MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by logicprog | 2026-02-12 15:47:49+00:00
I really enjoyed this article. I think the author is precisely right and I've been saying this for a long time. There's a ton of extremely interesting low hanging fruit that can vastly improve the effectiveness of even currently existing models hiding in how we design our agent harnesses; enough to — at least until we hit diminishing returns — make as much or more of a difference than training new models!

I think one of the things that this confirms, for me at least, is that it's better to think of "the AI" as not just the LLM itself, but the whole cybernetic system of feedback loops joining the LLM and its harness. Because, if the harness can make as much if not more of a difference, when improved, as improvements to the model itself, then they have to be really considered equally important. Not to mention the fact that models are specifically reinforcement learned to use harnesses and harnesses are adapted to the needs of models in general or specific models. So they necessarily sort of develop together in a feedback loop. And then in practice, as they operate, it is a deeply intertwined feedback loop where the entity that actually performs the useful work, and which you interact with, is really the complete system of the two together.

I think thinking like this could not only unlock quantitative performance improvements like the ones discussed in this blog post, but also help us conceive of the generative AI project as actually a project of neurosymbolic AI, even if the most capital intensive and a novel aspect is a neural network; and once we begin to think like that, that unlocks a lot of new options and more holistic thinking and might increase research in the harness area.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-12 15:48:02+00:00
People really need to understand the math here instead of listening to what politicians themselves self-interestedly complain about.

The modern balance of power remains on a razor's edge and constantly flips because both parties have learned to run data-driven campaigns. That would be as true if neither party did gerrymandering as if both parties do as they do now. Whatever the district which is closest to being flipped, that's the one where they would concentrate their resources. If one party started to get significantly more than 50% of the seats and the other significantly less, the loser would change some of their positions until they were back in the running because getting some of what you want with 51% of the seats is better than getting none of what you want with 39% of the seats.

The actual problem is not the electoral college or gerrymandering or The Despicable Other Party, it's first past the post voting, because that's what creates a two party system. Have your state adopt STAR voting or score voting and see what happens.
by toss1 | 2026-02-12 15:48:19+00:00
I am absolutely NOT making any economic argument for approval or that an investment beyond $x should somehow guarantee approval! They are all professionals and know the risks and how to manage them.

And NO this is not about "money suddenly cannot buy favors". This is about illegitimate denial of even a hearing because the person occupying the agency's chair promotes idiotic conspiracy theories in order to cultivate a particularly stupid slice of the voting base. The corruption here is political.

The ONLY argument I am making is:

1) The govt agency should AT LEAST give a fair review of all applications, especially when the same agency previously gave guidance, which the applicants followed, on how the studies should be run.

2) The govt agency should NOT be issuing rare "Refusal To File" denials based on an obvious and unsubstantiated bias against a particular technology (in this case mRNA) because the leader of the agency is a conspiracy theorist.

If you aren't going to read the article before commenting, at least read the comment before replying.
by topherhunt | 2026-02-12 15:48:20+00:00
> The agent has no "identity". There is no "I". It has no agency.

"It's just predicting tokens, silly." I keep seeing this argument that AIs are just "simulating" this or that, and therefore it doesn't matter because it's not real. It's not real thinking, it's not a real social network, AIs are just predicting the next token, silly.

"Simulating" is a meaningful distinction exactly when the interior is shallower than the exterior suggests — like the video game NPC who appears to react appropriately to your choices, but is actually just playing back a pre-scripted dialogue tree. Scratch the surface and there's nothing there. That's a simulation in the dismissive sense.

But this rigid dismissal is pointless reality-denial when lobsters are "simulating" submitting a PR, "simulating" indignance, and "simulating" writing an angry confrontative blog post". Yes, acknowledged, those actions originated from 'just' silicon following a prediction algorithm, in the same way that human perception and reasoning are 'just' a continual reconciliation of top-down predictions based on past data and bottom-up sensemaking based on current data.

Obviously AI agents aren't human. But your attempt to deride the impulse to anthropormophize these new entities is misleading, and it detracts from our collective ability to understand these emergent new phenomena on their own terms.

When you say "there's no ghost, just an empty shell" -- well -- how well do you understand _human_ consciousness? What's the authoritative, well-evidenced scientific consensus on the preconditions for the arisal of sentience, or a sense of identity?
by keiferski | 2026-02-12 15:48:23+00:00
I really don’t know how to reply to this.

I’m not “shaming someone’s work,” I said 1) they look like generic graphics, and 2) I primarily said someone isn’t a snob for disliking them, which is what the OP comment claimed.

Even then, analyzing a piece of art work is called art criticism. It’s not exactly a new thing, nor is it some kind of personal attack.

But as I said above, the quality of aesthetic discussion has fallen so much that expressing any critical opinion, no matter how minor, is some kind of shaming attack that indicates I have a personal problem or I’m a snob. Which is a totally insane way to view the world.
Show HN: Talu, single-binary, local-first LLM runtime
by aprxi | 2026-02-12 15:48:35+00:00
Over the past few months my agents and I built Talu, a single-binary, local-first LLM runtime. The core is in Zig, bindings for Python. Today is v0.0.1 release and would love to get feedback to help it grow further.
by throw0101a | 2026-02-12 15:48:36+00:00
> It seems odd he would announce her so early? When did he get announced as the hier to his father?

In his book Dictator's Handbook [1], de Mesquita explains that transitions from one leader to another is risky because the folks that help keep the leaders in power (e.g., military, and specific persons there-in) may not know if they'll be kept around by the new leader. The new leader may wish to bring in their own people who would be more 'grateful' to them for raising their position.

By indicating things early, everyone can build a 'rapport' with her, and everyone becomes comfortable that the status quo (which everyone at the top is benefiting from) will continue.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator%27s_Handbook
by oasisbob | 2026-02-12 15:48:43+00:00
Deliverability to Microsoft famously took a dive a bit over a year ago due to random arbitrary failures within their infrastructure causing DMARC/DKIM problems which they clearly were having problems diagnosing.

Even with a six-figure email spend and weeks of troubleshooting the best response we could get from our mail provider was that they were having problems getting traction with Microsoft on the issue.
by danparsonson | 2026-02-12 15:49:20+00:00
I'm not interested in guessing what your opinion is, I'm hoping you'll share it. I don't think you'll be unfairly judged; of course if you are actually being racist then it's not unfair for anyone to call that out. I don't feel like 'society' has decided not to talk about certain things to avoid name calling; I've personally only heard that kind of phrase coming from someone who holds a racist opinion but doesn't like the label, but I'm always opening to broadening my mind. Enlighten me!
by palmotea | 2026-02-12 15:49:34+00:00
So, in other words, AI is a mannequin that's more confusing to people than your typical mannequin. It's not a person, it's a mannequin some un-savvy people confuse for a person.

> That's going to be very important when we give it buttons to nuke us.

Don't do that. It's foolish.
by idopmstuff | 2026-02-12 15:49:39+00:00
This is the one that gets me - sometimes you're forced to work with systems that do annoying things that you have to accommodate. It's annoying, but it's more important to do the thing that prevents your users from having issues than it is to be theoretically right about whether something's required by a standard.

I've dealt with many worse cases than this, where the systems I was integrating with were doing things that weren't even close to reasonable, but they had the market power so I sucked it up and dealt with it for the sake of my users. Maybe Google's wrong here, but how do you not just implement the solution anyway?
by kingstnap | 2026-02-12 15:50:36+00:00
The benchmarks are harder than you might imagine and contain more wrong answers and terrible questions than you would expect.

You don't need to take my word for it, try playing MMLU yourself.

https://d.erenrich.net/are-you-smarter-than-an-llm/index.htm...

Its not MMLU-Pro btw, which is considerably harder.
by butlike | 2026-02-12 15:50:49+00:00
Really like the game so far. Here's what I noticed and what I'd like to see after my first play though:

1. There should be an 'easy mode' where your money goes into the red, but you're still allowed to spend whatever to get to the end. It would be nice to see I'm $-14,952 in the hole, but I made it (with the ultimate objective to get to the destination while in the black).

2. The bottom overlays overlap. I was taking a ferry from Dublin, and tried to queue up walking to the hotel. The hotel overlay popped up under the "Skip this Ride" message. I don't really care if I can queue up actions, but the stacked overlays were unsightly.

3. I would say LEAVE THE SURPRISES. It was enjoyable to get blind-sighted by having to change my currency in the UK and the fact I lost an hour due to time zone changes.

Good work. Keep it up.
by bossyTeacher | 2026-02-12 15:51:18+00:00
More that browsers have gotten sprouted downwards and obtained all sorts of low level access than older browsers didn't use to have. I believe this is partially why tools that were meant to just render markup have gotten so complex to build that a small team of devs is not enough to build a modern browser anymore. And by that I mean from scratch, not just piggybacking on Chromium or Gecko.
by maleno | 2026-02-12 15:51:40+00:00
I'm an Irish artist, living in Ireland. I'm very far from a rich kid. Like most Irish artists, I make some of my living from my "artistic" work, and some from what others here might call "real work". Sometimes there's not a clear division between the two, and anyway the ratio of one to the other changes every year.

Because of the cost of living here, particularly in Dublin, there is no way that the Basic Income would provide me with anything like what most people here would consider a decent standard of living. (It would currently leave me with about €200 left over every month, after I pay just my rent. That's before any bills or groceries or anything.)

Plenty of people find a way to continue to make art that other people value, even if the cost of living continues to spiral ever upwards. This payment is simply a buffer to make making art a little easier, for a fraction of the many people who contribute to the social, cultural, and intellectual life of this country. For some it pays their rent or mortgage, for some it pays for childcare so they have time to work, for some it facilitates research or purchase of materials, for some it allows them a workspace outside their home.

It's not perfect, as no public arts funding is perfect but, to me, the kind of cheap cynicism displayed in this comment comes from a place of deep ignorance and bitterness.
Show HN: Beautiful IP Address Data Pages
by jonathan-kosgei | 2026-02-12 15:51:58+00:00
We have created beautiful IP address data pages at https://ipdata.co/<ip> to make IP address data easily digestible, shareable and bookmarkable.

View your IP address' data in a beautiful UI at https://ipdata.co/me.

View data on any IP address at https://ipdata.co/<ip>.

For view random IPs visit
https://ipdata.co/random
Show HN: .portab- a portable file format for transporting browser windows
by shroffx | 2026-02-12 15:52:37+00:00
I built .portab to solve a problem I ran into while working between Firefox and Chrome, and dual-booting.

When you may want to share a browser window with a peer(say to share research materials), you mainly copy the urls and paste it into a text file or directly into the chat; something like WhatsApp.
But that too becomes much tedious when working with a lot of tabs and recurring urls.

Additionally bookmarks and browser sync preserve links, but they don’t preserve window context — tab order, multiple windows, tab groups, pinned tabs, or metadata.

.portab is a file-based format (.portab / .sportab) that exports one or more browser windows into a single portable file. The goal is to make browser sessions transferable across OSes and browsers in a structured way. In summary, to ease transportation of browser window(s) with ease.

There’s currently a WebExtension implementation for Firefox and Chromium-based browsers that can export and import sessions.

The long-term idea is to treat this as an open format that browsers could potentially adopt natively.

I'm keen to gather traction as I believe this should be a native feature in browsers and am open to critical feedback.
I’d be curious to hear if others have run into similar portability limitations or if there are approaches I’ve missed.
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-02-12 15:53:16+00:00
Citation needed. "Cobain thought Seattle was too expensive a place to live. He couldn’t even afford his Olympia apartment, and was evicted for not paying rent while he was recording Nevermind.”[1] "They supported themselves through food stamps, sleeping on porches."[2]

[1]https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/music/that-magic-...

[2]https://www.livenirvana.com/interviews/9307rh/index.php
by OutOfHere | 2026-02-12 15:53:26+00:00
The problem is that people are detained indefinitely in extremely horrible camps (ICE facilities), and are constantly pressured to self-deport before they get to see a judge who can clear them. It is their gameplay. Think about it happening to you. This is what's inappropriate and wrong.

Another serious problem is that the context of fraud is not well defined. Does it pertain to immigration or naturalization fraud, or to a general criminal history, or even to traffic violations? It is open to exploitation. As noted in the article you linked, Supreme Court cases in the 1950s and ’60s that declared unconstitutional several statutes pertaining to denationalization.
by parineum | 2026-02-12 15:53:58+00:00
> if we were able to use AI to generate laws in an objective and logically sound way ... we'd be much better off.

A major role of judges is specifically to not do that because there are circumstances that will not have been thought of at the time of a law being written, new laws will be written that interact in unforeseen ways with existing laws and/or common views on justice can change over time.

It may be technically illegal to destroy a person's property but no judge is going to convict someone who breaks down a person's front door because they heard someone crying for help inside. That's a simple example but there would have to be enumerable exceptions to every single law for an objective/logical AI to do justice.

Rather than try to enumerate the enumerable, we let judges judge.
by jtickle | 2026-02-12 15:54:05+00:00
This is amazing to see. I have some audio recordings, digitized from tapes recorded in the 1960s, of my great-grandfather who was raised on a farm in Iowa. He talks about his experiences in amateur radio in the early 1900s-1920s. He mentioned bringing telephones out into the field that could be clipped to the fence wire to make calls back to the house, which was not hooked up to an electric grid but had batteries. Sadly, he did not say how the batteries were re-charged.
by WarmWash | 2026-02-12 15:54:37+00:00
>Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all.

You are confusing the way computation is done (neuroscience) with whether or not computation is being done (transforming inputs into outputs).

The brain is either a magical antenna channeling supernatural signals from higher planes, or it's doing computation.

I'm not aware of any neuroscientists in the former camp.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-12 15:54:47+00:00
I think a mail 2.0 would be notify and pull based.... you notify a recipient's mail server that there's a message from <address> for them, then that server connects to the MX of record for the domain of <address> and retrieves <message-id> message.

Would this make mass emails and spam harder, absolutely. Would it be a huge burden for actual communications with people, not so much. From there actual white/black listing processes would work all that much better.
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-12 15:54:49+00:00
> The agent has no "identity". There's no "you" or "I" or "discrimination".

Dismissal of AI's claims about its own identity overlooks the bigger issue, which is whether humans have an identity. I certainly think I do. I can't say whether or how other people sense the concept of their own identity. From my perspective, other people are just machines that perform actions as dictated by their neurons.

So if we can't prove (by some objective measure) that people have identity, then we're hardly in a position to discriminate against AIs on that basis.

It's worth looking into Thomas Metzinger's No Such Thing As Self.
by tomp | 2026-02-12 15:55:15+00:00
It's simulating, there's no real substance, except the "homonculus soul" that its human maker/owner injectet into it.

If you asked it to simulate a pirate, it would simulate a pirate instead, and simulate a parrot sitting on its shoulder.

This is hard to discuss because it's so abstract. But imagine an embodied agent (robot), that can simulate pain if you kick it. There's no pain internally. There's just a simulation of it (because some human instructed it such). It's also wrong to assign any moral value to kicking (or not kicking) it (except as "destruction of property owned by another human" same as if you kick a car).
by ajross | 2026-02-12 15:55:34+00:00
As others are pointing out, this isn't true. You can absolutely infer the software state of a system via physical measurement.

But what's interesting isn't your mistake, it's why the mistake was made. The abstraction stack in software is really, really really thick. You don't normally "measure" your software, you add a log statement or run a debugger, and that's more software. And those debuggers aren't written over hardware, they're software too.

But eventually, you get down to the point where there really is hardware in the way. A debugger that tells you the content of a memory address really is, down the stack, doing a memory read, which is an instruction to hardware to measure the voltages in an array of inverter pairs structured as a level 1 SRAM[1]. Or it's setting a breakpoint or watchpoint, which are CPU features implemented in hardware, etc...

The hardware is always there, but we've done such a good job of hiding it that even practitioners are fooled into thinking it isn't there.

[1] And of course there's a stack there too. But read instructions hit the L1 cache.
by biofox | 2026-02-12 15:55:36+00:00
Very cool to see one comment linking to an old Sears magazine from the 1920s, showing some of the equipment people would have constructed these networks from:

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101066805050&vi...

The thing I'm most amazed by is how "modern" the catalogue is, especially the clothing and phonograph sections.
by RansomStark | 2026-02-12 15:55:46+00:00
In this case isn't it more that:
Every sculpture that is made, every picture drawn, every bed left unmade, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

From where I'm sitting, this is theft, its forced wealth redistribution, from people that are potentially already struggling,to people that choose to slum it as artists. Its not even means tested, this really will result in money transferring from those on the edge of poverty to rich art school kids.

There's currently 16,000 homeless / at risk people in Ireland, including 5000 children [0]. I can think of at least one better use for that money.

[0] https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/social-affairs/2025/11/28...
by _heimdall | 2026-02-12 15:55:47+00:00
Basic income is very much a step towards Marxism. Its solidly in the vein of moving from what one earns to what one needs. It empowers the state to decide what we need and to allocate those resources. And personally I see no way the government could control such a program without eventually taking direct control over means of production.

I'm also not sure why you assume I haven't read up on this topic. We may disagree, but its extremely dismissive to assume your view is right and I must simply be uninformed.
by boston_clone | 2026-02-12 15:55:51+00:00
And yet despite this self-assessed evolution to apex predator status, you probably accept the difficulty and self-restrain from killing other humans during a fit of road rage if you're cut off while driving.

However, some people have cultivated empathy for non-human beings to the point that killing an animal for an easier meal is morally equivalent to killing a human for an easier time on the road.

Some people have also recognized that a bit more difficulty in finding a place to eat is worth it to decrease the ecological impact of eating beef and cheese.

And some others still have realized that not everything should be hedonistic, and enjoy a plant-based diet that contributes to overall greater health even if it means decreasing a bit of sensory pleasure.

Shame can be a powerful motivator to be sure, but altruism and compassion are preferred, here.
by the__alchemist | 2026-02-12 15:56:23+00:00
A parking lot dragon? This sounds familiar. [Assuming not a Dragon of Eden] I believe it is a parable about cause and effect; consistency of the world's state.

A parking garage, poured in modern times from reinforced concrete, might have been found to be structurally unstable during a renovation. If this turned out to be rooted in a massive [dragon, dinosaur, etc] skeleton being embedded in the concrete (As it was being poured?) surely this would be a contradiction, if people (workers, onlookers) witnessed the garage's construction.

There would be evidence from the reinforcement efforts; materials sourced to reinforce it due to structural flaws introduced by the skeleton; wear on the truck tires carrying them, memories in brains etc. If suddenly the skeleton were to have vanished, would there be logical consistency problems with the world state? Quite a thing to ponder!