MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmux | 2026-02-28 18:16:22+00:00
really good piece, sums up almost exactly where I'm at with AI currently.

cognitive debt is a real problem in my domain (embedded software) because AI simply can’t debug the symptom when the reasons for the bug aren’t in code, and a stack trace may not exist. finding the REALLY hard bugs requires in depth systems understanding and the ability to connect things you’ve seen around the codebase together - and the fix usually isn’t adding code, which means the patchwork fixes Claude likes to do only makes things worse.

that said, it’s made writing harnesses and supporting tools WAY easier and faster, and my workflow is better for it. Searching the git history for the why of things is also made way easier; helping me to reason more effectively
by Klaster_1 | 2026-02-28 18:16:55+00:00
Agree, but current agents don't help with that. I use Copilot, and you can't even dump it preserving complete context, including images, tool call results and subagent outputs. And even if you could, you'd immediately blow up the context trying to ingest that. This needs some supporting tooling, like in today's submission where agent accesses terabytes of CI logs via ClickHouse.
by markisus | 2026-02-28 18:17:03+00:00
> Before their papers, mathematicians had assumed that even though the number line might look like a continuous object, if you zoomed in far enough, you’d eventually find gaps.

I'll try to interpret this sentence.

We all have some mental imagery that comes to mind when we think about the number line. Before Cantor and Dedekind, this image was usually a series of infinitely many dots, arranged along a horizontal line. Each dot corresponds to some quantity like sqrt(2), pi, that arises from mathematical manipulation of equations or geometric figures. If we ever find a gap between two dots, we can think of a new dot to place between them (an easy way is to take their average). However, we will also be adding two new gaps. So this mental image also has infinitely many gaps.

Dedekind and Cantor figured out a way to fill all the gaps simultaneously instead of dot by dot. This method created a new sort of infinity that mathematicians were unfamiliar with, and it was vastly larger than the gappy sort of infinity they were used to picturing.
by marssaxman | 2026-02-28 18:17:03+00:00
It would be fun if the donate button let you see how many additional papers your gift would enable. I'm thinking of something like the ticker you see on the right side of a GoFundMe page, where you might see "$175 donated today, 112 papers translated, credit for 96 papers remaining"; one might choose to donate $20 rather than, say, $5, if there were a clear connection to the benefit you were providing.
Show HN: I dump all my private notes into an LLM and tell it to build me a site
by elijahlucian | 2026-02-28 18:17:21+00:00
I’ve always found the concept of AI "hallucinations" fascinating. We constantly debate whether models are creative or just making stuff up, so I wanted to see what happens when you remove the guardrails entirely.

Tresbuchet is a publishing experiment. I drop a loose prompt into the agent along with a folder full of random text files, chat logs, and thoughts I’ve accumulated over the years. No specific instructions, no schema, no guidance on how to style it. I just tell it to "Go."

It reads the unstructured text and generates a completely new iteration of the site based on how it interprets the data.

It's been interesting tracking how different platforms (Claude, Codex, Gemini) handle the exact same mess of text differently. I've found that giving the models less instruction actually yields more interesting UI and copy results than trying to prompt-engineer a specific outcome.

I'm just building stuff to see what the models do when left to their own devices.

Curious what you guys think of the approach.
by wrsh07 | 2026-02-28 18:18:11+00:00
You can construct sequences of rational numbers where the limit is not rational (eg it's sqrt 2)

Trivially, the sequence of numbers who are the truncated decimal expansion of root 2 (eg 1.4, 1.41. 1.414, ...) although I find this somewhat unsatisfying.

With the real numbers there are no gaps. There are no sequences of reals where the limit of that sequence is not a real number
by abdullahkhalids | 2026-02-28 18:18:47+00:00
> Closely followed by the interactive notebooks.

Mathematica's notebooks are the only environment where I can do some computation to arrive at a symbolic expression. Copy the expression from the output cell into a new input cell. Then manipulate it by hand into the form I want. Then continue processing it further.

Also, symbolic expressions can be written nicely with actual superscripts and subscripts, and with non-latin characters.

One of the best features of Mathematica system.
by xg15 | 2026-02-28 18:19:07+00:00
> What we actually need is for the WebAuthn spec to include a signal that tells credential managers "this passkey is load-bearing for encryption, not just auth" so they can surface appropriate warnings before deletion. Right now credential managers treat all passkeys identically.

This feels more like CYA/shifting the blame for me. If a service is designed so that I will lose all my data if I lose the passkey, then a "yo, don't lose that passkey, like, ever!" warning is the minimum, but doesn't solve the problem.

I found the initial suggestion "don't ever use passkeys for encryption of persistent data" more reasonable.

(Or what the sibling comment describes: Design the encryption in such a way there is an alternate key that could be used for decrypting)
by lukifer | 2026-02-28 18:19:14+00:00
Examples abound; but for good and ill, the language-using ape seems to be a religious animal, having co-evolved with mythological memeplexes.

There's the old salt from DFW, "one can't choose whether to worship, only what to worship". Less apologetics, perhaps, than a realmythos (akin to realpolitik).

Nature abhors a vacuum, and something inevitably fills the void: the "god-shaped hole" in individuals, and the game-theoretic basin of attraction, the actual realpolitik of loyalty-signaling, load-bearing fictions which bind an "imagined community". (The first might be manageable, but the second is a doozy: a faith which could not be more explicitly anarcho-pacifist mutated into justification for brutally violent hierarchies of domination and exploitation. So it goes.)
by amdivia | 2026-02-28 18:19:57+00:00
I think for AI to become useful while minimizing it's harm, the interface as a whole needs to be reworked. Instead of having a loop of code generation followed by review. The initiative should be taken by the developer, AI should be a background thing, not one that's surfacing itself to the developer.

For instance I was thinking of AI coding where the developer is writing the application interface, files, design, and the AI in the background is reading them and translating them to the programming language of choice.

This way the developer is writing the whole thing out by hand, it would be as if one is writing fluid pseudo code, but the abstractions would be there, the way they are interacting with each other is there, the human is thinking if the abstractions and when to use them. Whereas the AI is out of the view, simply translating the fluid pseudo code to a rigid programming language.

Perhaps the above isn't really it, but I strongly feel something needs to change in the way we currently work, because it really creates a chasm between the developer and the outputted code not only in terms of the actual implementation but the mental abstractions it's supposed to reflect
by thenoblesunfish | 2026-02-28 18:20:04+00:00
Just to make sure it's somewhere in these comments: the fundamental issue is people trying to measure something they don't understand. That is not new. The article gives an interesting exploration of how things break down in a new way when people focus too much on metrics instead of (IMO) the more robust approach of getting people who care to try to make something that feels quality. We're building crap, yes, but I blame the people who spend their time measuring "velocity" like it's a well defined term, not the coding tools being used to play the game.
by F7F7F7 | 2026-02-28 18:20:04+00:00
This just further points to the real issue at hand: the US Department of War (Defense) wants to be the arbiter in determining what 'lawful use' means. They don't want to be audited or policed. Which IMHO makes any mutual 'agreement' pretty much useless.

It also sounds like they are trying to clean up Altman's carefully crafted hedging. Because the chances of this NOT ending up in court are nil.
by vaeyshl | 2026-02-28 18:20:28+00:00
Before AI, we discuss on how to solve a problem with teammates.
Even if we didn't remember exactly what we wrote 6mo ago, we at least remembered the general idea.

After AI, that understanding often disappears, to the point where we can't even direct the AI to fix the problem because we don't know what's wrong.

Also AI often changes the code in the context of current problem. So, we might get more bugs when fixing one.
by artemonster | 2026-02-28 18:20:33+00:00
Thanks for elaborated reply, both papers Ive seen too. I have mostly same views, but I really dislike that there is no clean solution for binary methods, i.e. add( float, int), where symmetric add(int, float) ends up being a boilerplate. Also I think in asymmetric case its hard to handle dispatch when it has failed to produce method when looking in first argument. i.e. dispatching "collide" with Asteroid, Ship, if collider method is found in Ship, how to bind "this", where does Asteroid is bound. Anyways, good luck with your experiments!
by hsaliak | 2026-02-28 18:20:44+00:00
The Gemini-CLI situation is poor. They did not communicate that AI Pro or AI Ultra accounts cannot be used with this API broadly earlier. I specifically remember searching for this info. Seeing this made me wonder if I had missed it. Turns out it was added to the TOS 2 days ago - diff
https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/pull/20488/chang.... I'd be happy to stand corrected here.

Anti Gravity I understand, they are subsidizing to promote a general IDE, but I dont understand constraining the generative AI backend that Gemini CLI hits.

Finally, it's unclear what's allowed and what's not if I purchase the API access from google cloud here https://developers.google.com/gemini-code-assist/docs/overvi...

The Apache License of this product at this point is rich. Just make it closed source and close the API reference. Why have it out there?
by thisislife2 | 2026-02-28 18:21:10+00:00
It doesn't matter - when a strong and stable political structures suddenly collapse, the state fails and disintegrates due to the political infighting. While I agree with you that the chances of Iran becoming a completely failed state is unlikely, I do see an imminent civil war in Iran's future if a regime collapse happens, and the Americans and Israelis install their Shahi (royal) puppet there. A regime collapse will of course mean Iran will lose its sovereignty (probably for a decade or more), till a truly independent stable polity emerges form the ashes.
by slashdev | 2026-02-28 18:21:14+00:00
I have this at the bottom of my AGENTS.md:

You will also add a markdown file to the changelog directory named with the current date and time `date -u +"%Y-%m-%dT%H-%M-%SZ"`, record the prompt, and a brief summary of what changes you made, this should be the same summary you gave the developer in the chat.

From that I get the prompt and the summary for each change. It's not perfect but it at least adds some context around the commit.
by tonymet | 2026-02-28 18:21:19+00:00
Allowing anonymous signatories only weakens the petition. Two important people signing a petition is worth more than 10000 anons.

I scrolled through a few pages and 40-60% are anonymous. Even a handful weakens the petition.

I wish more people would participate in civics . Attend your city council or local political party meeting. See what it takes to actually collect signatures, run a campaign.

Online slactivism actually just worsens the cause, because potential energy is vented on futile online “petitions” rather than taking real action.
by bwestergard | 2026-02-28 18:21:38+00:00
"As we have seen, for Marx a social world dominated by commodities and
money necessarily involves an all too real, if impersonal, form of coercion.
The goods and services required to address human needs must take the form
of commodities. Producers must exchange their output for money. Agents
must obtain money in order to gain access to goods and services. As a result,
commodities and money become things with power over human subjects, like the fetish objects of a supposedly distant past. The circulation of these alien
things becomes the mode in which human sociality (in the historically specific
form of dissociated sociality) is expressed. That, at any rate, is the Marxian view."

https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/t...
by hedora | 2026-02-28 18:22:05+00:00
They exempt applications that run inside another “host application” though, which is ~ everything in any modern app store.

I guess Linux native games on GoG might be covered. All windows and wsl programs run in userspace compat layers. iOS might be covered. Snap, probably not (containers), AppImage? Maybe?

Nix, and brew? Probably not.
by juris | 2026-02-28 18:22:22+00:00
since you’re lost (now I’m being flippant to match your tone):

age is an identifier as part of a ‘fingerprint’. a fingerprint is used to track you. your fingerprints are attached to the things you criticize online. you must temper your criticisms. end of story.

your ‘o noes another slippery slope arg’ falls flat on its ass when you look outside at what your government is patently and evidently doing. you paying any attention to the anthropic ‘mass surveillance’ canary? how about the ice app? no? god, you really need to be led to water huh.

maybe look up how the persona company aggregates data for the government and get back to me as to whether you think that has a chilling effect on speech and assembly (when droves of people are leaving discord)

ah maybe too “abstract” for you. How about this:

a/s/l? :3 don’t worry, im just a dev, i won’t bite. unless of course, you disagree with me o3o
by bloppe | 2026-02-28 18:22:37+00:00
If you were a customer, what would you do? Keep paying for Claude but be extra careful about preventing all the people working on anything that might potentially be construed as related to the DoD work from using it, for fear of a retributive Hegseth? Or just use codex company-wide and not worry?

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/26/incoherent-hegseths...

> The designation, typically reserved for foreign firms with ties to U.S. adversaries, could ban companies that work with the government from partnering with Anthropic.

> “You’re telling everyone else who supplies to the DOD you cannot use Anthropic’s models, while also saying that the DOD must use Anthropic’s models.”

I wouldn't put anything past this administration in terms of twisting rules and acting in bad faith to excerpt as much leverage as possible. They do it all the time. It's basically a government of patent trolls threatening everyone with meritless lawsuits that are nonetheless extremely effective.
by 8cvor6j844qw_d6 | 2026-02-28 18:22:40+00:00
Are there plans to support scoped token permissions (specific folders or even specific notes)? I'd love to try setting up something that automatically updates a specific Obsidian note on a state change or cronjob, but I'd want to avoid giving access to the rest of the vault.

also, thanks for the great product, bought the vip catalyst as a show of support.
by gwern | 2026-02-28 18:22:50+00:00
Oh yes, this is blatantly AI-written. Whether this is ironic and discredits the claims is up to you.

But the opening at least makes a good point: AI-written code is right now something of an embezzlement or theft or fraud. Like junk food, it presents all the appearance of coming with correlates like "an engineer now understands the problem-space and has built tacit knowledge and a theory of how the domain/code work"... But it doesn't. The human engineer takes all the credit (and promotions), having put in a tenth or less the usual work, but evades the blame or tech debt.

This is why vibecoding is the inevitable endpoint. The current code market is a lemon market, and we see the exact same kind of dynamics of 'buyers' withdrawing from 'purchases' as they see all these shiny code bases which are secretly lemons, and sellers increasingly get frustrated they can't get a 'fair price' (like anyone to look at their 'Show HN' posts).

We must understand that the source code is no more valuable than a compiled binary, and that the responsible human doesn't understand it and has to trust it, in the same way that we now understand source code but don't understand and have to trust the compiled binary. Today, I understand my Haskell code, but I have no idea what is going on in the compiled binary (nor do I claim to); tomorrow, I will understand my prompt/spec, but I will have no idea what is going on in the 'source code' (nor will anyone expect me to or admire me for 'writing all that code' or be surprised if some seriously mistaken assumption is hardwired into the generated code). Just as no one cares about a binary you compiled today, no one will care about your source code. (Unless there is something special about it, of course. 'I compiled Firefox for my Linux' - OK, congrats? 'I compiled Firefox for my toaster' - OK now I'm interested.)

So, no one will care about the codebase for your 'Show HN' project; you have to instead get them to care about your proposal or your testsuite. If it's any good, they can simply pass it to their own LLMs to 'compile'; no need to trust your crummy dubious already-obsolete 'source code'...
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-02-28 18:23:03+00:00
> One other thing that surprised me was that my eng manager was seemingly oblivious to my ongoing complains about growing cognitive load and confusion rate.

Engineering managers in my experience (even in ones with deep technical backgrounds) often miss the trees for the forest. The best ones go to bat for you, especially once verifying that they can do something to unblock or support you. But that’s still different than being in the terminal or IDE all day.

Offloading cognitive load is pretty much their entire role.
by casey2 | 2026-02-28 18:23:24+00:00
>bought “Yes” shares in the “U.S. strikes Iran by February 28, 2026?” market just hours before explosions were reported in Tehran and other cities.

If these sites were serious about their promise they would freeze betting so people have a reasonable window of time to change their behavior given new information. Otherwise insiders will wait too long, especially on bets like these where as the dates approach more people rationally vote no incentive's insiders to withhold as long as possible.

Or at least put this warning on every bet with this structure. Fallacious reasoning cannot produce value, you are just taking money from people reasoning poorly hence gambling
by raffael_de | 2026-02-28 18:25:07+00:00
> OpenClaw has nearly half a million lines of code, 53 config files, and over 70 dependencies.

Isn't OpenClaw just ...

while(True) {
in = read_input();
if(in) {
async relay_2_llm(in);
}
sleep(1.0);
}

... and then some?
by tempest_ | 2026-02-28 18:25:31+00:00
What are the open source options? Turnstile is a replacement for Recaptcha after google moved it from a free product to a paid one.

The main advantage of Turnstile is that is benefits from CFs ubiquity to help judge legitimate vs illegitimate requests.

I would love to know what other options are available in this space aside from Turnstile, Recaptcha and HCaptcha.
by kepano | 2026-02-28 18:25:36+00:00
Startup time in Obsidian could be better (we're working on it!), but performance is more than startup time. It's making interactions fast throughout the entire app. Obsidian is only three developers but we spend a lot of time shaving off milliseconds everywhere we can. Keystrokes, scrolling, querying, navigating large vaults, opening and parsing large Markdown files, etc.

In 2025 we made reduced startup time on mobile under 0.5s (used to be several seconds), made search nearly instantaneous and released Bases to make complex queries equally fast (much faster than Dataview and other pre-existing solutions).

I wrote a bunch more on this topic here:

https://x.com/kepano/status/2004008730720194759
by grehbies | 2026-02-28 18:25:40+00:00
Humoring the notion, America is a capitalist enterprise that put on the religious and humanist airs that were conveniently en vogue at the time of its founding, and which it always goes back to when its economic reality becomes too onerous. The contradiction baked into our existence is felt subconsciously by most, and there is a psychological toll taken in knowing that your society is built, in part, on hypocrisy, and having to be vigilant for when the other shoe inevitably drops, so that you can at least get out alive.
by bloppe | 2026-02-28 18:25:41+00:00
> they'll just have to show how they mitigated the "risk"

If Hegseth is the one who decides whether the risk has been mitigated (he is), you think he's gonna be overcome by a sudden spirit of good faith and make impartial judgements? Or just do the thing that maximizes his leverage, gratifies his ego, and pleases his boss.
by avazhi | 2026-02-28 18:25:48+00:00
Iran: We are going to get nukes at any cost and wipe Israel and the United States off the face of the earth. It is our destiny.

Israel and the US: You serious?

Iran: Yes.

...

Iran, after being bombed to a slightly earlier point of the Stone Age than they've spent the past ~50 years: We are working hard trying to find the guy responsible for this.

FAFO, as they say. Meanwhile, literally the entire Middle East and the rest of the world besides Russia will be happy to see these clowns gone. Bon voyage.
by cortesoft | 2026-02-28 18:25:49+00:00
I am not sure how many other people on here are old enough to remember, but I first learned to program before I had the internet. I had to read books, and then if I was trying to figure out how to do something, I would have to figure out which book to look it up in, and then figure out where in the book to find it and how to apply it to my situation. It made me learn a ton, because I would have to read a lot of books to even know where to look; I had to do my own ‘scraping and indexing’.

I remember as the internet took off and you could just search for things, I thought it made programming too easy. You never had to actually learn how it worked, you can just search for the specific answer and someone else would do the hard work of figuring out how to use the tools available for your particular type of problem.

Over the years, my feelings shifted, and I loved how the internet allowed me to accomplish so much more than I could have trying to figure it all out from books.

I wonder if AI will feel similar.
by Chinjut | 2026-02-28 18:26:00+00:00
I don't like the way it's written, but what they are talking about is completeness in the sense of "Dedekind completeness"; i.e., that given any two sets A and B with everyone in A below everyone in B, there is some number which is simultaneously an upper bound for A and a lower bound for B.

Note that this fails for the rationals: e.g., if we let A be the rationals below sqrt(2) and B be the rationals above sqrt(2).
by Terr_ | 2026-02-28 18:26:40+00:00
It sounds like part of the problem is that two rather separate standards of "phishing" are getting conflated:

1. "Hi, I'm your bank, log in just like you normally do." (Passkeys immune.)

2. "Hi, I'm your bank, do something strange I've never ever asked you to do before by uploading some special files or running this sketchy program." (Passkeys just resist.)

The problem with the expansive definition is it basically starts to encompass every kind of trick or social-engineering ever.