MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jtrn | 2026-02-16 23:01:55+00:00
I think you just heard that word and use it because it makes you sound like a logical person. It’s not fitting at all here. After all, a straw man would be me taking a general claim and creating the weakest version of that argument.

If anything, you should argue that it’s overgeneralization, over-extrapolation, or an argument from authority. Hell, if you involved the concept of non sequitur, it would be better.

It’s like you’re cobbling together words related to scientific rigor without understanding the concepts. A hypothesis is, by definition, based on incomplete data. If it wasn’t, it would just be called an observation. So you make a hypothesis, see how it fits the data, and maybe even see how well it predicts the future.
by ericol | 2026-02-16 23:02:14+00:00
> Having the LLM write down a skill representing the lessons from the struggle you just had to get something done is more typical (I hope) and quite different from what they're referring to

Just as of last week I had Claude build me a skill when I ask it to help me troubleshoot issues, and it came out quite good.

It did had some issues (Claude tends to o er specify over anecdotal data) but it's a strong step in the right direction.

Also, "skills" are too broad in my opinion. I have one (that Claude wrote) with my personal data that I have available when I analyze my workouts.

I think there's ample room for self-generated skills when you use a rather long exchange on a domain you plan to revisit, _specially_ when it comes to telling Claude what not to do.
by bsder | 2026-02-16 23:03:02+00:00
> We should give up with the idea of databases which are 'open' to the public, but you have to pay to access, reproduction isn't allowed, records cost pounds per page, and bulk scraping is denied. That isn't open.

I disagree.

Even if you simply made the database no cost but such that an actual human has to show up at an office with a signed request, that is fine. That's still open.

The problem isn't the openness; it's the aggregation.
by trogdor | 2026-02-16 23:03:10+00:00
I’m sure there are countless examples to the contrary, but I recently submitted feedback regarding an issue that I was experiencing in Final Cut Pro. Within a week, a member of the Final Cut Pro team contacted me and asked for a copy of my video editing files so they could replicate the issue. I sent them the files, they confirmed the issue, and the issue was fixed in the next release.

I was very pleasantly surprised.
by ishouldstayaway | 2026-02-16 23:03:13+00:00
I find this kind of funny, since you say your not signalling anything, and then in the second half of the sentence describe for us a very signal you claim you aren't sending:

> I'm not going to change for a role that doesn't require it.

Whether you like it or not, whether you meant to or not, you are communicating something here. You don't get to opt out.
by toss1 | 2026-02-16 23:03:41+00:00
Doesn't the alignment sort of depend on who is paying for all the tokens?

If Dave the developer is paying, Dave is incentivized to optimize token use along with Anthropic (for the different reasons mentioned).

If the Dave's employer, Earl, is paying and is mostly interested in getting Dave to work more, then what incentive does Dave have to minimize tokens? He's mostly incentivized by Earl to produce more code, and now also by Anthropic's accidentally variable-reward coding system, to code more... ?
by cyberax | 2026-02-16 23:03:58+00:00
> The people arguing against routine MRI scans are the checklist people!

Are they? They seem to be exactly the same set of people who resisted them ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22069112/ ).

> The argument being made here is about full body MRI scans: doing a dragnet sweep looking for neoplasms anywhere and everywhere. Not the same thing!

It's exactly the same thing, but on a larger scale. Yes, it will likely require at least some adjustment to the standards of care and development of more stringent criteria for follow-up procedures. But we're already talking about fine-tuning, rather than something fundamental.

Here's a study from one of the providers:

> Prenuvo's recent Polaris Study followed 1,011 patients for at least one year following a whole-body MRI scan. Of these patients, 41 had biopsies. More than half of the 41 were diagnosed with cancer. Of these cancers, 68% didn't have targeted screening tests and 64% were localized when detected. The company says it finds possibly life-threatening conditions in 1 in 20 people.

So we're talking about the real-world 4% rate for biopsies, with about 50% false positive rate. This is not that far removed from the current clinical 30% false positive rate. And this is far from the apocalyptic scenarios of multiple biopsies for every patient.

And the psychological burden appears to be modest: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33279799/

While the negatives cited by doctors are:

> To date, no study has been performed that rigorously investigates the impact on disease-specific survival following whole body MRI in asymptomatic patients without specific risk factors, and no study has been performed to confirm that a ‘negative’ whole body MRI excludes significant disease 5 or more years’ later.

I read most of the studies that are cited here: https://www.ranzcr.com/college/document-library/2024-positio... And I have not found a single one that had anything really negative about the MRI consequences. And half of them are outright positive endorsements: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33216779/

The only real remaining argument is cost effectiveness of MRI, especially for government-based healthcare. It is a valid argument, but it's beside the point for people who are self-paying. And it's also missing the implications of economy of scale.

So I'm pretty sure in this particular case the geeks indeed know more than doctors.
by palata | 2026-02-16 23:04:53+00:00
Agreed, but then it makes the whole thing a lot less impressive and it doesn't get viral.

Parents or a teacher most likely guided this kid to empirically measure how much weight a known origami fold can hold. I mean I remember that we were guided to do similar experiments at school when I was the same age... I don't remember making the news for "14-year olds empirically confirm Newton's law" :-).
by montymintypie | 2026-02-16 23:05:26+00:00
Easily one of the coolest RE projects out there, I've always looked on in awe.

> The relocation table synthesizer analyzer relies on a fully populated Ghidra database (with correctly declared symbols, data types and references) in order to work

It's a shame that this requirement exists (I am well aware that it's a functional necessity), because all the stuff I want to relink is far too big to make a full db!
by secbear | 2026-02-16 23:06:18+00:00
The finding that self-generated skills provide negative benefit (-1.3pp) while curated skills give +16.2pp is the most interesting result here imo. Big discrepancy, but makes sense. Aligns with the thought that LLMs are better consumers of procedural knowledge than producers of it.

+4.5pp for software engineering is suspiciously low compared to +51.9pp for healthcare. I suspect this reflects that frontier models already have strong SWE priors from training data, so skills add less marginal value. If true, skills become most valuable precisely in the domains where models are weakest — which is where you'd actually want to deploy agents in production. That's encouraging.
by bigiain | 2026-02-16 23:06:53+00:00
Oh cool, thanks. My last time playing with this was pre covid, possibly 5 or more years pre covid.

I do know for sure that my iOS devices connect with persistent MAC addresses on both my home and work wifi networks - I'd _assumed_ it was the same MAC address on both networks, but I'll be curious to see if that's correct next time I'm in the office.
by nerdsniper | 2026-02-16 23:07:12+00:00
Sort of - there's some distinction in the "multi-chip" vs "multi-chiplet". We're just not using the "MCM" term to describe those chips anymore. To some degree though, it's true in the sense of: "A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet".

The explanation by 'kurthr provides some insight as to why we don't use the term MCM for them today, because the term would imply that they're not integrated as tightly as they are today.

The best example of MCM's are probably Intel’s Pentium D and Core 2 Quad. In these older "MCM" designs, generally the multiple chips were mostly fully working chips - they each had their own last-level (e.g. L3) cache (LLC). They also happened to be manufactured on the same lithography node. When a core on Die A needed data that a core on Die B was working on, Die B had to send the data off the CPU entirely, down the motherboard's Front Side Bus (FSB), into the system RAM, and then Die A had to retrieve it from the RAM.

IBM POWER4 and POWER5 MCM's did share L3 cache though.

So parent was 'wrong' that "chiplets" were ever called MCM's. But right that "chips designed with multiple chiplet-looking-things" did used to be called "MCM's".

Today's 'chiplets' term implies that the pieces aren't fully-functioning by themselves, they're more like individual "organs". Functionality like I/O, memory controllers, and LLC are split off and manufactured on separate wafers/nodes. In the case of memory controllers that might be a bit confusing because back in the days of MCM's these were not in the same silicon, rather a separate chip entirely on the motherboard, but I digress.

Also MCM's lacked the kind of high-bandwidth, low-latency fabric for CPU's to communicate more directly with each other. For the Pentiums, that was organic substrates (the usual green PCB material) and routing copper traces between the dies. For the IBM's, that was an advanced ceramic-glass substrate, which had much higher bandwidth than PCB traces but still required a lot of space to route all the copper traces (latency taking a hit) and generated a lot of heat. Today we use silicon for those interconnects, which gives exemplary bandwidth+latency+heat performance.
by gnabgib | 2026-02-16 23:07:22+00:00
Please read the guidelines[0] and FAQ[1]:

> Why can't I post a comment to a thread?

> Threads are closed to new comments after two weeks, or if the submission has been killed by software, moderators, or user flags.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by criticalfault | 2026-02-16 23:07:37+00:00
> I would rather the web was based on a statically typed language that had better error handling practices like Go.

So, dart?

Back in the day Google had plans to make a dart VM in Chrome, but powers that be didn't like this idea.

So here we are. it's 2026 and the web is still limited to one language. Dare I say the only area where we don't have alternatives.
by NewsaHackO | 2026-02-16 23:11:15+00:00
To me, this is what it ultimately comes down to. It is a normie world: sure, they care now about the ID and face scans, but the reason it even got to this stage is because everybody wants to be on the platform that everyone else is on, and the platform that has the most eye-catching features is the one that gets picked. Not the one with the most robust protocol that prevents centralization but can’t save a chat history, get channels renamed, or has no voice support.
by treyd | 2026-02-16 23:11:45+00:00
Not a cryptography / data format thing. Although CBOR is just as widely supported as JSON and that would have been a better choice there, but that's not really the issue, but the whole approach to identity.

Identities are global and shared across devices. Naturally, if your keys are lost/compromised your identity is lost/compromised.

So the solution they have to this is that your real root identity delegates signing to other identities (generated local to a device) by publishing a note indicating a list of keys allowed to sign on its behalf, and presumably you keep your root identity on a trusted device (like maybe a crypto hardware wallet or a threshold multisig).

But this just reduces the problem and worsens the UX. Your identity still gets lost/compromised if the root is.

There's also an issue with how identity updates themselves work. Since these delegates are really signing for the single root, they need to be synchronized to work properly. There was a common bug (which might still happen) where if you set up your identity on a new device, the app might broadcast an identity update with an incomplete view of your identity and it resets your follows and post history. Since your identity data might be influenced based on every note you've ever sent, and message delivery is unreliable, it's hard to properly sync and reconstruct sent note history. This comes out of a fundamental design issue, where you have multiple "writers" writing to the same state. CRDTs could have helped with this, but it's too late to do that.

This sucks! It forces users to think about key management and has catastrophic failure modes. It's really hard to re-establishment trust after key compromise because there's no notion of identity that lives longer than any one key.

Matrix is not a comparable kind of protocol, but its identity management story is a lot better. Each device has a local key that never leaves the device, and when you add a new device you cross-sign it from another device you have. Homeservers maintain a list of identities tied to a user, and other people can decide to trust the device cross-signing or manually verify each of them. This can be built in a fully decentralized context (which Nostr is not, for what it's worth).
by serf | 2026-02-16 23:11:48+00:00
everyone is mentioning a movie they remembered or liked his performance in, and the first one that sprang to mind for me, for whatever reason, was Gone in Sixty Seconds.

It's a terrible corny movie (and an even worse remake), but i'm a car person and i'm from the city it takes place in, so it's hard not to like it.

He plays the surrogate-father-figure/sorta-reformed-chop-shopper, and he's wholly authentic. He reminded me of every machine shop owner i've ever met.
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-16 23:11:56+00:00
> I believe shopping malls often use such signals (wifi, bluetooth) to track what your travel pattern through the mall is. They know what section of the store you spend most of your time in and what storefronts you stall

They do but most phones rotate the mac adress these days. So while they can still track you through the store (sadly) they don't have the ability to track your recurring visits.

I wish phones had the option to constantly spam broadcasts with random MAC ids. That would make the practice useless.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-16 23:12:05+00:00
No real fixed benchmarks AIUI since performance will then depend on how much extra RAM you have (which in turn depends on what queries you're making, how much context you're using etc.) and how high-performance your storage is. Given enough RAM, you aren't really losing any performance because the OS is caching everything for you.

(But then even placing inactive experts in system RAM is controversial: you're leaving perf on the table compared to having them all in VRAM!)
by joemi | 2026-02-16 23:12:32+00:00
I used to fervently keep my bluetooth off on iOS, and I learned that if you turn it off via the Control Center, then it automatically gets turned back on the next day. But if you turn it off via Settings, then it only gets turned back on when the system software updates. (I stopped doing this a couple iOS versions ago, though, so it may have changed since then.)
by elAhmo | 2026-02-16 23:12:58+00:00
Well, you can argue that tech meetups in general are a form of marketing - but this wasn't really a 'company X hosts a react meetup trying to find people to work there' type of thing. Many drove for hours just to attend.

Getting dozens of people in the same room, excited about technology is not trivial, and having hundreds of people show up is relatively hard in a city like Vienna which doesn't have a vibrant tech scene. Sure, some people come to find job opportunities or for free food, but many 'established' meetups sometimes just have a few attendees, so this on its own is not a small task. Peter definitely didn't have time to focus on this given everything else that was going on. So for Vienna, this is pretty much as viral as it gets.

Not sure about other cities where this took place.
by ssl-3 | 2026-02-16 23:13:21+00:00
I missed the IDSL phase completely. I'm not even sure if it was ever available in my neck of the woods.

For me, it the continuum went like this: Dialup > ISDN > dialup > slow DOCSIS > faster VDSL > faster DOCSIS > [this is the part where I write a whole chapter about how there is fast, cheap gigabit fiber available in rural areas directly surrounding my small city, from multiple competing companies, but none within the city limits]

Anyway, IDSL. That technology skipped right by a lot of what was cool about ISDN. For me, real ISDN was always-on unless I disconnected it for some reason. While still "dialup" in the strictest sense, it was not infrequent to have sessions that went for months without any interruption at all. But I could also do anything else I wanted with it.

And backups: Apparently these days, a person can get a slice of Starlink pretty cheap. In this mode ("Standby Mode," IIRC), it provides a slow, always-on connection -- I think it's $5 per month for ~500Kbps.

The RV and snowbird communities hate it because it isn't free (they used to be able to pause service in off-season without monthly cost), but it sounds pretty good as a fixed, domestic backup: 500kbps is a lot more than 0. (And if this backup needs used for a long time or speed is important, then: 500kbps is way more than enough bandwidth to log in and pay for a month of real service.)
by nimonian | 2026-02-16 23:13:57+00:00
It's like those sequences of images where we ask the LLM to reproduce the same image exactly, and we just get some kind of grotesque collapse after a few dozen iterations. The same happens with text and code. I call this "semantic collapse".

I conjecture that after some years of LLMs reading a SharePoint site, producing summaries, then summaries of those summaries, etc... We will end up with a grotesque slurry.

At some point, fresh human input is needed to inject something meaningful into the process.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-16 23:14:12+00:00
I think there is some medical progress in this area but outside of those involved I don't think the vast majority of people even know that has been happening.

But when they find out, even with the preliminary clinical evidence so far, it looks like there is quite a bit of skepticism. Like it goes along with the territory.

For the clinicians I don't think it helps their case to start claiming that one dose and you're cured overnight.

It may be potent but there are all kinds of potent medications and I don't think most of them are touted as anything like one-dose cures, so this could be perceived as more difficult-to-believe exaggeration or worse.
by suzzer99 | 2026-02-16 23:15:46+00:00
I started playing Civ (any version) for the first time a few months ago. I'm somewhat addicted, but at the same time I might find a new game soon because I get upset when the AIs attack me. Sometimes I take it personally and decide to just destroy that AI to the detriment of winning. I also am leery of an AI if they attacked me in a previous game.

I realize these are all silly and "me" problems. But like the author, it's interesting that I actually have to work to emotionally divest myself from being upset at a bunch of 1s and 0s.
by user3939382 | 2026-02-16 23:15:50+00:00
I miss the analog of this community from the 90s. We had actual principles and ethos and wouldn’t have been caught dead upvoting and using software from the frickin NSA. Not that it’s any surprise here. Contemporary San Francisco driven software culture which is the majority represented on this forum have no qualms with FAANG ethics, open source is not really important either.

Oh I’m sorry the NSA didn’t spy on the whole country “wittingly” according to our leaders, carry on and use their software no ethical conflict here.
by JBAnderson5 | 2026-02-16 23:15:51+00:00
> Now consider what the same analyst does with an LLM agent:
"Show me all software companies with over $1B market cap, P/E under 30, and revenue growing over 20% year over year. Build a DCF model for the top 5. Run sensitivity analysis on discount rate and terminal growth."

While I think LLMs can improve the interface and help users learn/generate domain specific languages, I don’t see how a professional can trust an llm to get a technical request like this correct without verification. Wouldn’t a financial professional trust the Bloomberg llm agent that translates their request into a set of Bloomberg commands more?
by zmgsabst | 2026-02-16 23:16:06+00:00
I’ve made frameworks that turn a project entirely over to the AI — eg, turn a paragraph summary of what I want into a book on that topic.

Obviously I get much less out of that — I’m not denying the tradeoff, just saying that some people are all the way to “write a short request, accept the result” for (certain) thinking tasks.
by medunes | 2026-02-16 23:16:42+00:00
I agree that for fully autonomous agents (or IDE extensions), tool-use/search is the superior architecture. dewdrops is specifically targeting the "Chat UI" workflow, where a developer just wants to drag/drop a feature branch into Claude/GPT/Gemini to ask a quick question without setting up a local RAG pipeline. It's a "dumb tool" for a specific constraint.

it also doesn't touch or generate AGENTS.md. It just respects .gitignore and dumps the raw source.
by aura-guard | 2026-02-16 23:17:12+00:00
API-level spend caps solve the "how much" problem but not the "why." The agent still loops 50 times before hitting the limit. You just lose $50 instead of $200.

The missing layer is detection inside the agent loop itself. If the agent is calling search_kb for the 8th time with slightly different args, or about to issue a refund it already issued, you want to catch that at iteration 3, not at the dollar ceiling.

I built an open-source middleware called Aura Guard (https://github.com/auraguardhq/aura-guard) that does exactly this. It sits in the agent loop and detects repeated tool calls, argument jitter, duplicate side-effects, stall patterns, and budget overruns. When it catches a loop it can rewrite the prompt, return a cached result, or escalate instead of letting the agent spin until an external limit kills it.

Zero dependencies, framework-agnostic, works with any LLM provider. Has a shadow mode so you can see what it would catch without blocking anything.

Your approach and this are complementary. Spend caps at the proxy level, loop detection at the agent level. Both are needed if you're running agents in production.
by themafia | 2026-02-16 23:17:16+00:00
> "what if we had a consistently available tech stack and data model"

And Palantir is the only company that provides this? They didn't have this before? After they bought it what changed? Again, what new capabilities do they have now that they lacked before? What required them to make a deal with a defense contractor for a "consistent data model?" Did other ERP vendors not exist?

It's 2026. Make this make sense. Justify their decision don't excuse it with hand waving.

> is that far fetched an idea though.

You are working really hard to ignore reality here. Basic accountability in spending tax payer funds is not a "far fetched idea."

> https://digital.nhs.uk/services/federated-data-platform

The deeper you dig into that site the more you discover the supposed benefits still had to be developed locally and merely rely on Foundry as a database. You're telling me the NHS had to make this highly questionable decision because they couldn't find a database vendor?

This stinks. I'm sorry you can't or aren't willing to admit you smell it.