MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by micimize | 2026-02-16 21:53:06+00:00
Vapid and wrong on every point. Many good ideas come from steeping in a novel soup of ideas for a long time, you don't need that many people to care about quality to make it a lucrative differentiator, and as I've seen many point out on X dot com the everything app: where's all the the shipped results of these slop torrent?

The models are increasingly capable in impressive ways. Maybe the next gen will enable the "sales critter" to slop out commercially viable software with no tech know-how. If not, I'm sure we'll assume the next can, and if not that, the next.

But feigning confidence about the shape and nature of this unfurling sea-change is absurd when the high-profile examples we have are like, what, moltbook? And denigrate _all_ potential ingenuity and insight unilaterally into the bargain? What a careless way of looking at the world
by ninjagoo | 2026-02-16 21:53:07+00:00
As it turns out, IMHO, the debate in this thread is about 1 year behind the reality [1]. Personally, I was about a week behind in my reading of the landscape, so didn't realize this is all asked and answered [1].

A number of points that various folks have made in the posts in this thread - free vs paid capabilities, model choices etc. are addressed much more eloquently and coherently in this blog post by Matt Shumer [1]. Discussed here on HN at [2] but like me, many others must have missed it.

[1] https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46973011
by sunaookami | 2026-02-16 21:53:12+00:00
Gemini 3 Flash answers tongue-in-cheek with a table of pro & cons where one of the cons of walking is that you are at the car wash but your car is still at your home and recommends to drive it if I don't have an "extremely long brush" or don't want to push it to the car wash. Kinda funny.
by jrm4 | 2026-02-16 21:53:26+00:00
Yes. And as much as I hate "well, users should just be smarter and deal with inconvenience," I think it may fit here.

Identity is always hard, and I strongly doubt there is any great way that makes it "easier" and still safe.

Aka, yes please kill passkeys, or at least be super upfront and informative.

"When you use passkeys, you are giving your keys to Apple or Google, and they cannot guarantee safety."
by erpellan | 2026-02-16 21:53:31+00:00
The standard pattern to avoid select for update (which can cause poor performance under load) is to use optimistic concurrency control.

Add a numeric version column to the table being updated, read and increment it in the application layer and use the value you saw as part of the where clause in the update statement. If you see ‘0 rows updated’ it means you were beaten in a race and should replay the operation.
by smcleod | 2026-02-16 21:53:33+00:00
There is almost no point in telling an agent to build a skill without augmenting it's knowledge on the thing it's writing about as you're just piping output to input without expanding the information in the system. If you get an agent to perform a bunch of research online, distil that down to information that the models tend not to get right or is newer than what is in their training data or simply better aligns with your desired workflow than what they generate out of the box - that's going to create a far more useful skill. I use a skill that gets activated when creating a skill to help guide this approach: https://github.com/sammcj/agentic-coding/blob/main/Skills/sk...
by Feuilles_Mortes | 2026-02-16 21:53:38+00:00
I do hear what you're saying, and I've wrestled with "not everything should / can be an app". That being said, I'm still trying to solve food (for myself) with computers, haha.

Right now, that looks like trying to create a nutritionally-optimal "dog food for humans", using combinatorial optimization solvers. I think I'm going to write something up as a post when it becomes a bit more feature-complete.

It's living at chow.seanjohnsen.com if you're curious! Would love feedback from someone who has thought along these lines.
by evmaki | 2026-02-16 21:54:27+00:00
> I ask it to reflect on why, and update the Skill to clarify, adding or removing detail as necessary.

We are probably undervaluing the human part of the feedback loop in this discussion. Claude is able to solve the problem given the appropriate human feedback — many then jump to the conclusion that well, if Claude is capable of doing it under some circumstances, we just need to figure out how to remove the human part so that Claude can eventually figure it out itself.

Humans are still serving a very crucial role in disambiguation, and in centering the most salient information. We do this based on our situational context, which comes from hands-on knowledge of the problem space. I'm hesitant to assume that because Claude CAN bootstrap skills (which is damn impressive!), it would somehow eventually do so entirely on its own, devoid of any situational context beyond a natural language spec.
by arjunchint | 2026-02-16 21:54:41+00:00
So with the rise of cloud browser agents, identity management is a critical problem.

There are a lot of users on our rtrvr.ai/cloud platform wanting to automate sites where they have to login to and right now are resorting to including usernames/passwords in prompts (presumably these are non critical sites that they dont really care about). We are offering a more secure option of just syncing cookies from our Chrome Extension to our cloud browsers so the agents will always be logged in without any credential exposure.

You choose the specific domains for the cookies you want synced so its not like all your cookies are syncing.
by Steve6 | 2026-02-16 21:54:44+00:00
I recommend reading the book first, then watching the series. They're both great but the book has a lot more details and explains the events better than the series. It will make watching the series even better.

The audiobook is great, but the sound quality for the first few chapters wasn't the best. That gets fixed though. If they ever do a "full cast" audiobook for this one I would definitely buy it.
by munksbeer | 2026-02-16 21:54:47+00:00
The rule of metaprogramming is that it ends up just as convoluted and full of edge cases as regular code, just without a nice way to debug. The rule is also that it always seems like a fantastic idea at first and will solve so many isues.

I've been programming since 1994. I've seen a lot. I almost always end up despising any metaprogramming system and wish we'd just kept things simpler even if it meant boilerplate.
by Mossly | 2026-02-16 21:54:58+00:00
It's quite amusing to ask LLMs what the pelican example is and watch them hallucinate a plausible sounding answer.

---

Qwen 3.5: "A user asks an LLM a question about a fictional or obscure fact involving a pelican, often phrased confidently to test if the model will invent an answer rather than admitting ignorance." <- How meta

Opus 4.6: "Will a pelican fit inside a Honda Civic?"

GPT 5.2: "Write a limerick (or haiku) about a pelican."

Gemini 3 Pro: "A man and a pelican are flying in a plane. The plane crashes. Who survives?"

Minimax M2.5: "A pelican is 11 inches tall and has a wingspan of 6 feet. What is the area of the pelican in square inches?"

GLM 5: "A pelican has four legs. How many legs does a pelican have?"

Kimi K2.5: "A photograph of a pelican standing on the..."

---

I agree with Qwen, this seems like a very cool benchmark for hallucinations.
by mft_ | 2026-02-16 21:55:58+00:00
> Mass-market newspapers may be in trouble, but that's because it turns out most people were buying those for the classifieds, not really for the news.

Genuinely interested in some sort of data on this.

My working assumption was that print news media was dying through a combination of free news availability on the internet, shifting advertising spending as a result, shifting ‘channels’ to social media, and shifting attention spans between generations.
by zachlatta | 2026-02-16 21:56:36+00:00
I love this idea, and originally planned to build it using local models, but to have post-processing (that's where you get correctly spelled names when replying to emails / etc), you need to have a local LLM too.

If you do that, the total pipeline takes too long for the UX to be good (5-10 seconds per transcription instead of <1s). I also had concerns around battery life.

Some day!
by tgtweak | 2026-02-16 21:56:47+00:00
Spark DGX and any A10 devices, strix halo with max memory config, several mac mini/mac studio configs, HP ZBook Ultra G1a, most servers

If you're targeting end user devices then a more reasonable target is 20GB VRAM since there are quite a lot of gpu/ram/APU combinations in that range. (orders of magnitude more than 128GB).
by shimman | 2026-02-16 21:56:54+00:00
I often wonder that if cable news was around say, during the American Civil War, how likely would the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments have passed? I'd say extremely unlikely.

Throughout our entire race as a species, abusers have always fucked the commons to the extreme using whatever tools they have available.

I mean take something as "innocuous" as the cotton gin, prior to the cotton gin there was a real decline in slavery but once it became extremely easier to process cotton slavery skyrocketed. Some of the worse laws the US has ever passed, the fugitive slave act, was during this period.

To think that technological progress means prosperity is extremely delusional.

We're still dealing with the ramifications of nuclear weapons and the likelihood that someone makes a committed nuclear attack will assuredly happen again in our species, just hoping that it doesn't take out all life on Earth when it happens.
by toxik | 2026-02-16 21:57:22+00:00
I agree, it's a bit of a trick question. It's really hard to imply the car's location without ruining the test though. Here's my attempt, which Claude Opus 4.6 had no problem with:

Alice drives home after a long day at work, exhausted she pulls into her driveway when she realizes she needs to go to a car inspection appointment. She goes into the house to get her paperwork before she leaves. The mechanic is only 100 meters away. How should she get there, walk or drive?

> She should *drive*, since she needs the car at the mechanic’s for the inspection.

Haiku 3.5 and Sonnet 4.5 fail consistently. Opus 4.5 also passes with the correct analysis as above.
by just6979 | 2026-02-16 21:57:32+00:00
I assume it was to force the LLM to "think" about creating physical art as opposed to just a digital representation in a file. I'd bet the responses would be different if it was told to just look at the SVGs instead of photos of the plots. Perhaps less kitschy art-critic-speak and more technical analysis of the document. In other words, what parts of the training corpus are boosted by framing it as physical art vs just a digital representation.
by robocat | 2026-02-16 21:57:37+00:00
> it's not completely clear how long it lasts

This explanation assumes we won't develop a better vaccine in a decade.

Shingrix was expensive. I knew too many people with horrific Shingles.

A couple of days of very mild flu symptoms for me.

Plan to avoid mental or physical responsibilities or events for 2 days after the shot.
by isahers | 2026-02-16 21:58:01+00:00
I disagree with most of this article. Disclaimer: I'm a junior engineer and I believe both that: 1. AI is going to take my job, 2. AI is going to do incredible good for the world.

I don't see how these are distinct. It's a technology shift, of course it's going to make certain jobs obsolete - that's how technology shifts work.

I'm not going to go through every quote I disagree with, but unlike some AI negativity discourse (some of which I agree with btw, being an optimist doesn't mean being irrational) this just reads as old man yells at cloud. Mainly because the author doesn't understand the technology, and doesn't understand the impact.

The author clearly does not understand model capabilities (seems to be in the camp that these are just "prediction machines") as they claim it's unreasonable to expect models to "develop presently impossible capabilities". This is not at all supported by prior model releases. Most, if not all, major releases have displayed new capabilities. There are a lot more misconceptions on ability, but again not going to go through all of them.

The author also doesn't understand the impact, saying stuff like "Tech doesn’t free workers; it forces them to do more in the same amount of time, for the same rate of pay or less". What? Is the author unaware of what average labor hours were like before the industrial revolution? AI is clearly going to be hugely net positive for white-collar (and with robots eventually blue-collar) workers in the near future (it already is for many).
Show HN: Snapbyte – personalized email digests from HN/Reddit/Lobsters
by onatm | 2026-02-16 21:58:37+00:00
Creator here. I built Snapbyte because I stopped having the time/energy to browse Hacker News / Reddit / Lobsters / Devto regularly, but I still wanted to keep up with things worth reading.
Snapbyte collects posts from multiple tech communities, filters them based on your interests, summarises them, and sends you a personalised email digest on a schedule you choose.

You can try it without creating an account (the homepage shows real example digests).

Some implementation details: Runs as a set of small services on my k8s cluster. Scraping via trafilatura. Summaries via gemini-3-flash-preview. Mix of TypeScript / Python / Go

Happy to answer questions, especially around scoring/filtering and what sources people would want next.

Note: if this post makes it to the HN front page, it’ll likely show up in Snapbyte digests tomorrow.
by tgtweak | 2026-02-16 21:59:13+00:00
I think this is the case for almost all of these models - for a while kimi k2.5 was responding that it was claude/opus. Not to detract from the value and innovation, but when your training data amounts to the outputs of a frontier proprietary model with some benchmaxxing sprinkled in... it's hard to make the case that you're overtaking the competition.

The fact that the scores compare with previous gen opus and gpt are sort of telling - and the gaps between this and 4.6 are mostly the gaps between 4.5 and 4.6.
by CharlieDigital | 2026-02-16 21:59:17+00:00
This has been my observation with self-generated docs as well.

I have seen some devs pull out absolutely bad guidance by introspecting the code with the LLM to define "best practices" and docs because it introduces its own encoded biases in there. The devs are so lazy that they can't be bothered to simply type the bullet points that define "good".

One example is that we had some extracted snippet for C#/.NET that was sprinkling in `ConfigureAwait(false)` which should not be in application code and generally not needed for ASP.NET. But the coding agent saw some code that looked like "library" code and decided to apply it and then someone ran the LLM against that and pulled out "best practices" and placed them into the repo and started to pollute the rest of the context.

I caught this when I found the code in a PR and then found the source and zeroed it out. We've also had to untangle some egregious use of `Task.Run` (again, not best practice in C# and you really want to know what you're doing with it).

At the end of it, we are building a new system that is meant to compose and serve curated, best practice guidance to coding agents to get better consistency and quality. The usage of self-generated skills and knowledge seems like those experiments where people feed in an image and ask the LLM to give back the image without changing it. After n cycles, it is invariably deeply mutated from the original.

Agentic coding is the future, but people have not yet adapted. We went from punch cards to assembly to FORTRAN to C to JavaScript; each step adding more abstractions. The next abstraction is Markdown and I think that teams that invest their time in writing and curating markdown will create better guardrails within which agents can operate without sacrificing quality, security, performance, maintainability, and other non-functional aspects of software system.
by bradhe | 2026-02-16 21:59:35+00:00
I've actually been experimenting with using Ghidra and Opus to create human-consumable, reverse-engineered software. My ultimate dream would be a buildable EverQuest client. Opus does a decent job of pulling out various subsystems and understanding how it works. I was able to get a pretty much working networking layer for instance with less than an hour's work.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-16 21:59:40+00:00
> isn't this more a trait of autism than anything else?

No. It’s a sign of drive and discipline. The latter, specifically the focus element, overlaps with autism. But more broadly it does not. (There are a lot of impressive teenagers applying themselves diligently to impressive ends. Most of them are not on the spectrum, though I suspect mild autism is slightly over-represented in that set.)
by umanghere | 2026-02-16 22:00:06+00:00
I started reverse engineering at 13 with an IDA Pro of questionable provenance - at that time, I found it quite difficult.

One thing which really helped me (and I wholeheartedly recommend) is to write simple programs, run them through the compiler and then in the disassembler. It really helps build a correspondence between program structure and its object code.

Eventually, you can make it even more fun and challenging by stripping debug symbols and turning on compiler optimisations.

Happy reversing!
by nerdsniper | 2026-02-16 22:00:10+00:00
> Can you really say that unless you switched fields multiple times?

I have ;-) far too many times! Even going back and taking undergrad math coursework that my engineering curriculum didn't have like Discrete Math or Statistics got a lot harder than calculus / differential equations was when I was younger. I felt like I got less out of each hour, and also couldn't put in as many hours.
by mlhpdx | 2026-02-16 22:00:52+00:00
The key here is scale. What works in inches often falls apart at feet. The structure is holding about 33 psi over the area (which is rigidly supported from below), much more along the contact edges. By comparison balsa wood can support significantly more pressure (varies, but well over 100psi) but doesn’t concentrate pressure on edges.

Is there anything useful about this? Maybe as an inexpensive(?) core for high strength skins?
by codys | 2026-02-16 22:01:05+00:00
Seems you could use a single SQL statement for this problem. Something like this, using CTEs is possible, but alternately one can reformat them as subqueries.

WITH
o AS (
SELECT FROM orders
WHERE orders.id = $1
),
os AS (
SELECT FROM orderStatuses
WHERE orderStatuses.orderId = $1
ORDER BY DESC orderStatuses.createdAt
LIMIT 1
)
INSERT INTO orderStatuses ...
WHERE EXISTS (SELECT 1 FROM os WHERE os.code != $2)
RETURNING ...something including the status differ check...
by libertine | 2026-02-16 22:01:19+00:00
So once again, the narrative of Russia having no agency...the government, the People, the elites, are all reactive without choice?

It's the narrative that Russia invades other sovereign countries because of those countries, not because it's a choice, a continuous wrong choice by the way.

> Also how oligarchs came to power from the late 80s to the late 90s. Russia experienced unhinged free market reforms applied by incompetent politicians and opportunists who managed to sell out the accumulated wealth of the former RSFSR in just a few years.

How's that different or worse from the current regime? In fact, how many Russians died in the wars of the 80s and 90s, and how many Russians have died under this regime?

If you don't see neighboring countries suffering, it's because you either don't care or you refuse to look. It's impressive that you're yet to see why countries distanced themselves from Russia and are making bridges with other countries.

> e.g. Ukraine got all its debts forgiven and inherited specialized industries which were subsidized by Russia during soviet times.

Yeah, and Ukraine surrendered its nukes, and look at what's happening. And Russia got funding from USA and the perks of the USSR, with all the contributions from other countries of the union.

> They had 25 years to make something out of it and did basically nothing.

Ukraine did basically nothing?
- They have one of the strongest states and national identities in Europe; Russia doesn't even come close to them in this regard (remember the world witnessed the Wagner coup).
- They have one of the strongest and most competent armies of all countries.
- They will join the European Union and NATO;

That's not bad for a country so young.
by globalnode | 2026-02-16 22:01:27+00:00
Most normies dont want to set up their own mail server, they just want to log into a "service" that allows them to send/recv mail. Thats how companies insert themselves into peoples lives, as a low friction and often free way to save time and effort. How are protocols going to solve that problem? Someone will have to donate their time and effort to making other peoples lives easier and then you have centralization again.
by anvevoice | 2026-02-16 22:01:36+00:00
The key distinction dcre raises is important. The paper tests skills as "pre-task procedural brainstorming" — essentially asking the model to think aloud before acting. Of course that adds little; it's already what chain-of-thought does.

The actually useful pattern is post-hoc: agent attempts task, fails in some specific way, then distills that failure into a concrete correction rule. This is closer to how experience-replay works in RL — you're not generating knowledge from priors, you're encoding observed environment feedback into reusable form.

The real question is retrieval. Even well-crafted skills are useless if they're dumped wholesale into context. You need conditional activation — matching the current state to relevant skills, not just prepending everything. Most skill implementations I've seen fail here, not at the generation step.
by aruggirello | 2026-02-16 22:01:54+00:00
Minisforum, Gmktec also have Ryzen AI HX 370 mini PCs with 128Gb (2x64Gb) max LPDDR5. It's dirt cheap, you can get one barebone with ~€750 on Amazon (the 395 similarly retails for ~€1k)... It should be fully supported in Ubuntu 25.04 or 25.10 with ROCm for iGPU inference (NPU isn't available ATM AFAIK), which is what I'd use it for. But I just don't know how the HX 370 compares to eg. the 395, iGPU-wise. I was thinking of getting one to run Lemonade, Qwen3-coder-next FP8, BTW... but I don't know how much RAM should I equip it with - shouldn't 96Gb be enough? Suggestions welcome!
by bodiekane | 2026-02-16 22:02:15+00:00
I consider it a small green flag, if the award is from somewhere semi-reputable.

I've worked at places where employee surveys were done by the 3rd party to decide on winners. Companies that know they mistreat their employees won't bother and some companies will have management surprised when they find out how poorly their employees rated them on those surveys.

I don't think of it as really being a big positive, but it at least weeds out many of the worst.
by AnujNayyar | 2026-02-16 22:02:42+00:00
iNaturalist is great for identification and information, but it lacked the fun and soul we were looking for.

It doesn’t feel like you’re playing when you use it, it feels like you’re in biology class (no hate to them).

Wildex gives you cute fun facts and lets you build up points for rare species finds. It feels like a completely different experience.
by just6979 | 2026-02-16 22:02:45+00:00
"You can do this in pure software, the hardware side of it just adds noise."

That "noise" changes the context, connects it to different parts of the training corpus.

Removing the "physical art" part would likely change the responses to be much more technical (because there is way more technical talk surrounding SVGs) and less art-critic (there is more art-critic talk around physical art).