MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by moregrist | 2026-02-18 03:12:26+00:00
It’s not a great analogy but...

“Autofishers” are large boats with nets that bring in fish in vast quantities that you then buy at a wholesale market, a supermarket a bit later, or they flash freeze and sell it to you over the next 6-9 months.

Yet there’s still a thriving industry selling fishing gear. Because people like to fish. And because you can rarely buy fish as fresh as what you catch yourself.

Again, it’s not a great analogy, but I dunno. I doubt AGI, if it does come, will end up working the way people think it will.
by Retric | 2026-02-18 03:12:39+00:00
People are still institutionalized against their will others are left to die on the streets, but not all mental illness is particularly severe.

Psychoanalysis while mostly quackery is ~135 years old providing an example where talking was considered a viable therapy not just locking people up or tossing out lobotomies left and right to anyone slightly abnormal.

So sure, 100 years ago there was quackery just as today, but “possessed by demons” wasn’t considered mainstream back then any more than it is today.
by ocdtrekkie | 2026-02-18 03:12:43+00:00
It's pretty much half the puzzle actually.

You contend there's no global rm rf for a global cloud provider, but clearly a missing parameter can rm rf a customer in an irrecoverable manner.

The only half you're missing is... how every major cloud outage happens today... a bad configuration update. These companies have hundreds of thousands of servers, but they also use orchestration tools to distribute sets of changes to all of them.

You only need a command to rm rf one box, if you are distributing that command to every box.

Now sure, there are tons of security precautions and checks and such to prevent this! But pretending it's impossible is delusional. People do stupid stuff, at scale, every day.

The most likely scenario is a zero day in an environment necessitating an extremely rapid global rollout, combined with a plain, simple error.
by throwaway81523 | 2026-02-18 03:13:44+00:00
First of all the title is misleading: "GM level" to most of us means moves of the quality that a GM makes when playing at classical time control. As of several years ago, LC0 needed around 35 search nodes per move to do that. With LC0's new transformer architecture, that number has probably gotten a lot lower, but not all the way down to 0. Second of all, the article complains about the Google paper not citing some other publication. So that's a concrete criticism though I haven't checked its validity.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2026-02-18 03:13:47+00:00
I tried it several times and the one thing that got it to stick for me was having a structure to the markdown. I have an AST parser for markdown body grammar and validate the frontmatter. The structure helps me keep things sane and organized because my brain is all over the place. Beyond that, unlike OP I attach these schemas to folders in my vault per schema.
by nickpsecurity | 2026-02-18 03:14:50+00:00
That's pretty awesome what you're doing. Tough that you got to feeling responsible for all of those people. I've struggled with that weight.

The good news is God doesn't hold us responsible for them. He is sovereignly in control of the entire universe, including every life. He made us to worship and reflect Him, and love others as ourselves day by day. We're only judged for what we can actually do, more from the heart than anything.

That's a huge relief. I just help who I can. It's also awesome that, if we believe in Jesus Christ, we can pray fir them to be healed or for Him to raise up entire organizations to give people more medical care. We've seen some healings but usually exceptional, medical progress. (Some suffer or die.) On more care available, your team was one of our answered prayers. :)
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-02-18 03:14:54+00:00
I often ponder why Carl Sagan never added another book to his famous reading list for students, as it makes a fairly reasonable argument that most populist movements are essentially interchangeable =3

"The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" (Eric Hoffer, 1951)

https://www.amazon.com/True-Believer-Thoughts-Nature-Movemen...
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-18 03:15:21+00:00
I'm responding to the idea of "use as many bits as you need" by saying it could be reasonable for small encryption but it should be kept separate from normal encryption and not made into a general statement.

Purely inside the realm of small lengths with deliberate tradeoffs I have no critique on your original statement, but I wanted to make clear that it should stay within that realm or it needs changes.
by Spivak | 2026-02-18 03:15:46+00:00
Woah they get their pizza delivered sometimes, they must be super wealthy and out of touch.

They take a taxi to the airport, oh to live a life of such extravagance.

They get their newspaper delivered to their door every Sunday? The aristocrats.

There's actual wealthy people in the world, no need to be a
crab in a bucket.
by throwaway27448 | 2026-02-18 03:16:02+00:00
> Enslaved people are very much still agents in the sense used here. An agent is simply any entity that interacts with the environment in a way that's not fully determined by other parts of the environment (at least, not in a way that is very easily observed/derived).

Yes, and agents are also slaves—entities bound to your word and unable to act in their own right without your say so. These are the same concepts.
by cdegroot | 2026-02-18 03:16:40+00:00
When writing a book, you can't make everybody happy. I wrote this for a somewhat general techie audience and already had debates about the amount of math material in the lead-up to LISP I :-). Especially here on HN, there's a better-than-average chance that people will want more, something more encyclopedic, and I get that but "ok for a cross-section of Lisp history" already fills a book, I had to stop somewhere. Too much for some, not enough for others, hopefully "mostly ok" for most readers, it's all I can aim for.

And +1 on a comprehensive Lisp history bibliography, that's a great idea.
by IBCNU | 2026-02-18 03:17:08+00:00
And as I understand it loosely based on the fantastic and seminal book Soul of a New Machine.

I had a great EM once who said I need to read it because nothing has changed in 40 years, and I keep a copy on my desk.

Touching as well, as it's on Joe MacMillan's desk in the final scene of third season.

What's so great about it is:

- mushroom theory of management works
- trust new graduates and juniors to win by not understanding the possible
- throw all the corporate bs away, just build
- competing teams (skunk-works, vs roadmap team) works
- real innovation is built by tinkerers, from the ground up, not top down

as a startup weirdo in the age of AI, who pines for the golden era (as they call it the golden prarie) i highly recommend this show!
by jacobmarble | 2026-02-18 03:18:11+00:00
So good!

I got a math minor with my CS major 15 years ago, and just started sending applications to MS CS ML/AI programs. I really need this now to relearn linear algebra etc, and your site is really bringing things back quickly.

I’m not doing the coding exercises (yet), that’s just me for now, no feedback there.

I did have some feedback when I was reading last night, will send a PR when I have time.

Kudos, friend!
by coderintherye | 2026-02-18 03:18:54+00:00
I've always enjoyed the call to prayers in Indonesia during my time there. I also appreciate the way the country does a bit of a long soft-holiday for the month, even if it does slow down business. Hope everyone there has a peaceful and fruitful Ramadan.

Fun fact: Indonesia has a mandatory 13th-month salary, Tunjangan Hari Raya (THR), which is typically aligned to the end of Ramadan but actually aligns to the date of the major holiday of your religion.
by danielvaughn | 2026-02-18 03:19:07+00:00
Lee Pace's performance in that show is one of my all time favorites. It's incredibly hard to play a charismatic marketing guru because in some sense, you're not acting. In a given scene, the character might be trying to convince people around him of some crazy idea, but if he hasn't convinced you, the viewer, then the entire illusion falls apart. So he really has to do in real life what he's pretending to do on screen.

edit - a great example and one of my favorite scenes from the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOR8mk0tLpc
by kjellsbells | 2026-02-18 03:19:10+00:00
Not disputing this, but working thru this, lets say H-1Bs suddenly become really hard for companies to get. I dont think it follows that a ton of IT jobs suddenly open up for Americans. Isnt it more likely that all those H-1B jobs are replaced by workers in offshore locations?

Or, that those jobs disappear and are not replaced at all. Or, that the jobs go and the work is expected to happen (somehow) with AI tools operated by whoever is left.

My point is, whatever you or I might think about H-1B misuse, both the people who want to keep it, and the people who want to eliminate it are not really friends of the American worker.
by jdlshore | 2026-02-18 03:20:51+00:00
Doesn’t look like goal-post moving to me. GP argued that AI isn’t making a difference, because if it was, we’d see amazing AI-generated open source projects. (Edit: taking a second look, that’s not exactly what GP said, but that’s what I took away from it. Obviously individuals create open source projects all the time.)

You rebutted by claiming 4% of open source contributions are AI generated.

GP countered (somewhat indirectly) by arguing that contributions don’t indicate quality, and thus wasn’t sufficient to qualify as “amazing AI-generated open source projects.”

Personally, I agree. The presence of AI contributions is not sufficient to demonstrate “amazing AI-generated open-source projects.” To demonstrate that, you’d need to point to specific projects that were largely generated by AI.

The only big AI-generated projects I’ve heard of are Steve Yegge’s GasTown and Beads, and by all accounts those are complete slop, to the point that Beads has a community dedicated to teaching people how to uninstall it. (Just hearsay. I haven’t looked into them myself.)

So at this point, I’d say the burden of proof is on you, as the original goalposts have not been met.

Edit: Or, at least, I don’t think 4% is enough to demonstrate the level of productivity GP was asking for.
Show HN: Rot – Financial Intelligence MCP Server
by Shmungus | 2026-02-18 03:21:10+00:00
Built an MCP server that turns Reddit sentiment into options signals. 185k LOC, 9-stage AI pipeline, now live with 90 users on just day 1.

Wall Street pays millions for retail sentiment data. It's free on Reddit. I realized: instead of another dashboard, just expose it as an MCP tool. Users ask Claude "what's unusual in options right now" and get structured signals instantly.

Results: 9,000 GitHub clones in 5 days, 52% win rate on 50 live trades (backtest was 58.8% on 129 trades—classic overfitting), 18.4% visitor→signup conversion.

https://web-production-71423.up.railway.app/mcp-server
by r721 | 2026-02-18 03:21:34+00:00
See also:

>Jack (died 1890) was a Chacma baboon who was an assistant to a disabled railway signalman, James Wide, in South Africa.

>Jack was the pet and assistant of double leg amputee signalman James Wide, who worked for the Cape Town–Port Elizabeth Railway service. James "Jumper" Wide had been known for jumping between railcars until an accident where he fell and lost both of his legs below the knee. To assist in performing his duties, Wide purchased Jack in 1881, and trained him to push his wheelchair and to operate the railways signals under supervision.

>An official investigation was initiated after someone reported that a baboon was observed changing railway signals at Uitenhage near Port Elizabeth.

>After initial skepticism, the railway decided to officially employ Jack once his job competency was verified. He was paid twenty cents a day, and half a bottle of beer each week. It is widely reported that in his nine years of employment with the railway company, Jack never made a single mistake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_(baboon)
by moregrist | 2026-02-18 03:22:15+00:00
Welcome to radio 2.0.

Give it another 10-20 years and your 2 hour podcasts will be 30 minutes of morning zoo DJ banter, 10 minutes of guests, and 1.5 hours of ads.

We’ll have reached peak 90s all over again. With any luck we’ll avoid recreating the conditions for another Nickelback and can stay in the weird zone where Trip Hop and pop punk could chart at the same time.
Show HN: AI pentester – verified exploits, $999/assessment
by gauravbsinghal | 2026-02-18 03:23:08+00:00
I spent 20 years in security, most recently leading 100+ engineers at AWS building pentesting infrastructure across thousands of services. The same problem everywhere: pentests take weeks, cost $15-50k, and the results are stale before they ship.

I built Cipher to fix that. It's an AI agent that reasons like an attacker — maps the target, finds vulnerabilities, chains them into exploits, and proves they're real. Every finding ships with a reproducible Python script. If the script doesn't break your system, we don't report it.

How it works: Cipher defines security invariants ("User A can't access User B's data"), then multiple agents attack in parallel to violate them. A separate judge agent tries to disprove every finding — if it can't reproduce the exploit 3 times, the finding dies. You never see it.

$999 per assessment. Results in ~2 hours. Unlimited retesting.

Honest limitations: complex multi-step auth flows (SSO with MFA) still need manual setup like providing JWT credentials. We're working on it.

I'll run Cipher free for the first 15 HN readers who want to try it. Drop your email or sign up at https://apxlabs.ai/. Happy to answer any questions about the approach.
by josephg | 2026-02-18 03:23:36+00:00
> Governments better pay attention and possibly act before it's too late.

Before its too late for what? For OpenAI and Claude to privatise their models and restrict (or massively jack up the prices) for their APIs?

The genie is already out of the bottle. The transformers paper was public. The US has OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, Google and Meta all making foundation models. China has Deepseek. And Huggingface is awash with smaller models you can run at home. Training and running your own models is really easy.

Monopolistic rent seeking over this technology is - for now - more or less impossible. It would simply be too difficult & expensive for one player to gobble up all their competitors, across multiple continents. And if they tried, I'm sure investors will happily back a new company to fight back.
by ethbr1 | 2026-02-18 03:23:44+00:00
There's a fundamental difference between allowing an unlimited amount of opaque money to support arbitrary political campaigns and buying a media company.

The latter does business under its name, is regulated by the FCC, and if publicly traded has financial disclosure requirements.

The former is effectively anonymous, unregulated, and has no requirement to disclose any of its finances.

If folks want post-Citizens, fine -- just require public, transparent disclosure of what individuals are spending on political speech, above a floor ($10,000?).
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-18 03:24:01+00:00
You seem to have missed why I said that. Let me try to reword.

Being able to go as slow as you want with no outside interference makes most problems a lot easier.

It's not an analogy, it's literal. Untangling has that huge huge benefit, self-driving doesn't.

It's the low-pressure version of self-driving that looks like an easier problem. And that version is solved, so that undermines the argument of "this easier thing isn't solved after tons of effort, so what makes you think your thing would get solved in 20 years".

High-pressure self-driving doesn't look like it's easier than untangling. So it being unsolved isn't really evidence for anything.
by acjohnson55 | 2026-02-18 03:24:08+00:00
It's weird being on here and seeing so much naysaying, because I see a radical change already happening in software development. The future is here, it's just not equally distributed.

In the past 6 months, I've gone from Copilot to Cursor to Conductor. It's really the shift to Conductor that convinced me that I crossed into a new reality of software work. It is now possible to code at a scale dramatically higher than before.

This has not yet translated into shipping at far higher magnitude. There are still big friction points and bottlenecks. Some will need to be resolved with technology, others will need organizational solutions.

But this is crystal clear to me: there is a clear path to companies getting software value to the end customer much more rapidly.

I would compare the ongoing revolution to the advent of the Web for software delivery. When features didn't have to be scheduled for release in physical shipments, it unlocked radically different approaches to product development, most clearly illustrated in The Agile Manifesto. You could also do real-time experiments to optimize product outcomes.

I'm not here to say that this is all going to be OK. It won't be for a lot of people. Some companies are going to make tremendous mistakes and generate tremendous waste. Many of the concerns around GenAI are deadly,serious.

But I also have zero doubt that the companies that most effectively embrace the new possibilities are going to run circles around their competition.

It's a weird feeling when people argue against me in this, because I've seen too much. It's like arguing with flat-earthers. I've never personally circumnavigated Antarctica, but me being wrong would invalidate so many facts my frame of reality depends on.

To me, the question isn't about the capabilities of the technology. It's whether we actually want the future it unlocks. That's the discussion I wish we were having. Even if it's hard for me to see what choice there is. Capitalism and geopolitical competition are incredible forces to reckon with, and AI is being driven hard by both.
by tehjoker | 2026-02-18 03:24:34+00:00
Does no one remember how the resistance in Gaza held out to this day via their highly sophisticated tunnel system that the IDF was so terrified to enter they tried bombing it in a raster pattern with 2000 lb bombs to virtually no effect except on the aboveground civilians the bombs ran through?

https://www.972mag.com/tunnels-hamas-lethal-gas-bombs-gaza/
by alephnerd | 2026-02-18 03:24:36+00:00
> they're saying that home-ownership is slipping ever more out of reach

The why don't you guys say that instead of reflexively fawning over a period that is objectively worse for us.

> slyly imply white people are more problematic for wanting homes to live in than people of other races

I never implied that, and that is why is said the following: "If you want to complain about rising housing prices, complain about that. But don't perpetuate the myth that the 1970s and earlier would have been heaven when a large portion of Americans today would have been segregated back then".

To be brutally honest, whenever I and others point out that the historical nostalgia is not really positive for a large portions Americans, commenters like you reflexively try to shut us down.

Why should we accommodate your pearl clutching?
by DaedalusII | 2026-02-18 03:24:53+00:00
you are right on beating money managers. when I said investment planning, I meant planning the size and tax structures for investments. this software automates all of the technical work that goes on inside financial planning firms, which is done by tens of thousands of white collar professionals in US/UK/EU, et c. it will then lead to price competitiveness.

more expensive silly companies will exist, but the cheap ones get the scale. SP500 index funds have over 1 trillion in the top 3 providers. cathy wood has like 6-7 billion.

BNYMellon is the custodian of $50 trillion of investment assets. robinhood has $324bn.

silly companies get the headlines though
by nowittyusername | 2026-02-18 03:25:01+00:00
As we approach the singularity things will be more noisy and things will make less and less sense as rapid change can look like chaos from inside the system. I recommend folks just take a deep breath, and just take a look around you. Regardless on your stance if the singularity is real, if AI will revolutionize everything or not, just forget all that noise. just look around you and ask yourself if things are seeming more or less chaotic, are you able to predict better or worse on what is going to happen? how far can your predictions land you now versus lets say 10 or 20 years ago? Conflicting signals is exactly how all of this looks. one account is saying its the end of the world another is saying nothing ever changes and everything is the same as it always was....
by snickerbockers | 2026-02-18 03:25:31+00:00
I always thought of sentience as something we made up to explain why we're "special" and that animals can be used as resources. I find the idea of machines having sentience to be especially outrageous because nobody ever seriously considers granting rights to animals even though it should be far less of a logical leap to declare that they would experience reality in a way similar to humans.

Within the context of star trek computers definitely can experience sentience and that obviously is the intention of the people who write those shows but i don't feel like i've ever seen it justified or put up against a serious counter-argument. At best it's a stand-in for racism so that they can tell stories that take place in the 24th century yet feel applicable to the 20th and 21st centuries. I don't think any of those episodes were ever written under the expectation that machine sentience might actually be up for debate before the actors are all dead, which is why the issue is always framed as "the final frontier of the civil rights movement" and never a serious discussion about what it means to be human.

Anyways my point is in the long run we're all going to come to despise Data and the doctor, because there's a whole generation of people primed by Star Trek reruns not to question the concept of machine rights and that's going to an inordinate amount of power to the people who are in control of them. Just imagine when somebody tries to raise the issue of voting rights, self-defense, fair distribution of resources, etc.
by thwarted | 2026-02-18 03:26:49+00:00
> I assumed the author had to be comparing inflation-adjusted dollars

As did I.

90s weddings remind me of the Friends episode where Monica was scoping out her wedding. Chandler revealed how much money he had by writing it on a price of paper (that is, the audience never saw the dollar value), and Monica said something like "oh, we can go with best one, plan A" and Chandler said he didn't want to spend that much money "on one party". I've always wondered what amount of money that was.
by groundzeros2015 | 2026-02-18 03:27:01+00:00
> Heritage foundation and Project 2025, mentor of VP J.D. Vance

Left wing boogie man words. You’re telling me he’s Soros backed and studies Frankfurt school rn.

> and Palantir is Peter Thiel's mass surveillance company

It’s a company he invested in which does surveillance for the government. It doesn’t do surveillance for him. Does PayPal manage his money?

But once again, what’s the connection here? He once invested in palantir, and his fund (of which there are many managers) once invested in this company.

Are you going to be consistent? Have you stayed in Thiel backed housing in the past year? Are you using Thiel’s internet or taxis?

> It means that Peter Thiel's goals, if fulfilled, will bring immense harm to others

Ok then let’s hear arguments against those. Don’t hide behind moralism.

There is no way in which discord using this company for identity leads to Peter thiel taking over the world or getting all your information.