MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shevy-java | 2026-02-22 18:30:51+00:00
So the best one found about 50%. I think that is not bad,
probably better than most humans. But what about the remaining
50%? Why were some found and others not?

> Claude Opus 4.6 found it… and persuaded itself there is nothing to worry about
> Even the best model in our benchmark got fooled by this task.

That is quite strange. Because it seems almost as if a human is
required to make the AI tools understand this.
by ordu | 2026-02-22 18:31:00+00:00
They somehow broke Font Contrast FF addon. If you go to the main site and back it shows the article, but you can't read it without straining your eyes because it is light gray on white. Font Contrast helps, but not in this case. Depending on how I approach to use it, the site either refuses to show the article, or fixes contrast for the heading but not for the bulk of the text.

Some1 worked really hard to break everything.
by zamadatix | 2026-02-22 18:31:12+00:00
I think we see that opening from very different perspectives. You see it as "this kind of statement must only mean they wish to attack these things with it, as that's the only conclusion I would make from the statement" whereas I see it as "this statement grabs the reader's attention to make them read through on why the author likely sees it differently than the reader would assume one normally expect from that". It is relatively short. I don't see that as a crime though, particularly for the latter style posting you don't want to lose most of the audience before the end.

I.e. yes, coding agents can't make everyone happy and do 100% of everything - but by the end the opposite of the expected point from that is reasoned. It may not be exhaustive, but that does not automatically mean the sole point is reductionist. It only takes one counterexample of reasoning to show a point invalid, so if you don't assume the goal is to make Electron and Claude actually sound bad then these points are not really problematic.

As someone who sees themselves more towards the center of the AI debate I found the article surprisingly refreshing in not trying to argue absolutes about extremes. Others who sit more towards the extremes probably see it as an attack piece (regardless of which extreme) just because it doesn't go as far as they'd like in each regard.
by stared | 2026-02-22 18:31:48+00:00
One of the authors here.

Tasks here are entry level. So we are impressed that some AI models are able to detect some patterns, while looking just at binary code. We didn't take it for granted.

For example, only a few models understand Ghidra and Radare2 tooling (Opus 4.5 and 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro, GLM 5)
https://quesma.com/benchmarks/binaryaudit/#models-tooling

We consider it a starting point of AI agents being able to work with binaries. Other people discovered the same - vide https://x.com/ccccjjjjeeee/status/2021160492039811300 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46846101.

There is a long way ahead from "OMG, AI can do that!" to a end-to-end solution.
by hiimkeks | 2026-02-22 18:31:58+00:00
I love this! The docs are really good and I am looking forward to playing with this.

I think I disagree a little bit about the value of type and lifetime annotations, I think if I used this, I would put a lot of [sig ..] into my code.

I think having a similar syntax for lifetimes would be valuable so I as a developer can make sure that some value is not 'static (or has the lifetime of some other object that lives as long as my program). Basically I want to ensure that my values are actually dropped at some point.

One thing the docs could be more explicit about is where this runs. I saw that it has a Wasm backend, but can I also compile this to native code? Do the effects require some runtime (and I don't mean something like the JRE, more like what Go has)? Maybe I missed this, though.

Anyway, I hope I get to play with this soon!
by bigyabai | 2026-02-22 18:32:11+00:00
This is the same justification that was used to ship the (now almost entirely defunct) NPUs on Apple and Android devices alike.

The A18 iPhone chip has 15b transistors for the GPU and CPU; the Taalas ASIC has 53b transistors dedicated to inference alone. If it's anything like NPUs, almost all vendors will bypass the baked-in silicon to use GPU acceleration past a certain point. It makes much more sense to ship a CUDA-style flexible GPGPU architecture.
by Galaxeblaffer | 2026-02-22 18:32:23+00:00
I'm sure there was tons of external meddling in most of eastern Europe before the many regime changes. It's very hard to draw any comparison between 80s eastern Europe and today's Iran. I don't think you really fathom how ingrained the regime really is. First of all Iran is huge and very rich in resources which makes the regime very rich and iran is technically self sufficient with food and energy. second, the regime has evolved and learned from the mistakes if other regimes making sure to have large foreign armies that don't give a shit about the Iranian people as long as the money keeps flowing, i could go on.

Also you seem to not grasp that the current regime are viewed as invaders forcing Islamic rule which I'm pretty sure is very very different from the scenarios your mentioning. And even in your scenario, if Trump really succeeds in destroying American democracy and takes everyone's guns away and closes the internet to the world and starts killing every and all opposition and terrorizes America for 40 years I'm pretty sure you'd like who ever the duck is capable of removing that to intervene. And it's not like I'm making it up, i happen to have many Iranians in my family, and many of them living in Iran still and i can assure you that the vast majority in the big cities want the US to kill off the regime. I'm sure there's some kind of rural population that loves sharia like the us has maga, but i don't think they are the majority any more.
by ahf8Aithaex7Nai | 2026-02-22 18:32:28+00:00
Yes, these people are publicly warning about the risks of AI. Altman is promoting regulation that clearly favors OpenAI. This is called regulatory capture. It aims to strengthen one's own position. Furthermore, the claim that these companies cannot shape economies is simply false. They decide how quickly they deploy, which industries they automate, whether they cooperate with unions, etc. These are all decisions that shape the economy.

Widespread job losses as a path to post-work are about as plausible as a car accident as a path to bringing a vehicle to a standstill. You would have to be from another planet (or a sociopath) not to understand that this violates boundary conditions that we implicitly want to leave intact.
by shermantanktop | 2026-02-22 18:32:36+00:00
I get it, I hear that too, but it’s wrong.

Vegetarian = no meat, no chicken, no fish, no crustaceans, no dead animals, no meat/fish broth, no lard. Nothing derived from a dead animal. Or as my little sister used to ask: “did this have a face?”

But that’s what “vegetarian” means to me. I guess that’s a “strict vegetarian”?
Show HN: AppFeedBackScratch – Reciprocal Feedback for Indie Developers
by splurk | 2026-02-22 18:33:25+00:00
Apps are multiplying, and I see tons of threads of devs sharing their app and asking for feedback and getting no engagement. As an app dev, I need feedback, and one thing I can give in exchange is feedback for others.

So the idea here is simple: build in an incentive for builders to take a serious look at other builders' apps. On this site, if you give helpful reviews to other devs (determined by AI and upvotes), then your app rises higher on the list and gets seen by more other builders.

Since this is new and empty, I'm planning to personally give feedback to the first 10 apps posted.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-22 18:33:49+00:00
Fischer-Tropsch is based on the reaction of carbon monoxide with dihydrogen (free hydrogen). This mixture is known as syngas.

While now the cheapest way is to make syngas from methane or from coal, it is possible to make syngas from carbon dioxide that reacts with electrolytic hydrogen.

It is also possible to make equivalent precursors of synthetic hydrocarbons by the electrolysis of carbon dioxide in water.

For these 2 methods, you do not need any fossil fuels, but only electrical energy for electrolysis.

Where the energetic efficiency is still very low is when you want to use clean air as the source of CO2, instead of using a concentrated source of CO2. With very cheap energy, i.e. solar energy that is used at the point of capture, it should still be possible to devise a method of capture for CO2 from the air. Many such methods are known, their only problem being a high energy consumption per the amount of captured CO2, so they are impractical with energy that must be bought from the grid, but I do not see why they could not work when coupled directly with solar panels.
by adamgold7 | 2026-02-22 18:34:20+00:00
The pattern only works if the tool enforces the OTP - i.e. the CLI doesn't perform the dangerous action until it receives the OTP through a path the agent can't spoof. If the tool just returns "ask the user for OTP" and the agent relays that to the user and then passes whatever the user types back into the tool, the security is in the tool's implementation: it must verify the OTP (e.g. server-side or via a channel that bypasses the agent, as stavros described) and only then execute. The all-caps message is then UX for the human and a hint to the agent, not the actual gate. So the question "does it actually require an OTP?" is the right one: if the tool code doesn't block on a real OTP check, it's hope, not a security model.
The other approach is to not give the agent access to the thing that needs protecting. Run the agent in an isolated environment - sandbox, VM, separate machine - so it never has the ability to email-blast or nuke your files in the first place. Then you're not depending on the agent to obey the prompt or on the human to be present for every dangerous call. Human-in-the-loop (or OTP-in-the-loop) is a reasonable layer when the agent has broad access; isolation is the layer that makes the blast radius zero. We're building https://islo.dev for that: agents run in isolation, host is out of scope, so you can let them run without approval prompts and still sleep at night.
by selridge | 2026-02-22 18:34:33+00:00
Was it a good thing for anyone writing software which included those things to need to not only work out how they are on a blackboard but how they are on the real machine in question? And how they are on the next machine over?

Do you yearn to return to that world? I suspect most people don't. It's not just knowing your own machine, but any machine the code could run on. It's also not just reaching for some 2nd year bachelor topics when the matter at hand is much more complicated. Where does your sine approximation fail? How do you know? Can you prove that? Does the compiler or the hardware decide to do things behind your back which vitiate any of those claims?

Knowing the answer to that all every time you need a sine is not something 99.99% of engineers need to worry about. IT USED TO BE. But now it's not. No one is going back to that.
by adamzochowski | 2026-02-22 18:34:37+00:00
Not a referral issue. Doing ctrl-click or middle-click or open-in-a-new-tab all are broken too.

Most likely it is just a typical broken spa.

Most web apps, are shut for the websites. They ignore and badly processes the url because things like linking to content, ctrl-click, bookmarks, sharing with friends are afterthought and not on forefront of developers mind.
by don_esteban | 2026-02-22 18:34:39+00:00
Empathy means understanding that nationalism is a powerful force and even people who are against their government would support their government against external aggressor.

Empathy means that you understand that what YOU consider terrorism might mean 'supporting self-determination of oppressed and occupied people' by somebody else. Is it so difficult to understand that ordinary Iranians do not see their government as international supporters of terrorism?

I was 19 in 1989. While I do not claim to understand geopolitical realities in their entirety, I was old enough to distinctly remember how surprising the fall of communism felt. Despite almost all people I knew being (low-level, passive) anti-communists, nobody saw it really coming until the last few months. In fact, in June 1989, I had a choice to make - either to go to a competition to West Germany, or go with friends hiking to Caucasus. The choice was obvious - go to West Germany, who knows when will be the next chance to see The West. On the other hand, I could go to Caucasus anytime.... we know how that turned out to be.
by selva86 | 2026-02-22 18:34:58+00:00
This will be a helpful resource for those who prefer to learn via books and blog, but also want to practice what they learn in the same page. So, this is like a blog but is also a fully functional Python notebook which you can use to workout python code and also solve exercises. It's meant to be comprehensive starting from the very basic to advanced Python concepts that's not often discussed in classrooms, in one sequential flow of lessons. I hope you enjoy it!
by verdverm | 2026-02-22 18:35:47+00:00
There are some people in other networks who feel very strongly their answer is the right answer to the great question of decentralization [insert south park atheist otters]. I think they are in part frustrated that ATProto (not the "right" answer) has attracted the users and developer. The meanness and lack of curiosity certainly provide the undertones to justify this interpretation.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-22 18:36:50+00:00
> because China would not have become the technical behemoth it is now if those protests had succeeded

Taiwan's GDP/capita is 2.6x China's [1]. It grew faster, for longer, in large part through high technology.

Counterfactuals are always hard in history. But we literally have the nationalist government's democratic, capitalist successor kicking in way above its weight class economically and technologically. It's fair to say that if the '89 protest hadn't been massacred, the 21st century would currently be undoubtedly China's to rule. (I'd also put even odds on Taiwan having peacefully reunified by now.)

[1] https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/taiwan/china?sc...
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-02-22 18:37:27+00:00
Ya, but anyone who is using an LLM to write just code and isn’t also using them to write tests is nuts: they are just going to get garbage out. An LLM can totally write correct code, just not without some kind of feedback loop going on, even if that feedback loop is some form of oracle testing (where the LLM is also writing the tests, and the tests can be wrong themselves). They are also great enumerating edge cases, which feeds nicely into test coverage. 80% of your prompting work is in getting the LLM to write tests and get good coverage, maybe 20% is getting it to write code.

Junior developers (human) can kind of get by without testing, at least in the short term. The LLM can never get by without testing unless it’s some simple one off logic.
by scrumper | 2026-02-22 18:38:00+00:00
> Also, the thing about high frequencies and sharp edges lead to a contradiction: babies are more round than adults and produce higher pitched sounds, this is almost universal across all species.

It's more in terms of harmonic content than the pitch fundamental. There are more harmonics from a thing with sharp transitions than there are in a thing with rounded transitions regardless of the fundamental pitch. Compare harmonic content of a pure sine wave (it's just the fundamental) with that of a square wave, which has an infinite series of higher harmonics.

Babies are also smaller, which means higher fundamental pitch.

> "kiki" is not just higher pitched, it is also "shaped" differently if you look at the sound envelope, with, as expected, sharper transitions.

Exactly!

EDIT I think this is interesting: it also applies to images as well, not just sound. You can "low pass filter" a photograph and it'll reduce some of the detail, smoothing out transitions (typically used for noise reduction). Detail is high frequency information (or high frequency noise depending on whether you want it or not.)
by magicalhippo | 2026-02-22 18:38:17+00:00
> if it might not be worth isolating the parts of the protocol/flow that actually requires a service (i.e. protocol-aware server in the loop) from those that don't, so that you could still get limited authentication/identity-tagging if your "provider" is your personal domain where you're just hosting static site.

I'm having a dense moment, so I can't quite grasp what the person asking wants to achieve, or what flow they envision. Can you help by spelling it out?
by leptons | 2026-02-22 18:38:20+00:00
The ADCs on the ESP32 are similar to other embedded MCUs in that they are not intended for audiophile-level audio capture, as some people seem to think they should be capable of.

The main value proposition for these ADCs is to hook them up to a simple potentiometer to allow physical input controls, and even for that purpose you need to average multiple samples to get a somewhat steady value. Of course the ADCs can be used for various other tasks, but "ADC" does not mean they can do anything any ADC can do, there's a wide variety of quality and purpose in the field of ADCs, and the ESP32's ADCs are a cheap and easy way to add a simple ADC function to the chip.

I have been able to use the ADCs quite easily for input controls, it works perfectly fine for that.
by TimAssay | 2026-02-22 18:39:09+00:00
I share that concern. Treating probabilistic systems as if they were deterministic execution units is a big shift from traditional computing.

What motivated this project wasn’t the idea that uncertainty is good..it’s that these systems are already being deployed, and today the only record of what happened is usually internal logs controlled by the operator.

The goal here isn’t to make AI “safe” or correct. It’s to make the behavior observable in a way a third party can verify after the fact, even if they don’t trust the system owner.

Your goto analogy is interesting, structured programming didn’t eliminate bugs, but it made programs understandable and debuggable. This is trying to add a similar layer of structure around AI calls: not confidence scores, just tamper-evident records of inputs, outputs, and context.

If the paradigm turns out to be harmful, having reliable evidence of what actually happened seems better than reconstructing it from mutable logs.
by kibwen | 2026-02-22 18:39:14+00:00
The problem is that "division" in the context of computation refers to multiple different operations, so that we all end up talking past each other. Some people want a `division_where_zero_is_an_illegal_denominator`, some people want `division_but_return_zero_if_denominator_is_zero`, and I'm sure other people want weirder things. Honestly, I'm coming around to the idea that for any precise and reliable system, the fact that we only have a single "operator" (+ - * / etc) that we arbitrarily assign to one of the many possible operations that we want to do does more harm than good. Consider how many different ways there are just to add a number (panic on overflow, error value on overflow, saturate on overflow, wrap on overflow, return tuple with optional carry flag on overflow...).
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-02-22 18:40:11+00:00
The failure of Mastodon to thrive even when Twitter itself became very vulnerable unfortunately tells me that people actually want this pathologically bad behaviour. Lots of friends who slagged Twitter and Facebook etc for its anti-social aspects turned around and tried Mastodon for a few days and then came back to me with a "there's nothing happening there" and it's "boring" etc because they were fundamentally expecting to be force fed entertainment just like Twitter. Lots of comments on hackernews to that effect, too.

That's fine. I never liked Twitter anyways, but I do think it's interesting how two faced we can be about this.

The engagement hackers found a market and met it. Not good, but true.
by verdverm | 2026-02-22 18:40:47+00:00
It's a strawman argument, of course there are many groups that have nothing to do with politics and echo chamber is wholly inappropriate. Think about your hobby or friend groups, certainly seems fine to have those be little islands in the internet sea.

You are also correct there is nothing new here, groups have been able to create very small echo chambers if they want, many options today.

Nor do they have to be "echo chambers", there are places in the middle which largely remain unexplored. This is where I've charted my course in ATProto
by roysting | 2026-02-22 18:40:56+00:00
I have no dog in a fight, in which you seem to really care about Iran, which is totally irrelevant, meaningless, and inconsequential to the USA or its national interests or national security; but the war machine relies on fools to fun smoothly. You do realize though that you are morally and ethically and spiritually culpable and responsible for the murder of the people that will die due to the support you provide to that end, you do realize that, right?

Maybe tell your children tonight when you get home that "I support that children like you be blown up and their families and communities be destroyed".

They may ask you "why would you support something like that, dad?" and you will only be able to say "because the colonial puppet Shah regime used to have good relations with the country founded by terrorists (the Haganah, the Irgun (ETZEL), the Stern and the LEHI) we call Israel today, you know, the ones that supported Epstein that liked raping children like you, which has manipulated me into caring more about killing other people children because I cannot think for myself or realize what awful things they have me supporting!" ... "Good night children. May there not ever be someone as awful as me in the world that decides to bomb you or your children in the future for others who have manipulated them to be awful."
by anonymousiam | 2026-02-22 18:41:02+00:00
Even if the polygraph examiner is not abusive, the whole process is stressful, especially to "Type A" people. It's designed to be stressful. You are under constant surveillance, and they make sure that you know this. They make you wait for a long time before beginning. They keep the rooms cold, so you aren't comfortable. They don't let you wear a jacket, because "it could interfere with the equipment." The chair is uncomfortable, and the sensors (especially the blood pressure cuff) are deliberately too tight. My arm would often turn purple.

You are obligated to keep coming back until they say you're finished. More often than not, they will not tell you that you "passed" the exam.

I always had issues with their "baseline" question where they tell you to give an incorrect answer. They've told you to lie, and they know that you're lying. I have no stress at all in that situation because everybody has agreed and knows that I'm expected to lie. For some dumb reason, they are looking for some sort of physiological response from me that indicates deception. Maybe some people will react subconsciously, but I don't.
by Neywiny | 2026-02-22 18:41:20+00:00
I'll answer your question with a question: how often do you see people complaining about needing setup processes vs the old way of just plug and play? There's no perfect answer that placates all sides. Things can certainly be better, but when those people win and you no longer need to have a setup process, then what?

While true that in $current_year it would be nice if things were more secure, the sad truth is that most people don't care.