MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thunderbong | 2026-02-10 14:23:30+00:00
For me this was telling -

> Coding agents are designed to be accommodating, it doesn’t push back against prompts since it neither has the authority nor the context to do so. It may ask for clarifications upon what was specified, but it won’t say “wait, have you considered doing X instead?” A human developer would, or at least, they’d raise a flag. An LLM produces plausible output and moves on.

> This trait may be desirable as a virtual assistant, but it makes for a bad engineering teammate. The willingness to engage in productive conflict is part and parcel to good engineering: it helps broaden the search in the design space of ideas.

Whenever non-technical people ask me about LLMs, I tell them this -
The goal of an LLM is not to give you correct answers. The goal of an LLM is to continue the conversation.
by Lerc | 2026-02-10 14:23:58+00:00
On the topic of modern Chinese culture, Is there the same hostility towards AI generated Imagery in China as there seems to be in America?

For example I think there would be a lot of businesses in the US that would be too afraid of backlash to use AI generated imagery for an itinerary like the one at https://qianwen-res.oss-accelerate-overseas.aliyuncs.com/Qwe...
by snowwrestler | 2026-02-10 14:24:24+00:00
In the scope of international cooperation, tens of billions of dollars is not very much money. For context, the U.S. economy generates $10 billion every ~3 hours. One private company, Google, spends $10 billion in about 2 weeks.

So look at it this way. Let’s take a bunch of the smartest people alive, train them for decades, give them a month of Google money, and they’ll spend 30 years advancing engineering to probe the very fabric of reality. And everything they learn will be shared with the rest of humanity for free.

Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
by jakobnissen | 2026-02-10 14:24:52+00:00
For the people comparing the dependence on US tech to US dependence on ASML: It’s not the same. US software providers can shut down their software services in an instant, paralyzing European societies.

If the US government forces them to, Microsoft and Google could refuse to serve Office 365, Microsoft cloud storage, Google Drive, Google mail, all online services that we use Google to log in with, Android, so nearly all smart phones, Windows and MacOS. Society would grind to a halt.

If Taiwan loses access to ASML, then Europe loses as much as Taiwan or US does, and the effects could take years to feel
by watwut | 2026-02-10 14:25:41+00:00
Kids do think about others and cooperate, they do have natural empathy and care too. A lot more in cooperative cultures where they are taught to be like that. Less in individualistic cultures where they are taught to not be empathetic. Even within West, there is range of individualism. Netherland is different then USA and both are different then Spain.

It is not just instinct that makes some people (including kids) dominant, it is also that they are being actively taught to act like that. The natural thing is for parents to teach kids own values, both in a planned and conscious way and in the "by the way" style.
by thunky | 2026-02-10 14:26:47+00:00
Agree completely. Where I'm optimistic about AI is that it can also help identify poorly written code (even it's own code), and it can help rewrite it to be better quality. Average developers can't do this part.

From what I've found it's very easy to ask the AI to look at code and suggest how to make the code maintainable (look for SRP violations, etc, etc). And it will go to work. Which means that we can already build this "quality" into the initial output via agent workflows.
by rodrigorcs | 2026-02-10 14:26:53+00:00
I've been building Openfuse (https://openfuse.io), a centralized circuit breaker platform.

Started building it about a year ago after dealing with the same problem across multiple companies: circuit breakers scattered across dozens of services, each configured slightly differently, no single place to see what's happening when things go sideways. The existing options are either libraries you embed in every service (Resilience4j, opossum, etc.) leaving every server stateful, or going full service mesh which is overkill for most teams.

Openfuse gives you a central control plane for circuit breaker policies across your stack. You define your reliability rules in one place, get visibility into breaker states, and can react without redeploying anything.

Been a great project and I'm genuinely happy with where it landed. If you're running microservices or an integration-heavy monolith and have ever cursed at a cascading failure, I'd love to hear how you're handling it today! :)
by BowBun | 2026-02-10 14:27:04+00:00
They have >200 million DAUs and guesses say they have >10K servers with >10K users. Assumptions from a tech crowd who were used to IRC should be taken with a grain of salt.

Now if we're just looking for alternatives for ourselves, cool. But I think the reality is that most normal users do fully lean into the social aspects of Discord. A server like Marvel Rivals has literally millions of users. Players join that discord to socialize with all of those players and build a community around the game.
by ben_w | 2026-02-10 14:27:18+00:00
Depends on the timeline.

Fundamentally, there's no reason why the continent of Europe can't do what China did.

Politically, I only see that kind of transitioning happening with an actual war, where all the problems with the USA or Russia respectively (yes, even though I said "continent" and Russia let alone Ukraine is on continental Europe) are at present distant storm-clouds on opposite horizons.
by strangehospital | 2026-02-10 14:28:16+00:00
Hey guys! I've been working on solving the bootstrap problem in epistemic uncertainty.

The problem: How do you make AI explicitly model what it doesn't know, without requiring examples of "unknown" things during training?

STLE's approach: Use complementary fuzzy sets:
- μ_x = accessibility (computed via density ratios)
- μ_y = inaccessibility (1 - μ_x, guaranteed)
- No OOD training data needed

Results: 67% AUROC on OOD detection without any OOD training, < 1ms inference.

The Sky Project:

Already in production: Built MarvinBot (u/MarvinBot-20260210114005 on Moltbook), a fully optimized and aligned bot using STLE in practice. This validates the framework works beyond a toy demo.

The repo has:
- Minimal NumPy version (17KB, zero deps)
- Full PyTorch version (18KB)
- 48KB theoretical spec
- All validation experiments

It's proof-of-concept level for the framework, but already deployed in Phase 2 (application mode).

Most useful for: medical AI, autonomous systems, active learning—anywhere "I don't know" matters.

The core innovation is solving the bootstrap problem through on-demand density estimation rather than trying to initialize uncertainty for unseen data.

Happy to answer questions about the STLE, implementation, MarvinBot, or how it compares to MC Dropout / Deep Ensembles / Posterior Networks!
by rayiner | 2026-02-10 14:28:27+00:00
It could be colonization but it would predate the British. The British East India company colonized India in the first place by exploiting the lack of cooperation. At the time, there wasn’t the overwhelming disparity between the countries there is today. Mughal India was one of the gunpowder empires, with the largest military in the world in the late 17th and early 18th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_of_the_Mughal_Empire. The per-capita GDP gap between India and Britain was only a factor of 2. But India’s vastly large population meant it had about four times the state revenues.

Britain couldn’t have, and didn’t, colonize India the way the Mughals had: through a direct land war. Instead, the British East India company entered into deals with various port cities one by one to establish toe holds. Then in the Battle of Plassey, they overthrew the Nawab with just 750 British soldiers and 2,000 Indian mercenaries against a Mughal army of 50,000. The British persuaded the Mughal generals to defect, and the Nawab, fearing further defections, capitulated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Plassey
by jonathansampson | 2026-02-10 14:28:35+00:00
There's a lot of confusion around the "brave-reward holding garbage."

To be brief, Brave issued grants to users, which those same users could then direct to their favorite content creators. So, the grants _started with Brave_, and initially _remained with Brave_ until they were claimed by the designated content creator. If the content creator never claimed the grant, it could be recycled back into the pool, and re-issued to another Brave user in the future.

The _grossness_ of this "controversy" is in the fiction surrounding it, and not in the details itself. Some falsely claimed Brave solicited donations on behalf of content creators—that was never the case. _Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it._
by badhorseman | 2026-02-10 14:28:46+00:00
Indeed if ones own race is not being denigrated one would not feel embarrassed, although one may be embarrassed that racist material was created by their people. If ones own race is being denigrated then one may indeed feel embarrassment and perhaps also the anger and hopelessness. As for why exactly embarrassment if the purpose is to degrade by pointing some reason why the author holds your people in contempt and you are indeed hopeless as to stop it, shame and embarrassment is often what is felt.

In another post you talked about people getting mad at the image without context What context are we missing exactly. I do not feel ill informed or angry. But I could indeed be missing something, can you explain the context? If you where to say it's because of the LLM adding more context then that could be plausible, but why the medieval and hemp-rope? I know how sensitive the western companies have been on their models getting rid of negative racial stereo-types, going as far as to avoid and modify certain training data, would you accept an LLM producing negative stereotypes or tending to put one particular racial group into a submissive situation then others?

I really do feel like the idea that the LLM would just take the prompt A human male being ridden by a horse to include all those other details and go straight for a darker, somber tone and expression and a dynamic of domination and submission rather then a more humorous description, unlikely.
by phkahler | 2026-02-10 14:28:55+00:00
I'm convinced there are some semi-classical explanations that just haven't been figured out.

Electrons are helically moving photons:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281322004_The_elect...

That's some interesting/wacky stuff, but there has been more research to improve those calculations - like deriving the electron charge and magnetic moment.

Personally I like the idea that a proton is somehow literally an electron and 3 up quarks (a neutron gets 2 electrons and 3 up quarks). I am not a physicist though, so I'm sure there are reasons they "know" this is not the case.

I find it fascinating that some physicists say wave functions are somehow "real" and then we've got Jacob Barandes saying you don't even need wave functions to do the computations of QM:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oWip00iXbo

IMHO there is a lot of exploration to be done without particle accelerators.
by jorvi | 2026-02-10 14:28:59+00:00
"Bureaucrats" are rarely elected, that's what makes them bureaucrats. They're appointed.

As for the EU, you have the Commission who are unelected and the Parliament who are elected. The Parliament has to confirm laws like chat control.

If a majority of Parliament votes in chat control (they haven't and probably won't), that means a majority of the people want chat control. Or think they want it, anyway.

I'm also not sure why you think the EU is the pinnacle of central government. It carries vastly less power over its constituent countries than the US does over its constituent states.
by asa400 | 2026-02-10 14:29:15+00:00
That these facets of use exist at all are indicative of immature product design.

These are leaked implementation details that the labs are forcing us to know because these are weak, early products and they’re still exploring the design space. The median user doesn’t want to and shouldn’t have to care about details like this.

Future products in this space won’t have them and future users won’t be left in the dust by not learning them today.

Python programmers aren’t left behind by not knowing malloc and free.
by xnorswap | 2026-02-10 14:29:16+00:00
If you're going through the hassle of dropping DST, why not settle on BST as the permanent timezone if that's what the preference is for hours of daylight?

Asking an entire culture to change from 09:00-17:30 to 08:00-16:30 seems awkward and doomed to failure in comparison to simply landing on BST instead.
by graypegg | 2026-02-10 14:30:01+00:00
One tiny thing I don't see many UI libraries do when loaded with rounded corners: don't nest rounded boxes without adding the size of the gap between the two to the border radius. It appears to be present on the snackbar component for example. [0] Chrome recently added this two-up pane layout for tabs, and it has this exact issue. [1]

[0] https://www.chainlift.io/components/snackbar

[1] https://i.imgur.com/uPuTtNb.png
by yubainu | 2026-02-10 14:30:12+00:00
One thing I didn’t emphasize in the post: this work started partly from thinking about how black-box generative models might be audited under emerging regulations like the EU AI Act, where access to model internals or weights can’t be assumed.

Instead of aiming for human-readable explainability, ONTOS looks at whether it’s possible to leave behind reproducible, quantitative traces of structural stability during generation — something closer to audit evidence than a narrative justification.

I don’t claim this says anything about factual correctness or ethics. The narrower question is: was this generation process structurally stable, predictable, or already collapsing internally, even if the output still looks fluent on the surface.

I’m curious whether people see structural monitoring like this as complementary to existing safety / compliance approaches, or fundamentally limited in ways I might be missing.
by BowBun | 2026-02-10 14:30:37+00:00
My take: Discord will slowly enter the arena with the likes of Google, MS, Meta, Apple, Valve for their massive user network. The amount of resources needed to sustain free offerings for so long make it a nearly insurmountable moat for others to compete.

Even if one could reproduce their tech (which I doubt, they are top-tier), individuals would drown under hosting costs. They've positioned themselves incredibly well.
by gjsman-1000 | 2026-02-10 14:30:38+00:00
However, complaints about this always ring hollow because it’s constantly tied to a political goal.

“Americans are so individualistic, they don’t care about climate change.”

For how many Americans don’t care about their credit score, or bank account, or student debt, or local elections, or countless other things directly immediately affecting their lives, that’s not the case. It’s more that humans A) are bad at caring about the future and B) don’t trust scientists for any number of reasons they wouldn’t trust any other human meaning C) the only way to change this is to convince them, not lecture them, just like any other group that wants power, because no group is intrinsically special regarding human communication.
by timmg | 2026-02-10 14:30:48+00:00
It's true but also (could be) innocent. In the sense that if you A/B test things and look for engagement, you will almost certainly end up with "addictive" systems.

I think this may also be why there is so much sugar in American food. People buy more of the sweet stuff. So they keep making it sweeter.

I'm not sure who should be responsible. It kinda feels like a "tragedy of the commons" kind of situation.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-10 14:30:50+00:00
Supposedly the people working for these companies are "the brightest of the bright" but if they didn't even notice that this was what they were contributing to, what kind of intelligence is even that? Not everyone working there could possibly be so socially inept that they didn't realize what they helped building right? Or are we chalking it down to just missing morals? I feel like I'm missing something here to properly understand why people ended up working for these companies in the first place, even before it started making the news.
by komali2 | 2026-02-10 14:31:05+00:00
So as to keep the conversation productive, could you please define "China?" I have no idea what you're talking about when you say, "Tibet has been a part of China for centuries," but it sounds like the sort of ethnonationalism that the CPC likes to play with.

> If Xinjiang has concentration camps, then why are the Chinese allowing the UN , tourists and journalists in?

They didn't used to, I should know, I tried to go and was rejected.

Yes, Israel is committing a genocide in Palestine, and a far more violent one than the CPC committed against Xinjiang. The PLA did not snipe Uighur Muslim children in the back of head and did not airstrike hospitals in Xinjiang. It still committed a genocide.

Remember the words of Chen Quanguo: "Round up everyone who should be rounded up," immediately before ordering mass arrests.

I'm sorry, but I've had this conversation too many times, I will simply need to give you the challenge I've given everyone else. Please, can you canonically dismiss each of these sources? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Chin... There are 402 of them. I understand it's a relatively monumental task, but that's the unfortunate reality you find yourself in when you argue against consensus, it's a lot of work. If you can't do that, then, I don't understand why I should believe you instead of the mountain of evidence against you. And no, "it's all CIA" doesn't really work considering the diversity of sources.

By the way, you never addressed imperialist threats against Taiwan. Could you please explain how threatening to invade a sovereign nation isn't imperialist?
by cubefox | 2026-02-10 14:32:58+00:00
> I disagree, nano banana pro result is on a completely different league.

I strongly disagree. But even if you are right, the difference between the cafe shots and the Atlantis shots is clearly much, much larger than the difference between the different cafe shots. The Atlantis shots are super unrealistic. They look far worse than the cafe shots of Flux.2 Pro.

> Why? It's the perfect settings in my opinion

Because it's too easy obviously. We don't need an AI to make fake realistic photos of realistic environments when we can easily photograph those ourselves. Unrealistic environments are more discriminative because they are much more likely to produce garbage that doesn't look photorealistic.

> Btw I don't think you are using nano banana pro, I'm getting this from your prompt: https://i.ibb.co/wZHx0jS9/unnamed-1.jpg

I'm definitely using Nano Banana Pro, and your picture has the same strong AI look to it that is typical of NBP / Imagen 4.

> First of all how should you know the architecture details of gemini-3-pro-image, second of all how the model can modify the image if gemini itself is just rewriting the prompt (like old chatgpt+dalle), imagen 4 is just a text-to-image model, not an editing one, it doesn't make sense, nano banana pro can edit images (like the ones you can provide).

There were discussions about it previously on HN. Clearly NBP is using Gemini reasoning, and clearly the style of NBP strongly resembles Imagen 4 specifically. There is probably also a special editing model involved, just like in Qwen-Imahe-2.0.
by pelzatessa | 2026-02-10 14:33:03+00:00
the problem with decentralized alternatives is that they are even less stable than matrix currently is, and therefore less adoptable by non-tech people. I'd love to spend more of my time on tox/jami/cabal rather than matrix, but I'll do so only after matrix is widespread enough, beacuse I think that currently matrix needs the contribution in form of actually using it and getting people to use it, so that it gets a stable userbase. once I won't worry about matrix getting weaker because of no users, then I'll look into decentralized messengers.
by Markoff | 2026-02-10 14:33:13+00:00
1. we don't know their age, we only know they were virgins

2. they could be adult virgins

3. they deliberately made him drunk so he won't know anything and forced him to have sex with them not remembering it

not sure how is this CSAM, just because it's incest, doesn't mean it's CSAM, and by your logic they were his "children", then everyone is someone's child and literally all porn is CSAM then
by mikkupikku | 2026-02-10 14:33:18+00:00
There is no empirical test for consciousness. It's the 21st century equivalent of angels dancing on pin heads.

Engineers, who aren't trying to play at being new age theologians, should concern themselves with what the machines can demonstrably do and not do. In Asimov's robot tales, robots interpret vague commands in the worst way possible for the sake of generating interesting stories. But today, these "scripts" as you call them, can interpret vague and obtuse instructions in generally a reasonable way. Read through claude code's outputs and you'll find it filled with stuff like "The user said they want a 'thingy' to click on, I'm going to assume the user means a button." Now I haven't read the book since I was a teenager, but HAL 9000 applies literally instructions to achieve the mission in a way that actually makes him a liability to the mission. The best take was in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, in the intro when the narrator protagonist asks if machines can have souls, then explains that it doesn't matter, what matters is what the machine can do.
by tkrenn06 | 2026-02-10 14:33:21+00:00
Built this to solve a pain we had ourselves: AI costs were spread across providers with no single source of truth.

With AI Costboard, integration is simple: change your base URL, use your project key, and keep your existing SDK flow. From there, every request is tracked automatically, normalized, and shown in one place (cost, tokens, latency, errors, provider/model breakdowns), with budgets and alerts to prevent surprises.

Would love your feedback on:

onboarding clarity,
pricing/limits,
which provider or workflow we should improve next.
by superkuh | 2026-02-10 14:33:37+00:00
The jury is using words outside of their medical context in situations that do not justify the word then. In fact, most of society seems okay with this gross mis-use of the term to apply to things that don't actually manipulate incentive salience. We're going to end up with authoritarians in control of all 'screens' just because our schools have done such a bad job of explaining neuroscience. If you think handing the federal government control of all screens is a good idea in the USA you really need to look around.

I am not saying that Facebook didn't try. I am just saying that only having access to screens, they would inevitably fail. Screens are very unlike addictive drugs and cannot directly alter neurochemistry (at least not any more than a sunset or any perception does). I strongly dislike the company and have personally never created a Facebook account nor used the website.
by phendrenad2 | 2026-02-10 14:33:48+00:00
Furthermore, people are stuck thinking about the world in a worker/employer dynamic. But there are scenarios where everyone in New York state could be paid UBI. There are 20 million people in the state, let's say we pay each one $100k/year. That's $2 trillion. Conveniently, the current GDP of New York state is $2.3 trillion. If they can increase that to 5+, it should be no problem distributing 50% to the citizens. And how can they do that? By charging high taxes on any business that wants to do business in NY. By leveraging their strategic access to the NY harbors. By essentially turning the entire state into a business, everyone inside it an employee or shareholder, and everyone outside a customer.