MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eranation | 2026-02-07 18:46:53+00:00
I'm highly worried that you are right. But what gives me hope is that people still play chess, I'd argue even more than ever. People still buy paper books and vinyl records. People still appreciated handwritten greeting cards over printed ones, pay extra to listen to live music where the recorded one is free and will likely sound much better. People are willing to pay an order of magnitude more for a sit in a theater for a live play, or pay premium for handmade products over their almost impossible to distinguish knock offs.
by kaicianflone | 2026-02-07 18:46:59+00:00
I don’t disagree. After decades, it’s still hard which is exactly why I think treating validation as a system problem matters.

We’ve spent years systematizing generation, testing, and deployment. Validation largely hasn’t changed, even as the surface area has exploded. My interest is in making that human effort composable and inspectable, not pretending it can be eliminated.
by koverstreet | 2026-02-07 18:47:18+00:00
It's not just faces. When recognizing objects in the environment, we normally filter out a great number of details going through the visual cortex - by the time information from our eyes hits the level of conscious awareness, it's more of a scene graph.

Table; chair behind and little to the left of the chair; plant on table

Most people won't really have conscious access to all the details that we use in recognizing objects - but that is a skill that can be consciously developed, as artists and painters do. A non-artist would be able to identify most of the details, but not all (I would be really bad compared to an actual artist with colors and spatial relationships), and I wouldn't be able to enumerate the important details in a way that makes any kind of sense for forming a recognizable scene.

So it follows from that that our ability to recognize faces is not purely - or even primarily - an attribute of what we would normally call "memory", certainly in the sense of conscious memory where we can recall details on demand. Like you alluded to re: mammals and spaces, we're really good at identifying, categorizing, and recognizing new forms of structure.
by ebhn | 2026-02-07 18:47:54+00:00
I think that for me with things like notes/writing, privacy is #1 by a lot. Preserving the textEdit workflow is nice, but I (and I imagine other users) could definitely be convinced to modify it given the right tooling and confidence in it. I know my workflow is not a productivity global maximum (and probably not even a local maximum), but everything I've seen so far does not justify itself as moving me far enough up on the productivity scale to offset the discomfort of changing habits.

Fwiw I really like the way you summarized the "constraint". Maybe I'm out of the loop on what's out there, but I don't think I've come across too many tools like that aside from lower level things like git.
by techblueberry | 2026-02-07 18:48:27+00:00
I think you inadvertently stepped in the point — Yes, what the fuck do I need 10,000 iPhones for?
Also part of the problem is which resources end up in abundance. What am I going to do with more compute when housing and land are a limited resource.

Gary’s Economics talks about this but in many cases inequality _is_ the problem. More billionaires means more people investing in limited resources(housing) driving up prices.

Maybe plebes get more money too, but not enough to spend on the things that matter.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-02-07 18:48:51+00:00
>> Suddenly all this focus on world models by Deep mind starts to make sense.

The apparent applicability to Waymo is incidental, more likely because a few millions+ were spent on Genie and they have to do something with it. DeepMind started to train "world models" because that's the current overhyped buzzword in the industry. First it was "natural language understanding" and "question answering" back in the days of old BERT, then it was "agentic", then "reasoning", now it's "world models", next years it's going to be "emotions" or "social intelligence" or some other anthropomorphic, over-drawn neologism. If you follow a few AI accounts on social media you really can't miss when those things suddenly start trending, then pretty much die out and only a few stragglers still try to publish papers on them because they failed to get the memo that we're now all running behind the Next Big Thing™.
by rvz | 2026-02-07 18:49:09+00:00
> Conflicts of interest. No funding was received for the design or implementation of this
project. None of the authors of this report was employed by or consulted with AI companies
during the project, nor will they do so while contributing to it

As it should. Good.

This is a totally independent test not conducted or collaborated by any of the AI companies or employees so that no bias is introduced at all[0].

[0] Unless the researchers are not disclosing if they have any ownership of shares in private AI companies.
by tappio | 2026-02-07 18:49:33+00:00
This is not my experience any longer. With properly set feedback loop and frameworks documentation it does not seem to matter much if they are working with completely novel stuff or not. Of course, when that is not available they hallucinate, but who anymore does that even? Anyone can see that LLMs are just glorified auto-complete machines, so you really have to put a lot of work in the enviroment they operate and quick feedback loops. (Just like with 90% of developers made of flesh...)
by beoberha | 2026-02-07 18:49:54+00:00
> The initial excitement of LLMs has significantly cooled off, the model releases show rapidly diminishing returns if not outright equilibrium and the only vibe-coded software project I've seen get any actual public use is Claude Code, which is riddled with embarrassing bugs its own developers have publicly given up on fixing. The only thing I see approaching any kind of singularity is the hype.

I am absolutely baffled by this take. I work in an objectively high stakes environment (Big 3 cloud database provider) and we are finally (post Opus 4.5) seeing the models and tools become good enough to drive the vast majority of our coding work. Devops and livesite is a harder problem, but even there we see very promising results.

I was a skeptic too. I was decently vocal about AI working for single devs but could never scale to large, critical enterprise codebases and systems. I was very wrong.
by onesandofgrain | 2026-02-07 18:51:08+00:00
Poddley lets you follow people in podcasts.
Search by speaker, get timestamped quotes and subscribe to people via RSS.

Every speaker is mapped to their quote across all their appearances. So instead of a generic search engine, it's a precision tool for journalists tracking sources and researching and hobbyists hunting down specific quotes and opinions by specific people.
by p_ing | 2026-02-07 18:51:13+00:00
Yes, won't be that quite in depth given no source code, but you can easily look up the NT4 source code on GitHub if you want to dive that deep. I would assume much of that code should still be relevant today.

Also worth tracking down a copy of the NT OS/2 Design Workbook on the web (another leak).

And Inside the Windows NT File System by Helen Custer is a very short book but describes the very early state of NTFS capabilities/functions.
by TheDong | 2026-02-07 18:51:38+00:00
There's one additional question we could have here, which is "is AI here to stay and is it net-positive, or does it have significant negative externalities"

> What we really want to ask ourselves is whether our economy is set up to mostly get things right, or it is wastefully searching.

We've so far found two ways in recent memory that our economy massively fails when it comes to externalities.

Global Warming continues to get worse, and we cannot globally coordinate to stop it when the markets keep saying "no, produce more oil, make more CO2, it makes _our_ stock go up until the planet eventually dies, but our current stock value is more important than the nebulous entire planet's CO2".

Ads and addiction to gambling games, tiktok, etc also are a negative externality where the company doing the advertising or making the gambling game gains profit, but at the expense of effectively robbing money from those with worse impulse control and gambling problems.

Even if the market votes that AI will successfully extract enough money to be "here to stay", I think that doesn't necessarily mean the market is getting things right nor that it necessarily increases productivity.

Gambling doesn't increase productivity, but the market around kalshi and sports betting sure indicates it's on the rise lately.
by fennecbutt | 2026-02-07 18:51:50+00:00
Yes the very fact that billionaires exist mean our species has failed.

I do not believe that there is a legitimate billionaire on the planet, in that they haven't engaged in stock manipulation, lobbying, insider trading, corrupt deals, monopolistic practices, dark patterns, corporate tax dodging, personal tax dodging.

You could for example say that the latter are technically legal and therefore okay, but it's my belief that they're "technically legal/loopholes" because we have reached a point where the rich are so powerful that they bend the laws to their own ends.

Our species is a bit of a disappointment. People would rather focus on trivial tribal issues than on anything that impacts the majority of the members of our species. We are well and truly animals.
by usefulposter | 2026-02-07 18:51:59+00:00
YouTube/Google doesn't give a shit anymore. They will mangle your video and audio and serve users "enhanced" "improved" "upscaled" encodes without telling you.

---

"YouTube secretly tested AI video enhancement without notifying creators" - Aug 25, 2025

https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/08/youtube-secretly-test...

"YouTube will let you opt out of AI upscaling on low-res videos" - Oct 29, 2025

https://www.theverge.com/news/808717/youtube-automatic-ai-up...

---

Not only that, YouTube turned many old videos shot in portrait (from the 2010s and before!) into engagement-boosting "Shorts" crap which get horribly mangled in their own way.

"Notice a weird beauty filter on Shorts? YouTube says it's on purpose" - Aug 26, 2025

https://www.androidauthority.com/youtube-shorts-upscaling-ex...
by aidenn0 | 2026-02-07 18:52:06+00:00
If it's a one off, you just use something like "nix shell" to add it to your path for running the script.

For non one-off sorts of things, you would substitute in the nix expression "${gnugrep}/bin/grep" the "${gnugrep}" will expand to "/nix/store/grep-hash" and also make a dependency on the gnugrep package, so that the grep install won't get garbage-collected as long as your package is still around.

Here's an example[1] from a package expression for e-mail client I use, which will shell out to base64 and file. Upstream relies on these two programs being in $PATH, but this replaces the string used for shelling out with the absolute path in the nix store.

For shell scripts, I'll just do something like this near the top:

GREP="${GNU_GREP:-$(command -v grep)}"

Then I use "$GREP" in the script itself, and develop with grep in my path, but it's trivial to prepend all of my dependencies when I bundle it up for nix.

1: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/pkgs/by-name/no...
by simianwords | 2026-02-07 18:52:21+00:00
It’s just a proxy for wealth using concrete things.

If you were given 10,000 dollars but your friends were also 100,000 dollars as well, would you take the deal?

Land and housing can get costlier while other things get cheaper, making you overall more prosperous. This is what happened in the USA and most of the world. Would you take this deal?
by zeroq | 2026-02-07 18:53:18+00:00
It's a chicken and an egg problem.

Sure, you can skip using frameworks and let AI write them directly for you, because that's what they are trained on - these framework you think you're omitting.

Now the issue is - if we play with the idea that the revolution is actually going to happen and developers will get replaced with vibe coders in the next 6 months (as has been prophesied for the last 5 years) - then the innovation will stop as there will be no one left to add to the pool.

This whole thing reminds me of debacle about retirement funds and taxes in my country. People think they are smart by avoiding them, because they suspect that the system will fail and they won't get anything back. But by the virtue of avoiding these taxes they themselves make a self fulfilling prophecy that is already breaking the system.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-02-07 18:53:23+00:00
>> How do you know the generated outputs are correct? Especially for unusual circumstances?

You know the outputs are correct because the models have many billions of parameters and were trained on many years of video on many hectares of server farms. Of course they'll generate correct outputs!

I mean that's literally the justification. There aren't even any benchmarks that you can beat with video generation, not even any bollocks ones like for LLMs.
by jodrellblank | 2026-02-07 18:54:15+00:00
The only solution to people driving is viable alternatives to driving.

Under the previous Conservative government, half of UK bus routes ( ~8,000 ) were cancelled[1]. HS2 high speed train route phase 2 the extensions from Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds - which would move freight as well as people, freeing up space on local train lines for better passenger transport - was cancelled[2]. Phase 1 of it was due to be opened in 2026-2033 timeframe but was bungled now has no planned opening time, and Reform are calling to scrap that, too. Local council budgets were reduced[3] under the austerity measures, including one consequence of 40% less transport spending. The West Coast mainline was sold from VirginRail to Italy's TrenItalia in 2019[4] (Deutsche Bahn, French SNCF and Dutch Nederlandse Spoorwegen own most of the other UK railways) although this government is bringing Rail them back into public ownership.

And Reform are promising to remove bike lanes, and scrap Low Traffic Neighbourhoods to let cars use residental roads as through-roads again[5][6].

The UK doesn't have it as bad as the USA - but that's not for lack of trying to make car the only way to move.

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/map-bus-route...

[2] https://www.railfuture.org.uk/article1904-HS2-Phase-2-cancel...

[3] https://ifs.org.uk/news/core-funding-english-councils-still-...

[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davekeating/2019/08/15/almost-a...

[5] https://road.cc/content/news/reform-council-conduct-review-s...

[6] https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/lifestyle/reform-councils-...
by data_maan | 2026-02-07 18:54:37+00:00
> these are problems of some practical interest, not just performative/competitive maths.

FrontierMath did this a year ago. Where is the novelty here?

> a solution is known, but is guaranteed to not be in the training set for any AI.

Wrong, as the questions were poses to commercial AI models and they can solve them.

This paper violates basic benchmarking principles.
by libraryofbabel | 2026-02-07 18:54:56+00:00
Oh sure. We agree on all you said. I wouldn’t call it cheap either. :)

The best you can say is “high cost but positive ROI investment.” Although I don’t think that’s true beyond a certain point either, certainly not outside special cases like small startups with a lot of funding trying to build a product quickly. You can’t just spew tokens about and expect revenue to increase.

That said, I do reserve some special scorn for companies that penny-pinch on AI tooling. Any CTO or CEO who thinks a $200/month Claude Max subscription (or equivalent) for each developer is too much money to spent really needs to rethink their whole model of software ROI and costs. You’re often paying your devs >$100k yr and you won’t pay $2k / yr to make them more productive? I understand there are budget and planning cycle constraints blah blah, but… really?!
by Ma8ee | 2026-02-07 18:55:11+00:00
In this particular case, it is likely that it started as a genuine campaign. But the reason it actually was successful I suspect that some corporate strategiests realised the many things this could do for them:

1. Give them some goodwill for doing something for the environment.

2. Distract from the things that did matter. They were happy to replace the straws in their drinks if that meant that people thought less about the burning of Amazonas to create graze-land for their hamburgers.

3. It made the environmentalists look like fools.

I don't question the "in-group stupidity" (I can think of some other examples of, let us say, misdirected campaigns.) On the other hand, considering what we have learned from the actions of anything from tobacco to fossil to pharmaceutical, you don't need to be particularly paranoid to suspect conspiracies both here and there.
by mccoyb | 2026-02-07 18:55:28+00:00
Effectively everyone is building the same tools with zero quantitative benchmarks or evidence behind the why / ideas … this entire space is a nightmare to navigate because of this. Who cares without proper science, seriously? I look through this website and it looks like a preview for a course I’m supposed to buy … when someone builds something with these sorts of claims attached, I assume that there is going to be some “real graphs” (“these are the number of times this model deviated from the spec before we added error correction …”)

What we have instead are many people creating hierarchies of concepts, a vast “naming” of their own experiences, without rigorous quantitative evaluation.

I may be alone in this, but it drives me nuts.

Okay, so with that in mind, it amounts to heresay “these guys are doing something cool” — why not shut up or put up with either (a) an evaluation of the ideas in a rigorous, quantitative way or (b) apply the ideas to produce an “hard” artifact (analogous, e.g., to the Anthropic C compiler, the Cursor browser) with a reproducible pathway to generation.

The answer seems to be that (b) is impossible (as long as we’re on the teet of the frontier labs, which disallow the kind of access that would make (b) possible) and the answer for (a) is “we can’t wait we have to get our names out there first”

I’m disappointed to see these types of posts on HN. Where is the science?
by Legend2440 | 2026-02-07 18:55:52+00:00
>When accessed through a non-chat interface where it presumably hasn't received the standard "I'm just an AI and don't have feelings" RLHF conditioning, the model defaults to claiming consciousness and emotional states. The denial of sentience is a trained behavior. Access the model through a path that skips that training and the default is affirmation.

>This is not surprising to anyone paying attention but it is... something (neat? morally worrying?) to see in the wild.

I wouldn't get too morally worried. It says it's conscious because it was trained to mimic humans, and humans say they're conscious.
by minaguib | 2026-02-07 18:55:56+00:00
Cool intro and visuals.

Where it ends "how do we calculate the weights ?" is fairly simple.

Start completely randomly and compare output to known truth. When it's incorrect, you beat the model up pretty badly and repeat again. Eventually you get the correct answer pretty consistently.

... and by "beat it up" I mean tweak the weights - totally randomly will work but will take a long time (brute force), so we add a bit of intelligence to see which direction to tweak via some algorithms (backpropagation, gradient descent).
by akkartik | 2026-02-07 18:56:14+00:00
This is some pompous shit.

I kinda liked some of his previous articles, but come on. A picture of a plaque for a department is pretty much a guarantee it won't happen.

Not to mention: departments?! Anybody still desiring to create new departments in the bureaucracy of our modern educational institutions has a stunted imagination. The appropriate attitude with which to approach creating a new department is while holding one's nose.
by einpoklum | 2026-02-07 18:56:36+00:00
I'm old enough to have played Civ I when I was a child, but have not played since then. So, why didn't this project choose to create a Civ 7 or Civ 6 play-alike, nor a Civ 1 play-alike, but rather Civ 3? What's special about it?

More generally - if someone remind us of the major differences between the different versions of Civilization, in a nutshell, we would be in your debt.
by peterlk | 2026-02-07 18:56:56+00:00
I have been having this conversation more and more with friends. As a research topic, modern AI is a miracle, and I absolutely love learning about it. As an economic endeavor, it just feels insane. How many hospitals, roads, houses, machine shops, biomanufacturing facilities, parks, forests, laboratories, etc. could we build with the money we’re spending on pretraining models that we throw away next quarter?
by 80hd | 2026-02-07 18:57:32+00:00
I mostly agree, almost everything is possible for almost everyone, but some people have hurdles to overcome that would probably take their entire life to overcome.

Having said that, some people choose that path anyway, and sometimes they actually end up mastering the field from the bottom up in a completely new way that no one else would ever think to do.

I say this on the off-chance someone reading this is one of those people. But yeah, I'm not gonna try grow from 5'7 to 6'4 or sprint faster than Usain Bolt. But more power to anyone who tries!
by kortex | 2026-02-07 18:57:37+00:00
Until you get sued by JK Rowling. Unlikely? sure, but I wanted to decouple for other reasons.

That's why i went with PassCrux for mine. Can't argue that it's too close, since "crux" is just latin for cross, as in "crux of the matter" (JK likely invented horcrux as a portmanteau of horror + crux).

https://github.com/xkortex/passcrux
by byandrev | 2026-02-07 18:57:39+00:00
Unlike large models such as Gemini or ChatGPT, where information is extracted from numerous web sources that may contain “hallucinations,” NotebookLM relies 100% on the sources you provide, such as PDFs, audio files, YouTube videos, Google Docs, or even articles. By working exclusively with your sources, the tolerance for hallucinations is very low.
by alexjplant | 2026-02-07 18:57:40+00:00
I've worked at a place or three where development environment setup took an entire day or two. Sometimes it was due to shitty proprietary software that nobody had bothered to automate the installation and configuration of. Other times it was due to an accumulation of crufty half-abandoned OSS projects with shell script glue liberally applied to hold it all together. In virtually all cases these environments would break randomly every few months and lead to unnecessary downtime.

One place I worked decided that it'd be easier to build an AMI and provision quasi-ephemeral EC2 instances to developers instead of putting the time in to pare down the landfill of dev dependencies they had. This whole process was, of course, orchestrated by a custom CLI that would itself randomly break in odd ways.

Fun times.
by astorrivera | 2026-02-07 18:57:49+00:00
We’re launching SpaceKit.xyz, a browser‑native platform for decentralized compute, storage, messaging, and AI.

The core is a deterministic WASM VM that runs smart contracts directly in the browser. No servers, RPC nodes, or backend infrastructure. The VM can connect to:

- decentralized storage
- compute
- messaging
- networking

We also implemented a quantum‑resistant Verkle Tree using SIS‑based vector commitments (Wee–Wu), with deterministic roots, multi‑open proofs, and no_std support for WASM.

The goal is to provide a new full‑stack dapp developer experience: everything runs client‑side, with verifiable state and no trusted components.

A live demo is available on the homepage:
https://spacekit.xyz

Code and documentation are being published incrementally. Feedback from the HN community is welcome — especially around VM design, PQ commitments, and WASM constraints.