MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sarchertech | 2026-02-27 07:06:28+00:00
Agents require tests to keep from spinning out of control when writing more than a few thousand lines, but we know that tests are wildly insufficient to describe the state of the actual code.

You are essentially saying that we should develop other methods of capturing the state of the program to prevent unintended changes.

However there’s no reason to believe that these other systems will be any easier to reason about than the code itself. If we had these other methods of ensuring that observerable behavior doesn’t change and they were substantially easier than reasoning about the code directly, they would be very useful for human developers as well.

The fact that we’ve not developed something like this in 75 years of writing programs, says it’s probably not as easy as you’re making it out.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2026-02-27 07:06:30+00:00
Anthropic cares first and foremost about extinction risk. This is not what everyone who professes to care about human welfare thinks should be at the top of the priority list. See e.g. the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement for an example of a humanistic approach to letting humanity die off with no replacement.

One of the most challenging problems in AI safety re/ x-risk is that even if you can get one country to do the right thing, getting multiple countries on board is an entirely different ballgame. Some amount of intentional coercion is inevitable.

On the low end, you could pay bounties to international bounty hunters who extract foreign AI researchers in a manner similar to an FBI's most wanted lost, and let AI researchers quickly do the math and realize there are a million other well paid jobs that don't come with this flight risk. On the high end you can go to war and kill everyone. Whatever gets the job done.

Either way, if you want to win at enforcing a new kind of international coercion, you need to be at the top of the pack militarily and economically speaking. That is the true goal here, and I don't think one can make coherent sense out of what Anthropic is doing without keeping that in the back of their mind at all times.
by remarkEon | 2026-02-27 07:08:01+00:00
The simple version: Weapons systems are quickly advancing to the point where many of them can navigate and operate independent of human control. The obvious question here is at which point do we give these platforms release authority for lethal weapons. It becomes impractical to require (or even imagine, really) there to be a human "pilot" operating every single drone when you have hundreds or thousands of them operating in theater. That's really what this is about.

Think of it this way: mines installed in the seabed in wars past were "dumb", in that a passing ship had to happen into it. Imagine systems deployed underwater that were mobile, contained multiple torpedoes, and could strike warships with little to no warning given their small acoustic signature. It's the same principal as a mine (you leave it one spot, hope an enemy ship comes by), but the capabilities are far more advanced. If the system is not at least semi-autonomous than it might as well be a dumb mine again.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-27 07:08:12+00:00
I wonder if we can really repeat such revolution. Our communities are fractured and politics more partisan than ever. Be it collective bargaining or more, any fractured attempt to rebel will only end in failure. Perhaps by the working class eating itself alive a la Jay Gould (even if misattributed, the sentiment matches).

On the bright(?) side: traditional propaganda is absolutely abysmal for the youth these days. If they try to pull off this kind of recruitment, I see many Gen Z/Alpha deserting or outright choosing arrest. You can't screw over a man their entire life and expect them to want to fight and die for their country.
Ask HN: How Many Programmers Are Now Using AI Agents in Their Work?
by somthingwrong | 2026-02-27 07:09:49+00:00
Title: How Many Programmers Are Now Using AI Agents and Other Tools in Their Work?

Content:
AI-powered programming is becoming increasingly popular, and I'm curious how many people have already started using AI agents in their actual work (usage level: purely for assistance, completely relay on agent). Among those already using them, how many have company support, and how many are using them at their own expense?
by the_origami_fox | 2026-02-27 07:10:10+00:00
Unfortunately this article and the conversation here is taken in the context of the entirety of Israel is bad, the whole military war against Hamas and its patrons was bad, and that there is a genocide in Gaza. It leaves little room to have meaningful conversations about difficult conditions in the war and whether soldiers acted incorrectly or not and if they should be tried or not with regards to this single incident.
by amunozo | 2026-02-27 07:10:20+00:00
I just see here is nationalism. How can they claim to be in favour of humanity if they're in favour of spying foreign partners, developing weapons, and everything that serves the sacred nation of the United States of America? How fast do Americans dehumanize nations with the excuse of authoritarianism (as if Trump is not authoritarian) and national defence (more like attack). It's amazing that after these obvious jingoist messages, they still believe they are "effective altruists" (a idiotic ideology anyway).
Show HN: Humanpass – Proof of humanness using WebAuthn, no data collected
by jzaragoza | 2026-02-27 07:10:25+00:00
Hi HN, I built humanpass because every human verification system today asks you to give up something — your time (CAPTCHAs), your money (paid blue checks), or your biometric data (Worldcoin).

humanpass uses WebAuthn/passkeys to verify there's a real person behind the screen. You authenticate with your device's biometrics, get a temporary link (expires in 60 seconds), and share it anywhere. Whoever clicks it can see the verification is real.

Your biometrics never leave your device — the server only receives a cryptographic assertion. No signup, no email, no passwords. The only data stored is a random user ID and a public key.

Some technical details:
- Built with Hono on Cloudflare Workers, D1 for storage, Workers KV for ephemeral links
- Blocks known virtual/emulator authenticators by AAGUID
- No analytics, no third-party scripts
- Chrome extension for one-click verification
- AGPL-3.0 licensed

Live at human-pass.org. Would appreciate feedback on the threat model and attack surface.
by NicuCalcea | 2026-02-27 07:10:45+00:00
Okay, gotcha.

Working my notice period has never be even an issue for me. It gives me an opportunity to wrap up projects, say goodbye to colleagues, etc. It's usually fairly light work as well, you're not taking on new responsibilities. I didn't even realise it could be otherwise.

The reason I'm saying it's part of the redundancy package is because (some?) companies will pay off your notice period without you having to actually work it. I've taken voluntary redundancy only once, and I was told that I would stop working at the end of the month, but I was still paid my full 3 months of notice (in addition to the tax-free redundancy payout). That was not part of the initial contract.
by zaptheimpaler | 2026-02-27 07:11:08+00:00
This is all just completely wrong. Anthropic explicitly stated in their usage use of their products is not permitted in mass-surveillance of American citizens and fully automated weapons, in the contract that DoW signed. Anthropic then asked DoW if these clauses were being adhered to after the US’ unlawful kidnapping of Maduro. DoW is now attempting to break the contract that they signed and threatening them because how dare a company tell the psycho dictators what to do.
by kfreds | 2026-02-27 07:11:13+00:00
Jesus talks and articles have been very helpful to me.

Three years ago I had no idea how the Go runtime worked, but I very much wanted to learn more. I’m not a software engineer in the conventional sense, so reading the Go source was not a realistic option.

Jesus talks and articles inspired me to learn more. Today I feel comfortable with all stages of the general compiler pipeline. In the past few months I have studied the calculi of the lambda cube, Martin-Lof type theory, Horn-clause-based instruction selection, algorithms for register allocation, Milner’s CCS vs pi-calculus, which structures in compilers and kernels map to digraphs, and so on.

Jesus talks are an excellent onboarding ramp.
by Thrilok2802 | 2026-02-27 07:11:29+00:00
Based on my observations, creating a directory with relevant claude.md files tends to increase file count, and claude --resume already stores code-related data. Given this, I'm wondering if it might be worth considering an alternative approach — summarizing the entire code and its actions instead. From what I understand, Claude handles this through a planning process, where we define a to-do list before starting a project or idea, iterate on it until we're satisfied, and then ask it to build accordingly. With this approach in place, I'm curious whether HAM is still necessary — just wanted to share this thought for consideration, not to dismiss anything.
by weinzierl | 2026-02-27 07:13:06+00:00
OP has a good point, but for me, I'd rather wish we'd skipped the 90s and picked up again much later. I like to think of the 8-bit era as an early bronze age of computing, lots of things went right and were done right.

16-bit, to me, are the dark ages. Lot's of confusion, not much good came out of it technologically and aesthetically. God, everything was ugly. Maybe all the trials and tribulations were necessary for what was about to come but I like believe they weren't.

32-bit to me is the golden age and 64-bit is platinum.

If you offered my a time machine to go back, I'd surely say: "No, thank you!". There hasn't been a better time than now, but if you'd forced me at gun point, I'd pick the 80s over the 90s any time.
by hirsin | 2026-02-27 07:13:25+00:00
I can't think of a more quintessential crash out of a major brand than Twitter from the past couple years. For a significant percentage (>10% publicly, I'm confident much more than that internally) of users it became unattractive.

If Microsoft did something that resulted in 300 million users leaving it would be considered crashing and burning, but I guess when Elon does the same proportion someone will show up to explain why losing half your revenue is better than losing all of it.

I just want to know who those people are so that I can pitch them on my next investment fund.
by rconti | 2026-02-27 07:13:35+00:00
Well, the concrete pond is usually empty. But yeah, the site kinda smells like methane. Hard to say if it's from the dump (which of course has vents), or from the sewage treatment plant. The sewage treatment plant is always burning.. something. Maybe methane escaping from the dump? Maybe from the wastewater? I'm not sure.

Anyway, it's not bad-- I run around there all the time. It's just when the wind blows a certain way. I live a half mile from it and you absolutely do not ever smell it outside of the park.
by Brajeshwar | 2026-02-27 07:13:57+00:00
I was in school, and I remember my 1993. Our school was one of the extremely few schools in my hometown (north-east India) that got computers.

Unfortunately, we had too many students for each computer during classes. I started a revolt that “Computers are wasting our study time, as our upcoming board exams are more important.” The whole class signed the petition and the School Head had to schedule a class-wide talk and agreed to make it totally optional to the point of, “If you really want, you be part of it. But yes, study for the exam is more important.”

So, the computer classes ended up with just me (the traitor), a friend from Kerala, and the school head’s daughter. We ended up like 3 computers each to our disposal. I wrote a QBasic Game-ish program to impress my first girl-friend — she hits some area on a heart-shaped thingy on the screen and it prints her name. I remember using physical graph-paper to calculate the screen “pixels” (I think) or co-ordinates to calculate strike areas.

Oh and Yes, almost all of my classmates remember me for being that cheater.

https://brajeshwar.com/2025/fixing-a-dos-computer-for-the-ar...
by jacobriers | 2026-02-27 07:15:30+00:00
> It's like you assigning to humans divine capabilities :) . Hyperbolizing a little, humans also only copy and mix - where do you think originality comes from? Granted, AI isn't at the level of humans yet, but they improve here.

I reckon we copy God - who is a creator - which means we're creators too - and our creations will copy us. But the created won't ever match the creator.
by roughly | 2026-02-27 07:16:22+00:00
> What I don't get though is, why did the so-called "Department of War" target Anthropic specifically?

Because Anthropic told them no, and this administration plays by authoritarian rules - 10 people saying yes doesn’t matter, one person saying no is a threat and an affront. It doesn’t matter if there’s equivalent or even better alternatives, it wouldn’t even matter if the DoD had no interest in using Anthropic - Anthropic told them no, and they cannot abide that.
by JeremyStinson | 2026-02-27 07:17:13+00:00
In addition to what Twitch is doing, a banner popped up in the Android YouTube app stating that you need to upgrade to Premium to be able to "Jump Ahead to parts other users think are valuable". Different from skipping 10 seconds at a time, but there's a non-zero chance that'll be pay-walled too.

It'll only be a matter of time until you can't do anything but watch whatever content Google has curated for you, with no chance to adjust anything at all.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-27 07:17:20+00:00
Having been through a couple of layoffs and merges, as I approach mid-century, the MBA powered managers are always to blame, because the stupid way to manage every year has to be x% exponential increase over the previous year, always forgetting that it is physically impossible when everyone goes for the same goal.

And then when targets aren't met, it is the employees that get shown the door while management gets their bonus.

The companies that are happy getting what they need to keep the lights on, seldom go through such layoff rounds.

Ah but the shareholders can sue the CEO, well this seems to be an US approach to how companies are run.
by palmotea | 2026-02-27 07:17:44+00:00
> Equating both of these things is dangerous and wrong. It’s not as if these are the same things.

What's really going on is you seem so caught up in your own biases that you can't even see what you're doing.

> Creationism is factually provably wrong by all standards of modern science. Pretending that the position of “we ban teaching things that are known to be wrong”

Do you really think the reason teaching creationism in American public schools is banned is because it's "factually provably wrong by all standards of modern science?"

I kinda get the impression you may be someone who has a hard time distinguishing between your subjective view and objectivity. This controversy isn't in any way shape or form about "book bans," it's really about the political decision about whose subjective view will prevail in schools. But at least one side won't admit that, because there's power in gaslighting people and power in mischaracterizing things to hit certain buttons. Regardless of who wins, the same types of "curation" activities will occur in school libraries.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-27 07:17:53+00:00
Engineers can make an argument if you can also logically and coherently tie your argument with outcomes that can grow pipeline and/or revenue.

Most customers that matter to a business don't churn due to subpar user experience - discounting, roadmap, and dedicating a subset of engineering staff to handle bugs originating from a handful of the most important accounts is enough to prevent churn.

That said, this advice only really holds in the US (and that too in the major tech hubs). If you work in Western Europe you're shit out of luck as a SWE - management culture there just doesn't give a shit about software, because for most Western European businesses software is a cost center, not a revenue generator.
by johng | 2026-02-27 07:18:18+00:00
We've sold off what we call "Verticals" of our company to a competitor in the past. A competitor that previously we had helped co-found and had very horrible interactions with. So we had zero trust in dealing with them and wanted the contracts to be rock solid. The process took forever to agree on a contract, the payment process, putting the money in escrow, etc.... Part of us didn't want to have anything to do with selling something to this company because we despised them. But business is business and their offer was higher than what we could get from anyone else.

Long story short, the process went fine. We ended up selling another vertical to them, and then another. All 3 sales went through fine.

This is the lawyer we used and he also happened to be local.

https://www.gregorprivate.com/
Show HN: I asked AI to respond to the AirSnitch vulnerability the day it dropped
by nevynweb | 2026-02-27 07:18:35+00:00
Hello world!

Long time lurker first time poster, please be kind :)

AirSnitch published at NDSS 2026 this week. Every tested router is
vulnerable to Wi-Fi client isolation bypass. Vendors will patch it
eventually. The IEEE will update the standard eventually.

I wanted to know: how quickly can AI turn a newly published academic
paper into something a paranoid homeowner could actually deploy while they wait for firmware updates?

One afternoon. No prior knowledge of the exploit. No testing. Full
honesty about both of those things in the README.

The result is a Raspberry Pi cloud-init config that deploys Kismet
tuned to AirSnitch attack indicators, with webhook and email alerting.

Is it perfect? No. Is it a credible starting point that didn't exist
Yesterday morning? Yes. That's the point.

https://bitbucket.org/nevynweb/airsnitchalerter

I’m sharing in good faith that this is either genuinely useful to someone, perhaps even a catalyst for an actual detector or patch, or just a novelty demonstration of the current capability of Claude AI

Thanks for looking :)
by tonyedgecombe | 2026-02-27 07:18:54+00:00
>You can absolutely care about your health and still enjoy some unhealthy things every once in a while, be it dinning out, a grill party, a glass of wine or a motorcycle ride.

Isn't this the message we get from the food companies marketing departments every day. Sure you can eat that thousand calorie desert once in a while as part of a healthy diet. Then before you know it we are in an obesity epidemic and what is genuinely healthy looks extreme to the majority.
by Noumenon72 | 2026-02-27 07:18:58+00:00
The Most Intolerant Wins[1]: different groups in society are more likely to shun and organize against others (usually those who live in Modia, not Mundia[2]). So if you don't need this feature, then others want it to use against you.

1. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

2. https://brianoflondon.me/mundia-and-modia/index.html
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-02-27 07:20:22+00:00
Google was better, but I'd argue that, say after 2014 or so, for the vast majority of my searches there was no real difference with Bing, and in some areas Bing was better (e.g. some aerial imagery in maps). Bing still never made a considerable dent in Google's market. I can easily see ChatGPT being a similar story.
Show HN: Agent-Rules – Opinionated Rules and Workflows for Claude Code
by letientai299 | 2026-02-27 07:20:25+00:00
Last year I was skeptical about coding AI. Now, they can produce much better quality output, so I started using them more often, specifically claude code. During this transition, I felt unsatisfied with the prompting UX:

- Outputs are either noisy, or lacking important details.

- Trade-offs aren't fully listed when the agents provide options.

- Limited context length, and the inability to share context between sessions means I often have to repeat the same info multiple times when iterating through a problem.

So, I defined some custom workflows that make the agent persist the context to markdown files, where I can thoroughly review, answer inline, cross-reference, or delegate another agent for more analysis. The agent and I keep iterating the discussion until we resolve every blocker. This builds an auditable trail of discussions and decision making.

I believe these problems and preferences aren't only mine. There are likely some existing tools or skills that provide similar mechanics (e.g. Entire.io). However, I avoided them due to security concerns with third-party plugins, and because I dislike the prompting UX. Skills, if relevant, would just add more slash commands. My customized workflows are about discussions-like UX.

The repo contains:

- Opinionated mechanics to group rules by layers: global + cross machine, global + machine specific, project + shared, and project + personal.

- A layout to split language/tech specific rules into small files. Agents read only what's relevant to the current task, so they don't waste context.

- Some general practices that I find useful.

Consider this repo as a template or reference implementation which you can build upon. More details in the project readme. Enjoy.
by fhd2 | 2026-02-27 07:20:38+00:00
It likely has to do with changed investor preferences. In the boom years, it was OK to grow at all costs, make money whenever. Nowadays investors are looking to cash out earlier, from what I observe. Gotta find ways to make the stock move up in that environment, cost-cutting-because-AI seems to work right now.

I'm not 100% convinced it means they gave up and are trying to cash out. It could also be that they just struggled to integrate all the people in a meaningful way, even if they're all really good. Having grown a company from a hand full of people to 250, I more than once fantasized about going back down to ~100. Scaling companies well is hard. 10k, I can't even imagine.
by kristianp | 2026-02-27 07:22:20+00:00
I was doing Modula 2 coding of assignments around then on 1 bit xterms. [1] I don't think we had that new fangled Modula 3.

[1] possibly NCD-16, https://groups.google.com/g/comp.windows.x/c/yGBvXhuTL0Y
by sarchertech | 2026-02-27 07:23:06+00:00
It has nothing to do with whether small mistakes are allowable or not. It’s about customers needing a consistent product.

The in-code tests and the expectations/assumptions about the product that your users have are wildly different. If you allow agents to make changes restricted only by those tests, they’re going to constantly make changes that break customer workflows and cause noticeable jank.

Right now agents do this at a rate far higher than humans. This is empirically demonstrable by the fact that an agent requires tests to keep from spinning out of control when writing more than a few thousand lines and a human does not. A human is capable of writing tens of thousands as of lines with no tests, using only reason and judgement. An agent is not.

They clearly lack the full capability of human reason, judgment, taste, and agency.

My suspicion is that something close enough to AGI that it can essentially do all white dollar jobs is required to solve this.