MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NoLinkToMe | 2026-02-17 14:34:09+00:00
> If you say the culprit is hookup culture, then most people are into that culture and don't want kids.

No, what I'm saying is that an app to hook up isn't representative.

Neither me nor the women I've dated have ever been on dating apps, yet we're together and want kids. We're not in your sample of potential app users. Neither are my parents who had kids. Or virtually every parent who is in a relationship with kids. None of them are in your sample of potential app users.

Yet everyone who doesn't want kids and wants to date, is possibly in your sample of potential app users.

It should be obvious what type of user is likely to join this app, and what type of user isn't. Far more people join for a hookup than for a relationship.

Even if 50% of members join to find a partner on the app to have kids, and 50% just want a hook-up, the former leave as soon as they're successful, leaving the latter group. By definition you're not expected to find a large pool of people on there who want a partner and kids, compared to the number of people who just want short-term hookups.

So are the people you see on this app representative of society? No.
by steer_dev | 2026-02-17 14:34:11+00:00
Hi HN, I'm a senior MLE. I've been watching the hype around agent swarms and tools like Gas Town clash with reality of productizing them. I wrote this because I see companies burning millions in ''reasoning tax" (LLM-as-a-judge) instead of building deterministic safety rails. Would love to hear how others are handling output verification in their pipelines.
by humanizersequel | 2026-02-17 14:34:33+00:00
Ok sure but in this sense it is already a rule (most people do not either prescribe these things to their kids or allow them to indulge in them) and what we're debating is how firm that rule.

As it happens, I think I disagree with you. I do value greatness. I value a culture that lauds greatness. The point of virtuosic musicianship isn't entertainment, or at least not a banal thoughtless kind (a symphony is not a substitute good for ragebait podcast clips with a subway surfers overlay), it's inspirational art. The examples I chose are particularly evocative, but there's no real difference between that and a parent who compels or allows their child to become ridiculously capable in some kind of mathematics or literature. Imagine if Terrence Tao's parents had insisted that he carry on with a typical pre-university series of broad survey courses for the sake of making him a generalist! Imagine all the less high-profile examples who were maybe even more important to pushing some practical effort forward.

Making it illegal is a nonstarter because I think it runs afoul of the categorical imperative in exactly the same way. I'm a strong believer in the idea that most progress (again, not intended to have a positive connotation) is made by a small group of people who were almost never generalists. Einstein was not a generalist. Kant, who I've been referencing throughout this conversation, was really not a generalist. The possibility of greatness is just as necessary as a certain number of pliable generalists.

What would the point of living in a world without greatness be? Since I meant that question rhetorically: is there a way to allow such greatness to be achieved without manipulating young people into obsession?
by Majromax | 2026-02-17 14:34:36+00:00
Thinking happens in latent space, but the thinking trace is then the projection of that thinking onto tokens. Since autoregressive generation involves sampling a specific token and continuing the process, that sampling step is lossy.

However, it is a genuine question whether the literal meanings of thinking blocks are important over their less-observable latent meanings. The ultimate latent state attributable to the last-generated thinking token is some combination of the actual token (literal meaning) and recurrent thinking thus far. The latter does have some value; a 2024 paper (https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15758) noted that simply adding dots to the output allowed some models to perform more latent computation resulting in higher-skill answers. However, since this is not a routine practice today I suspect that genuine "thinking" steps have higher value.

Ultimately, your thesis can be tested. Take the output of a reasoning model inclusive of thinking tokens, then re-generate answers with:

1. Different but semantically similar thinking steps (i.e. synonyms, summarization). That will test whether the model is encoding detailed information inside token latent space.
2. Meaningless thinking steps (dots or word salad), testing whether the model is performing detailed but latent computation, effectively ignoring the semantic context of
3. A semantically meaningful distraction (e.g. a thinking trace from a different question)

Look for where performance drops off the most. If between 0 (control) and 1, then the thinking step is really just a trace of some latent magic spell, so it's not meaningful. If between 1 and 2, then thinking traces serve a role approximately like a human's verbalized train of thought. If between 2 and 3 then the role is mixed, leading back to the 'magic spell' theory but without the 'verbal' component being important.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-17 14:35:06+00:00
That's exactly my take. I've had a similar thing where a car of mine got stolen and I petitioned the police to use their ANPR capability to give an idea of where it went and they said they couldn't even though I already knew that they could. It was a funny conversation. It hinged on 'couldn't' because of 'reasons' vs 'technical ability'.
by elliotbnvl | 2026-02-17 14:35:07+00:00
I agree... I wrote an essay about this: https://joinkith.com/#the-internet-is-dead

tl;dr of the essay, we need to move back to human-to-human recommendations and trust systems, and people are already doing that a lot of ways by retreating to DMs (iMessage, email, in-person conversations) and personal recommendations rather than relying on Google + the algorithm. What this means for public forums I don't know. I think they're gone and will never come back, probably.
by throw46974228 | 2026-02-17 14:35:23+00:00
This is a common bit of hate propaganda.

Do yourself a favor; go on to google maps and zoom out until you can see all these countries. Isreal is a tiny sliver on that scale and has not expanded in the last 50 years.

What has happened, is that the large Jewish populations of Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon have gone to 0. So you got yourself a large “clean” and “pure” area. But it’s that remaining sliver that you are obsessed with trying to wipe out.
by MITSardine | 2026-02-17 14:35:44+00:00
To be fair, a lot of science doesn't follow the scientific method. I've yet to see an applied mathematician (to speak only of what I know) come up with a hypothesis, it's usually rather: here's how people solve this problem currently, this has this and that drawback, and our paper introduces a new method that solves bigger problems faster/new classes of problems.

The same could be said of theoretical work: here, we tightened up an inequality.

This is also research, not all of it is experimental!
by compressedgas | 2026-02-17 14:36:43+00:00
You want to have Proactive Computing https://cacm.acm.org/research/proactive-computing/ (David Tennenhouse, 2000), not to get rid of interfaces which is something that can't be done as you will always have an interface, even if it is only in the form of an API, not wrapped up for any specific use, that has representations and actions, that the agents will need be be able to do anything.
by ghrl | 2026-02-17 14:37:32+00:00
"Break free from Google" and buy a Pixel phone from them to do so.

But unironically Pixels are currently some of the best actually open phones.
They do not lock down or require shady practices for unlocking the bootloader (although they do require a network check once that happens automatically, but it will permanently allow unlocking the bootloader if successful once. Pixels are very easy to restore and almost un-brickable, allow bypassing the boot screen warning by pressing the power button twice, actually allow relocking the bootloader and don't void your warranty unlocking it, don't have a shady one-time fuse like Samsung phones do with Knox, etc.
Advaita Inquiry Matrix (Aim): Structured Non-Dual Inquiry with AI
by adyashakti | 2026-02-17 14:38:30+00:00
I’m building an experiment called Advaita Inquiry Matrix (AIM).

AIM is an AI-assisted system that models the pedagogical method of Advaita Vedānta. Not a “guru bot,” not mystical content generation — but a rule-governed dialogue system that automates structured ontological inquiry as far as possible.

The idea:
• Use a YAML-tagged corpus (Upaniṣads, Śaṅkara, etc.)
• Track a student’s conceptual state over time
• Dynamically select passages and questions
• Apply formal teaching methods (negation, identity statements, paradox, state analysis)
• Use constrained Socratic dialogue to expose contradictions

Advaita has a surprisingly rigorous epistemology. The teaching unfolds in a precise sequence. That makes it amenable to:
• Semantic tagging
• State-machine modeling
• Concept graphs
• Agent orchestration

The human teacher remains curator and final authority. The system handles structured mediation between text and student.

If you’re interested in AI-mediated pedagogy, knowledge representation, or formal dialogue systems — I’d welcome critique or collaboration.

Spec here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DRw486wPENqKmOjruP160Gx4OZnM2WSn/view?usp=share_link

— Dev
by lyfeninja | 2026-02-17 14:38:33+00:00
I think the tech would continue to exist since there is already a market for it and I do believe it will increase productivity. I just get concerned about the concentration of value (for example, 30ish percent of the S&P 500s value is tied to 7 companies) and the shear size of the capex going on (conservatively, hundreds of billions). This increases the risk significantly. Even a normal correction (20% decline) of the stock prices of those 7, will wipe out trillions of dollars in market value and hit everyone, because everyone is essentially invested in it already and the repercussions of that could be brutal (deep recession).

Additionally, new tech could make all the CAPEX in data centers or businesses useless in the fairly near future, but this can be hard to predict (black swan). I think of quantum computers or advancements like DeepSeek's LLM reinforcement learning style, but it will likely be something that isn't in anyone's mind yet. There is also a vast opportunity cost to all this investment.

Those with wealth will be fine (why do you think they're building bunkers), everyone else will pay the price.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-17 14:38:34+00:00
I get the idea you like to question everything, which I really think people should do more of in so many ways :)

I'm certainly nothing like an actual degreed economist. That was my college roommate for a while. He was a grad student in macroeconomics getting his dissertation ready, and wanted me to look at the final draft and help him type the equations on my IBM Selectric typewriter. These things were expensive and I was lucky to have it for a song after the business crash.

People already knew I was the only kid typing my chemistry homework onto the handout sheets, and it did look pretty sharp if I do say so myself :)

Well, I didn't like all his equations and we went over all the text in pretty good detail too, but got done making the equations on the strips exactly as he had drawn. Some drafting pens were also used for characters the IBM did not have. He would have to physically cut then paste each typed equation into the proper space between paragraphs that he had on his manually typewritten text.

By then I was about as old as you could be before you're no longer a teenager, so I was a bit rusty and not up-to-date with the stock market or anything else financially, even though I had started financial analysis as a preteen and made some people some good money (as an actual teenager by then), it had been years since the crash.

So we talked it over philosophically about the equations for a number of weeks and things became a lot clearer to both of us. He ended up throwing out the whole dissertation !

Anyway, he transferred to a different grad school, under a different PhD he earned his own PhD and ended up becoming a professor.

At a place out west I had never heard of called Stanford.

Thanks for reminding me :)
by sfkamath | 2026-02-17 14:39:13+00:00
I vibe-coded jvm-hotpath to analyse my vibe-coded output.

jvm-hotpath is a JVM agent that instruments Java code and records line-level execution counts. The differentiator is the UX: it generates a single HTML report that updates continuously while your app is running. No server/dashboard — it uses JSONP + polling, so you can open it from file:// and watch hotspots move as you click around. It’s meant for local dev, and there’s a stopwatch-style lap/reset so you can zero counts, do one action, and immediately see the hot path for just that interaction.

Why this helps with “vibe coding”: when code is changing faster than your understanding (LLM-assisted or just a new/unfamiliar codebase), the hard bit is answering “what actually ran when I did this?”. This gives a quick runtime map of the paths you really exercised — and it’s also a handy way to learn a codebase by driving the app and watching what lights up.

Questions I’m curious about:

• What’s the closest thing you’ve seen to this in the JVM world?

• Where would this save you the most time: learning a new codebase, validating AI-assisted changes, refactoring safely, or chasing weird behaviour?

Project: https://github.com/sfkamath/jvm-hotpath

Documentation (README): https://github.com/sfkamath/jvm-hotpath/blob/main/README.md

Motivation: https://github.com/sfkamath/jvm-hotpath/blob/main/docs/Motiv...

Foojay article: https://foojay.io/today/runtime-code-analysis-in-the-age-of-...

Long-time HN reader, first time posting — happy to take feedback.
by vessenes | 2026-02-17 14:39:33+00:00
Every few years I get to thinking I want to do some research on this and then maybe make a combo karma age filter, and then I go read some posts from 2017 and I think “it was better, but I don’t know if it was that much better.”

Excepting the last year - things see dark for a lot of users here in the last year.
by NoLinkToMe | 2026-02-17 14:39:39+00:00
Sorry for the late reply.

In principle I agree, in a darwinian sense the purpose is to pass on genetics. That's not really a matter of opinion I'd say, although perhaps I'd have chosen a different word than 'purpose', I tend to agree.

But what's the point of saying that? What larger point are you making? If I say water is wet, sure you'll agree, but why did I mention it in the first place? I didn't understand your post in that sense yet, perhaps you can expand.

W.r.t. the darwinian 'purpose' though: I also agree with some posters in this thread noting accurately that our darwinian sexual drive can be satisfied without passing on genes. (ample birth control & pornification of just about any sexual niche you can imagine). So while our sexual urges are to support passing on genetics, the world around us can pacify that urge to the point it's satisfied without passing on your genetics.

As such our darwinian instincts aren't effective in the same way as they used to be. Plenty of men are satisfying many of their urges, ultimately dying childless, much more so than in the past.

Second, plenty of parents satisfy their urges with 1 or 2 children instead of 8 in the past, insufficient for replacement-levels, but sufficient to pass on genes.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-17 14:40:16+00:00
I remember running Java applets under Netscape 3.x and 4.x on System 7.5 on a 200Mhz PPC 603ev and 16MB RAM. It was “fine” mostly, but loading was slow as mud (though that might’ve just been the 28k dialup) and they crashed Netscape or the whole system a lot more than the rest of the web did. Technically usable, but practicality was questionable.
by dbalatero | 2026-02-17 14:41:18+00:00
I think modern day instruments are competitive and only getting better (I bought a modern cello by an excellent maker and couldn't be happier).

One large difference today is instrument makers are starting to share their techniques with each other, whereas Stradivarius took that information to the grave.

With Strad you're getting a high end instrument but also paying through the nose for rarity and legend.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-17 14:41:23+00:00
Or literally a path of the self, which is what the OP was getting at I think. And there is plenty of that in the software world. "I'm a Rubyist", "I'm a Pythonista", "A rustacean" and so on. There is plenty of identity ridiculousness. I've been a C programmer but I've also been a basic programmer an assembly language programmer, a PHP programmer, a FORTH programmer and a whole list of others. To me that collapses to "I'm a programmer" (even if the sage advice on HN by the gurus is to never call yourself a programmer I'm more than happy to do so). It defines what I do, not what I am, and it only defines a very small part of me. That's one reason why I can't stand the us-vs-them mentality that some programming languages seem to install in their practitioners.
by adolph | 2026-02-17 14:42:01+00:00
When you build an app with Xcode, your .xcassets folders are compiled into binary .car files that ship with your application. . . . The “CAR” extension likely stands for “Compiled Asset Record” based on method names found in Xcode’s IBFoundation framework.

The article is well worth reading even without ingesting the specifics in order to follow the author's reverse engineering process.
by lh105 | 2026-02-17 14:42:28+00:00
I understand the sentiment, but the danger of these articles is that people give up when they should fight back.

This isn't the first industry mandated madness. Software engineers have supported any fad that their overlords dictated for a long time. It is always the mediocre 100 IQ people who act as mouthpieces for the industry and temporarily get ahead of their more intelligent colleagues.

It is no different now. You can see who is a paid shill and who is not. Python projects like NumPy, members of which are on the take from PyTorch, go to great lengths to rationalize AI usage. Anaconda people who take AI money join in.

Projects like Zig, which are much more interesting, move away from Slophub.

What concerns me is the silence of academics. There are enough tenured professors who could speak up, but they have been intimidated by various speech restrictions from different political parties over the last decade. Or they want that next industry grant.
by SirMaster | 2026-02-17 14:43:01+00:00
It's not necessarily about that humans can't mistake the question too, but just that overall LLMs seem to have far less ability to correctly understand a prompt than the average human. And that the "intelligence" shown in its understanding of the prompt seems to be far less than its "intelligence" in its answers.

So it feels like a big area of limitation or a big bottleneck towards getting a good answer.
by Arifcodes | 2026-02-17 14:43:12+00:00
The study measures task completion on SWE-bench style issues, but that misses the main reason most of us write these files. I don't use AGENTS.md to help the model solve GitHub issues faster. I use it to stop the agent from doing dumb things that waste my time later.

Things like: don't use TypeVar in new code, always run migrations through our wrapper, never modify the shared proto files without updating the generated code. These are guardrails, not performance optimizers. The study's framing around "task success rate" misses that the value is in reducing the cleanup work after the agent "succeeds."

The finding that context files encourage "broader exploration" actually supports this. I want the agent to check more files and run more tests, even if it costs 20% more tokens. Tokens are cheap. Debugging a subtle regression the agent introduced because it didn't know about an invariant in the codebase is not.
by elliotbnvl | 2026-02-17 14:44:01+00:00
I wrote this essay to capture how I feel about the current state of the internet and share a potential solution.

The tl;dr is I'm saddened and scared in equal measure by the rise of bots, and I think we need to do something new in order to preserve any vestige of human-to-human digital communication.

My proposal is that we create invite-only networks where every account traces back through a chain of human trust. If a bot gets in, you prune the branch: remove it and every account it invited. The threat of losing your account (and your invitees losing theirs) creates real social accountability and makes moderation at scale practical.

There are kinks with the idea of course like the risk of false flags, witch hunts, and slow growth, but AI detection and CAPTCHAS are in a losing arms race with LLMs.
by Arifcodes | 2026-02-17 14:44:36+00:00
The "audience of one" framing is spot on, and I think it reveals something important about how AI changes the economics of side projects. The cost of building something just for yourself used to be weeks of learning a new stack. Now it's a conversation and some token spend.

But the workflow described here is the real takeaway. Spec first, containers for sandboxing, git as your safety net. That's not a beginner workflow, that's a senior engineer adapting their existing discipline to a new tool. Most "vibe coding" advice skips this entirely and jumps straight to "just prompt and ship."

The 80/20 split is what I keep seeing too. The agent gets you a working prototype fast, but the last 20% (error handling, edge cases, the stuff that makes software actually reliable) still requires you to understand the code. If anything, AI makes that gap more visible because you hit the wall faster.
by littlecorner | 2026-02-17 14:44:39+00:00
It's very disconcerting to think that this "innocent" toy or clothing I see my children playing with as "tainted" by this monster. Suddenly he's not just some nebulous monster out there, but in some way the idea of him is here with my children, arousing protective instincts without anything in particular to direct that energy towards.

It also shows him as a human like other humans, which then makes me ponder is that person walking down the street also a monster? Could I become a monster like Epstein?

Such thoughts are very disconcerting
by chasd00 | 2026-02-17 14:44:42+00:00
I feel like the coding assistants are opening doors for hobbyists the same way 3d printing did. If you’re into a hobby with physical components like rc-anything, robotics, or just need a one off part to fix something a 3D printer is a game changer. In the same way, if you’re into writing software for personal projects or just filling a discreet need ClaudeCode is a game changer.
by winclaw-dev | 2026-02-17 14:44:54+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been working on WinClaw, a personal AI assistant and multi-channel AI gateway that you run on your own devices. It lets you interact with AI models (Claude, GPT, etc.) through the messaging apps you already use.

Latest highlights:
- Native Windows EXE installer (bundled Node.js, no prerequisites)
- 19 messaging channels (WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Signal, iMessage, etc.)
- Desktop automation via MCP Bridge + Chrome DevTools
- Chat-based configuration (no config file editing needed)
- Cross-platform: Windows, macOS, Linux
- Windows-only skills: Office automation, Outlook, PowerShell, file system

Architecture:
- Gateway (Node.js) manages channels, sessions, skills
- Agent handles AI model interaction and tool execution
- Skills provide domain-specific capabilities
- Plugins extend functionality (MCP Bridge for external tools)
- Local-first, OAuth-first, no telemetry

GitHub: https://github.com/itc-ou-shigou/winclaw
Docs: https://docs.winclaw.ai

Would love to hear your feedback!