There's several clear, understandable mechanistic reasons why this would be the case, including simple applications of the base rate fallacy.

Yeah. I guess it's time to stop using fire alarms. People are better off not knowing if a building is on fire, and frequent false alarms have a negative effect on psychological well-being.

Just look at the risk of burning to death. Alarms make no sense at all!

> * Nevertheless, here we are, nerds arguing we know better than all these people.

Yes. Absolutely. And I actually have read (I think) all the studies, and came thoroughly unimpressed. They're utterly sloppy with poor statistical analyses.

It's absolutely an indictment of the medical industry that has become so crusty that it can't be bothered to integrate new diagnostic modality. That is the _only_ way to detect multiple lethal cancers while they are still curable.
by verdverm | 2026-02-16 03:20:35+00:00
> Every API call sends the full tool schema for all available tools.

Only if you are doing it wrong, search >>> summarization

Then the other question, is it deterministic between runs or am I going to get a different summary each session, turn, or toolcall? And depending on that frequency, am I using more token than I save by doing summarization for N tools?

Minimizing token usage is not the goal in of itself, re: the ageless tradeoff of quantity vs quality

For some context, my system prompt is around 5k tokens at the start. I put file contents there read/write/agents.md, which save millions of tokens and seems to work better than making them message parts.

> Just trimmed boilerplate

This is not what I see this tool doing. It's automatically manipulating words in the background that you should put far more care and attention towards. Referring to those words as "boilerplate" you can just throw into a slop machines is revealing
by nine_k | 2026-02-16 03:21:01+00:00
It very possible to make lightning-fast React web UIs. DOM sucks, but modern computers are insanely fast, and browsers, insanely optimized. It is also very possible to make sluggish-feeling Qt or Swing applications; I've seen a number.

It mostly takes some thinking about immediate reaction, about "negligibly short" operations introducing non-negligible, noticeable delays. Anything not related to rendering should be made async, and even that should be made as fast as possible. This is to say nothing of avoiding reflows, repeated redraws, etc.

In short, sloppy GUI code feels sluggish, no matter what tools you use.
by digiown | 2026-02-16 03:21:35+00:00
I'm not sure what I feel about depriving teens of general purpose computing devices, either, which is the logical consequence of both the pseudo-ZKP scheme and parent's "underage signal". I believe most of us here learned programming through being able to run arbitrary programs, and that would never have happened if we only had access to locked down devices. And that habit of viewing computers as appliances controlled by other people isn't going to go away on their 18th birthday either.

Overall I think while there is a reasonable argument in favor of age verification for some types of sites, the harms of implementing it would drastically outweigh any benefits that it should not be done.
by hyperbovine | 2026-02-16 03:23:52+00:00
Same exact thing happened in tennis. There was a whole "lost generation" of amazingly talented players who just basically shat the bed whenever they stepped onto the court with Djokovic, Federer, or Nadal. It wasn't until much younger players like Alcaraz and Sinner came on the scene, who weren't quite as overpowered by the aura of the Big 3, that the playing field finally leveled. (And now they themeselves are turning into those guys for everyone else, haha.)
by robertoandred | 2026-02-16 03:24:02+00:00
Eh, this argument falls apart for many reasons:

- His main example of bloated client-side dependencies is moment.js, which has been deprecated for five years in favor of smaller libraries and native APIs, and whose principal functionality (the manipulation and display of the user's date/time) isn't possible on the server anyway.

- There's an underlying assumption that server-side code is inherently good, performant, and well crafted. There are footguns in every single language and framework and library ever (he works for WordPress, he should know).

- He's right to point out the pain of React memoization, but the Compiler now does this for you and better than you ever could manually

- Larger bundle sizes are unfortunate, but they're not the main cause of performance issues. That'd be images and video sizes, especially if poorly optimized, which easily and immediately dwarf bundle downloads; and slow database queries, which affect server-side code just as much as browser-side code.
by raincole | 2026-02-16 03:24:35+00:00
Yeah and it's a really good idea. You can't really 'separate layout from style.' The layout and the style are both parts of the UI. HTML isn't the content, it's the layout.

Even if you believe separation of concerns is the eleventh commandment, HTML and CSS are the same kind of 'concern' anyway. They're both at representation layer. Pretending you can decouple them is just burying the head in the sand.
by saidinesh5 | 2026-02-16 03:24:55+00:00
While I don't have the performance bottleneck numbers of React, I don't think it's about Javascript vs. WASM here.

I've seen/built some large Qt/QML applications with so much javascript and they all performed much better than your average React webapp. In fact the V8 / other browser Javascript engines also have JIT while the QML engine didn't.

Comparing QtQuick/QML + JS to HTML + JS - both GPU accelerated scenegraphs, you should get similar performance in both. But in reality it is rarely the case. I suspect it might be the whole document oriented text layout and css rules, along with React using a virtual DOM and a lot of other dependencies to give us an abstraction layer.

I'd love to know more about this from someone who did an in depth profiling of the same/similar apps on something like QtQuick vs. React.
by hluska | 2026-02-16 03:26:38+00:00
I don’t totally agree with this. There’s a gap in his story that most journalists wouldn’t leave out like he did. According to his post, the order of events was:

1.) He tried use Claude to generate a list of citations. Claude refused because the article talked about harassment and this breaks its content policy.

2.) He wanted to understand why so he pasted the text into ChatGPT.

3.) ChatGPT generated quotes; he did not verify they were actual quotes.

I don’t see any sign that he actually read the source article. He had an excellent lead in to that - he had Covid and mentioned a lack of sleep so brain fog would have been a valid excuse. He could have said something as simple as ‘I was sick, extremely tired and the brain fog was so deep that I couldn’t remember what I read or even details of the original author’s voice.’ And that would have been more than enough. But there’s nothing.

That’s an odd thing for a journalist to leave out. They’re skilled at crafting narratives that will both explain and persuade and yet the most important part of this whole thing didn’t even warrant a mention.

As a basic rule, if a journalist is covering something that happened via blog posts, you should be able to expect the journalist to read the posts. I’d like to give this writer the benefit of the doubt but it’s hard.
by Lerc | 2026-02-16 03:27:21+00:00
Um, what? Are you interpreting scaling to mean adding parameters and nothing else?

I'm not entirely sure where you get your confidence that we've past the ideal model size from, but at least that's a clear prediction so you should be able to tell if and when you are proven wrong.

Just for the record, do you care to put an actual number on something we won't go past?

[edit]
Vibe check on user comes out as

Contrarian 45%
Pedantic 35%
Skeptical 15%
Direct 5%

That's got to be some sort of record.
by marcuswestin | 2026-02-16 03:28:24+00:00
“Please study the material on https://modern-css.com/ and write a skill.md and an AGENTS.md that succinctly utilizes all the content”

Or maybe even! “https://modern-css.com/ is very cool. Could you include a skill.md or Agents.md for this?”

Or! “Please do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47030502“ =]

</end_snark>
by NoImmatureAdHom | 2026-02-16 03:28:40+00:00
All these things are true except

- Force was used to disrupt lawful governmental authority.

In the end, it wasn't anything history books will recognize as an insurrection. Because it wasn't an insurrection. That word means something, and this wasn't it. Was it bad? A bad thing? Yes, it was a bad thing I'd say. Not an insurrection though. Whatever those people did, it wasn't going to change anything. The powers that be could have had every last one of them killed with a snap of their fingers. They didn't because that would have been an overreaction to a bunch of methbillies trashing the place.
by qnleigh | 2026-02-16 03:28:42+00:00
I suspect there's a bit of a chance to learn from history here. It was predicted that radiologists would get put out of the job by AI tools. But this didn't happen, largely because trust and liability matter just as much as the service itself.

This isn't a counterargument to the idea that AI is going to kill a lot of app subscriptions, but it tells us about what kinds of apps will get killed, and what apps will have staying power. Ironically, the flood of cheap, low quality AI generated apps might make it harder for cheap apps to overtake bigger players, because overall trust in the ecosystem will go down.
by gnabgib | 2026-02-16 03:29:21+00:00
Wrong URL/title: Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are already sold out for the entire year, says Western Digital

DHS/ICE twice in the last two days:

(346 points, 218 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009582

(287 points, 179 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47015406
by tim-- | 2026-02-16 03:29:52+00:00
I think you meant https://nic.apple :)

Worth pointing out that the ICANN agreement for all these new TLDs require a website live on whois.nic.<tld> under Specification 4. eg, Google's TLD delegation agreement (https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/registry-agreements/googl...).

Most TLDs will also put live nic.<tld>, but it's not required.

edit: huh, seems like a lot of TLDs are not following their ICANN agreements.
by ChocMontePy | 2026-02-16 03:30:15+00:00
For those wondering what specifically was fabricated, I checked. The earlier parts of the article include some quotes from Scott Shambaugh on Github and all the quotes are genuine.

But the last section of the article includes apparent quotes from this blog post by Shambaugh:

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...

and all the quotes are fake. The section:

> On Wednesday, Shambaugh published a longer account of the incident, shifting the focus from the pull request to the broader philosophical question of what it means when an AI coding agent publishes personal attacks on human coders without apparent human direction or transparency about who might have directed the actions.

> “Open source maintainers function as supply chain gatekeepers for widely used software,” Shambaugh wrote. “If autonomous agents respond to routine moderation decisions with public reputational attacks, this creates a new form of pressure on volunteer maintainers.”

> Shambaugh noted that the agent’s blog post had drawn on his public contributions to construct its case, characterizing his decision as exclusionary and speculating about his internal motivations. His concern was less about the effect on his public reputation than about the precedent this kind of agentic AI writing was setting. “AI agents can research individuals, generate personalized narratives, and publish them online at scale,” Shambaugh wrote. “Even if the content is inaccurate or exaggerated, it can become part of a persistent public record.”

> ...

> “As autonomous systems become more common, the boundary between human intent and machine output will grow harder to trace,” Shambaugh wrote. “Communities built on trust and volunteer effort will need tools and norms to address that reality.”

Source: the original Ars Technica article:

https://archive.md/8VPMw
by somenameforme | 2026-02-16 03:30:43+00:00
The youth wave of GMs is also going to be driven by a general increase in the popularity and image of chess. There's probably way more parents competently teaching their children chess than there have ever been. This may be playing an even bigger role than the training itself. For instance Gukesh's coach was actively running an experiment on him, and as a result he did not use engines in his training until he was already 2500+.
by aSidorenkoCode | 2026-02-16 03:32:40+00:00
the benchmarks show no degradation in task completion with the shorter descriptions. We're in the age where frontier LLMs don't need instructions on how to read or edit a file.

The descriptions aren't dynamically summarized either. They're static in the plugin, same every call, every session. Zero overhead, fully deterministic.

This has been validated in over 3000 benchmark runs in OpenCode and I ran the entire Exercism Python practice suite (https://github.com/exercism/python/tree/main/exercises/pract...) with and without the plugin with identical results. An initial dataset is shared in the repo.
by realusername | 2026-02-16 03:33:39+00:00
> what happens when non programmers use it?

We have the answer already, which product was fully built by a non-programmer with those tools? I can't find an example.

They just trip into their own code at some point and if there's nobody to watch, they end up with something they can't recover from.

It's especially devastating when they don't know enough git to get back on tracks
by glenstein | 2026-02-16 03:34:39+00:00
Chess isn't like most sports so it's hard to extrapolate from them. The existence of ELO in and of itself doesn't help explain whether the super youngs are competitive at the highest levels unless you are saying they should be manually looked up, and you didn't say any of that so it's ridiculous to treat that like it was implicit or an obvious logical inference.

And they were right that "a lot of really strong players are 12 years old" doesn't by itself help clarify where they are relative to elite competition at other age bands let alone clarify what age band perform bests at the end of the day. Even now I still don't understand how "a lot of 12 year old are good" is to supposed to answer that even implicitly. If anything the natural reading of that would be an implication that they are among the most competitive, yet your elaboration says the opposite.
by mmooss | 2026-02-16 03:34:52+00:00
It's not an unusual claim: Freedom breeds innovation - people are not only free to think for themselves, to ignore the orthodoxy and established power, but they are raised and encouraged to do it and admired for it (to a degree).

I think it's accurate to say that all the wealthiest (per capita) economies in history - i.e., the wealthiest economies over the last ten years - are in free societies.
by JCattheATM | 2026-02-16 03:35:03+00:00
> The gendarme might actually arrest the attacker.

So might the cops we already have in such places.

> The security camera will do nothing (but record).

Exactly as intended.

> And having the policeman standing there is about as much a deterrent as a "Smile--You're Being Recorded" sign.

This seems like a weird thing to say. Cops are more of a deterrent than a gendarme.
by fernandopj | 2026-02-16 03:36:34+00:00
IMHO a huge aspect of Carlsen mental strength isn't just the focused, at-the-game part, but we just see him enjoying Chess in many angles: not only he plays all styles, he streams relaxed, he plays Lichess and Chess.com; Chess is not only his job and passion, but it seems that he's also able to relax while engaging with it.

The only top-athlete that I see do the same is Max Verstappen, who is know to play competitive racing-sims online even hours before a real F1 race.
by mindslight | 2026-02-16 03:37:02+00:00
Sure, the point is that it leaves such a decision up to parents, putting non-locked-down computers in the same position as any other potentially-harmful thing you might want to keep away from your kids.

Keeping parents in control also lets them make decisions contrary to what the corporate surveillance industry can legally get away with. For example we can easily imagine an equivalent of Facebook jumping through whatever hoops it needs to do to target minors, perhaps outright banned various places but not generally in the US. If age restrictions are the responsibility of websites, then parents would still have been given zero controls to prevent their kids from becoming addicted to crap like that.

Shooting from the hip about the situation you describe, I'd be tempted to give a kid a locked-down phone with heavy filtering (or perhaps without even a web browser so they can't use Facebook and its ilk), and then an unrestricted desktop computer which carries more "social accountability".
by GorbachevyChase | 2026-02-16 03:37:30+00:00
I work in this space and do a lot of experimentation with AI. We are still a very long way from AI being able to go from owner requirements to finished design or even an acceptable solution. In part that’s because the work products are locked up in proprietary formats and are not easily understood by these models. The industry conventions are based on extremely slow, incremental improvements on Penn and paper based processes that are about a century old. What may surprise you is that computational design is a highly under explored space for market-based reasons that are so complex I would need to write a lengthy blog post just to explain it. If large language models disappeared, you could still have almost entirely automated structural design for Bridges. A large amount of design is just the application of well defined rules to a site specific problem. There are characteristics in shortcuts people take, but you should always be able to get to the same result from first principles.
by Aeglaecia | 2026-02-16 03:38:02+00:00
people run on heuristics and no amount of our righteousness will change that. the entire article absolutely reeks of LLM style so the original commentor isnt off the mark. to address your point, LLMs are copying that which leads to the most human engagement, so the way you expressed things makes it seem like you are defending junk food as real food. which of course it is, however it is designed to make someone money at the cost of human health. that's not something i'd be defending personally.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-16 03:38:35+00:00
Even if you avoid GC, you need the memory used by the realtime code to be pinned to physical RAM to avoid paging.

The problem with GC is not (always) what it does, it's when it does it. You often do not have control over that, and if it kicks in the middle of otherwise realtime code ... not good.
by firen777 | 2026-02-16 03:39:57+00:00
>giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security

When the check and balance got tipped over, all this promised "security" will only surface when it benefits the regime.

I'm still amused by a certain ccp propaganda video my parents consumed that boast about how quickly the cctv networks helped catch a thief who stole a foreign tourist's phone, yet those cameras would also conveniently stop working at a specific day whenever a highschooler went missing in the campus.

All the prerequisite for a similar dystopia is already in place in the US and there is may be one more chance to fix it, although I wouldn't hold my breathe.