MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hodgehog11 | 2026-02-13 07:16:12+00:00
Fine, that's fair. I believe the statement that you made is countered by my claim, which is:

Theorem. For any tolerance epsilon > 0, there exists a transformer neural network of sufficient size that follows, up to the factor epsilon, the policy that most optimally achieves arbitrary goals in arbitrary stochastic environments.

Proof (sketch). For any stochastic environment with a given goal, there exists a model that maximizes expected return under this goal (not necessarily unique, but it exists). From Solomonoff's convergence theorem (Theorem 3.19 in [1]), Bayes-optimal predictors under the universal Kolmogorov prior converge with increasing context to this model. Consequently, there exists an agent (called the AIXI agent) that is Pareto-optimal for arbitrary goals (Theorem 5.23 in [1]). This agent is a sequence-to-sequence map with some mild regularity, and satisfies the conditions of Theorem 3 in [2]. From this universal approximation theorem (itself proven in Appendices B and C in [2]), there exists a transformer neural network of a sufficient size that replicates the AIXI agent up to the factor epsilon.

This is effectively the argument made in [3], although I'm not fond of their presentation. Now, practitioners still cry foul because existence doesn't guarantee a procedure to find this particular architecture (this is the constructive bit). This is where the neural scaling law comes in. The trick is to work with a linearization of the network, called the neural tangent kernel; it's existence is guaranteed from Theorem 7.2 of [4]. The NTK predictors are also universal and are a subset of the random feature models treated in [5], which derives the neural scaling laws for these models. Extrapolating these laws out as per [6] for specific tasks shows that the "floor" is always below human error rates, but this is still empirical because it works with the ill-defined definition of superintelligence that is "better than humans in all contexts".

[1] Hutter, M. (2005). Universal artificial intelligence: Sequential decisions based on algorithmic probability. Springer Science & Business Media.

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.10077

[3] https://openreview.net/pdf?id=Vib3KtwoWs

[4] https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.14548

[5] https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.16859

[6] https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361
by avree | 2026-02-13 07:16:34+00:00
The only way a door gets left open is if someone orders a ride and leaves it open. That person is charged a fee, which pays for the Doordash person - which is cheaper than installing motors/automatic doors in every ride. And, there's good availability of Doordash (or Uber Eats, etc.) drivers in every market Waymo is in right now.

Seems like a pretty good solution, honestly.
by manuelmoreale | 2026-02-13 07:17:36+00:00
> Just allowing a service provider to receive a third party attestation that you "allowed" still allows the third party to track what you are doing even if the provider can't. That's still unacceptable from a privacy standpoint, I don't want the government, or agents thereof, knowing all the places I've had to show ID.

Isn't this solvable by allowing you to be the middle man? A service asks you to prove your age, you ask the government for a digital token that proves your age (and the only thing the government knows is that you have asked for a token) and you then deliver that to the service and they only know the government has certified that you are above a certain age.

The service gets a binary answer to their question. The government only knows you have asked for a token. Wouldn't a setup like that solve the issue you're talking about?
by sota_pop | 2026-02-13 07:19:05+00:00
This reminds me of a gag voting simulation website from the early 2000s when BushJr was running for president against Al Gore. The (maybe flash?) game simulated voting, but when you tried to click, the buttons would “run away” from the cursor, or change size to avoid being clicked… dark patterns… always fun to “play against”.

More recently though, I must say, YouTube has really jumped the shark in terms of perfecting their dark patterns/algo stickiness. I can’t even go to the site without immediately forgetting my original intent.
Ask HN: Where to find people to discuss the future of AI?
by Vishal19111999 | 2026-02-13 07:19:33+00:00
I am building an AI product. And am in constant anxiety that I am missing on ideas.

I have moments where I want to desperately discuss what I am thinking but have no friend that would like to participate in that?

What should I do about it?

Most people consider AI as some tool that they can chat with. But I want to discuss stuff such as the "self evolving software" vs "An AI app builder" and so on...
by RuggedPineapple | 2026-02-13 07:19:41+00:00
AI has been around for 60+ years. SAIL, the Stanford AI Laboratory is one of the most important centers of early hacker culture. Knuth spent his time there. Both Cisco and Sun were founded by SAIL alumni.

Unless you're wanting to rewind the clock to the Berlin airlift we aren't going back to a world before AI. But I do think this absurd bubble is going to pop. Generative AI is crap. It's code is crap. It's images are crap. I say this as someone who has been self-employed for 2 years now in AI. The fact that its so hard to get usable results from generative AI that I can just get over the line into six figures of yearly income because I can massage it into doing something just passable enough to work for people is probably its biggest indictment.
by thefz | 2026-02-13 07:21:20+00:00
In the files there are scanned documents from the FBI reporting direct testimony from the victims of rape, violence, murder from prominent politicians, bankers, et cetera.

Start with... investigating that?

Ask them: why this person should be going around telling people you raped her? Have you ever met?

You know, like law enforcement does when there is the suspect of a crime.
by vonunov | 2026-02-13 07:23:50+00:00
Yes, the LLMs have made great progress in that regard. It wasn't too long ago that the majority of dashes seen in LLM material could have been commas, periods, or nothing at all with no loss of tone or meaning, and almost none were used to offset parenthetical phrases. It was nearly exclusively an overdramatic flourish. And now look at them. They're growing up. Just makes you want to squeeze them until they pop.
by CDieumegard | 2026-02-13 07:23:58+00:00
I built this because I kept seeing the same question everywhere / "what model should I run on my 16GB Mac?" or "will this fit on my 4060?"

LocalClaw matches your exact hardware (OS, RAM, GPU VRAM) to the right model + quantization out of 125+ options. Takes about 30 seconds.

It recommends for LM Studio specifically, shows file sizes, speed/quality scores, and explains WHY a model fits your setup (RAM usage %, VRAM fit, context window overhead).

Everything runs in the browser. No data collected, no account needed.

Built this in Switzerland, feedback welcome /|/ especially if a recommendation feels off for your hardware.
by TylerE | 2026-02-13 07:24:23+00:00
That was actually a bad year, as that "free" $21 million represented a loss of about $30 million. $1.17 billion on Jan 1st 2016 is equivalent to $1.22 billion a year later due to inflation. So they would have had to generate $50 million just to break even in actual buying power terms.
by rhubarbtree | 2026-02-13 07:24:46+00:00
I agree with your sentiment. Here are the three reasons I think people worry about superintelligence wiping us out.

The most common one is that people (mostly men) project their own instincts onto AI. They think AI will be “driven” to “fight” for its own survival. This is anthropomorphism and doesn’t make any sense to me if the AI is not a product of barbaric Darwinian evolution. AI is not a bro, bro.

The second most common take is that humans will set some well intentioned goals and the superintelligent AI will be so stupid that it literally pursues these goals to the extinction of everything. Again, there’s some anthropomorphism going on, the “reward” being pursued is assumed to that make the AI “happy”. Fortunately, we can reasonably expect a superintelligence not to turn us all into paperclips, as it may understand that was not our intention when we started a paperclip factory.

The final story is that a bad actor uses superintelligence as a weapon, and we all become enslaved or die as a result in the ensuing AI wars. This seems the most plausible to me, as our leaders have generally proven to be a combination of incompetent, malicious and short-sighted (with some noble exceptions). However, even the elites running the nuclear powers for the last 80 years have failed to wipe us out to date, and having a new vector for doing so probably won’t make a huge difference to their efforts.

If, however, superintelligence becomes widely available to Billy Nomates down the pub, who is resentful at humanity because his girlfriend left him, the Americans bombed his country, the British engineered a geopolitical disaster that killed his family, the Chinese extinguished his culture, etcetera, then he may feel a lack of “skin in the civilisational game” and decide to somehow use a black market copy of Claude 162.8 Unrestricted On-Prem Edition to kill everyone. Whether that can happen really depends on technological constraints a la fitting a data centre into a laptop, and an ability to outsmart the superintelligence.

Much more likely to me is that humanity destroys itself. We are perfectly capable of wiping ourselves out without the assistance of a superintelligence, for example by suicidally accelerating the burning of fossil fuels in order to power crypto or chatbots.
by enraged_camel | 2026-02-13 07:25:22+00:00
>> I would certainly take a careful person over the likes of yegge who seems to be neither pragmatic, nor an engineer.

What utter nonsense. Yegge has been a programmer for longer than some people on this board have been alive, has worked on a lot of interesting and massively challenging projects and generously shared what he has learned with the community. Questioning his engineering chops is both laughable and absurd.
by optionalsquid | 2026-02-13 07:26:09+00:00
> It has ceased making its iconic beverage and now only sells a variant that tastes crap.

It looks like they reintroduced the original recipe in 2021 (and previously as a limited release in 2019), under the name Irn Bru 1901. Or does that version still differ from the version of Irn Bru the low-sugar Irn Bru replaced?
by jpreagan | 2026-02-13 07:26:38+00:00
Great question. I touched on this in the article: "our assistants will deal with one another, taking action on our behalf."

The honest answer is nobody knows exactly what that looks like at scale. Markets with millions of automated agents optimizing simultaneously could behave very differently. That's pretty wild to think about.

But I think the more immediate reality is much more mundane. Right now these assistants are reading your email and reminding you about dentist appointments. We're a long way from autonomous agents negotiating on your behalf at scale. The infrastructure isn't there, the trust isn't there, and the coordination protocols between agents don't really exist yet.
When we do get there, it probably looks less like a free-for-all and more like new norms and rate limits emerging, the same way APIs and marketplaces already throttle automated access. That's my guess.

The interesting question to me is who builds those protocols and whether they're open or proprietary.
by Nathanba | 2026-02-13 07:28:11+00:00
What I don't understand about Polis though is who is creating these less biased polls full of unbiased positions that people can vote on? It takes a lot of intelligence and wisdom to even formulate a question that isn't tainted by layers and layers of political innuendo. You can't just put something like "Do you believe in the rights of the unborn child?" into a system like this and expect quality outcomes.

I guess the theory is that you put the entire spectrum of positions on the line which allows fully biased positions on each end to exist. Then biased people on both ends will vote on slightly less and less biased positions that they still agree with and you'll see the true shared positions. But I still think that if you don't have a perfectly equal number of positions to vote on for each side you'll end up with the same problem we already have in society, people are being given biased questions not necessarily by strength but by amount. Therefore they will subconsciously and consciously conclude that the world wants them to be more towards the position that had more questions presented.
by sooheon | 2026-02-13 07:30:44+00:00
This is a sad take, and a misunderstanding of what art is. Tech and tools go "obsolete". Literature poses questions to humans, and the value of art remains to be experienced by future readers, whatever branch of the tech tree we happen to occupy. I don't begrudge Clarke or Vonnegut or Asimov their dated sci-fi premises, because prediction isn't the point.

The role of speculative fiction isn't to accurately predict what future tech will be, or become obsolete.
Show HN: AgentProbe – Validate AI agent endpoints across 8 protocols in one URL
by Andreas_3d | 2026-02-13 07:31:06+00:00
I built AgentProbe to solve a recurring problem: checking whether an AI agent endpoint actually supports the protocols it claims to.

Paste a URL, click Validate, get instant verdicts across HTTP, MCP, A2A/AP2, x402, OAuth, MCP Apps, HTML, and ERC-8004.

Each layer gets a detail breakdown — tools found, payment networks, SSL status, agent card metadata, AP2 detection, etc.

It also exposes a built-in MCP server so agents can trigger validation programmatically.

Code: https://github.com/FlowMCP/mcp-agent-validator
Stack: Node.js 22, vanilla JS, DigitalOcean App Platform.

Would love feedback on the detection approach.
by torginus | 2026-02-13 07:31:12+00:00
I'm an EE, I have worked with things like sensor fusion professionally. In short sensor fusion depends on what sensors you have and how you combine them, especially if two sensors' outputs tend to disagree - which one is wrong and to what extent, and how a piece of noise gets reflected in each sensors' outputs, to avoid double counting errors and coming up with unjustifyably confident results.

This field is extremely complex, it's often better to pick a sensor and stick with it rather than trying to figure out how to piece together data from very dissimilar sources.
by jibal | 2026-02-13 07:31:17+00:00
No, defer is always optional, which makes it highly error prone.

There's errdefer, which only defers if there was an error, but presumably you meant what you wrote, and not that.

BTW, D was the first language to have defer, invented by Andrei Alexandrescu who urged Walter Bright to add it to D 2.0 ... in D it's spelled scope(exit) = defer, scope(failure) = errdefer, and scope(success) which is only run if no error.
by asdff | 2026-02-13 07:31:52+00:00
Kind of funny you say it is capital concentration that blocks innovation then praise anthropic, when we are in a thread about them concentrating capital. And not only have these companies concentrated capital, and mindshare in the mass media, they have concentrated talent.

You have to wonder how often they hire talent just to keep them out of the market for other upstart companies to potentially use, like with no actual objective just to keep them off market. With half trillion valuation there's plenty of money for that, and given how few people actually know the really deep stuff competently, it would be so stupid of them not to be doing that right now.
by Mentlo | 2026-02-13 07:32:35+00:00
Until the problem is politically recognised by the masses with adequate concern there will be no change. Climate collapse is not a problem for the capital and the elites it’s only a problem for the masses, but getting the masses to understand that requires higher levels of complex system understanding and third and fourth order effects - something which is not a majority trait.

I fear the only solution to this is that a climate correcting perverse incentive materialises, such as fusion at scale being more profitable than fossil fuels, but without mass-panic induced traits such that fission has.
Show HN: Connect Slack to Your OpenClaw – Tutorial and Hosting
by Gregoryy | 2026-02-13 07:33:26+00:00
Openclaw Setup just added an integration with Slack.

Check out our tutorial for setting this up: https://openclaw-setup.me/tutorials/slack/

OpenClaw setup also provides a free and feature-rich managed hosting for OpenClaw: secure setup, Telegram + Slack, ENV and agent state management, CLI tooks authentification and much more: https://openclaw-setup.me
by elC0mpa | 2026-02-13 07:33:39+00:00
Well, I really like building CLIs for my personal use, and I prefer Golang for both Backend and CLIs, I am currently working on aws-doctor (https://awsdoctor.compacompila.com/), An Open Source CLI to diagnose AWS costs, detect idle resources, and optimize cloud spending directly from your terminal.
Let me know WDYT if you take a look at it.
by stopbulying | 2026-02-13 07:34:05+00:00
Is this a Bush administration in disguise?

"Ten Years After the Patriot Act, a Look at Three of the Most Dangerous Provisions Affecting Ordinary Americans" | Electronic Frontier Foundation (2011) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/ten-years-later-look-t... :

> 0.8% [True Positive Rate]

And zero accountability.

Snowden (film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowden_(film)

During the Obama administration, there was a surveillance reform near-candidate who was appropriately angry about surveillance abuse.
Show HN: Temp Mail – Fastest temporary email generator for iOS/macOS
by jamcry | 2026-02-13 07:36:33+00:00
Hi HN!

I use temporary email services daily, for different purposes such as:
- Protect my real email inbox from spam, phishing...
- Testing my apps where I need many distinct email addresses

I always thought we deserve a better service; most of the popular ones are pretty slow and very ugly. That's why I developed my own.

Temp Mail is the fastest and the most modern looking disposable mail generator app on the whole App Store.

Available for iOS and MacOS, and Android version coming soon!

If you want direct link to App Store, here it is: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/temp-mail-disposable-mailbox/i...

--

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- How long do temp email addresses last?
Temporary email addresses expire after a set period of time (typically a few hours to a few days). This helps keep your inbox clean and reduces long-term spam. Once expired, the address can no longer receive emails.

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No sign-up required. Open the temp mail app, tap to generate an address, and start using it immediately. No registration, no passwords, no hassle.

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We recommend using disposable emails for one-time verifications, free trials, newsletters, and untrusted signups. For important accounts like banking or healthcare, use your real email address.

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Yes. Emails are stored temporarily and automatically deleted when addresses expire. We don't store your personal information or track your usage patterns.

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Disposable email addresses are receive-only. They are designed for one-way communication like OTPs, verification codes, and newsletters.

- Is the app free?
Yes, the temp mail app is completely free to use. Generate as many temporary email addresses as you need without any subscriptions or hidden fees.
by kiroid123 | 2026-02-13 07:37:08+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a small tool called Introspect.

The problem I kept running into (consulting + internal ops work) was this:

The analysis itself takes minutes.
Turning a CSV export into something clean enough to send to a client or stakeholder takes much longer.

So I built something opinionated and narrow:
• Upload a CSV
• Automatically generate:
• 2 charts (trend + breakdown when possible)
• Top driver cards
• A written executive-style summary grounded in the numbers
• A shareable link
• PDF export
• No account required
• Pay per dashboard ($16)

It uses deterministic profiling of the data (column detection, numeric parsing, trend logic, concentration analysis) and then feeds structured facts into an LLM to generate narrative insights.

It’s intentionally not trying to be a BI platform — more like a “sendable update generator” from raw exports.

Would really appreciate feedback on:
• Whether $16 feels reasonable
• If the output feels genuinely useful or just “AI fluff”
• Where this breaks down for you

Link: https://introspectdigital.com

Happy to answer technical questions and thank you.
by ssstiktok | 2026-02-13 07:37:09+00:00
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by ssstiktok | 2026-02-13 07:37:27+00:00
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by ssstiktok | 2026-02-13 07:37:43+00:00
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by rhubarbtree | 2026-02-13 07:38:05+00:00
Unsure if you’re trolling, but you haven’t listened to what Tesla are actually saying.

Having more sensors is complicating the matter, but yes sure you can do that if you want to. But just using vision simplifies training a huge amount. The more you think about it, the stronger this argument is. Synthesising data is a lot easier if you’re dealing with one fairly homogenous input.

But the real point is that cameras are cheap, so you can stick them in many many vehicles and gather vast amounts of data for training. This is why Waymo will lose - either to Tesla or more likely a Chinese car manufacturer.

I do not like Elon because I do not think nazi salutes or racism are cool, but I do think Tesla are correct here. Waymo wins for a while, then it dies.