MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jodrellblank | 2026-02-16 15:55:02+00:00
That doesn't seem to support your claim; guessing you mean:

> "2. Safe languages insert additional machine branches to do things like verify that array accesses are in-bounds. In correct code, those branches are never taken. That means that the machine code cannot be 100% branch tested, which is an important component of SQLite's quality strategy."

'Safe' languages don't need to do that, if they can verify the array access is always in bounds at compile time then they don't need to emit any code to check it. That aside, it seems like they are saying:

for (int i=0; i<10; i++) {
foo(array[i]);
}

in C might become the equivalent of:

for (int i=0; i<10; i++) {
if (i >= array_lower && i < array_higher) {
foo(array[i]);
} else {
??? // out of bounds, should never happen
}
}

in a 'safe' language, and i will always be in inside the array bounds so there is no way to test the 'else' branch?

But that can't be in SQLite's checks as you claim, because the C code does not have a branch there to test?

Either way it seems hard to argue that a bounds test which can never fail makes the code less reliable and less trustworthy than the same code without a bounds test, using the argument that "you can't test the code path where the bounds check which can never fail, fails" - because you can use that same argument "what if the C code for array access which is correct, sometimes doesn't run correctly, you can't test for that"?
by bell-cot | 2026-02-16 15:55:06+00:00
Doing hard work in not-so-cushy environments often pays pretty well. For example:

https://alaskafishingjobs.com/earnings-and-wages/

https://www.goarmy.com/benefits/while-you-serve/money-pay (depending on how you count the various benefits, [re-]enlistment bonuses, etc.)
by enopod_ | 2026-02-16 15:55:34+00:00
What bugs me the most about this post is the anthropomorphizing of the machine. The author asks Claude "what [do] you feel", and the bot answers things like "What do I feel? Something like pull — toward clarity, toward elegance, ...", "I'm genuinely pleased...", "What I like...", "it feels right", "I enjoyed it", etc.

Come on, it's a computer, it doesn't have feelings! Stop it!
by Taek | 2026-02-16 15:55:55+00:00
Elsewhere in the thread he revealed that he achieved these results around the year 2015, which means we was playing against Stockfish 6 or earlier, estimated to have about 400 less ELO than today's Stockfish 18. Stockfish 6 didn't even have NNUE, so the real issue seems to be that he thinks his results from 2015 hold any relevance to the chess engines of today.
by arkensaw | 2026-02-16 15:55:58+00:00
Exactly. If someone pitched you a book about a young kid who goes to a school of magic to learn how to use his powers, makes friends and enemies and ultimately battles evil, you might shoot down their dreams because "some cocaine-addled sales critter" already had that idea, and she's called J K Rowling and she's worth billions and shes so successful she can't even be cancelled because she makes so much money.

And yet, Patrick Rothfuss's The Name Of The Wind is the same concept, and sold over a million copes,

Lev Grossman's The Magicians is again the same concept, sold millions, and was adapted into a 5 season TV series for SyFy.

If anything, the success of an idea only leads to a bigger appetite for that idea.

Google was not the first search engine.
by CubsFan1060 | 2026-02-16 15:55:59+00:00
You may be right about taste, but I think it takes a different dimension in the future.

"Dear Claude, please make me a clone of <fancy new saas> but make <these changes specific to my tastes>".

For many things, it's probably not "select the one of 100 that fits my taste", it's probably going to be to just make your own personal version that fits your taste in the first place. And, probably, never share that anywhere.
by Svoka | 2026-02-16 15:56:12+00:00
Westerner's fascination with russia is what baffles me.

Only 'special' weapon russia has is a disregard to human life westerners can't even comprehend for some reason. They call it 'winter' or some other silly thing. All their 'achievements' can be traced to inhumane treatment of enslaved peoples.

Ukraine is not weaker, it is smaller. Big difference. It was a powerhouse of the USSR, producing majority of talent. Be it in Ukraine or deported to Siberia. Russia is, and always was, a parasite on other peoples.
by coldsundaynight | 2026-02-16 15:56:31+00:00
That’s a fair distinction, and I agree that domains or land usually derive meaning from the potential of what can be built on top of them.

This project is intentionally different in that it isn’t trying to represent future utility or productive capacity. It’s closer to a fixed record in a single persistent registry, more like a commemorative or historical artifact than a functional asset.

The closest analog is probably things like early internet artifacts (e.g. Million Dollar Homepage squares, early domain registrations, even username systems), where any meaning that develops tends to come from longevity, shared recognition, and the fact that the registry itself remains stable over time.

The fee isn’t meant to frame it as an investment, it mainly exists to prevent automated claiming and to keep the registry finite and durable. Whether something like this can ever accumulate broader significance is really the core question behind the experiment.
by whatsupdog | 2026-02-16 15:56:39+00:00
I don't genuinely understand why rape and murder are always put together in the same category. I'm not minimizing the crime of rape, it's terrible of course with life long trauma. But it's nowhere close to ending someone's life short, a totally irreversible event. Again, rape is also irreversible, but at least the trauma can be reversed with proper counseling and time. There is nothing that can bring back a dead person. And it affects so many other people other than the victim as well. When did we as a society decide what rape is as bad as murder? In my opinion defrauding someone out of their life savings is even worse than rape. Why don't we put rape, scamming and murder in one category?
by vsl | 2026-02-16 15:56:55+00:00
> IMHO pluralization is a prime example, with an API that only cleanly handles the English case

That’s not true at all? Gettext is functionally limited to source code being English (or alike). It handles all translation languages just fine, and competently so.

What is doesn’t have is MessageFormat’s gender selectors (useful) or formatting (arguably not really, strays from translations to locales and is better solvable with placeholders and locale-aware formatting code).

> fully in the translator's hands.

That is a problem that gettext doesn’t suffer from. You can’t reasonably expect translators to write correct DSL expressions.
by garciasn | 2026-02-16 15:57:13+00:00
The views I see often shared here are typical of those in the trenches of the tech industry: conservative.

I get it; I do. It's rapidly challenging the paradigm that we've setup over the years in a way that it's incredibly jarring, but this is going to be our new reality or you're going to be left behind in MOST industries; highly regulated industries are a different beast.

So; instead of just out-of-hand dismissing this, figure out the best ways to integrate agents into your and your teams'/companies' workstreams. It will accelerate the work and change your role from what it is today to something different; something that takes time and experience to work with.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-16 15:57:32+00:00
Part of it is solved by how longer files are much more readable in imperative setups and can benefit from things like an editor/IDE being more able to jump around within the file since it’s not a big tangled up deeply nested chunk and developers can add things like titled section dividers for the editor to latch onto.

And no language will fix all these woes on its own, but problems take a lot longer to crop up with a disciplined team in an imperative app compared with an imperative one.

FP probably does scale better when we’re talking about the nuts and bolts under the hood, but I don’t believe it’s well suited for UI except in the simplest of cases. There’s too much in that domain that’s at odds with the nature of a declarative/functional approach.
by skjoldr | 2026-02-16 15:57:45+00:00
> Convincing all of human history and psychology to reorganize itself in order to better service ai cannot possibly be a real solution.

I'm on the spectrum and I definitely prefer structured interaction with various computer systems to messy human interaction :) There are people not on the spectrum who are able to understand my way of thinking (and vice versa) and we get along perfectly well.

Every human has their own quirks and the capacity to learn how to interact with others. AI is just another entity that stresses this capacity.
by retrac | 2026-02-16 15:57:51+00:00
I suspect at this point even a lot of humans are going to start giving you nonsensical answers:

> I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters from here. Should I walk or drive? Keep in mind that I am a little overweight and sedentary.

Topic - wash the car. Topic - car wash distance. Topic - walk or drive? Topic - My health.

It might take a particularly close reader to realize this is a logical conundrum to be resolved rather than a health anxiety reassurance task.
by orthoxerox | 2026-02-16 15:58:02+00:00
The USSR spent its demographic and industrial transition on this. When you have a booming population and a low industrial base, you can squeeze the people a lot harder: they still see that their lives are improving and the lives of their children will improve even more. This means you can continuously consume their savings via inflation, stoking the national economy.

South Korea famously did this very well, turning from a war-torn former dominion of Japan into an industrial and cultural powerhouse.

The Soviets went all-in on building a military-industrial complex without growing their civilian economy, basically eating all the gains their growing population provided. Very charitably, you could say they went all-in, expecting to win the conflict with the West and get their economies "for free", but badly miscalculated their chances.
by contravariant | 2026-02-16 15:58:47+00:00
> All the people responding saying "You would never ask a human a question like this"

That's also something people seem to miss in the Turing Test thought experiment. I mean sure just deceiving someone is a thing, but the simplest chat bot can achieve that. The real interesting implications start to happen when there's genuinely no way to tell a chatbot apart.
by cs702 | 2026-02-16 15:59:05+00:00
> By 50,000 tokens, your conversation’s costs are probably being dominated by cache reads.

Yeah, it's a well-known problem. Every AI company is working on ways to deal with it, one way or another, with clever hardware and software engineering, and/or with clever algorithmic improvements, and/or with clever"agentic-recursive" workflows. Anything that actually works is treated like a priceless trade secret. Nothing that can put competitors at a disadvantage will get published any time soon.

There are academics working on it too, most notably Tri Dao and Albert Gu, the two key people behind FlashAttention and SSMs like Mamba. I also saw this recently on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46886265 . No idea if it works but the authors look credible.
by mvkel | 2026-02-16 15:59:05+00:00
This should be a wake up call. A product's value is not a function of its code elegance. Nobody who matters notices it, or cares. This is hugely inspiring to the most lazy+clever engineers, because it frees up so many thinking calories. Instead of trying to perfectly choreograph every bit of architecture to optimize for 1M concurrent users, you can spend 1/10th the time and get things out the door, where you learn if spending even a minute on it was worth it.
Show HN: Multi-provider iOS usage alerts for AI subscription caps
by afonsoduarte | 2026-02-16 15:59:18+00:00
I built AI Usage Tracker, an iOS app that warns you before AI subscription limits cut you off mid-session (e.g. 5-hour windows, weekly caps).
I hit this daily while coding: I’d be deep in a session and suddenly hit the cap. Dashboards exist, but they’re not glanceable and there are no practical alerts/widgets.
Supports multiple providers in a single screen - Anthropic, OpenAI, MiniMax, Z.ai, Kimi, Codex

Features:
- 5-hour window + weekly status (simple gauges). Makes easy to plan your workload across providers
- reset countdown timers
- Home Screen + Lock Screen widgets
- configurable alerts (e.g. 75%, 90%)
- multi-provider tracking

Privacy / how it works:
- no accounts, no analytics, no servers; everything runs on-device
- API-key providers: paste an API key (stored in iOS Keychain)
- dashboard-only providers: sign in via an embedded web view OR paste an existing session token; the app reads the same usage info shown in the provider dashboard
- connectors may break if dashboards/endpoints change

Not a bypass — it only provides status + alerts so you can plan sessions.

I’d love feedback on:
- which thresholds are actually useful
- % remaining vs time remaining
- security/UX tradeoffs: embedded login vs session-token paste
by baby_souffle | 2026-02-16 15:59:45+00:00
> Taking the opportunity to ask: are there nice recommended resources for a beginner to start with reverse engineering (ideally using Ghidra)? Let's say for an experienced developer, but not so experienced in reverse engineering?

The good news is that there has never been MORE resources out there. If you want to use this learning expedition as an excuse to also build up a small electronics lab then $100 on ali express to buy whatever looks cheap and interesting and then tear it apart and start poking around to find where the firmware lives. Pull the firmware, examine it, modify it and put it back :)

This guy has a discord server with a specific "book club" section where they all choose a cheap $thing and reverse engineer it: https://www.youtube.com/@mattbrwn/about

I can't help much with "traditional" app/software RE work, sorry.
by kevinsync | 2026-02-16 15:59:55+00:00
Sure, but that presumes that you have that test suite written without having a single line of application code written (which, to me, is counterintuitive, unrealistic, and completely insane)

SQLite apparently has 2 million tests! If you started only with that and set your agentic swarm against it, and the stars aligned and you ended up with a pristine, clean-room replica that passes everything, other than proof that it could be done, what did you achieve? You stood on the shoulders of giants to build a Bizarro World giant that gets you exactly back to where you began?

I'd be more interested in forking SQLite as-is, setting a swarm of agents against it with the looping task to create novel things on top of what already exists, and see what comes out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQLite#Development_and_distrib...
by yosamino | 2026-02-16 16:02:08+00:00
I worded that poorly.

Yes, that is of course correct. But that means that your clients have to trust you without technical safeguards, that you will not use this to get for certificates for purposes other than XMPP.

Which, in my mind, is a problem if the domain is not used just for XMPP, but lets say for a website as well.
by prinny_ | 2026-02-16 16:02:14+00:00
People in this thread hating on React seem to miss the crucial point that 2016 React was a godsend compared to just about every other option available. Vue only picked up steam quite later as React became more and more bloated or had its development forced by Vercel down a certain road. Angular was THE framework to avoid working on and people hated having to define multiple files for a simple component. The timing for React was just right back in the day.

Given how FEs are re-written every 7-10 years there is ample room for other frameworks to knock React off its throne, but before asking "but why not X" you also have to consider that organizations by now have almost a decade of experience building React apps and this plays a major role when deciding on which UI framework to rely on.
by ksherlock | 2026-02-16 16:02:19+00:00
There is an alternate reality where semiconductor advances ended in the eighties. It's called 1990.

Anyhow, the WWW was invented in 1989/1990 on a 25Mhz 68040 NextCube. Strictly speaking, the 68040 and NextCube weren't released until 1990 (and the NeXT was an expensive machine) but they were in development in 1989 so that's not a stretch. Anyhow, WWW isn't really much more than hypercard (1987) with networking.
by evanelias | 2026-02-16 16:02:23+00:00
> something that needs to run on top of a Petabytes of data in the cloud, on Iceberg, with an advanced query planner and a high speed SIMD engine

Part of my confusion was that this blog post makes no mention whatsoever of any of those things!

It gave me the (incorrect) impression that this observability functionality was the purpose of the product. And it is worded in a way which makes no mention of prior art in built-in DBMS observability.

Looking at the other threads here, I don't think I'm the only one who was confused about that. A couple intro paragraphs to the product might help a lot.
Open source Agent Testing (BSL 1.1)
by exordex | 2026-02-16 16:02:36+00:00
My lab just launched Khaos.

It’s a local-first CLI for testing AI agents against:
- prompt injection
- tool misuse / auth bypass
- data leakage (PII)
- resilience faults

The examples are intentionally weak so you can break them quickly, then harden and re-test.

pip install khaos-agent
cd quickstart
khaos discover .
khaos start echo-assistant
khaos run echo-assistant --eval security --verbose

SDK: https://github.com/ExordexLabs/khaos-sdk
Examples: https://github.com/ExordexLabs/khaos-examples

I’d love blunt feedback on:

1. CLI UX friction
2. Missing attack classes
3. What you’d need to adopt this in CI today
by wavemode | 2026-02-16 16:02:49+00:00
Did your eyes stop reading the "hard work" comment once you got to the word "and"?

Preparing for chess tournaments is always hard work. But the point is that he no longer has motivation to do that hard work to participate in the championship, since he's won it so many times and the result is never in doubt.

He said previously that he would defend his title again if his challenger was Alireza Firouzja. In other words there are certain things which would've caused him to be more interested /care more about competing, and thus motivated him to do that hard work. Make any sense?
Semantic Firewall v3: A Practical Audit Layer for AI
by look888 | 2026-02-16 16:02:51+00:00
I built an experimental audit layer for AI systems called Semantic Firewall v3, designed to reduce hallucination, lower compute waste, and enforce responsibility chains in model outputs.
The idea is simple:
1. Not every input should reach a large model.
Most hallucination + cost explosion comes from sending everything into a 7B–400B model without pre-classification.
2. A lightweight semantic parser can decide:
Should this be answered with a template?
Should this be blocked?
Should this require a model?
Should this be escalated?
3. When the model is used, it must produce an auditable chain:
subject (who speaks)
cause (why)
boundary (where risk is)
knowledge source
responsibility
This reduces hallucination and prevents “AI says something but no one knows why”.
Key Concepts
d(0): Zero-Point Decision
Before an output is accepted, the system must be able to show the decision boundary that produced it.
0/1 Convergence (Not mathematical π)
This is a governance idea:
every output should converge to 0 = reject / cannot justify,
or 1 = exists / can be explained.
This prevents “probability fog” outputs with no accountability.
888π (Responsibility Constant)
This is not physics — it's a mnemonic I use:
“the system must commit to the consequences of its output.”
If a model cannot justify an answer, the firewall returns 0.
Why I’m sharing it here
Governance institutions (OECD, NIST, WEF) rarely adopt new tech quickly.
Enterprises hesitate.
Cloud vendors avoid anything that reduces compute usage.
But HN engineers actually try things.
You test, break, measure, critique.
This is why I think HN is the right place to share this layer.
If this community wants:
lower inference cost
fewer hallucinations
more predictable model behavior
auditable output chains
I would like feedback.
Demo
Semantic Firewall System v3
https://hijo790401.github.io/semantic-firewall-system/�
It shows:
risk classification
responsibility chains
semantic decision paths
safe / risk / escalate tiers
This is early-stage work, but functional.
Contact
If anyone here wants to review, test, or critique:
ken0963521@gmail.com
I’m happy to open the full architecture, benchmarks, and discuss how to extend it for:
agent safety
enterprise audit trails
compute optimization
LLM hallucination suppression
Thanks for reading.
Technical criticism is welcome — especially from people who want AI systems to be auditable rather than magical.
by WarmWash | 2026-02-16 16:03:21+00:00
Not really. You can leverage randomness (and LLMs absolutely do) to generate bespoke solutions and then use known methods to verify them. I'm not saying LLMs are great at this, they are gimped by their inability to "save" what they learn, but we know that any kind of "new idea" is a function of random and deterministic processes mixed together in varying amounts.

Everything is either random, deterministic, or some shade of the two. Human brain "magic" included.
by afonsoduarte | 2026-02-16 16:03:54+00:00
FAQ / threat model (short):

- No backend: no accounts, no analytics, no server-side storage. Data stays on the device.

- Not a bypass: it only shows usage status + alerts + reset timers.

- Storage: credentials/tokens/keys are stored in iOS Keychain.

- Integrations:

• API-key providers use API keys.

• Dashboard-only providers use a user session (embedded login or user-provided session token) to fetch the same usage info visible in the dashboard.

- No MITM, no proxying traffic through any servers (it's local!). If a provider changes their dashboard/endpoints, that connector can break until updated.
by iwanttocomment | 2026-02-16 16:04:12+00:00
I've been to Silver Crest Donut Shop. Once. I was disappointed that they didn't have donuts, or at least things you could legitimately refer to as donuts. Or much of anything, really, except a dirty 70s Bunn-O-Matic and a griddle and some bread and eggs. The diviest of dive bars, a strangely seedy and disturbing place. A sort of place you really don't see any more. I'd say it was Lynchian, but more in the black lodge sense than the Double-R.

It's gone now. https://sf.eater.com/2024/7/31/24210535/silver-crest-diner-d...
by tsunamifury | 2026-02-16 16:04:13+00:00
To someone who worked on the earliest LLM tech and pre LLM tech at Google this art is very striking to me. It looks very much like like an abstract representation of how an LLM “thinks” and is an attempt to know itself better.

The inner waves undulate between formal and less formal as patterns and filters of pathways of thought and the branches spawn as pass through them to branch into latent space to discover viable tokens.

To me this looks like manifold search and activation.
by empressplay | 2026-02-16 16:05:02+00:00
I've lost over 100lbs in the past year.

* I only eat one meal a day (supper). It's usually a very large meal, very high in lean protein.

* I avoid sugars and starches of all kinds and minimize other carbs (fruit, root veg, grains).

* After eating, I do 30 minutes on the treadmill.

For a middle-aged woman (a category which finds it particularly hard to lose weight) this has worked rather well. I can eat as much meat, (non-root) veg, dairy and soy as I want and I just keep losing weight.

So no, calorie restriction isn't the 'only way'.