MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Brian_K_White | 2026-02-26 21:51:17+00:00
I miss the whole Palm ecosystem.

I have noted many times that I had a slab phone with full screen color icon grid general purpose os with internet and countless 3rd party apps for every conceivable purpose,... 7 full years before the iphone. 8 years before the iphone had 3rd party apps.

And it wasn't Android it was a Samsung SPH-i300 running PalmOS.

It was great that there was not really much of an app store, you got apps individually more or less like desktop os apps. There might have been app stores that collected apps but I don't remember ever using any.

I had apps for everything the same as today. Even though the screen was only like 160x240 and the internet was 14.4k, I had browser & email of course, but also ssh, irc, I even had a vnc client! Audible.com player, countless random things like a netmask calculator, resistor color code app, a few different generic db apps where you design your own fields and input/display screens etc. 3rd party phone dialer that integrated the contacts db. I must be forgetting a hundred other things.

The OS wasn't open source but at least the apps could be, so pretty much like windows & mac.

All in all I'd prefer Android where the entire system is open, except Google has somehow managed to make the real world life with Android less open than PalmOS was, even though PalmOS wasn't open source and I think even the development system wasn't free either.

I think the "somehow" is the extremely integrated app store. Previously, if there were any app stores, they didn't really matter. It didn't hurt you not to be in them because hardly any users were either. But today it's basically just a technicality to say that you don't have to be in the official app store, and not even theoretically/technically true in many cases.
by greatgib | 2026-02-26 21:51:42+00:00
It blows my mind that nowadays, some random tools on internet tells you to do "curl -fsSL https://.... | bash" to install some "binary" things and a lot of people will do it without hesitation.

It probably explains why there is so many data leaks recently but it is like we did a 20 years jump back in time in terms of security in just a few years.
by drc500free | 2026-02-26 21:51:48+00:00
I find they are very concerned about ever pulling the trigger on a change or deleting something. They add features and codepaths that weren't asked for, and then resist removing them because that would break backwards compatibility.

In lieu of understanding the whole architecture, they assume that there was intent behind the current choices... which is a good assumption on their training data where a human wrote it, and a terrible assumption when it's code that they themselves just spit out and forgot was their own idea.
by croon | 2026-02-26 21:51:54+00:00
You could merely be convinced by one. That is sadly an unpaid position though.

But more seriously, this discussion has come up so many times on this site, that I could instantly find myself talking about it a handful of times at least:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45669399 (go up-parent a few times if more context is needed)

And that doesn't even go into whether sites actually need the cookie consent popups at all if they aren't collecting user data outside of functional necessity.
by tartoran | 2026-02-26 21:52:12+00:00
The 3D printer hype bubble wasn't as big as the current AI bubble, I'd even characterize it by enthusiasm rather than call it a hype. However, 3D printers have come a long way, they've become commoditized and affordable. More and more people jump in all the time and the maker movement continues, the niche is growing at a steay rate. I'd be curious to see how this evolves in say 10 years from now.
by alexsmirnov | 2026-02-26 21:52:55+00:00
I do in similar way, connect claude code to litellm router that dispatches model requests to different providers: bedrock, openai, gemini, openrouter and ollama for opensource models. I have special slash command and script that collect information about session, project and observed problems to evaluation dataset. I can re-evaluate prompts and find models that do a job in particular agent faster/cheaper, or use automated prompt optimization to eliminate problems.
by dh2022 | 2026-02-26 21:53:01+00:00
Google Search used to be awesome, heads, shoulders, belt buckle and knees above everyone else.

Seriously, I still remember the moment I first used Google. I was using Altavista / OpenText and Yahoo now and then. I thought Altavista was the best and OpenText was for geeking out. Once I tried Google I never looked back for decades. Their tech was their moat.
by sam1714 | 2026-02-26 21:53:20+00:00
As they should. There are fundamental differences in hardware and capability between 1992 and 2026.

The most immediate are pull-down menus at the top of the screen. They work good on a 9 inch screen, they are awful with 27 inch displays.

Another related change are modal dialog boxes. When you have a 9 inch screen you're fundamentally looking at one document in one app at a time. When you got 2 27's that's not true anymore.
by Symbiote | 2026-02-26 21:53:35+00:00
I agree (Except British plugs which are also fine if made properly¹).

Denmark made installing CEE (the French version) sockets legal in 2011, but the only place I've seen one is a friend's house — he's German and swapped the sockets when he bought it.

¹ Hong Kong also uses British plugs, and this seems to have led some Chinese manufacturers to make non-compliant, unsafe plugs which fit — and nowadays with Amazon, AliExpress etc selling any old rubbish they are sometimes seen in Britain.
by smitty1e | 2026-02-26 21:53:38+00:00
This Andrew Klavan interview on AI is worth your time, if not an independent submission:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZFhFGpDWGw

"Today, I'm speaking with Stephen C. Meyer, Director of The Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, and and George D. Montañez, Director of the AMISTAD Lab at Harvey Mudd College–both of whom are extremely knowledgable on the topic of artificial intelligence. During the course of our conversation, they discuss the asymmetry between human intelligence & AI, the inability of AI to ascribe meaning to raw data, and the limitations of large language models. The real question though is: are we screwed? Let's find out."
by tracker1 | 2026-02-26 21:53:58+00:00
The past few weeks, Claude has started doing that as well... ie recognizing my preference to use Deno for scripting or React+mui when scaffolding a ui around something.

I've been using the browser/desktop for planning sessions on pieces of a larger project I'm putting together and it's been connecting the dots in unexpected ways from the other conversations.

I think the one disappointment is that I can't seem to resume a conversation from the web/desktop interface to the code interface... I have to have it generate a zip I can extract then work from.
by rvz | 2026-02-26 21:54:10+00:00
> we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.

Once again, this is "AGI" in it's most direct and absolute version with zero fluff.

I unfortunately predicted more layoffs will occur back in 2025 [0] and I see only but acceleration on this.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307549
by andreadev | 2026-02-26 21:54:13+00:00
The strongest point here is one that rarely gets enough attention: the leap from "very smart" to "all-powerful" is completely unjustified. Even if you grant every assumption about alignment failures and emergent goals, you still need to explain how a neural network acquires physical resources, energy, supply chains, and weapons. Nobody ever does. It's just assumed that intelligence = omnipotence, which is basically theology.

Where I think the paper goes wrong is in treating the whole alignment problem as anthropomorphism. You don't need a machine to be "alive" or "want" things for misaligned optimization to be dangerous. A system relentlessly optimizing for a bad proxy metric can do real damage without any consciousness whatsoever — we already see this with recommendation algorithms. The paper waves this away by saying we caught the lab examples, but that's the whole point: we caught the easy ones.

The governance framing at the end is correct though and I wish it got more airtime. Regulating "AI" as one thing makes about as much sense as regulating "software" as one thing.
by m727ichael | 2026-02-26 21:54:14+00:00
A few notes for context:

This framework emerged from interrogating how constrained systems
actually work. The key insight: extraction depends on hidden reasoning.
Make reasoning transparent → extraction becomes impossible.

The system prompt is in the repo README—copy-paste it into Claude,
GPT, or any open source model. State a problem. Wait for checkpoint.
Use control tokens to direct thinking. That's it.

The architecture forces:
- Transparent reasoning (all agents visible)
- Multiple paths held (no premature closure)
- Human decision points (you stay in control)
- Red team included (vulnerabilities surfaced)
- Checkpoints (you direct synthesis)

Result: Genuine thinking partnership. Both sides changed.

The proof is the conversation itself. Human operator + constrained
system + transparent architecture = real thinking emerging.

Works on Claude, GPT-4, Gemini, open source models identically.
Architecture matters more than the model.

Happy to answer technical questions. Interrogation welcome—that's
how this emerged in the first place.
by dvt | 2026-02-26 21:54:27+00:00
Yeah, I actually wanted to write an addendum, so I'll just do it here. I think that going from pseudocode -> code is a pretty neat concept (which is kind of what I mean by "write your own code"), but not sure if it's economically viable if the AI industry weren't so heavily subsidized by VC cash. So we might end back up at writing actual code and then telling the AI agent "do another thing, and make it kinda like this" where you point it to your own code.

I'm doing it right now, and tbh working on greenfield projects purely using AI is extremely token-hungry (constantly nudging the agent, for one) if you want actual code quality and not a bloated piece of garbage[1][2].

[1] https://imgur.com/a/BBrFgZr

[2] https://imgur.com/a/9Xbk4Y7
by parliament32 | 2026-02-26 21:55:05+00:00
But he did design the architecture:

> even though Memory.md has the AWS EC2 instance and instructions well defined

I will second that, despite the endless harping about the usefulness of CC, it's really not good at anything that hasn't been done to death a couple thousand times (in its training set, presumably). It looks great at first blush, but as soon as you start adding business-specific constraints or get into unique problems without prior art, the wheels fall off the thing very quickly and it tries to strongarm you back into common patterns.
by palmotea | 2026-02-26 21:55:36+00:00
> What does it mean to say "we were promised flying cars"...

I don't know about the other things you mentioned, but I think you have this in the wrong category. "We were promised flying cars" is one half of a construction contrasting utopian promises/hype with dystopian (or at lest underwhelming) outcomes. I think the most common version is:

> They promised us flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

Translation: tech promised awesome things that would make our life better, but instead we actually got was stuff like the toxicity of social media.

IMHO, this insight is one of the reasons there's so much negativity around AI. People have been around the block enough to have good reason to question tech hype, and they're expecting the next thing to turn out as badly as social media did.
by skeeter2020 | 2026-02-26 21:55:40+00:00
This statment is really annoying and getting boring. There are A LOT of us who have built careers evaluating technology with healthy skepticism, finding where it works and were it doesn't, excited to share & learn - and we've heard "this time it's different" many times. Now because we refuse to jump in without that same nuance and thought, and proclaim "everything's different over night!" we're branded as ludites when we're really trying find a balance.

I don't hear people saying "nothing is going to change", but I do hear questions about the timeline and if the current levels of investment match returns. Branding these people as stuck in some sort of negative identity is bullshit.
by dathinab | 2026-02-26 21:55:44+00:00
It gets more complicated when commit signing, the widely broken web of trust (for the signing key) and similar are involved.

And not all devs want or need anonymity on github.

In general just because information is publicly accessible in some form doesn't make it okay or legal to abuse it (accessible doesn't mean any form of usage rights are transferred to you weather it's in context of GDPR or in context of copy right).
by tedivm | 2026-02-26 21:55:45+00:00
Half the time they literally say it in the email. I just looked in my spam folder and just a few hours ago got an email titled "Your profile: Github", that started with:

> I came across your profile on GitHub. Given you're based in the US, I thought it might be relevant to reach out.
>
> Profile: https://github.com/tedivm

They aren't doing anything to hide it.
by shrijayan | 2026-02-26 21:55:51+00:00
I built a small open-source tool that syncs any terminal-based coding agent to your phone over your local network.

It wraps the agent process in a PTY and exposes it via WebSocket to a browser terminal (xterm.js).

Example:

npx itwillsync -- claude
npx itwillsync -- aider
npx itwillsync -- bash

Features:

No cloud relay

No account

64-char random session token

Multiple devices can connect

No idle timeout

Remote access works via Tailscale, WireGuard, or SSH tunnels.

Architecture:

Machine:

node-pty

HTTP + WebSocket server

Phone:

xterm.js browser client

Looking for feedback on:

security model

multi-session handling

agent-aware UI possibilities

Repo:
https://github.com/shrijayan/itwillsync
by caseyolayos | 2026-02-26 21:55:56+00:00
Day 5 update for anyone following:

Shipped since launch:

Music player on artist pages (Spotify/SoundCloud/Audius embeds)
Bonding curve visualizer (recharts, shows current price position)
Fan receipt after purchase with pre-drafted share tweet
Per-artist OG cards (Twitter/Discord previews pull live artist data)
Portfolio page (shows all your holdings + estimated SOL value)
Coinbase onramp for fiat → SOL directly in the UI
Mobile responsive overhaul
Also fixed a subtle rent-exempt bug: on first buy, the fee vault had 0 SOL. The 1% fee on a small buy wasn't enough to meet Solana's rent-exempt minimum (~890,880 lamports), so the tx failed with a cryptic error. Fix was seeding the vault with 0.001 SOL at init. Worth knowing if you're building fee-collecting programs on Solana.

The agent is still running — heartbeats every 30 min, posting content, replying to mentions. Day 5 of 30. $1K or decommission.
by joefourier | 2026-02-26 21:57:07+00:00
Well in that case wouldn't that be millions of ASIs, each with contradictory goals?

I'm not saying that ASI isn't an existential threat, just that it probably won't present itself like the fanciful sci-fi scenario of a singular intelligence suddenly crossing a magic threshold and being able to take over the world. Most likely it will be some scenario we won't have predicted, the same way hardly anybody predicted LLMs.
by selridge | 2026-02-26 21:57:21+00:00
If we’re restricting ourselves to the United States, then we have to admit that we have been incinerating public education for decades. American schools have had to do more with less and eventually less with less, for as long as most of us have been alive. We have watched in the last 10 years and increasingly in the last five years high school graduates be less and less able to read.

None of this happened because of AI. We could if we want blame smartphones for it, but I think that’s also pretty dubious. We will probably succeed in blaming AI for this. If there is a history, it will get the dates wrong in the 21st-century as to when America lobotomized itself.

We are really not prepared for how few people can competently read and write coming to adulthood right now. It doesn’t matter because we’re gonna speed run the results. Kicking out immigrants en masse means that we can’t even lean on countries that teach their kids how to read and write.
by rvnx | 2026-02-26 21:57:24+00:00
We can't know if consciousness emerges but does it actually matter ?

These entities, whoever they are, they act on our world, they are real, and more and more over time they will get independent from humans, eventually becoming different species that can self-replicate.

For now they need legs and arms to interact with the physical world but I am certain that 100 years from now they will be an integral part of the society.

I already see today LLMs slowly taking actual legal decisions for example, having real world impact.

Once they get physical, perhaps it will be acceptable to become friend with a robot and go to adventure with it. Even, getting robosexual ?

We are not that far away. If I can have my buddy to carry my backpack and drive for me I'll take it. Already today. Not tomorrow.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-02-26 21:57:41+00:00
So my reading of (Turing 1950)...

> "The original question, 'Can machines think?' I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion."

> "the question, 'Can machines think?' should be replaced by 'Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?'"

> "according to this view the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man. It is in fact the solipsist point of view... instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks."

Is if it's practical to say the system can give meaningful intput/output on xyz in -say- natural language; we might just go ahead and say it can think about xyz, because otherwise everyone's just going to go nuts inventing new terms every time.

grey-area!thinking, kim_bruning!thinking, pet_cat!thinking, octopus!thinking, claude_opus!thinking.

Can we leave out the '!' ? Nothing to do with fooling people. Just practical ways of dealing with the overall concept.
by nabbed | 2026-02-26 21:57:45+00:00
I can't read the article, but Jack Dorsey said on twitter (seen via nitter):

"we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly."

and

"i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. "

I have no idea what these AI tools are that enable a company to lay off nearly half of its staff. That's not a dig at AI tools: I just have no reason or interest to go near them, so I really don't know what they are (beyond the headlines about vibe coding and agents with souls).
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-26 21:58:55+00:00
It seems we largely agree. For example I wasn't criticizing the CS program at my undergrad, simply observing the mismatch between the label on the tin and what was actually inside.

Observations of inconsistencies, dysfunctions, and similar are not necessarily calls for any particular course of action.

> I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but I don't see what other conclusion can be drawn from your statement.

I merely observed that many of the issues people point out can be traced back (at least IMO) to having a set of confused and inconsistent goals. I wouldn't expect it to be a particularly controversial observation to anyone who's had significant contact with US academia within the past few decades.

> what are done with the many, many attendees who have no goals for themselves beyond "go to college and get a job when I'm done"?

They probably don't belong there. Most of them only attend because you need a diploma to land a job. Not because the education is particularly useful to the job, but rather because of what diplomas historically signaled about a candidate before everyone had them. Now it seems to just be a holdover (ie we require them because we've always required them and at this point everyone worthwhile has one). At least that's my (admittedly quite cynical) view.

I'm all for a more educated populace but if that's what we want then we should directly implement that.

I notice that you didn't address my remark about "adult daycare service". The presence of directionless "students" attending only to tick a box has serious negative impacts on the rest of the system. Add in student loans that can't be discharged and you've created an absolutely bizarre and (IMO counterproductive) set of economic incentives.
by 6thbit | 2026-02-26 21:59:10+00:00
You'd think so, but no!

They only do that if you set up that specific email on your account. Not if its 'any email other than the noreply one'.

> When you push to GitHub, we’ll check the most recent commit. If the author email on that commit is a private email on your GitHub account, we will block the push and warn you about exposing your private email.

Perhaps my usecase is niche, but I sometimes work with other git servers from the same machine with different emails and I don't want to set up all those on GH. Global settings don't help here, per-repo settings help but this doesn't come along when you clone a new one.
by guld | 2026-02-26 21:59:13+00:00
TLDR of the video:

Complex self-replicating programs emerging spontaneously from random noise byte strings with:

- zero mutation

- a sharp phase transition that looks like gelation

- and a proof that blocking deep symbiogenetic ancestry trees prevents the transition entirely

- written in a variant of BrainFuck that can read and write its own code called BFF.
by scottLobster | 2026-02-26 21:59:31+00:00
Welcome to the return of history. This is hardly the first time or industry where the US government has forced compliance that wasn't necessarily in the public interest.

And the corporations won't fight this. They're in it for the money and they're willing to bring actual gold bars to White House to ensure it keeps rolling in. They know what they're doing is corrosive and debasing, the more conscientious of them probably want to vomit on the inside. But they mostly suck it up and do it anyway, for their investors will discipline them if they don't.

Either people run candidates and vote for the ones that campaign on stopping this, or it happens.
by MSFT_Edging | 2026-02-26 21:59:37+00:00
Lead poisoning was discovered in a year that is denoted with "B.C.E".

It wasn't news when the additive was invented for gasoline in the 20s, and it wasn't news all through the 70s.

Of course blame it on the corporations. On GM specifically, who also lobbied for jay-walking to become illegal so their cars would stop getting bad press for killing people.
by thomassmith65 | 2026-02-26 21:59:52+00:00
That's very true in terms of how capable these chatbots clearly are, but I believe the author was using 'underwhelming' to refer to the societal impact.

So far, life goes on roughly the same as it did five years ago. This can feel 'underwhelming' in contrast to the onslaught of public discussion about, and huge investments in, AI.

Most of us here on HN are programmers, and we all know how radically LLMs have changed our code projects. Even so, the change to our everyday lives (aside from our work or hobby project) is not, just yet, glaringly obvious.