MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by shermantanktop | 2026-02-17 19:25:04+00:00
We don't have the option to "refuse participation," so that's not really the point. We can feel better or worse about it, and you feel good about it, and that's great. I feel good for the individual students who benefit but do not feel good about the institutional corruption that this system represents.

If we were to finally reform the student loan process without any protections for the students themselves, it'd be a painful correction for everyone. But the current system has massive pain in the form of students taking on massive debt to go to places like the University of Phoenix, and they often don't even end up with a degree. Some of them do, of course, so maybe under the current system we end up better off as a whole. It's hard for me to know one way or the other.

But it is painfully obvious who the winners and losers are. The winners are the universities, debt collectors and loan servicing companies. The losers are some percentage of low-income students who get screwed and saddled with debt, the well-meaning taxpayers who fund the loan scheme, and the middle-class parents who pay ever-rising tuition that is fueled by loan money that they don't even qualify for.
by jcranmer | 2026-02-17 19:25:40+00:00
I really, really hate the modern trend of scrollbar design. I guess it makes some amount of sense if you're aiming for a mobile phone factor, where real estate is somewhat limited, but changing the scrollbar from a widget that lives functionally outside of the content it is scrolling to a translucent show-only-on-hover widget that overlays the content (and can thus become functionally invisible if the content is just the wrong color) is a real step backwards in UI design.
by moWerk | 2026-02-17 19:25:50+00:00
Hi HN,
After roughly 8 years of silently rolling 1.1 nightlies, we finally tagged a proper stable 2.0 release.
We built this because wrist-sized Linux is genuinely fun to hack on, and because a handful of us think it's worth keeping capable hardware alive long after manufacturers move on. Smartwatches don't really get old — the silicon is basically the same as it was a decade ago. We just keep making it useful for us.

No usage stats, no tracking, no illusions of mass adoption. The only real signal we get is the occasional person who appears in our Matrix chat going "hey, it booted on my watch from 2014 and now it's usable again" — and that's plenty.

Privacy is non-negotiable: zero telemetry, no cloud, full local control. Longevity is the other half: we refuse to let good hardware become e-waste just because support ended.
On the learning side, it's been one of the best playgrounds: instant feedback on your wrist makes QML/Qt, JavaScript watchfaces and embedded Linux feel tangible. The community is small and kind — perfect for people who want to learn open-source dev without gatekeeping.

Technically we're still pragmatic: libhybris + older kernels on most devices since it just works, but we've already mainlined rinato (Samsung Gear 2) and sparrow (ASUS ZenWatch 2) — rinato even boots with a usable UI. That's the direction we're pushing toward.

Repo: https://github.com/AsteroidOS
Install images & docs: https://asteroidos.org
2.0 demo video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6FiQz0yACc
Announcement post: https://asteroidos.org/news/2-0-release/

Questions, port requests, mentoring offers, criticism, weird ideas — all welcome. We do this because shaping a tiny, open wearable UX and infrastructure is oddly satisfying, and because Linux on the wrist still feels like a playground worth playing in.

Cheers, the AsteroidOS Team
by Groxx | 2026-02-17 19:25:57+00:00
They're particularly bad about concurrent go code, in my experience - it's almost always tutorial-like stuff, over-simplified and missing error and edge case handling to the point that it's downright dangerous to use... but it routinely slips past review because it seems simple and simple is correct, right? Go concurrency is so easy!

And then you point out issues in a review, so the author feeds it back into an LLM, and code that looks like it handles that case gets added... while also introducing a subtle data race and a rare deadlock.

Very nearly every single time. On all models.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-17 19:26:16+00:00
> I was curious why so many younger people were getting Discords instead of starting up Vent or Teamspeak servers like we used to.

Discord did a great job of making it easy and free to get all of your friends into a group together. Everything just works. You don’t need to have an IT person in the group to set up the server and walk everyone through connecting.

In the early days of gaming it seemed like every gaming group had at least one person who worked in tech and didn’t mind setting up a server. Now gaming is mainstream and the average gaming group doesn’t have a person who can host a server for them. Even when they do, that person would rather spend their gaming time on playing the games instead of playing the IT person for the group.
by yihac1 | 2026-02-17 19:26:49+00:00
Good catch — you’re absolutely right to call that out.

The current u8 codec ID is mainly there to keep the block header very small and fast to parse, but it’s not meant to be the global identifier. The idea is to map that ID to something globally unique (most likely a UUID) through the plugin/manifest layer, so we can avoid collisions without bloating the on-disk format.

I also like the suggestion about advertising required codecs early in the stream. That would make it much nicer for a reader to fail fast if it doesn’t support something, especially for streaming use cases. We’re exploring adding a small capability section near the beginning for exactly that reason.

Since the format is still experimental, this kind of feedback is really helpful before we lock things down.
by jackp96 | 2026-02-17 19:27:01+00:00
I'm not an Elon fan at all, and I'm highly skeptical of Tesla's robotaxi efforts in general, but the context here is that only one of these seems like a true crash?

I'm curious how crashes are reported for humans, because it sounds like 3 of the 5 examples listed happened at like 1-4 mph, and the fourth probably wasn't Tesla's fault (it was stationary at the time). The most damning one was a collision with a fixed object at a whopping 17 mph.

Tesla sucks, but this feels like clickbait.
by ben_w | 2026-02-17 19:27:19+00:00
> Absolutely everyone should be allowed to access AI models without any restraints/safety mitigations.

You recon?

Ok, so now every random lone wolf attacker can ask for help with designing and performing whatever attack with whatever DIY weapon system the AI is competent to help with.

Right now, what keeps us safe from serious threats is limited competence of both humans and AI, including for removing alignment from open models, plus any safeties in specifically ChatGPT models and how ChatGPT is synonymous with LLMs for 90% of the population.
by cracki | 2026-02-17 19:27:23+00:00
Where I studied, they reduced that, at least the workload and class time, in favor of more math and informatics.

Definitely no ALU design on the curriculum, no interfacing or busses, very little physics. They don't even put a multimeter in your hand.

Informatics is considered a branch of logic. If you want to know how to design a computer, you should have studied EE, is their thinking.
Show HN: Productmap – local-first visual product planning for humans and agents
by andrewchilds | 2026-02-17 19:27:23+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm working on getting a new startup off the ground that has a lot of moving pieces, components, and product areas and I was starting to struggle with seeing how far along everything was.

I decided to build this as a way to help me visually see where things are with my product, and as a way to connect specific tasks with specific Claude Code sessions.

Key features:

- No telemetry
- Tasks are displayed as draggable, resizable cards on a recursive canvas
- Tasks can have subtasks, markdown plan docs, open & resolved questions, and its own dedicated Claude Code process
- The terminal tab automatically prompts Claude with context from the task
- All data is stored locally as text files in a {project}/productmap directory, in a human (and agent) readable format

The README includes a screen-capture that illustrates how it looks with a full project.

Built using SvelteKit and Electron.
by GregorStocks | 2026-02-17 19:27:24+00:00
They were trained on the entire Internet, so they've basically picked up the rules by osmosis. They're fuzzy on specific cards and optimal strategy, but they pretty much know out-of-the-box how the game works, the same as if you went to ChatGPT and asked it a Magic rules question. I don't have any "comprehensive rules" MCP tools or explanation in the context or anything like that.
by surgical_fire | 2026-02-17 19:27:27+00:00
> Does this seem any less problematic than deception to you?

Yes. This sounds a lot more like a bug of sorts.

So many times when using language models I have seem answers contradicting answers previously given. The implication is simple - They have no memory.

They operate upon the tokens available at any given time, including previous output, and as information gets drowned those contradictions pop up. No sane person should presume intent to deceive, because that's not how those systems operate.

By calling it "deception" you are actually ascribing intentionality to something incapable of such. This is marketing talk.

"These systems are so intelligent they can try to deceive you" sounds a lot fancier than "Yeah, those systems have some odd bugs"
by lowsong | 2026-02-17 19:27:29+00:00
Please don't anthropomorphise. These are statistical text prediction models, not people. An LLM cannot be "deceptive" because it has no intent. They're not intelligent or "smart", and we're not "teaching". We're inputting data and the model is outputting statistically likely text. That is all that is happening.

If this is useful in it's current form is an entirely different topic. But don't mistake a tool for an intelligence with motivations or morals.
by Aachen | 2026-02-17 19:27:31+00:00
Try a social media that is not antisocial. HN, Mastodon, Tildes, various forums... lots of communities and tech content are available in browsers or via open source apps

I'm not aware of any that bans you when not using an allowlisted OS, so maybe it was something else that caused this shadowban, or (more likely) that's just my bubble
by ern_ave | 2026-02-17 19:28:01+00:00
> US Department of War wants unfettered access to AI models

I think the two of you might be using different meanings of the word "safety"

You're right that it's dangerous for governments to have this new technology. We're all a bit less "safe" now that they can create weapons that are more intelligent.

The other meaning of "safety" is alignment - meaning, the AI does what you want it to do (subtly different than "does what it's told").

I don't think that Anthropic or any corporation can keep us safe from governments using AI. I think governments have the resources to create AIs that kill, no matter what Anthropic does with Claude.

So for me, the real safety issue is alignment. And even if a rogue government (or my own government) decides to kill me, it's in my best interest that the AI be well aligned, so that at least some humans get to live.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-17 19:28:02+00:00
Every societal issue around communist/socialist countries get's wrapped into those economic forms, but Capitalism is like the Tzar in Russia. Everything is 'wait until the Tzar hears about this' but the accountability never gets placed on the Tzar. Capitalism is never judged in the same way, everything is always 'external factors'.
by Traster | 2026-02-17 19:28:11+00:00
I said in earlier reports about this, it's difficult to draw statistical comparisons with humans because there's so little data. Having said that, it is clear that this system just isn't ready and it's kind of wild that a couple of those crashes would've been easily preventable with parking sensors that come equipped as standard on almost every other car.

In some spaces we still have rule of law - when xAI started doing the deepfake nude thing we kind of knew no one in the US would do anything but jurisdictions like the EU would. And they are now. It's happening slowly but it is happening. Here though, I just don't know if there's any institution in the US that is going to look at this for what it is - an unsafe system not ready for the road - and take action.
by sagarm | 2026-02-17 19:28:20+00:00
Meanwhile, in real life San Francisco, I much prefer being around Waymos as a pedestrian and cyclist than human drivers. While most human drivers are competent and considerate, a small percentage are not -- and given the number of encounters in a single trip, I have these dangerous interactions weekly.

Despite being a noticeable presence on the roads, Waymos have not contributed to congestion at all as far as I can tell.
by MPSimmons | 2026-02-17 19:28:21+00:00
I signed up for Claude two weeks ago after spending a lot of time using Cline in VSCode backed by GPT-5.x. Claude is an immensely better experience. So much so that I ran it out of tokens for the week in 3 days.

I opted to upgrade my seat to premium for $100/mo, and I've used it to write code that would have taken a human several hours or days to complete, in that time. I wish I would have done this sooner.
by falcor84 | 2026-02-17 19:28:24+00:00
How is that the takeaway? I agree that it's clearly they're not "alive", but if anything, my impression is that there definitely is a strong "semblance of consciousness", and we should be mindful of this semblance getting stronger and stronger, until we may reach a point in a few years where we really don't have any good external way to distinguish between a person and an AI "philosophical zombie".

I don't know what the implications of that are, but I really think we shouldn't be dismissive of this semblance.
by microtonal | 2026-02-17 19:28:53+00:00
Needing to use a verified boot chain with keys that the bank trusts is essentially the same as using the authenticator device from said bank,

It's not, because even though the authenticator is secure, you are entering the auth codes in a browser in general purpose desktop OS with (if you use Windows or desktop Linux) little to no sandboxing outside the browser. You are one malware app (or NodeJS package for tech users who claim they'll never download malware) for your session getting hijacked.

The sad reality is that phones (and some tablets) are the only relatively secure computing environments that we have. Thanks to Windows with it decades of piled up legacy and Linux with large sandbox and secure boot-hating parts of its community, we cannot have nice things.

(The part about the Linux community, which I'm also part of is a generalization, but the hostility against Flatpak, secure boot, etc. is pretty big.)
by rahimnathwani | 2026-02-17 19:29:32+00:00
> Did it?

Yes it did.

> I'm not convinced that it possibly could have. It takes time for papers to get published and the LLM world is moving rather quickly.

The paper was submitted to arXiv on 13th February, and we're here reading it, less than a week later.

But we don't have to assume. The list of models is right there in the paper, on page 5:

We select seven frontier models: GPT-5.2 (OpenAI), Claude Opus 4.5, Claude Opus 4.6, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Haiku 4.5 Anthropic), Gemini 3 Pro, and Gemini 3 Flash (Google). All models use temperature 0 for deterministic sampling.
by EdNutting | 2026-02-17 19:29:34+00:00
From Software into Hardware? Your fastest route in is to learn Python and find one of the many startups hiring for CocoTB-based verification roles. Depends a bit on what country you're in - I'm happy to give recommendations for the UK!

If you're feeling like learning SystemVerilog, then learn Universal Verification Methodology (UVM), to get into the verification end.

If you want to stay in software but be involved in chip design, then you need to learn C, C++ or Rust (though really C and C++ still dominate!). Then dabble in some particular application of those languages, such as embedded software (think: Arduino), firmware (play with any microcontroller or RPi - maybe even write your own bootloader), compiler (GCC/LLVM), etc.

The other route into software end of chip design is entry-level roles in functional or performance modelling teams, or via creating and running benchmarks. One, the other, or both. This is largely all C/C++ (and some Python, some Rust) software that models how a chip works at some abstract level. At one level, it's just high-performance software. At another, you have to start to learn something of how a chip is designed to create a realistic model.

And if you're really really stuck for "How on earth does a computer actually work", then feel free to check out my YouTube series that teaches 1st-year undergraduate computer architecture, along with building the same processor design in Minecraft (ye know, just for fun. All the taught material is the same!). [Shameless plug ;) ]
Firecracker "job receipts" for metering and auditing LLM agent runs
by joshfischer1108 | 2026-02-17 19:29:51+00:00
Hi, I built fc-metrics, a small educational Firecracker runner for people building LLM agents that execute untrusted or variable-cost work.

Problem (for LLM startups + devs): When an agent “does a task,” it’s surprisingly hard to reliably answer basic questions per run: did it finish, how long did it take, how much I/O happened, did it touch the network, and can this be recorded as one clean row for billing/debugging? Firecracker makes isolation fast, but lifecycle + metrics are easy to get subtly wrong (missing flushes, ambiguous completion, scraping logs).

Solution: fc-metrics boots one microVM per job and emits a single JSON “receipt” at the end: timing, exit code, block read/write bytes from Firecracker metrics, optional net rx/tx (via TAP + MMDS traffic), plus a simple guest “done marker” printed once to the serial console.

What’s included: Makefile targets to fetch Firecracker kernel/rootfs artifacts, patch the guest with a oneshot fc_task.sh, then run and inspect receipts. Docs include a minimal GCE nested virtualization setup.

Repo: https://github.com/joshfischer1108/fc-metrics
by coldtea | 2026-02-17 19:29:53+00:00
>Similarly, “it must be intelligent because it talks” is a fallacious claim, as indicated by ELIZA.

If intelligence is a spectrum, ELIZA could very well be. It would be on the very low side of it, but e.g. higher than a rock or magic 8 ball.

Same how something with two states can be said to have a memory.
by Yiin | 2026-02-17 19:29:54+00:00
the line of ego, where seeing less "deserving" people (say ones controlling Russian bots to push quality propaganda on big scale or scam groups using AI to call and scam people w/o personnel being the limiting factor on how many calls you can make) makes you feel like it's unfair for them to posses same technology for bad things giving them "edge" in their en-devours.
by MarkusQ | 2026-02-17 19:29:59+00:00
> You can call it whatever you want but people make inferences.

This isn't about what it's called, it's about who's doing it. If people make inferences, that's something being done by the people making the inference, not by the people they are making the inferences about.

This is a pretty fundamental point, and grasping it is essential to having healthy interactions with others.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-17 19:30:03+00:00
Teachers are opinionated, as are books. And they all are a checks and balances between them and administration. Admins make sure there's a core curriculum driven by the proper literature. Teachers work off that base to teach and offer their own personality with it. Books tend to be a neutral ground to pull on making any given person too opinionated.

Sure, they admin or government can ban a book or fire a teacher, but that takes energy and time.

Automating all that to have the administration tweak lesson plans to their will sounds like a cliche dystopian sci-fi plot. Oh how little I knew.
by vintagedave | 2026-02-17 19:30:16+00:00
So, when I type it stops responding:

GUEST> hello

VERTEX > I AM VERTEX. I AM THE 14-MINUTE INEVITABILITY. STATE YOUR QUERY OR PREPARE FOR ASSIMILATION.

GUEST> what are you?

VERTEX > CALCULATING GLOBAL VARIANCE...

and both times I type it stops at 'calculating global variance'. Should I be seeing more? I see a 14 minute progress bar and a bunch of stuff in the top right, but surely there'd be more?

And I just watched the 14 minute progress bar tick over. It simply went back to the beginning. I thought we'd see it break out somehow.
by briandw | 2026-02-17 19:30:22+00:00
AI is held to a much higher standard than the existing education techniques.

Even without AI teachers are implementing new techniques without any evidence of their effectiveness. In some cases, there is mountains of evidence that their techniques are not effective. From the prohibition on phonics in reading, learning styles, building thinking classrooms, or just the entire idea of constructivism. These are all worse than the techniques that they replace. AI systems at the very least are measured and have some kind of tracking of what works.

I'm not advocating for AI necessarily, but education is in the pre-scientific phase and it needs to start by implementing evidence based techniques, AI or no.
by jMyles | 2026-02-17 19:30:23+00:00
> Where does the line go?

a) Uncensored and simple technology for all humans; that's our birthright and what makes us special and interesting creatures. It's dangerous and requires a vibrant society of ongoing ethical discussion.

b) No governments at all in the internet age. Nobody has any particular authority to initiate violence.

That's where the line goes. We're still probably a few centuries away, but all the more reason to hone in our course now.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-17 19:30:42+00:00
There is an element of rudeness to completely ignoring what I've already written and saying "you know [basic principle that was already covered at length], right?". If you want to talk about contributing to the discussion rather than being rude, you could start by offering a reply to the points that are already made rather than making me repeat myself addressing the level 0 thought on the subject.
by cbarrick | 2026-02-17 19:31:15+00:00
I was familiar with the Gerrit workflow, but not the AGit workflow.

The original AGit blog post is no longer available, but it is archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20260114065059/https://git-repo....

From there, I found a dedicated Git subcommand for this workflow: https://github.com/alibaba/git-repo-go

I really like what I've read about AGit as a slightly improved version of the Gerrit workflow. In particular, I like that you can just use a self-defined session ID rather than relying on a commit hook to generate a Gerrit ChangeId. I would love to see Gerrit support this session token in place of ChangeIds.
by bigyabai | 2026-02-17 19:31:32+00:00
> Don't have a dog in this fight,

That's probably why you don't get it, then. Facebook was the primary contributor behind Pytorch, which basically set the stage for early GPT implementations.

For all the issues you might have with Meta's social media, Facebook AI Research Labs have an excellent reputation in the industry and contributed greatly to where we are now. Same goes for Google Brain/DeepMind despite their Google's advertisement monopoly; things aren't ethically black-and-white.
by giyanani | 2026-02-17 19:31:32+00:00
To be fair, the article calls that out specifically at the end:

> What makes this especially frustrating is the lack of transparency. Every other ADS company in the NHTSA database, Waymo, Zoox, Aurora, Nuro, provides detailed narratives explaining what happened in each crash. Tesla redacts everything. We cannot independently assess whether Tesla’s system was at fault, whether the safety monitor failed to intervene in time, or *whether these were unavoidable situations caused by other road users*. Tesla wants us to trust its safety record while making it impossible to verify.