MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rerdavies | 2026-02-24 12:17:51+00:00
Ledbetter actually implicitly reveals why the pilot episode was so off, interestingly.

First off, he wasn't working in the industry at the time the pilot episode takes place. He first got involved in the industry a couple of years later, working for Sun Microsystems. (So not quite the ideal candidate for a technical consultant). And second off, he came to the table after the pilot episode had been written, but before the first regular season script was written. There's only so much a technical consultant can do when he's presented with a script whose central plot point is "it's hard to reverse engineer IBM PCs". He does claim responsibility for the procedure they used to reverse engineer the BIOS, oddly. But I am inclined to be generous, and give him credit for providing the most absurdly difficult technically-plausible procedure for reverse-engineering the BIOS, and grant that the right thing to do (throw the entire script away and start again because it WASN'T difficult to reverse-engineer the BIOS) was not a pragmatic realistic recommendation for a rookie technical consultant to deliver.

To put things in perspective. There was no need to reverse engineer the BIOS at all, because the IBM Technical Manual provided exquisitely commented assembler source code for the BIOS (copyright protected), including API documentation (the essence of which is not copyright protected). And a complete set of schematics. And IBM was -- for complicated reasons -- actively encouraging third parties to build clones. So correcting the technical inaccuracies in a pilot script whose entire plot revolves around "how audaciously difficult it is to reverse an IBM PC" is a bit interesting.

Once corrected, the plot of the pilot episode would have revolved around clean-room procedures for translating API documentation into copyright-safe BIOSes. Probably not that interesting to the unwashed masses. And abstract speculation as to whether IBM would sue their pants off for IP violations, even though IBM was very publicly and loudly saying that they would not. And whether you could convince CFOs and investors that they could take IBM at their word.

The actual strategy IBM was using was pretty clever, and quite horrifyingly machiavellian (although fair and reasonable enough that nobody ever really complained about it). I'm not actually sure if I'm allowed to tell the story of what happened when IBM patent attorneys showed up at our door wanting to have a discussion about a 10" thick stack of patents. Suffice it to say that I think they were playing a long game.
by cwillu | 2026-02-24 12:19:19+00:00
You've retreated that we're no longer in the realm of “consciousness is supernatural”, and I rest my case. Retreating to an infinite hypothesis space that I can never fully exclude only helps you if there is no mundane explanation, otherwise I reject it for the same reason I can reject the boltzman-brain hypothesis. “But there's still a chance!” is a line from a comedy, not statistics.
by nineteen999 | 2026-02-24 12:19:48+00:00
The bigger use for case for AAA games? Employment for highly talented artists, 3D modellers and sculptors, texture artists, sound and music artists, and even programmers.

At least it gives _something_ back. Until of course we've obsoleted all of them as well.

Most of the AAA games I've paid for sit there in my Steam library and never get played. At least _some_ of the money probably went to those talented people whose work was used for training GenAI and coding models (and yes I say this as someone who has used all of these tools to prototype my own games, and still think human created content is of a much higher quality, just more expensive to produce).
by Sirupsen | 2026-02-24 12:20:20+00:00
(cofounder of tpuf here)

We don't have a relational database, otherwise that would work great for a queue! You can imagine us continuing to iterate here to Step 5, Step 6, ... Step N over time. The tradeoff of each step is complexity, and complexity has to be deserved. This is working exceptionally well currently.
Ask HN: Are AI "Chatbot Wrappers" ruining EdTech? I'm testing a proactive UX
by Swadesh9422 | 2026-02-24 12:20:22+00:00
Hey everyone,

I’ve been doing customer discovery with CS students learning Data Structures and Algorithms. Right now, every AI tutor in the market is just a reactive chatbox (like ChatGPT next to a code editor).

The problem is, when a student is completely stuck on a logic problem (like Dynamic Programming), they don't even know what to prompt the AI. They just stare at the screen.

I am validating a new UX: A Proactive AI Mentor without a chatbox.

Instead of the user prompting the AI, the AI sits in the background and watches the code editor. It only intervenes via GitHub-style inline comments when a specific event triggers (e.g., they haven't typed in 60 seconds, or they write an O(n^2) loop when it should be O(n)).

Basically, it feels like a Senior Dev looking over your shoulder, rather than a search engine waiting to be asked.

As developers and founders, do you think this "event-driven/proactive" UX is the future for highly technical learning, or am I overcomplicating it? Would love to hear your thoughts.
by eesmith | 2026-02-24 12:20:44+00:00
My points though are

1) the development isn't actually using red/green TDD, and

2) the result doesn't show "really good results", including not following a very well-defined specification

so doesn't work as a concrete example of your description of what the second chapter is supposed to be about.

Perhaps you could show the process of refining it more, so it actually is spec compliant and tests all the implemented features?

What's the outcome difference between this approach vs. something which isn't TDD, likes test-after with full branch coverage or mutation testing? Those at least are more automatable than manual inspection, so a better fit to agentic coding, yes?

(Of course regular branch coverage doesn't test all the regexp branches, which makes regexp use tricky to test.)
by adebayoj | 2026-02-24 12:21:08+00:00
You got it exactly right :) And you can update the attribution.md to have it NOT rely on opensource projects that have been compromised. Imagine asking claude code to write a package/function in the style of a codebase that you care about or force it to ALWAYS rely on some internal packages that you care about. The possibilities are endless when you insert such knobs into models.
by Zekio | 2026-02-24 12:21:08+00:00
I will never understand why people don't just give OpenClaw instances their own set of credentials, that are limited, like you would a newbie employee.

Or even more limiting, use proxies, for instance when setting up the LLM connection instead of giving it the OpenRouter, OpenAI api keys directly, give it access via proxy that is running on a machine next to it.
by noduerme | 2026-02-24 12:21:41+00:00
You're not wrong. But it's case, not tense.
<3

Sorry, I'm not trying to be an asshole. I mean, I am one. But I'm not trying to be.

Yes, those people did get some control. Yes - they are like the bad versions of us.

We can be smarter. We'll win. Their dumb little utopias will collapse. Watch.

Tense means past/present/future. Case is for single/multiple pronouns.

I dropped out of school but I had a very mean grammar teacher ;)
by benterix | 2026-02-24 12:22:51+00:00
That's true but it's just like with ICOs, the so-called Web3.0 and so on - there is a percentage of people aggressively promoting these, with a part of the community getting fascinated like with everything new, then with time novelty fades and people have a more balanced view of the new tech and these things get downvoted quickly.
by thenoblesunfish | 2026-02-24 12:22:55+00:00
I was hoping for more on "... The only way to prove that you checked is to keep the data indefinitely." What do the laws say on this? What data is this? I would have assumed that just like a bouncer can check my ID and hand it back to me, a digital system can verify my identity and not hold onto everything (e.g. the actual photo of my ID).
by homebrewer | 2026-02-24 12:23:42+00:00
I'd also like to draw attention to the parent project Firebird. For some reason (probably its ties to Borland/Delphi?) it never became widely popular, even though it combines SQLite's ease of use with a proper fully featured database engine.

For example, it supports proper ALTER TABLE which doesn't force you to recreate tables and copy data around when you go beyond the most trivial use cases.

This is pretty much the only discussion I've found on this site:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22155260
by sarchertech | 2026-02-24 12:23:57+00:00
Again, if you occasionally caught a glimpse of a playboy, that’s not a significant problem.

If you were regularly smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, and reading porn magazines at 8 yeas, your parents fell down on the job. An 8 year old doesn’t have the wherewithal to hide that from parents who are paying attention.

> Now, as an adult, I can see more ways I could have gotten it if I wanted it.

Yeah a kid with the mind of an adult could access all kinds of illegal material.

Making it illegal to rob a bank doesn’t mean that’s it’s literally impossible. It’s about stopping enough people from trying that society functions.

The state of the world before the internet was that it was hard to keep a kid from ever glimpsing a titty, but it was relatively easy to keep a kid from having regular access to hard core porn-much, much easier than it is now. My take is that as a society we need to figure out some way to make this easy enough for parents to do that it becomes the default. Just like drugs, alcohol, and porno mags.

Another issue is that online porn and algorithmic brain rot is free (at least enough of it is). With IRL contraband, lack of money is a big limiting factor for kids. The IRL equivalent would be if the local liberal let 8 year olds checkout hard core porn DVDs.
by davedx | 2026-02-24 12:24:14+00:00
Some slightly more structural-technical critique I thought of too--

Assumptions that I think warrant closer inspection:

- agents will always win vs antibot firewalls: highly doubtful given my experience with openclaw. Antibot measures are everywhere, they're advanced, and the more agents threaten legacy business models the harder they'll fight to protect them. Think e.g. Uber investing more in anti-bot tech to stop agents turning them into a whitelabel API. Think CloudFlare's recent moves in this area. Think Salesforce reducing access to Slack API. Data moats will be guarded more strongly.

- total cost of inference will be cheaper than the margin destruction caused by agents: inference is currently heavily subsidized. I have serious doubts "on device" inference will ever be reliable and competitive enough to be viable for running high capability agents (will they even be online enough?). What's the real cost of inference? Does Claude Code really cost $200/month at maximum utilization?

It indeed assumes steady state responses from all incumbents and governments while AI agents move at the speed of innovation. Not sure about that.
by pu_pe | 2026-02-24 12:24:30+00:00
Looks neat and original, congrats!

I don't quite grasp how to interpret the training data attribution process. For example, it seems to say that for a given sentence like "They argued that humans tend to weigh losses more heavily than gains, leading to risk aversion", 24% is attributed to Wikipedia and 23% to Arxiv.

Does that mean that the concepts used in this sentence are also found in those datasets, and that's what's getting compared here? Or does it mean that you can track down which parts of the training data were interpolated to create that sentence?
by sa_gdi | 2026-02-24 12:24:45+00:00
co-Author here. We built a fraud detection system and realized the core problem — evaluating multi-signal policies against historical data in real-time — is structurally a query planning problem. This paper describes the compilation framework: declarative policies → dependency DAG → optimized SQL with CTE chains, history gating for cold-start entities, and plan caching for reuse. Applicable beyond fraud to any domain needing sub-100ms multi-signal decisions over relational data. Happy to discuss the architecture decisions and tradeoffs.
by whynotmaybe | 2026-02-24 12:24:50+00:00
If you have an app where the user must give their address when subscribing, what are the test that can be done?

User doesn't exist, invalid character in a field, user exists, wrong street name for the zip, wrong state for zip, wrong house number in the street, age below threshold, age above threshold,...

Each of these example must be done manually at least once to prove that the logic is correct and the tester must keep a report of it.

But, for each of these basic test, the data must be in a specific state (especially for the name already exists) so between each test you usually have a data preparation phase.

When you have a lot of these tests because it's spanning logic from decades, it takes time, especially when dealing with investments or insurance.

And usually for these test, you hire specific people that are targeted on correctness, not speed.

Now imagine what happens when you're at step 89 of your test and it fails.

The dev fix the code, fix the automated tests... And the tester restarts from step 1.
by coldtea | 2026-02-24 12:24:51+00:00
>so I got a human baseline through Rapidata (10k people, same forced choice): 71.5% said drive.

What kind of idiot would say "walk"?

I guess if they were average and above they wouldn't gig at Rapidata. Either that or foreigners with mediocre understanding of the English language. Or some bored teenagers that get their $0.20 or whatever Rapidata pays whatever they click (was it a multiple choice) - the (studied and reported) regression in reading comprehension levels doesn't help either.
by sfn42 | 2026-02-24 12:24:56+00:00
My parents did provide me with materials. They were happy to buy me books and stuff.

But school is where I spent most my time and did most of my learning. My single father had enough to deal with, working full time alongside being a farmer. He isn't exactly an academic. He did what he could. The school system failed me massively. Both in not supporting nor encouraging my exceptional performance, and in ignoring my bullies even when they walked in on it and when I told them about it.
by Springtime | 2026-02-24 12:25:00+00:00
I'm always surprised that archive.org's URL scheme is still used. To this day uploads will have URLs like `/details/hey` and IIRC the only thing to distinguish them from other submissions with matching names is the auto appending of a digit. It feels like `New Folder (1)` for URLs.

Edit: I misremembered. They append the date to the URL to avoid name conflicts, like `/details/hey_20260122`.

I think Youtube got it right early. Make it short enough but random, so users won't be tempted to manually type it out and make mistakes but if they really do need to manually type it the length is reasonable. It also made sharing via SMS/Twitter limits more feasible.
by ignoramous | 2026-02-24 12:25:16+00:00
Don't think Rapidus is. Nikon & Canon might be researching alternatives to EUV Lithography but how long is that going to take?

LSTC will contribute research (for 1nm) though it isn't clear if it'll be in partnership with ASML or as competition.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/japan-seeks-revitalize-its-sem...
by circularfoyers | 2026-02-24 12:25:21+00:00
I would hazard a guess that it's because there's been many debates about contributing PRs that might be perceived as AI slop. Not saying that's the case here, but it's possible the fix might be a poor one, not follow the project's guidelines, or one which the contributor doesn't fully understand, but doesn't care because it fixed the issue. I would guess the better approach would be to submit a bug report with the same information the LLM used, and maybe suggest there the fix the LLM provided. Unless this really was a tiny patch and none of the above concerns applied.
by thesvp | 2026-02-24 12:25:22+00:00
The separation between 'what the agent wants to do' and 'what it's allowed to do' is the right mental model.

The append-only ledger point is underrated too — pattern data from real failures is worth more than any upfront rule design.

How long did it take to build and maintain that governance layer? And as your agent evolves, do the rules keep up or is that becoming its own maintenance burden?
by dokeeffe | 2026-02-24 12:26:20+00:00
This is referring to active vs reactive power and the concept of power factor [1]. You're still paying for all the real energy consumed (including waste heat).
Inverter microwaves tend to have a higher power factor than traditional models (measured data [2]).
Residential electricity bills are based on active energy (kWh), not apparent power or reactive components, so a better power factor by itself doesn’t lower your bill.
We’ll take a look at the article to clarify it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_factor
[2] https://www.rtings.com/assets/pages/hRDTskis/power-factors-l...
by Havoc | 2026-02-24 12:26:45+00:00
Saw this play out in audit firms. They have a very rigid yearly cycle with each group coaching the next. It’s a good model because it’s basically hands on 1:1 tutoring on real world work.

Then leadership couldn’t resist the $$$ temptation of outsourcing the bottom tier to India.

Suddenly you’ve got people that have the senior title but can’t lead because they don’t understand the task they’re supposed to provide leadership on

And because it’s such a relentless yearly cycle you can’t do much to fix it. A single year of that caused substantial lasting damage
by Angoleyus | 2026-02-24 12:26:49+00:00
I built FlowDesk because I wanted a lightweight freelancer command center that didn't require a backend, a database, or even a signup. It handles invoices, client management, and financial reports entirely in LocalStorage.

Technical bits:

100% Client-side: All PDF generation and state management happen on the device.
Privacy as a Feature: Zero data is sent to servers. I used Vercel Serverless only for the Stripe signature verification.
PWA: Fully functional offline via Service Workers.
No-Signup Approach: I believe for a lot of solo-freelance work, a traditional account is overkill and a privacy risk.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on building "backend-less" apps. Is LocalStorage enough for professional work, or is the risk of losing data too high for this use case?
Show HN: 60 Years of Metal Music Data, Visualized
by oneyoudontknow | 2026-02-24 12:28:04+00:00
I've been tracking Metal Archives data since 2010 — originally Excel screenshots, now a proper interactive site.
The dataset (provided by MA admins, not scraped) covers genre trends from 1964 to present, with country-level breakdowns showing how genres evolved regionally.

Some interesting bits: Finland is indeed the country with most releases per capita in most genres; clear difference between Asia and Western countries in terms of genre distribution. And those end-of-graph drops that sparked "metal is dying" debates? This is rather due to a lack of data completeness and they tend to fill in to a certain level over time.

Frontend built with AI assistance; backend and all data work done by hand. Code and data release planned later this year. PHP, Html, CSS, JS were used. No building pipeline of any sort.
by benterix | 2026-02-24 12:28:57+00:00
A good point. I noticed that every time I see a condescending comment like "The war in Ukraine is totally the fault of the West, NATO should have stopped expanding..." etc., some neurons in my brain get activated and I feel obliged to correct this obvious crap using several reasonable and researched argument. But if these are all bots, who cares...

It makes me think if people en masse realize most of their online interactions are with LLMs, they might as well stop using these social platforms for engagement and just switch to totally passive consumption, which gives even less satisfaction and more frustration IMO.
by rickydroll | 2026-02-24 12:29:24+00:00
Oh, you sweet dishwasher podchild. When I lived the life of a bachelor and ate over the sink/kitchen counter, I could get by with a single set of dishes, one cast-iron skillet, one pot, a single set of silverware, one knife, and one spatula.

Now that I cook for 2-3 people and more on holidays, I know from practical experience that the number of dirty dishes generated and the water used quickly exceeds anything a dishwasher would use. The use of water also increases when you cook big batches of food, so you can have quick meals available for lunches and dinners when you're too tired too cook and/or broke to go out to a restaurant/takeout.

If someone tried to take away my dishwasher, I would put their head on a pike in the front yard as a warning to anyone else who tried.

The one thing I've learned from this article and the comments here is that I really should run a load every night, even if the machine isn't totally full, because there are always more dishes used than it looks like at first glance.
by theodric | 2026-02-24 12:29:27+00:00
May I infer from your response that your quarrel is not with a central authority having the final word in what code you're allowed to execute on your own device, but rather that it should be the government and not a corporation signing the binaries that are permitted to run?

If you're expecting a perfect analogy, you're not going to find one. Law in its application also doesn't deal in exactness, but in generalities and vibes: that's why lawyers argue, and judges decide.

I'm familiar with the process for individually certifying unique and modified vehicles in several European countries. Invariably, the process is costly and onerous, which serves as a deterrent.
by einr | 2026-02-24 12:29:58+00:00
Sure, but util-linux and the BSDs won't suddenly cease to exist. If you don't like what Ubuntu is doing, just don't use it.

And then websites and applications stop working if you're not using a verified, attested, locked-down OS and you're stuck with your nice free software system that will not do your online banking, let you chat with your friends, or access your company resources.