MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by omhome16 | 2026-02-12 02:09:20+00:00
Strongly agree on the 'Toy App' ceiling with current DAG-based frameworks. I've been wrestling with LangGraph for similar reasons—once the happy path breaks, the graph essentially halts or loops indefinitely because the error handling is too rigid.

The concept of mapping 'exceptions as observations' rather than failures is the right mental shift for production.

Question on the 'Homeostasis' metric: Does the agent persist this 'stress' state across sessions? i.e., if an agent fails a specific invoice type 5 times on Monday, does it start Tuesday with a higher verification threshold (or 'High Conscientiousness') for that specific task type? Or is it reset per run?

Starred the repo, excited to dig into the OODA implementation.
by jared_stewart | 2026-02-12 02:09:48+00:00
anecdotally, it seems like this helps find better places for code to sit, understands the nuances of a code base better, and does a better job avoiding duplicate functionality.

it's still very much a work in progress, the thing I'm struggling with most right now is to have claude even using the capability without directly telling it to.

there seems to be benefits to the native stack (which lists files and then hopes for the best) relative to this sometimes. Frankly, it seems to be better at understanding the file structure. Where this approach really shines is in understanding the code base.
by computerdork | 2026-02-12 02:10:01+00:00
Thanks!
And in terms of heated glove/mitten tech, have a pair of heated mittens already, the Thxtoms brand (although, they're discontinued):
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CDLN91CN

The tech definitely works, and these were, at the time, just another relatively-cheap, but decently-well reviewed pair. Yeah in fact, on their own, they aren't that thick or durable, but when the heat is turned on, they are plenty warm. Seems like almost any decent pair of heated mittens/gloves would work well.

For me at least, the iron-oxide heat-packs work pretty well too, but they typically don't heat the fingers too well, so when its really cold, the main parts of my hands are warm, but my fingers aren't. It's not that bad, and it's easy to heat up the fingers by curling them around the heat pack, but with a heated glove, the heat typically reaches the fingers, so you don't really have to do anything and can just completely forget about your hands - but yeah, if I was loosing gloves often, maybe heated gloves would be a net waste compared to heat packs:)

Recently, bought a pair of heated liners to go under an oversized pair of gloves - I have Leki ski-gloves that directly attach to the ski poles, and they don't currently have a heater option, so am trying this instead. This are the heated liners:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082XXKXCP

They're nothing special, but by my initial tests, they seem pretty warm under my gloves. Will know more tomorrow:)
Show HN: Double blind entropy using Drand for verifiably fair randomness
by rishi_blockrand | 2026-02-12 02:10:41+00:00
The only way to get a trust-less random value is to have it distributed and time-locked three ways, player, server and a future-entropy.

In the demo above, the moment you commit (Roll-Dice) a commit with the hash of a player secret is sent to the server and the server accepts that and sends back the hash of its secret back and the "future" drand round number at which the randomness will resolve. The future used in the demo is 10 secs

When the reveal happens (after drand's particular round) all the secrets are revealed and the random number is generated using "player-seed:server-seed:drand-signature".

All the verification is in Math, so truly trust-less, so:

1. Player-Seed should matches the player-hash committed

2. Server-Seed should matches the server-hash committed

3. Drand-Signature can is publicly not available at the time of commit and is available at the time of reveal. (Time-Locked)

4. Random number generated is deterministic after the event and unknown and unpredictably before the event.

5. No party can influence the final outcome, specially no "last-look" advantange for anyone.

I think this should be used in all games, online lottery/gambling and other systems which want to be fair by design not by trust.
by jiggawatts | 2026-02-12 02:11:13+00:00
It should never do any kind of parsing for any kind of file, irrespective of the file extension!

It's supposed to be a basic text file viewer / editor, not an alternative to WordPad or VS Code!

Not every app has to be everything for everybody.

We're in an era now where Calc.exe takes appreciable time to start and pops up HTTP web proxy authentication prompts on some networks.

It's just incredible to me the level of enshittification people just shrug off like it's nothing.

Just now, I'm trying to debug something in Visual Studio 2026. The debugger's "view list" control takes over 10 seconds to pop up a simple table of text.

Text! Tens of seconds! On a gaming/workstation PC!

Nobody at Microsoft thought this was a problem.
by Telemakhos | 2026-02-12 02:11:46+00:00
My microwave mainboard failed because I changed the range light bulb without unplugging the whole microwave first, which I would not have thought necessary. It seems that, without unplugging the whole microwave, the act of changing a light bulb will cause catastrophic voltage to delicate parts. Turns out to be a common thing with this brand.

I ended up replacing the mainboard with a part from no apparent manufacturer with new features (the blue LEDs dim after inactivity so as not to illuminate the whole room at night) and no connection for the thermistor. Works like a charm. It feels very much like the original manufacturer wanted the board to fail and be replaced, while some random Chinese circuit-board maker sold me a better quality board.
by Bender | 2026-02-12 02:12:24+00:00
I thought I provided detailed steps. Either way my solution was to whack that machine and install CachyOS since I am very comfortable with Arch. Bazzite can be someone elses problem if they care enough. The odd delay on terminal exit and random boot up and shut down times are the only real potential problems whereas the sexual preference is just a red flag to me personally as it suggests there will be other surprises or potential shenanigans in the OS pushing some agenda which as far as I am concerned my tools do not need these things. Some people may love it.
Ask HN: What resources do you use to fill specialized positions?
by jasbur | 2026-02-12 02:12:26+00:00
Our company has made the decision to create a new position for an AI-focused engineer, and I will be playing an integral part in finding the right candidate. Our goal is to fill the position with someone who can help synthesize data from our proprietary software, financial data, and other operational data into useful analysis and tangible outcomes and automated actions (i.e. not just a chat bot).

We are, at our core, a technology/software company but this is our first time filling a position like this and we’re not entirely sure where to start the search. We suspect that posting a position like this on a public job board would likely result in a large number of low quality applications and would like to take a more targeted approach. We suspect the type of candidate that would pique our interest would also be actively perused by a number of other companies, and we are willing to compete appropriately.

What methods have other members of the Hacker News community had success with when filling these kinds of positions?
by Schmerika | 2026-02-12 02:12:26+00:00
> The dining halls are run by Compass Group USA, Inc., which the Army has contracted with to run its new facilities based on the company’s history of running airport lounges and handling the meal-planning for college sports teams, Mohan said.

Cool. You're gonna give us some idea of who Compass Group is, right? No?

Fine, I'll do it. Brb.

...

I see. Million dollar bribes for UN contracts, overcharging schools, listeria outbreaks, feeding horse meat to schoolchildren, slave labor, and "Britain's most heartless employer".

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass_Group#Criticisms_of_Co...
by kulahan | 2026-02-12 02:13:11+00:00
You're not wrong, but I have had to do video verification over a phone once, and it seemed quite advanced. It would flash through a number of colors and settings and take probably 30 frames of you. I presume they're checking for "this came from a screen and not a human", but of course I have no idea how it works, so I don't know if it's truly sophisticated or not.
by wormpilled | 2026-02-12 02:14:10+00:00
That is a very insightful point. It highlights the irony of complaining about "loss of control" immediately after voluntarily inviting an autonomous agent into the codebase.

Those specific logs are essentially a prop anyways. Removing them makes it harder to LARP as an active participant; it forces the realization that "we" are now just passive observers.
Show HN: IQT – Why space feels panoramic and time feels fleeting
by diwank | 2026-02-12 02:15:12+00:00
I've spent the past year building a theory of phenomenal experience (consciousness) that's designed to be falsifiable.

It identifies phenomenal quality with a specific mathematical object (the algebra-state pair on a causal diamond in algebraic quantum field theory) and derives three experimental protocols with pre-registered failure conditions.

The short version: take the "intrinsic nature" intuition from Russellian monism seriously, ask what mathematical object could play that role, and discover that constraint-based reasoning forces you to a unique answer. Then show that this answer dissolves the composition problem, generates temporal phenomenology from diamond geometry, and predicts specific measurable differences from IIT (overlapping conscious regions vs. exclusion) and GNW (experience without global broadcast).

The paper is ~35 pages, mathematically involved but with interpretive boxes and discipline-specific reading guides. I'm actively seeking collaborators in anesthesiology, epilepsy surgery, and psychedelic research to run the protocols.

Paper: https://github.com/creatorrr/intrinsic-quality-theory/blob/m...

I'd especially value pushback from mathematical physicists on the AQFT formalization and from neuroscientists on whether the effective-theory bridge actually constrains the empirical predictions or is doing post-hoc work. Tell me what breaks.
by dasil003 | 2026-02-12 02:15:52+00:00
Um, I guess this might useful to some number of readers, but I don't think it's universal and I don't think it's a secret—more like its one of a few dozen pithy focus hacks that regularly make their way through the blogosphere and social media for those interested in "productivity".

To try my hand at reductive advice, I would say this: know your strengths and what work you do has the most value. The structure exists to serve the work and not the other way around. Habits and processes can serve the work, but can quickly become a form of procrastination for certain types of personalities. Reading about productivity on the internet will not generally make you more productive. Only through honest self-reflection can you actually improve your personal productivity and impact.
by unleaded | 2026-02-12 02:15:54+00:00
The network effect as seen in the other comments plays a big part, but also discord offers a useful service that really nobody else does well. there's a lot wrong with it but you can still create a community in a few clicks and you have text messages, photos, videos, gifs, voice chats, screenshare, a comprehensive permission/role system, tons of bots.. all for free and without needing to be too tech savvy, that's pretty damn cool.
by notpushkin | 2026-02-12 02:16:18+00:00
With a temperature of zero, LLM output will always be the same. Then it becomes a matter of getting it to output the exact replica of the input: if we can do that, it will always produce it, and the fact it can also be used as a bullshit machine becomes irrelevant.

With the usual interface it’s probably inefficient: giving just a prompt alone might not produce the output we need, or it might be larger than the thing we’re trying to compress. However, if we also steer the decisions along the way, we can probably give a small prompt that gets the LLM going, and tweak its decision process to get the tokens we want. We can then store those changes alongside the prompt. (This is a very hand-wavy concept, I know.)
by LorenPechtel | 2026-02-12 02:18:08+00:00
While I agree that the unreliable grid dominates I don't see how that says it's been factored in. The cost is hidden, pushed off onto the existing powerplants which run less of the time and thus cost more per kwh actually produced. This "works" until you don't have enough gas when it's calm and things go badly.

Most places simply do not have a high enough percentage of renewables to hit this yet. Last I knew Hawaii had hit a different wall--while in theory a transformer works equally well in both directions real world engineering of high power transformers doesn't work that way. The substations can't push power up, thus solar connections were prohibited if they could cause the situation to occur. (You can't have panels if too many of your neighbors do.)
by sgc | 2026-02-12 02:18:12+00:00
The best leader board I have used is ocrarena.ai. I agree it is not detailed enough. I wish people could rate what part of the ocr went well or bad (layout, text recognition, etc). However, my more specific results using custom prompts and my own images on their playground page are relatively closely aligned with the rankings as others have voted.

What more are you looking for?
by Fnoord | 2026-02-12 02:18:19+00:00
Yes, the warranty period for consumers in whole EU is the minimal amount: two years.

But some countries have a more lax law (Germany, for example, not).

For example, here in The Netherlands you can have more than two years warranty. If you buy a premium smartphone (say: the latest iPhone or Google Pixel), and it stops functioning after twenty-five months (two years and one month), then your warranty isn't exhausted because a premium / flagship device like that (costing that much) is to be expected to work longer than twenty-five months. So, your warranty is still active. Now, if you bought a budget smartphone, you're probably out of luck. This is also why, yes, sometimes Google Pixel devices are cheaper in Germany. But you'll have less warranty if you buy it from there.

Then there's non-conformity. A device like a microwave isn't supposed to stop working because of a LED display suddenly turning on due to a hardware failure. Especially not if a blue LED display has this issue far more often than a green one. You can argue non-conformity with the seller (so the company who sold you the product; not the manufacturer), and they have to figure out how to handle it with the manufacturer; such isn't your issue as consumer. Only issue is you need a lawyer to write the letter for you (but there are nice examples available online which you can copy/paste, and there are also some very nice lawyers who do this either for free or low fee).

For businesses, different laws apply…
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-12 02:19:03+00:00
If the Irish truly want this, I'm glad for them.

But in my view, arts should be funded by people in private. Any spare resources the government can muster up should be invested in improving the security and quality of life for its people. If no one ever goes hungry, and their medical needs are met swiftly, and justice is swift and accessible to all. then I can see the appeal in funding arts. But even then, sciences can meaningfully and in the long-term improve humans' lives.

I don't even know if the arts would benefit from this. Will the government arbitrate whose art is better? Private persons would, they won't fund a terrible artist. and from what I know about artists, the rejection and failure is instrumental to revelations and breakthroughs in their art. Without that, will the state be funding or facilitating mediocrity in art?

Imagine if this was for entrepreneurs. If the government will provide income so long as you're starting businesses. If you didn't have much to begin with, it might prevent you from giving up businesses that are failing, hold on to that restaurant years after it's failed because you like the vibe, and your needs are met. But if you'll eventually be in danger of running out of money to support yourself, you'll be forced to shut doors early, learn lessons and move on to something better.

I'm just making a case against dreams being kept alive artificially on life-support. And of the consequence of not having adversity when needed. I don't know if it's true, but I remember an analogy of artificial biospheres failing to grow trees and plants early on, because they didn't simulate wind. the trees needed the resistance, push and adversity of wind to thrive.

But I'll digress, I'm not saying Ireland did wrong, just putting my thoughts on the subject out there. They know what they're doing, I'm sure. And this is sounding too much like damn linkedin post, and on HN too of all places, talking about entrepreneurship, shame on me! :)
by toliveistobuild | 2026-02-12 02:19:30+00:00
The most telling number here isn't who's #1 - it's the spread. 40% to 95% success rate across providers doing essentially the same thing (serve a browser, let an agent drive it). That's a massive gap for infrastructure that's supposed to be commoditized.

The scalability test is where it gets real. 250 concurrent sessions and most providers weren't even tested because they couldn't handle it. BrowserAI at 86% vs ZenRows at 51% under load tells you everything about who actually built for multi-tenant agent workloads vs who wrapped a Playwright container in an API.

What's missing from this benchmark is the thing that actually kills you in production: anti-bot detection. A remote browser that loads pages fast but gets Cloudflare-blocked on every third request isn't useful. The "features" score tries to capture this but lumping CAPTCHA solving, proxy rotation, and session persistence into one number obscures the real failure modes.
The other elephant in the room: none of these benchmarks test authenticated sessions - the agent logged into your actual accounts doing real workflows. That's where the security/reliability tradeoff gets genuinely hard and where most of these providers have zero story.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-02-12 02:19:50+00:00
It's not like Ireland is getting rid of unemployment insurance. And insurance sales and carpet installation are professions where there are jobs that actually pay a living wage.

A lot of societies have realized there is value in supporting art and culture. For thousands of years that activity was sponsored by monarchs, royalty and other nobility. Up until actually quite recently, most first world countries without monarchs and nobles also provided substantial support for the arts.
by ocdtrekkie | 2026-02-12 02:20:04+00:00
> you are are effectively waiting for that

That's essentially what I was saying. I sort of hope when people are dead I can enjoy their performance more fondly even if I know they sucked before.

> Maybe get the episodes in a way that doesn't give him money.

I've owned the whole series on Blu-ray for a number of years. It really is just one of those things that feels tainted, at least for now. :/
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-12 02:20:37+00:00
https://www.ndtv.com/indians-abroad/indian-student-25-killed...

Weird tangent, but anyways: tax the rich.

Tan isn't exactly non-violet either, so more confused on the tangent:

>He once tweeted that seven of the city’s supervisors — all progressives — should “die slow, motherfuckers” in a late-night polemic. The tweet, which Tan said was a joke, prompted hateful mail and police reports.
by projektfu | 2026-02-12 02:21:15+00:00
My french horn teacher was a new-age "recovering Catholic"[1] and a paid singer for a couple Protestant churches. A job is a job. Personally, I am an atheist but I find a lot of devotional music to be well written and fun to sing, and I enjoy singing it in choir, even if I don't literally believe the words I'm singing.

In any event, you can play organ with a community choir, especially if you can also play piano. We pay our accompanists.

1. i.e. no longer Christian
by TimTheTinker | 2026-02-12 02:21:23+00:00
He probably would if he could think of a coherent action to call for.

These times are so strange that for people with organized and aware minds, one primary impulse is to retreat for the preservation of their own sanity (and perhaps future culture through them). That's what the monastics did during the "dark ages" (which is rather a misnomer in part because of the work they did).
by BADCAFE | 2026-02-12 02:21:35+00:00
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Looking for someone sharp and hungry with high agency. Startup experience preferred but not required. 4+ years experience is a plus, but we’d take an exceptional recent graduate over a mediocre tenured EA. Fluent English, strong judgment, self-starter, and real interest in technology required. Must operate independently in a fast-moving environment.

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by chillfox | 2026-02-12 02:22:47+00:00
They all get it right if you allow them to think.

I just copy pasted your question "The car wash is only 50 meters from my house. I want to get my car washed, should I drive there or walk?" without any further prompt and ran it against GLM 5, GPT 5.2, Opus 4.6, Gemini 3 Pro Preview, through OpenRouter with reasoning effort set to xhigh.

Not a single one said I should walk, they all said to drive.
by Nursie | 2026-02-12 02:23:20+00:00
Leeway for human interpretation of laws is not a bug, it's a feature. It doesn't make things bad laws.

This was the whole problem with the ludicrous "code is law!" movement a handful of years ago. No, it's not, law is made for people, life is imprecise and fairness and decency are not easy to encode.
by rmunn | 2026-02-12 02:23:25+00:00
The problem is not new, though. The article opens by mentioning a 1926 concert in which the choir asked the audience "If you sing tenor, please join us." The tenor range is relatively rare among men's voices. I'm a high tenor myself; I can routinely sing a G, and I can get up to an A if my voice is in good form. I think I managed a B♭ (Bb if HN strips out the ♭ (flat) Unicode character) once, but it was decades ago so I'm not sure if I'm remembering the arrangement correctly; and choral arrangers rarely ask tenors to sing a B flat since they know so few people can handle it. Pretty sure I've never been able to hit a C, though. (C5, that is; of course I can hit a middle C).

But tenors have been in short supply for decades and decades. Every single time I've tried out for a choir, when the choral director hears how high I can sing, I can see some sort of "tell" on his or her face. A smile, a widening of the eyes... I can sightread, too, so I know I'm a shoo-in for any choir (well, any amateur choir at least: I'm not a music professional and wouldn't be able to devote 20+ hours a week to a choir). But I suspect that even if I couldn't sightread at all and had to have my hand held for any new piece, choir directors would grab me anyway, just because of how high my voice can reach if I haven't been abusing it.