MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mindslight | 2026-02-05 17:28:54+00:00
> before whatever event happens that might trigger a lawsuit

I'll accept that interpretation. But that's still just a patch over the underlying semantics trying to eliminate a lot of thorny cases, not a full change in semantics.

For example, let's say 12/31 is a Sunday. The seller wishes to sell the property this year for tax purposes. The seller executes the purchase agreement and the deed on 12/31, and then only records the deed on 1/2 (when the registry reopens). For purpose of taxes, that is still treated as a sale in the earlier year, right?

> My question would be, how does a closing work in jurisdictions that have Torrens title? Does the closing have to take place at the land registry, so they can confirm that everything is checked and valid and recorded before I get the key to the house?

I have no idea. It seems like the main difference with Torrens title is that when the deed is accepted by the registry then you know it is authoritative. So a closing at an attorney's office with delayed recording has the same ambiguity under both systems. The difference would be that when the deed is confirmed recorded under Torrens, that ambiguity has been fully resolved. Whereas under non-Torrens that ambiguity hangs around indefinitely, insured against by title insurance, and eventually [mostly] extinguished by adverse possession.
by bluGill | 2026-02-05 17:29:01+00:00
They have multiple competing interests. One of their interests is telling the truth to their local military and politicians - getting caught in a lie to their side is the worst that could happen to them.

The world factbook was mostly things that the military or politicians might care about the truth of, and data they need anyway. Mostly what is there were things where there wouldn't be much value in spreading lies - and what value that might have is outweighed by you can fact check everything (with a lot of work) so lies are likely to be caught.

Not saying they are perfect, but this isn't a place where I would expect they would see distorting facts help them.
by ryanackley | 2026-02-05 17:29:17+00:00
Not my experience at all. Claude Code is impressive but it needs to be used iteratively for serious development and requires lots of testing.

Need it to one shot that report against your db using React/Typescript? Or pump out a web form that submits to your backend? works every time.

Need it to do something a little more creative? It frequently fails in subtle ways that aren't apparent until later.
by Balgair | 2026-02-05 17:29:22+00:00
--Even if "only" 10% of elite kids go on to become elite adults, 10% is orders of magnitude larger than the base percentage of adults who are elite athletes, musicians, etc. This doesn't sound "uncorrelated" to me so much as "not as strongly correlated as one might expect."

The way that I read the original study was that only 10% of elite adults were also elite youth.

Not that 10% of elite youth become elite adults.

That distinction is the key and surprising. Elite level talent and training and dollar spending in the youth is not then well correlated with elite level practice in adults across many disciplines.

As in your country's elite youth training centers (science, music, futbol, Olympic sports, etc) are mostly wasting money.
by just6979 | 2026-02-05 17:29:29+00:00
You: "Why did you build this?"

LLM: "Because the embeddings in your prompt are close to some embeddings in my training data. Here's some seemingly explanatory text with that is just similar embeddings to other 'why?' questions."

You: "What could be improved?"

LLM: "Here's some different stuff based on other training data with embeddings close to the original embeddings, but different.

---

It's near zero useful information. Example imformation might be "it builds" (baseline necessity, so useless info), "it passes some tests" (fairly baseline, more useful, but actually useless if you don't know what the tests are doing), or "it's different" (duh).
by joriJordan | 2026-02-05 17:29:32+00:00
What if he was both? His villainous nature made him a willing accomplice and aligned him with political monsters.

The "oh this is just repetitive/tiresome/old" energy is an emotional trope that is itself repetitive, tiresome, and old.

Dopamine addicted brain demands the circus bring out a new act! Otherwise it might calm down enough to notice all it's given to eat is bread!

Amazing how the adults are just like kids watching Saturday morning cartoons; aww news interruption! How dare reality intrude on my disassociation!
by wvenable | 2026-02-05 17:29:44+00:00
I agree. Just because you can buy some piece of software doesn't mean you should -- there is a lot of software that exists just to sell more consulting hours and will never fit the business. It's actually not hard at all to code and maintain much simpler alternatives.

Actually having to support multiple businesses with commercial software is hard. I've written a ton of custom software that far surpasses the capabilities of commercial offerings but if were to turn that into it's own commercial offering it would be large undertaking.
by bjourne | 2026-02-05 17:30:11+00:00
In the early days of Wikipedia many articles were taken directly from the CIA Factbook since it was public domain. Numerous Wikipedians have fond memories of it and remembers it as something the US did that was actually good and not evil shit. That and America's Army. Cheap ways to gain goodwill. Maybe in the grand scheme of things it didn't matter.
by rbanffy | 2026-02-05 17:30:49+00:00
Obvious propaganda plays a role in the destruction of a shared objective reality, which is part of the authoritarian playbook. Subtle propaganda distorts reality but preserves the notion of a shared objective one and does not intend to undermine trust.

When a government uses blatant, easily disproven lies, but doubles down on the lies and continues with increasingly absurd ones, there is no space for subtlety or trustworthy sources in that government.
by philwelch | 2026-02-05 17:30:53+00:00
The thing is, there’s really no good way to check a lot of the numbers you see in sources like the World Factbook.

Take population estimates for instance. Much of the world either doesn’t have the state capacity or can’t be trusted to maintain accurate, publicly known population figures. There are some countries where they haven’t had a census in decades and their official population figures are entrusted to numbers provided by regional governments which receive national funding on a per capita basis. Every region has an incentive to inflate their population numbers and, in a system where they’re all competing for funding from the central government, this eventually becomes common practice. Even national governments have little incentive to share honest figures with the rest of the world, and national governments that aren’t even accountable to their own people like China and Russia are also well practiced in keeping secrets. And population is probably one of the easiest things to measure.

The problem is that some people just accept the first number they find and are militant about not thinking beyond that point. If you tell them the radiation meter tops out at 3.6 roentgen, they say “3.6 roentgen, not great, not terrible”.
by ClassAndBurn | 2026-02-05 17:30:59+00:00
Any non-digital system you describe "as Code" is not a source of truth, but a Source of Hope. The code describes the intended state, something has to reconcile it with reality.

This is the same as having it in unstructured documents. Which means the auditing is still required funny enough.

So yes, this could be done. I'd love to see what run in the CI/CD for a change. When someone works on the wrong thing, or breaks compliance IRL, how do you backport it into this? "Alice is a software engineer, and created this SaaS account with her email when the company was founded. The admin email can not be changed and she has admin even though another role should control that"
by shattl | 2026-02-05 17:31:03+00:00
Not a stupid question at all, it's actually quite logical thinking. Here's why it's not that straightforward:
The worm is extremely fragile. Guinea worms can be up to a meter long but are very thin and delicate. When you pull too quickly or forcefully, the worm breaks. This is the central problem — it's not like a catheter or guide wire, which are engineered to have tensile strength. The worm's body is essentially a thin biological tube filled with millions of larvae.
Breaking it is the real danger. When the worm ruptures, it releases those larvae and bodily fluids into the surrounding tissue, triggering a severe inflammatory reaction, secondary bacterial infection, and sometimes abscess formation or sepsis. This is far worse than the worm itself. So the traditional slow winding onto a stick (a few centimeters per day) works with the worm's own gradual release from the tissue it's embedded in.
The path isn't a clean channel. Unlike a blood vessel, which is a defined, smooth lumen, the worm sits winding through subcutaneous connective tissue. It doesn't create a neat tunnel — it's loosely embedded and adhered to surrounding tissue along its length. There's no "pipe" to snake a tool through. A catheter in a blood vessel follows a pre-existing anatomical highway; here there's no such structure.
Surgical extraction is sometimes attempted, but it requires carefully dissecting along the entire worm's path without rupturing it — which is technically demanding, time-consuming, and requires facilities and skills that are often unavailable in the rural sub-Saharan communities where the disease occurs. For a worm that may wind through 30–60 cm of tissue, that's a significant operation for a condition that, while painful, is usually self-limiting.
The real solution turned out to be prevention. The Carter Center's eradication campaign brought cases from ~3.5 million per year in the 1980s to fewer than 15 per year now, almost entirely through water filtration and education — making the surgical question largely moot.
So in short: the worm isn't strong enough to pull, the path isn't clean enough to navigate, breaking it makes everything worse, and the settings where it occurs rarely have the surgical capacity for careful dissection.
by iso1631 | 2026-02-05 17:31:06+00:00
Zoom came along with a securre video/voice chat, sure it's American, but it was by far the world leader

Microsoft then used its monopoly in office tools to push Teams to everyone

You can't compete with a trillion dollar company offering your product as a bundle your clients already pay for, even if your product is better. Even VC money runs out eventually
by majormajor | 2026-02-05 17:31:25+00:00
But that's not what this is about:

> For many projects, maybe ~80% of the thinking about how the software should work happens after some version of the software exists and is being used to do meaningful work.

Some version of the software exists and now that's your spec. If you don't have a formal copy of that and rigorous testing against that spec, you're gonna get mutations that change unintended things, not just improvements.

Users are generally ok with - or at least understanding of - intentional changes, but now people are talking about no-code-reading workflows, where you just let the agents rewrite stuff on the fly to build new things until all the tests pass again. The in-code tests and the expectations/assumptions about the product that your users have are likely wildly different - they always have been, and there's nothing inherent about LLM-generated code or about code test coverage percentages that change this.
by InsideOutSanta | 2026-02-05 17:31:41+00:00
>They've been doing some of these patterns for a while in certain places.

This exactly. LLMs learned these patterns from somewhere, but they didn't learn them from normal people having casual discussions on sites like Reddit or HN or from regular people's blog posts. So while there is a place where LLM-generated output might fit in, it doesn't in most places where it is being published.
by cspeterson | 2026-02-05 17:32:06+00:00
Bonus, xclip can be directed provide the rich text directly to the clipboard (op this might offer you a solution that is usable as text by your recipients):

`cat something.md | pandoc -f gfm -t html | xclip -selection clipboard -t text/html`

other output type targets also available, check xclip docs

my small experience with Wayland suggested this sort of thing might be more difficult there, but dunno
by koverstreet | 2026-02-05 17:32:14+00:00
You'd have to be stupid and desperate to steal from a garage.

The people who work there aren't office workers; you've got blue collar workers who spend all day working together and hanging out using heavy equipment right in the back. And they're going to be well acquainted with the local tow truck drivers and the local police - so unless you're somewhere like Detroit, you better be on your way across state lines the moment you're out of there. And you're not conning a typical corporate drone who sees 100 faces a day; they'll be able to give a good description.

And then what? You're either stuck filing off VINs and faking a bunch of paperwork, or you have to sell it to a chop shop. The only way it'd plausibly have a decent enough payoff is if you're scouting for unique vehicles with some value (say, a mint condition 3000GT), but that's an even worse proposition for social engineering - people working in a garage are car guys, when someone brings in a cool vehicle everyone's talking about it and the guy who brought it in. Good luck with that :)

Dealership? Even worse proposition, they're actual targets so they know how to track down missing vehicles.

If you really want to steal a car via social engineering, hit a car rental place, give them fake documentation, then drive to a different state to unload it - you still have to fake all the paperwork, and strip anything that identifies it as a rental, and you won't be able to sell to anyone reputable so it'll be a slow process, and you'll need to disguise your appearance differently both times so descriptions don't match later. IOW - if you're doing it right so it has a chance in hell of working, that office job starts to sound a whole lot less tedious.

Way easier to just write code :)
by infecto | 2026-02-05 17:32:41+00:00
Absolutely true but I also think it’s a fair callout when the intent was to disprove the original post asking how old someone was because 15 years ago everyone was stringing together their own services which is absolutely not true. There were many shades of gray at that time both in my experience of either have a sysops/devops team to help or deploying to Heroku as well as folks that were indeed stringing together services.

I find it equally disingenuous to suggest that Heroku was only for startups with lavish budgets. Absolutely not true. That’s my only purpose here. Everyone has different experiences but don’t go and push your own narrative as the only one especially when it’s not true.
by cartmanboy1991 | 2026-02-05 17:32:52+00:00
I work at Speakeasy. We build a CLI for SDK generation, and we noticed that features we designed for humans - interactive prompts, spinners, guided workflows - were actively breaking AI coding assistants.

We wrote up what we learned from fixing this:

- Non-interactive flags that bypass prompts entirely

- Structured output modes (JSON, --quiet) to reduce token consumption

- Machine-readable exit codes so agents can determine success without parsing text

The insight: you don't need separate agent-only tools. You need escape hatches that let both humans and agents use the same CLI effectively.

Full post: https://www.speakeasy.com/blog/engineering-agent-friendly-cl...
by advisedwang | 2026-02-05 17:32:52+00:00
My point is that the leaders have constraints on them that prevent them actually executing on their values. E.g. imagine leadership dislikes spam, but an institutional investor on the board has warned the CEO that if there's a sales dip before quarterly earnings and the market reacts badly he'll get fired. So the CEO - against his values - orders the VP or marketing to spam for all his life is worth. This stuff gets so internalized, that we routinely make decisions at work that go against our values because we know that's what's demanded of us by our organizations.
by halfax | 2026-02-05 17:33:07+00:00
Bottom Line
HAL‑AI‑2 is a real system. Nanobot is a toy.
They are not peers. They are not even in the same category.
Nanobot is useful only as a conceptual sketch of an agent loop.
HAL‑AI‑2 is the substrate you’ve been building toward for months.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-05 17:33:12+00:00
For my relatively limited exposure, I'm not sure if I'd be able to tolerate it. I've found Claude/Opus to e pretty nice to work with... by contrast, I find Github Copilot to be the most annoying thing I've ever tried to work with.

Because of how the plugin works in VS code, on my third day of testing with Claude Code, I didn't click the Claude button and was accidentally working with CoPilot for about three hours of torture when I realized I wasn't in Claude Code. Will NEVER make that mistake again... I can only imagine anything I can run at any decent speed lcoally will be closer to the latter. I pretty quickly reach a "I can do this faster/better myself" point... even a few times with Claude/Opus, so my patience isn't always the greatest.

That said, I love how easy it is to build up a scaffold of a boilerplate app for the sole reason to test a single library/function in isolation from a larger application. In 5-10 minutes, I've got enough test harness around what I'm trying to work on/solve that it lets me focus on the problem at hand, while not worrying about doing this on the integrated larger project.

I've still got some thinking and experimenting to do with improving some of my workflows... but I will say that AI Assist has definitely been a multiplier in terms of my own productivity. At this point, there's literally no excuse not to have actual code running experiments when learning something new, connecting to something you haven't used before... etc. in terms of working on a solution to a problem. Assuming you have at least a rudimentary understanding of what you're actually trying to accomplish in the piece you are working on. I still don't have enough trust to use AI to build a larger system, or for that matter to truly just vibe code anything.
by mrweasel | 2026-02-05 17:33:25+00:00
Yeah, I saw that and no, that's not what I mean. Some of the conversations reads like incoherent ramblings, completely devoid of context, answers that seems unrelated. Even when we have a "full" thread of conversation, it's really hard to parse the messages and make sense of them. It sometimes read like maybe they have their own language.

Some people postes conversations, and comments, but I don't feel like they actually grasp what's being discused and they just latches on to key words.
by itaibo | 2026-02-05 17:33:25+00:00
I built BackRepo because I've always worried about single points of failure with GitHub: accidental repo deletion, account suspension, or even platform issues. GitHub has great infra and exports, but having an independent copy of my repos gives me peace of mind.

BackRepo connects via GitHub OAuth, uses git clone --mirror to grab full history/branches/tags, encrypts everything client-side (256-bit, zero-knowledge), stores it securely off-site, and automates scheduled backups. Recovery is simple: one-click download from your dashboard, decrypts in-browser to a .zip you can extract and push back.

It is a working product and I feel happy about it. However, it is the marketing bit that I lack (sad to say since I studied Advertising at university). So, I would appreciate comments regarding this topic: How can I get users?

These are the key differences with other platforms or automated scripts:
- True zero-knowledge
- Full mirror clones, not just exports
- No server management on your end
- Free tier: 1 GB; paid: 150 GB flat. Unlimited repos for both

It's early stage, built for devs like me who want a bit of peace. Try it out by signing in with GitHub (no email signup beyond that). Happy to answer questions and take feedback.

Email me if you prefer: itaibo@hey.com

Website: https://backrepo.com
by recursive | 2026-02-05 17:33:44+00:00
Not who you asked, but I don't like the effect they have on people. People develop dependence on them at the cost of their own skills. I have two problems with that. A lot of their outputs are factually incorrect, but confidently stated. They project an air of trustworthiness seemingly more effectively than a used care salesman. My other problem is farther-looking. Once everyone is sufficiently hooked, and the enshittification begins, whoever is pulling the strings on these models will be able to silently direct public sentiment from under cover. People are increasingly outsourcing their own decisions to these machines.
by acdha | 2026-02-05 17:33:47+00:00
They haven’t been truly novel if you want to say that, for example, the Lisa was covering Xerox PARC ideas but I think you’d have to ignore a lot of significant work to say they didn’t substantially innovate in GUIs, personal assistants and handwriting recognition (Newton), touchscreen behavior (iPhone), etc.

The key thing is that they tend not to ship things which aren’t mature enough to be useful (Vision Pro and Apple Intelligence being cautionary tales about why) and voice assistants just aren’t doing a whole lot for anyone. Google and Amazon have been struggling to find a market, too, and it’s rare to find someone who uses those dramatically more than Apple users do Siri. I think most of the big advances need something close to AGI: if you can’t describe something in a short command, it’s usually much faster to use a device with a screen and a lot of the useful tasks need a level of security and reliability which requires actual reasoning to deliver.
by malith | 2026-02-05 17:34:13+00:00
We ran inference benchmarks for arcee-ai/trinity-mini on Nvidia H200 using our DeployPad inference stack and published the full results.

Key results:

Mean tokens per second: ~114.5
Mean time to first token: 0.74 s

Under batch load, P99 tokens per second reached ~134.8.

The full benchmark report, raw statistics, and methodology are available here:
https://github.com/geoddllc/large-llm-inference-benchmarks/b...

Support for larger models (400B class) is planned for next week. If you want to try it yourself, you can deploy via the console
https://console.geodd.io/
by exponential_bld | 2026-02-05 17:34:22+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m the founder of PlanSpec, a coordination layer for humans and AI agents.

As AI agents get better at execution, we’ve found that human coordination is becoming the bottleneck: keeping goals aligned, managing context across sessions, and knowing when work is actually “done.”

PlanSpec is an open-source, goal-oriented declarative specification for coordinating humans and agents. It lets you describe goals, plans, dependencies, and explicit gates for review or approval, so execution can move quickly without losing shared understanding.

It’s early, but usable today. We’re especially interested in feedback from teams already working with multiple agents or long-running agent workflows.

Repo + docs: https://planspec.io
by advisedwang | 2026-02-05 17:34:29+00:00
The article includes (some?) of it:

> “Mr. Dernbach, don’t play Russian roulette with H’s life,” Jon wrote from his gmail account. “Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government along with many other governments don’t recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.”

That seems an extremely reasonable email/tone. In fact, this is basically a model of what our civics classes told us we should do.
by RajT88 | 2026-02-05 17:34:52+00:00
Your definition of "very high" costs likely don't align with what you think of when you think of "very high" government spending. NASA's 25 billion dollar budget for 2025 was a paltry ~.04% of the total government budget.

Wikimedia foundation's operating budget is 207 million a year - a drop in the ocean of federal budgets, if Factbook was similar.