MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by D-Machine | 2026-02-05 21:34:41+00:00
This is really not surprising in the slightest (ignoring instruction tuning), provided you take the view that LLMs are primarily navigating (linguistic) semantic space as they output responses. "Semantic space" in LLM-speak is pretty much exactly what Paul Meehl would call the "nomological network" of psychological concepts, and is also relevant to what Smedslund notes is pseudoempiricality in psychological concepts and research (i.e. that correlations among various psychological instruments and concepts must follow necessarily simply because these instruments and concepts are constructed from the semantics of everyday language, and so necessarily constrained by those semantics as well).

I.e. the Five-Factor model of personality (being based on self-report, and not actual behaviour) is not a model of actual personality, but the correlation patterns in the language used to discuss things semantically related to "personality". It would be thus extremely surprising if LLM-output patterns (trained on people's discussions and thinking about personality) would not also result in learning similar correlational patterns (and thus similar patterns of responses when prompted with questions from personality inventories).

Also, a bit of a minor nit, but the use of "psychometric" and "psychometrics" in both the title and paper is IMO kind of wrong. Psychometrics is the study of test design and measurement generally, in psychology. The paper uses many terms like "psychometric battery", "psychometric self-report", and "psychometric profiles", but these terms are basically wrong, or at best highly unusual: the correct terms would be "self-report inventories", "psychological and psychiatric profiles", and etc., especially because a significant number of the measurement instruments they used in fact have pretty poor psychometric properties, as this term is usually used.
by ben_w | 2026-02-05 21:35:57+00:00
> It is enough to have read even parts of a work for something to be considered a derivative.

For IP rights, I'll buy that. Not as important when the question is capabilities.

> I would also argue that language models who need gargantuan amounts of training material in order to work by definition can only output derivative works.

For similar reasons, I'm not going to argue against anyone saying that all machine learning today, doesn't count as "intelligent":

It is perfectly reasonable to define "intelligence" to be the inverse of how many examples are needed.

ML partially makes up for being (by this definition) thick as an algal bloom, by being stupid so fast it actually can read the whole internet.
by knoebber | 2026-02-05 21:36:02+00:00
Grinnell 17' here. At first I didn't enjoy intro with Racket. But by the end I changed my mind and it ended up being one of my favorite courses. In retrospect that class easily had the most impact on me during my CS major... I still have quite a few functional programming habits. These days I like to code in elixir for side projects, which has quite a few similarities.

Anyways, cool to see another alum here! I hope the department keeps it around for a while longer :)
by Schmerika | 2026-02-05 21:36:11+00:00
Connections was kind of like this, and it was excellent.

Sadly, a lot of the things most worth hearing about in the world are quite dark, and telling the truth about them without perfect evidence would get you sued by vastly powerful enemies.

And even bringing perfect evidence you might be liable to 'have an accident', or get smeared to high hell. Whistleblowers and investigate journalists have had a pretty rough time of it this past few decades.

Like, just look at what happened with Wikileaks, or Snowden, or Boeing, or the Panama Papers, or the FBI agents mentioned as having been murdered in the latest Epstein drop, or the 234 journalists murdered by Israel the past couple years [0] (many with their entire families)... Etc etc.

0 - https://www.ifj.org/media-centre/news/detail/category/press-...
by normalaccess | 2026-02-05 21:36:26+00:00
Just wait until the AI "layer" gets fast enough to rewrite the web in real time. Text, Photos, Videos, even real time phone calls will soon be in the grasp of the corporations. Forever locking us into our own personal prisons, controlled silos of information perfectly crafted and tailored to extract the maximum value where truth is not just hard to know but is imposable to know.
by rickydroll | 2026-02-05 21:36:37+00:00
Any form of a flat tax hits harder the smaller your income. A proportional tax would be more appropriate, as it would have an equal impact.

For example, you buy a gadget that has a $25 consumption tax. If you make $30,000 a year, it has a measurable impact on your financial well-being. If you make $200,000 a year, the same $25 consumption tax would have a negligible impact on your financial well-being. For the consumption tax to have the same impact, it would have to be $166.

This is also why self-funded retirement accounts are a cruel joke for most people. It's relatively easy to save for retirement if you're earning $150,000 to $200,000. If you're making $40,000, it often comes down to choosing between rent, food, and "there's nothing left."
Show HN: Dream-team – assemble a team of Claude Code agents for your task
by drbscl | 2026-02-05 21:37:05+00:00
Following the launch of Claude Code's new agent teams (orchestration) feature, I built a plugin to streamline the workflow, by:

- Identifying where you need more skills & agents to complete a task
- Searching or making new skills & agents to fill those gaps
- Dispatching a team of these agents to solve your problem
by geooff_ | 2026-02-05 21:37:10+00:00
Maybe I'm naive, but I find these re-engineering complex product posts underwhelming. C Compilers exist and realistically Claudes training corpus contains a ton of C Compiler code. The task is already perfectly defined. There exists a benchmark of well-adopted codebases that can be used to prove if this is a working solution. Half the difficulty in making something is proving it works and is complete.

IMO a simpler novel product that humans enjoy is 10x more impressive than rehashing a solved problem, regardless of difficulty.
by pilingual | 2026-02-05 21:37:16+00:00
I'd like to see a database of municipalities that have passed an ordinance banning these systems (including 12 hour drone flyovers like they've been doing in Camden, NJ; drones are fine for specific or exigent circumstances, but flying them systematically is concerning!).

In fact, if anyone knows of municipalities that have done so let me know. I'd like to spend tourist money in those places that I haven't been able to spend in authoritarian-leaning locales as a reward for valuing freedom over suffocation of the constitution for little to no benefit.
by dang | 2026-02-05 21:37:17+00:00
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Don't be snarky."

"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by w10-1 | 2026-02-05 21:37:23+00:00
Amazon and Koch Industries are
are probably the significant companies that come closest to this level of description and prescription.

You'd need something like probabilistic programming language to model discretion.

You'd want some way to compare organizational forms -- minimally build vs buy, but preferably also control via monitoring+specification vs selection+incentive alignment.

You'd probably need the kind of sensors and telemetry that no one would like, to avoid drowning in book-keeping.

Overall, what would the benefit be?
by mpyne | 2026-02-05 21:37:37+00:00
> Having established that, are you saying that you can't even conceptualize a conflict of interest potentially clouding someone's judgement any more if the amount of money and the person's perceived status and skill level all get increased.

If I used AI to make a Super Nintendo soundtrack, no one would treat it as equivalent to Nobuo Uematsu or Koji Kondo or Dave Wise using AI to do the same and making the claim that the AI was managing to make creatively impressive work. Even if those famous composers worked for Anthropic.

Yes there would be relevant biases but there could not be a comparison of my using AI to make music slop vs. their expert supervision of AI to make something much more impressive.

Just because AI is involved in two different things doesn't make them similar things.
by ck_one | 2026-02-05 21:38:32+00:00
Just tested the new Opus 4.6 (1M context) on a fun needle-in-a-haystack challenge: finding every spell in all Harry Potter books.

All 7 books come to ~1.75M tokens, so they don't quite fit yet. (At this rate of progress, mid-April should do it ) For now you can fit the first 4 books (~733K tokens).

Results: Opus 4.6 found 49 out of 50 officially documented spells across those 4 books. The only miss was "Slugulus Eructo" (a vomiting spell).

Freaking impressive!
by shagie | 2026-02-05 21:38:42+00:00
There's very little on JWST that makes it hot. Furthermore, the spacecraft bus where the non-scientific instruments exist) is on the other side of the sunshade so that the waste heat from the RAD750 (a single processor clocked at 118 MHz - PowerPC 750 architecture (Macintosh computers in '97) that uses 5 watts of power designed to operate -55°C to 125°C) doesn't interfere with the scientific instruments.

Putting an AI rack there is a completely different scale of power and cooling than what JWST uses.
by alpha_squared | 2026-02-05 21:38:48+00:00
> it's why Larry Ellison desperately wants to buy CBS.

I think this specific take is wrong. For example, Netflix doesn't want CNN/cable in the WB deal, so that's still up for grabs if Netflix acquires WB but Ellison still wants the whole thing (studio and cable). Extrapolating to CBS, it was Paramount the studio that Ellison was after, the network piece is just a dying artifact of a bygone era with a handy mouthpiece that has the veneer of credibility.
by nwparker | 2026-02-05 21:38:51+00:00
Our team lives in Slack, but we don’t have access to the Slack MCP and couldn’t find anything out there that worked for us, so we coded our own agent-slack CLI

* Can paste in Slack URLs
* Token efficient
* Zero-config (auto auth if you use Slack Desktop)

Auto downloads files/snippets.
Also can read Slack canvases as markdown!

MIT License
by bitexploder | 2026-02-05 21:39:27+00:00
It is salient to point out the individual almost certainly had incriminating evidence on that system. There aren't really any cases of a person being /randomly/ detained and held in contempt. Especially not a fishing expedition by the DOJ against a journalist. And if you know the act of giving away the password has some upper limit on contempt jailing vs. assured evidence against you in some much higher consequence felony wouldn't you just stay quiet? No amendment or right is absolute, but this one is rather strong, especially if you haven't, you know, been doing any crimes.
Show HN: A note-taking tool for homebuyers
by bschwartz9 | 2026-02-05 21:39:31+00:00
Easily capture thoughts during home tours, helping to remember and compare homes you've visited. Most tools are built and marketed towards agents, whereas this is built with the prospective buyer (novel concept...I know :) ) in mind to address their pain points and help choose the best home for them. MVP, so UI is a bit rough, but specifically requesting feedback around would you find this helpful in your search? (open to any though ofc) Bonus points if you are actively searching and use it!
by satvikpendem | 2026-02-05 21:39:48+00:00
Not sure what you're confused about, I never said assets were hard to get, I just said that the LLM needs to be provided a folder of the assets for it to make use of them, it's not going to create them from scratch (at least not without great difficulty, because LLMs are capable of using and coding Three.js for example). I don't know the answer to your first question because I don't hang around in the 3D or game dev fields, I'm sure there are examples of vibe coded games however.

As to your second question, it is about prompting them correctly, for example [0]. Now I don't know about you but some of those sites especially after using the frontend skill look pretty good to me. If those look bland to you then I'm not really sure what you're expecting, keeping in mind that the example you showed with the graphics are not regular sites but more design oriented, and even still nothing stops LLMs from producing such sites.

[0] https://youtu.be/f2FnYRP5kC4
by ddq | 2026-02-05 21:39:48+00:00
In addition, it broadcasts that the sender is too busy with all their important work to spend time refining and proofreading, that you're getting their raw, unfiltered thoughts directly from them, not through an assistant, and that their time is more valuable than yours so the burden is on you to parse their stream of consciousness jumble for precious nuggets of their exclusive wisdom. The semiotics make sense, plus it's just easier and faster.
by TruePath | 2026-02-05 21:40:42+00:00
Whoever wrote this just doesn't understand who apple's main customers really are. Yes, devs may be a high impact customer base but most of apple's customers are people like my mom who struggles with the difference between Gmail the app, Gmail the web page and Gmail in apple mail and is reasonably worried about scams and viruses because she knows she isn't really tech savvy enough to spot them. If she is going to run AI on her apple products it can't be 'well it probably won't delete your data.'. It needs to be something she can be sure is safe and is limited to the access she gives it.

That's a really tough problem. I'm not even sure yet google can pull it off.
by throwaway-aws9 | 2026-02-05 21:40:49+00:00
> the so-called "internal" IT team can and will do just the same.

but how is shadow IT gonna solve anything? it'll get kudos from the junior VP, chuckles from the SVP, but the CIO will laugh you out of the room at how poor you are at getting shit done internally.

> The problem isn't the cloud.

The problem is how gullible folks are at cloud advocacy, or any vendor advocacy in general. It's all lies but cloud lies are better than others! Your 3-year commitment won't scale down to low figures. Oh you wanna have that many nodes come black Friday? Gotta reserve! Yup, infinite scale actually means infinite lies.

Above all, the cloud is not cheap. 11B profit on 33B revenue per quarter at AWS. If your local IT spend is inefficient, I bet it won't be more efficient in the cloud.
by frde_me | 2026-02-05 21:41:05+00:00
It's hard to explain, but I've found LLMs to be significantly better in the "review" stage than the implementation stage.

So the LLM will do something and not catch at all that it did it badly. But the same LLM asked to review against the same starting requirement will catch the problem almost always

The missing thing in these tools is that automatic feedback loop between the two LLMs: one in review mode, one in implementation mode.
by ndesaulniers | 2026-02-05 21:41:17+00:00
I spent a good part of my career (nearly a decade) at Google working on getting Clang to build the linux kernel. https://clangbuiltlinux.github.io/

This LLM did it in (checks notes):

> Over nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and $20,000 in API costs

It may build, but does it boot (was also a significant and distinct next milestone)? (Also, will it blend?). Looks like yes!

> The 100,000-line compiler can build a bootable Linux 6.9 on x86, ARM, and RISC-V.

The next milestone is:

Is the generated code correct? The jury is still out on that one for production compilers. And then you have performance of generated code.

> The generated code is not very efficient. Even with all optimizations enabled, it outputs less efficient code than GCC with all optimizations disabled.

Still a really cool project!
by mbh159 | 2026-02-05 21:41:50+00:00
We have a standard harness for each of the model's that we test. Each prompt includes the rules, access to memory, and a lookup of the complete ruleset. The prompt adapts adding legal actions per turn and guidance depending on the stage of the game (updated based on the technological progress of the player).

Unlike RL algorithms these LLMs wouldn't learn quick enough without the prior knowledge the harness provides
by itay-maman | 2026-02-05 21:42:11+00:00
My first reaction: wow, incredible.

My second reaction: still incredible, but noting that a C compiler is one of the most rigorously specified pieces of software out there. The spec is precise, the expected behavior is well-defined, and test cases are unambiguous.

I'm curious how well this translates to the kind of work most of us do day-to-day where requirements are fuzzy, many edge cases are discovered on the go, and what we want to build is a moving target.
by allenu | 2026-02-05 21:42:25+00:00
I agree that framing and scoping tasks is becoming a real joy. The great thing about this strategy is there's a point at which you can scope something small enough that it's hard for the AI to get it wrong and it's easy enough for you as a human to comprehend what it's done and verify that it's correct.

I'm starting to think of projects now as a tree structure where the overall architecture of the system is the main trunk and from there you have the sub-modules, and eventually you get to implementations of functions and classes. The goal of the human in working with the coding agent is to have full editorial control of the main trunk and main sub-modules and delegate as much of the smaller branches as possible.

Sometimes you're still working out the higher-level architecture, too, and you can use the agent to prototype the smaller bits and pieces which will inform the decisions you make about how the higher-level stuff should operate.
by bs7280 | 2026-02-05 21:42:46+00:00
I don't see this as just exercise in making a new useful thing, but benchmarking the SOTA models ability to create a massive* project on its own, with some verifiable metrics of success. I believe they were able to build FFMPEG with this rust compiler?

How much would it cost to pay someone to make a C compiler in rust? A lot more than $20k

* massive meaning "total context needed" >> model context window
by joefourier | 2026-02-05 21:43:20+00:00
Odd that the author didn’t try giving a latent embedding to the standard neural network (or modulated the activations with a FiLM layer) and had static embeddings as the baseline. There’s no real advantage to using a hypernetwork and they tend to be more unstable and difficult to train, and scale poorly unless you train a low rank adaptation.
by tedsanders | 2026-02-05 21:43:21+00:00
Yep, we recently sped up default thinking times in ChatGPT, as now documented in the release notes: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6825453-chatgpt-release-...

The intention was purely making the product experience better, based on common feedback from people (including myself) that wait times were too long. Cost was not a goal here.

If you still want the higher reliability of longer thinking times, that option is not gone. You can manually select Extended (or Heavy, if you're a Pro user). It's the same as at launch (though we did inadvertently drop it last month and restored it yesterday after Tibor and others pointed it out).
by kimixa | 2026-02-05 21:43:50+00:00
The opus context window is 200k tokens not 1mm.

But I kinda see your point - assuming from you're name you're not just a single purpose troll - I'm still not sold on the cost effectiveness of the current generation, and can't see a clear and obvious change to that for the next generation - especially as they're still loss leaders. Only if you play silly games like "ignoring the training costs" - IE the majority of the costs - do you get even close to the current subscription costs being sufficient.

My personal experience is that AI generally doesn't actually do what it is being sold for right now, at least in the contexts I'm involved with. Especially by somewhat breathless comments on the internet - like why are they even trying to persuade me in the first place? If they don't want to sell me anything, just shut up and keep the advantage for yourselves rather than replying with the 500th "You're Holding It Wrong" comment with no actionable suggestions. But I still want to know, and am willing to put the time, effort and $$$ in to ensure I'm not deluding myself in ignoring real benefits.
by godelski | 2026-02-05 21:44:02+00:00
Is that meaningfully different? If you read malfist's point as "tptacek's point isn't valuable because it's from some random person on the internet" then the problem is "random person on the internet" = "unknown credentials". In group, out group, notoriety, points, whatever are not the issue.

I'll put it this way, I don't give a shit about Robert Downy Jr's opinion on AI technology. His notoriety "means nothing to anybody". But instead, I sure do care about Hinton's (even if I disagree with him).

malfist asked why they should care. You said points. You should have said "tptacek is known to do security work, see his profile". Done. Much more direct. Answers the actual question. Instead you pointed to points, which only makes him "not a stranger" at best but still doesn't answer the question. Intended or not "you should believe tptacek because he has a lot of points" is a reasonable interpretation of what you said.
by mikepurvis | 2026-02-05 21:44:12+00:00
I don't have a magic answer for how to get people on board, but I can say that I make a lot more than that number, and my taxes (in Canada) are way too low.

I think some of it is the psychology that government is incompetent and will just waste the money anyway ("let Bill keep his money and build toilets in Africa himself, at least he'll get it done"), and the best way to fight that is probably what Carney is trying to do right now: kick off a bunch of ambitious programmes to build new things like pipelines, rail, airport expansions, etc on an accelerated timeline. Perhaps if people see visible progress they'll be more open to saying yeah okay, I'm all right with paying more to live in a country where we get stuff done.
by hansjorg | 2026-02-05 21:45:36+00:00
His work on this and similar topics is very good, he has deep technical insight and is a good communicator, but it's a bit funny seeing him referred to as a security hobbyist as in my mind he's a musical genius and one of the greatest living US musicians/programmers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_SxlRQhHOA&list=RDZD8N9tDDQT4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vzXHhRBLnA&list=RDTgoAgYR4584
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHCg47cWIUc&list=RDXHCg47cWIUc
by mikkupikku | 2026-02-05 21:45:51+00:00
I downvoted it because he invoked the analogy of alcohol and tobacco while simultaneously arguing that it should be totally on the parents. That's not how it's done for alcohol and tobacco! If that were true then any shop could sell booze and cigs to kids, and if that were the case then how could parents possibly hope to stop it?

The premise that parenting is wholly on the parents and society at large doesn't need to play any role in raising kids is a manifestation of the kind of libertarianism that appeals to techies on the spectrum who want to find the simplest possible ruleset for everything, but it just doesn't work that way in reality.