MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zephen | 2026-02-16 21:28:04+00:00
> They (or their clothes as per the example) sends signals in either case.

Unless you're Sherlock Holmes, or know the person and their wardrobe intimately, you literally cannot discern anything of value from a one-time viewing of them.

Reddit and quora are littered with stories about car salesmen misreading what they thought were signals, and missing out on big sales. The whole Julia Roberts trope resonates exactly because it happens in real life.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes, as George Carlin pointed out, it's a big fat brown dick.
by d_burfoot | 2026-02-16 21:28:21+00:00
> they mimic and amplify the inherent racism present in their own training data

LLMs turn out to be biased against white men:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/me7wFrkEtMbkzXGJt/race-and-g...

> When present, the bias is always against white and male candidates across all tested models and scenarios. This happens even if we remove all text related to diversity.
by ghrl | 2026-02-16 21:28:36+00:00
I did something similar while I was still working with Windows a long time ago. I had just switched to PowerShell from the basic command line and kept typing cls, which did not work. I had typed that so often it was completely in my muscle memory, and every time the ugly PowerShell error would appear. So I decided to do the proper thing and NOT alias cls to clear, but instead alias it to immediate shutdown (shutdown -f -t 0 -s iirc) and that did work eventually. Wouldn't change a thing since clear is the universal command almost anywhere so it's a lot better muscle memorizing that!
by keybored | 2026-02-16 21:29:08+00:00
> But then literally every trade between two people—trading four sheep for one cow, say—is exploitation in both directions.

No. That could be a win-win. One might be a sheep farmer, the other a cattle/cow farmer. They both gain from exchanging these livestocks.

For an employee? See the value produced versus the wages earned. There’s the exploitation.

The nice thing about one single universal value—money—is that it makes things like this obvious. Just look at the numbers. It’s just one, single currency. Much easier than comparing livestock...
by nomdep | 2026-02-16 21:29:22+00:00
(I feel that I write a comment like this every few years)

The author catalog of harms is real. But it's worth noting that nearly identical catalogs were compiled for every major technological shift in modern history. The Internet destroyed print journalism, local retail, and enabled cyberbullying and mass surveillance. If we applied the same framework used here, Internet optimism in 2005 was also a form of "class privilege" (his term, I personally hate it).

And the pattern extends well beyond the Internet. For example, mechanized looms devastated weavers, the automobile wiped out entire trades while introducing pollution and traffic deaths, and recorded music was supposed to kill live performances.

In each case, the harms were genuine, the displacement was painful and unevenly distributed, and the people raising alarms were not irrational. They were often right about the costs. What they tended to miss was the longer trajectory: the way access to books, transportation, music, and information gradually broadened rather than narrowed, even if the transition was brutal for those caught in it.

History doesn't guarantees a good outcome for AI, but the author does advocates from a position of "class privilege": of having access to good lawyers, good doctors, and good schools already, and not feeling the urgency of tools that might extend those things to people who don't.
by lirbank | 2026-02-16 21:29:41+00:00
Here's a real-world example where atomic updates aren't an option - an order status transition that reads the current status from one table, validates the transition, and inserts into another:

await db().transaction(async (tx) => {
await hooks?.onTxBegin?.();

const [order] = await tx.select().from(orders)
.where(eq(orders.id, input.id))
.for("update");

const [status] = await tx.select().from(orderStatuses)
.where(eq(orderStatuses.orderId, input.id))
.orderBy(desc(orderStatuses.createdAt))
.limit(1);

if (input.status === status.code)
throw new Error("Status already set");

await tx.insert(orderStatuses).values({ ... });

});

You need the transaction + SELECT FOR UPDATE because the validation depends on current state, and two concurrent requests could both pass the duplicate check. The hooks parameter is the barrier injection point from the article - that's how you test that the lock actually prevents the race.
by ktm5j | 2026-02-16 21:29:52+00:00
which is run by bash in the way I described.

In /etc/bash.bashrc:

# if the command-not-found package is installed, use it
if [ -x /usr/lib/command-not-found -o -x /usr/share/command-not-found/command-not-found ]; then
...
fi
by kyars | 2026-02-16 21:30:07+00:00
the code has not been rigorously tested in all honesty, (this is mainly an experiment on agent orchestration as opposed to building a viable sqlite in rust)

- The choice of two workers per model is purely pragmatic: I can't afford more.
- I chose heterogeneous agents because it has not been done yet. There is no performance justification for this choice.
by godelski | 2026-02-16 21:30:08+00:00
> This is useful when you simply can’t hear someone very well or when the speaker makes a mistake

I have a few friends with pretty heavy accents and broken English. Even my partner makes frequent mistakes as a non native English speaker. It's made me much better at communicating but it's also more work and easier for miscommunication to happen. I think a lot of people don't realize this also happens with variation in culture. So even within people speaking the same language. It's just that the accent serves as a flag for "pay closer attention". I suspect this is a subtle but contributing problem to miscommunication on the and why fights are so frequent.
by chillacy | 2026-02-16 21:30:22+00:00
My take: openclaw should not run on a mac (even though looking at the skills it ships with it clearly was made to)

It should run on its own VPS with full root access, given api keys which have spending limits, given no way for strangers to talk to it. I treat it as a digital assistant, a separate entity, who may at some point decide to sell me out as any human stranger might, and then share personal info under that premise.
by xracy | 2026-02-16 21:30:37+00:00
At some point, we as a society are going to come to grips with the fact that only like 5% of the population is capable of actually losing and maintaining weight-loss.

The rest is just all new "fad diets" that cycle every 3 years as people go through the cycle of trying them, seeing results, failing to maintain them "forever" (which is what they'd have to do), and then putting the weight back on.

Every single diet has this problem (Even GLP-1s from what I have seen). The human body seems to have some mechanism by which it attempts to maintain it's current weight. But we all continue to be incredibly prone to "this new fad diet actually works!"
Show HN: Sira,an AI native flight booking experience
by malwaregeeeek | 2026-02-16 21:31:05+00:00
Sira is a chat-first flight booking interface built on top of published airline fares.

You describe the trip in plain English, and Sira returns normalized options instantly. The price shown is the final price — no added service fees or checkout upsells.

We surface published fares directly rather than consolidator inventory, and we keep the flow intentionally minimal. The goal is to reduce friction between intent and booking.

Under the hood, we reconcile availability and pricing from standard distribution channels and present a simplified booking layer on top.

Would love feedback from anyone who has worked with airline distribution or built in travel.
by themafia | 2026-02-16 21:31:54+00:00
> buys software

To do what, exactly? This is public money being spent. Why are you so eager to be ignorant of it?

> from massive multinational.

Let's be honest: "Health company buys software from US defense monopolist."

> They also work with Google, Azure and AWS

Yes, and you and I can also buy those products and use them, do you use any of palantirs products in your daily life?
by Aurornis | 2026-02-16 21:32:02+00:00
> The gambling analogy completely falls apart on inspection.

The analogy was too strained to make sense.

Despite being framed as a helpful plea to gambling addicts, I think it’s clear this post was actually targeted at an anti-LLM audience. It’s supposed to make the reader feel good for choosing not to use them by portraying LLM users as poor gambling addicts.
by abeppu | 2026-02-16 21:32:12+00:00
> You’d need to be high enough in the org chart; far enough up the pyramid; advanced enough along the career ladder.

> To be an AI optimist, I’m guessing you must not be worried about where your next job might come from, or whether you can even find one. The current dire state of the job market, I have to assume, doesn’t scare you. You must feel secure.

So I think even these people should not feel secure.
The perceived value of expertise is decreased by AI which routinely claims to have PhD level mastery of a lot of material. I think even for people with deep experience, in the current job market, many firms are reluctant to hire or pay in a way that's commensurate with that expertise.
If you're a leader whose clout in an organization is partly tied to how many people are under you in an org-chart (it's dumb but we have all seen it), maybe that will begin to shrink quarter after quarter.
Unless you can make it genuinely obvious that a junior or mid-tier person could not write a prompt which cause a model to spew the knowledge or insight that you have won through years or decades of work, your job may become vulnerable.

I think the class divide that is most relevant is more literal and old-school:

- Do you _own_ enough of businesses that that's how you get most of your income? If so, maybe there's a way that AI will either cause your labor costs decrease, or your productivity per worker increases, and either way you're probably happy.

- Can you invest specifically in the firms that are actively building AI, or applications thereof?

We're back to owners vs workers, with the added dynamic that if AI lets you partially replace labor with capital, then owners of course take a bigger share of value created going forward.
by jonfw | 2026-02-16 21:32:19+00:00
This is very much a tangent, and was asked in bad faith, but I’ll answer anyways!

One of the interesting things about working on distributed systems, is that you can reproduce problems without having to reproduce or mock a long stack trace

So I certainly don’t see the case you’re talking about where it takes hours to reproduce or understand a problem without a debugger. Of course there are still many times when a debugger should be consulted! There is always a right tool for a given job.
by Nevermark | 2026-02-16 21:32:28+00:00
If it is a Turing Test, it’s a test if our intelligence and we failed.

The internet is a wild west of privacy, security, social and ethical holes an army of grifters routinely drive through. And in the case of some famous big firms, leverage and magnify at scale.

That is bad enough.

But setting up a horde of intelligent beings, so that those holes are their critical path to survival, is like pouring poison into the water supply to see what happens.

Can’t argue with “interesting”. It is that.
by xg15 | 2026-02-16 21:33:05+00:00
By the same logic, you could ask "what part of a computer 'is' the computer? The CPU? The hard drive? The RAM? The TPM? The power supply? The sum of all peripherals? Etc"

You could ask all kinds of philosophical questions about this, but at the end of the day, there are parts that are easily replaceable and parts that are harder if you want to preserve the identity of a particular machine.

E.g. while RAM, CPU, GPU, power supply etc are all essential for running a PC, you can also swap them out without many problems. In contrast, the data on the hard drives or the TPM might be hard or impossible to restore.

In the same way, I'd still see the brain as the center of the self, because so much cognitive information is stored there.
by bmenrigh | 2026-02-16 21:33:06+00:00
I should add that I have a group of friends that only chat on "C", for C in:

* SMS
* Apple iMessage
* Email
* IRC
* Facebook Messenger
* Telegram
* Slack
* Webex Teams
* Discord
* Twitter (DMs)
* Signal
* Whatsapp
* A particular PHPBB web forum

Instead of being on top of all of these, I mostly neglect all of them, and then friends complain that they haven't been able to get a hold of me for 6 months.

XMPP was my own "solution" to this problem, which nobody else used.
by keybored | 2026-02-16 21:33:10+00:00
> Can you accept that two parties can make an exchange that leaves them both better off?

Yes.

> If you can’t accept that, there’s no real point in any further discussion.

There’s a lot of assumptions packed in to this statement.

But you can be the arbiter of the Overton Window. I know that I am swearing in church.
by yesimahuman | 2026-02-16 21:33:15+00:00
This sums up a lot of what I've been feeling lately. I've had a hard time getting excited about the AI long game, unlike a lot of my peers. I think being out of the industry for a few years (sold my startup a while back), and spending less time in that privileged tech bubble has made me far more aware of and concerned about average people and the future of non-tech hubs around the country/world. While I get value out of AI tools today, I see a lot more downsides in the immediate future for everyone that isn't directly working on this technology with skin in the game. Especially when our society doesn't seem even remotely ready for the big changes coming.
by bagacrap | 2026-02-16 21:34:19+00:00
Amex has less than 10% worldwide market share and is a distant 4th behimd unionpay, visa, mc. I don't see the monopoly here.

I have to say I was relieved when my Amex card issuer switched to visa because owning an Amex is a pita. I think they build their business on various rewards programs, the brand itself is garbage in my eyes.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-16 21:34:21+00:00
Well, in 2000, I lived in Atlanta with 4 years of experience. 2000 wasn’t bad outside of Silicon Valley. If you were an enterprise developer targeting banks, insurance companies in a 2nd tier city, there was no affect. I had no problem finding a job.

I also was looking for a job in 2008 - again in Atlanta, I was 34 and again had no trouble finding your regular old dev job.

The AI bubble busting means absolutely nothing to me as far as career prospects. While every project I do now is related to AI working in cloud consulting + app dev, AI is just another tool in my tool belt.

“All of the spending” means nothing to Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft.

They all are spending out of free cash flow and the hardware they are buying have a high failure rate and will be worthless in 3 years anyway. That just means they won’t replenish the hardware.

For the most part, I don’t deal with VC funded unprofitable companies - see how the bubble busting didn’t affect me.

If Claude Code becomes more expensive - which I doubt, compute gets cheaper over time and if the bubble does burst, that means compute gets cheaper because of excessive capacity.

On the other hand, I don’t pay for Claude Code myself, if the company thinks it does add value, the company I work for will up my monthly allowance from $1000 a month. If I were paying myself, I would just buy a computer that could run a local model.
by brabel | 2026-02-16 21:34:43+00:00
It is an all or nothing decision. We were letting devs make a decision about AI use and it turned out just a few were using it. The rest were using it just a little. But we noticed people were still spending time on stuff that AI can easily do for them!! I know because I had to do stuff for devs who were just not able to do things quickly enough and I did it with AI in minutes. Quite disappointing. But my conclusion is that we need to push AI quite strongly and invest in the best services otherwise people don’t even try it, and when they do it if it’s some cheap service they quickly dismiss it. So here we are.
by wolrah | 2026-02-16 21:34:48+00:00
> It's a perfectly reasonable choice: flexible, well specified, well supported, reasonably performant. I think the extreme level of hype 20 years ago was overdone and (just like with anything) there's good ways to adopt it and bad ways. But as a basic technology choice, it's fine.

Absolutely with you up to here, but...

> Particularly these days when you can have a coding agent write the parser boilerplate, etc. for you.

Absolutely not. Having seen the infinite different ways a naive implementation of XML goes wrong, arguably being one of the main causes of death for XHTML because browsers rightfully rejected bad XML, "Don't roll your own XML implementation" should be right up there with "Don't roll your own crypto".

I don't feel like it's going out on a limb to say that if someone needs to defer to a LLM to implement XML they're not qualified to determine if it's done it right and/or catch what it got enthusiastically wrong.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-16 21:35:09+00:00
The general rule seems to be, the more layers you automate with LLMs, the worse each successive layer gets. Piping LLM output as input into new LLM calls, you're already starting to notice how things fall apart and get lost quickly.

If you have the idea, more or less the implementation plan, let the LLM do the coding, you can end up with something maintainable and nice, it's basically up to you.

Strip away one layer, so you have the idea, but let the LLM come up with the implementation plan, then also the implementation, and things end up a lot less than ideal.

Remove another layer, let the LLM do it all, and it's all a mess.
by nlarion | 2026-02-16 21:35:14+00:00
Interesting article, Douglas Hofstadter's book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop takes it a step further and says that parts of our consciousness/soul lives outside of ourselves and in the minds and brains of others. Since one can generally guess how person you know would respond in a given situation, such as how a spouse might be able to know exactly what their spouse would say/do, and in that sense our "souls" are distributed. It's a bit more nuanced than that, but I think that gets the point across of how parts of ourselves live in others.
by rs545837 | 2026-02-16 21:35:20+00:00
Weave replaces git's merge with entity-level merge. It parses all three versions (base, ours, theirs) with tree-sitter, extracts functions/classes/methods, matches them by name and structural hash, and merges per-entity instead of per-line.
On our benchmark of 31 real-world scenarios across 7 languages:

- weave: 31/31 clean (100%)

- mergiraf: 26/31 clean (83%)

- git: 15/31 clean (48%)

The 5 scenarios where mergiraf fails are both-add-at-same-position and decorator conflicts. Mergiraf works at tree-node level, so when both sides insert at the same tree position it can't distinguish them. Weave treats entities as unordered sets, so two agents adding different functions at the end of a file just get unioned.

Key differences from mergiraf (which was on HN last year, 432pts):

- Entity-level, not tree-node-level. Functions and classes are the merge unit, not AST nodes.

- Inner entity merge: when both sides modify the same class, methods are decomposed and merged independently by name.

- Decorator/annotation bundling: decorators move with the function they annotate through merges.

- Rename detection via AST-normalized structural hashing. - ConGra conflict taxonomy (Text/Syntax/Functional) with resolution hints per conflict.

- MCP server with 15 tools for AI agent coordination (claim entities before editing, detect conflicts, preview merges, dependency/impact analysis).

- 12 languages: TS, TSX, JS, Python, Go, Rust, Java, C, C++, Ruby, C#, Fortran.

It plugs into git as a merge driver, so it works with merge, rebase, and cherry-pick. Setup is brew install ataraxy-labs/tap/weave && weave setup.

This blew up on X. A lot of the interest came from people running multiple Cursor/Claude agents on the same repo and hitting constant false conflicts.

Built in Rust. Entity extraction powered by sem-core (our tree-sitter wrapper). Open source, MIT.

Happy to answer questions about the merge algorithm, the benchmark methodology, or the MCP coordination model
by keeda | 2026-02-16 21:36:04+00:00
The broad point about assumptions is correct, but the solution is even simpler than us having to think of all these things; you can essentially just remind the model to "think carefully" -- without specifying anything more -- and they will reason out better answers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47040530

When coding, I know they can assume too much, and so I encourage the model to ask clarifying questions, and do not let it start any code generation until all its doubts are clarified. Even the free-tier models ask highly relevant questions and when specified, pretty much 1-shot the solutions.

This is still wayyy more efficient than having to specify everything because they make very reasonable assumptions for most lower-level details.
by Bolwin | 2026-02-16 21:36:49+00:00
Well written. My whole life I've always insisted that everything I make, everything with my name on it have my marks on it. My decisions, my idiosyncrasies, my preferences. Whatever it was, essays, presentations, code, drawings. LLMs break that, I can't enforce those marks without breaking their core value proposition.

Those marks do essentially what they claimed to. They prove I did the work. When I use LLM I didn't.

I also don't know how to tread the line between letting an llm do most of the work and still understanding the code base. And it's still an open question whether I will even need to understand it in the future. But if I don't then what is the point of my existence?
by Aurornis | 2026-02-16 21:36:54+00:00
> Intermittent variable rewards, whether produced by design or merely as a byproduct, will induce compulsive behavior,

This is clearly false, as most things in life have intermittent variable rewards.

"will induce compulsive behavior" is so obviously false statement that I don't understand how this is getting upvoted. There are so many things in life that produce variable, intermittent reward without turning everyone who uses them into gambling addicts that this should be obvious.
by appzenstudioo | 2026-02-16 21:37:14+00:00
Hi HN,
I’m an indie Android developer from India. I built a small utility app called WA Status Saver 2026 that lets users download WhatsApp photo and video statuses before they disappear.
The Problem I Noticed
Most status saver apps are overloaded with:
Full-screen interstitial ads
Forced ads before every action
Poor UX
Users tolerate it, but the experience feels frustrating.
My Approach
Instead of maximizing ad impressions, I experimented with:
Fewer interstitial ads
No ad before every download
Focus on faster loading and smoother UX
Keeping app size lightweight
The idea: increase usage and retention instead of short-term ad revenue.
What I Learned
Heavy ads increase short-term revenue but reduce retention.
Lower ad frequency improves session time.
Users leave honest positive reviews when they don’t feel exploited.
Small apps can compete by improving experience, not features.
I’m still experimenting with:
Rewarded ads vs interstitial balance
Retention metrics
Long-term monetization strategy
Would love feedback from the HN community on:
Sustainable ad strategies
Ethical monetization for utility apps
Growth without aggressive ads
Thanks