MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xg15 | 2026-02-18 20:38:56+00:00
I can understand that they want to err on the side of "too much humanism" instead of "not enough humanism", given where Star Trek is coming from.

Arguments of the form "This person might look and act like a human, but it has no soul, so we must treat it like a thing and not a human" have a long tradition in history and have never led to something good. So it makes sense that if your ethical problems are really more about discriminated humans and not about actual AI, you would side more with rejecting those arguments.

(Some ST rambling follows)

I've always seen ST's ideological roots as mostly leftist-liberal, whereas the drivers of the current AI tech are coming from the rightist/libertarian side. It's interesting how the general focus of arguments and usage scenarios are following this.

But even Star Trek wasn't so clear about this. I think the topic was a bit like time travel, in that it was independently "reinvented" by different screenwriters at different times, so we end up with several takes on it, that you could sort into a "thing <-> being" spectrum:

- At the very low end is the ship's computer. It can understand and communicate in human language (and ostensibly uses biological neurons as part of its compute) but it's basically never seen as sentient and doesn't even have enough autonomy to fly the ship. It's very clearly a "thing".

- At the high end are characters like Data or Voyager's doctor that are full-fledged characters with personality, memories, relationships, goals and dreams, etc. They're pretty obviously portrayed as sentient.

- (Then somewhere far off on the scale are the Borg or the machine civilization from the first movie: Questions about rights and human judgment on sentience become a bit silly when they clearly went and became their own species)

- Somewhere between Data and the Computer is the Holodeck, which I think is interesting because it occupies multiple places on that scale. Most of the time, holo characters are just treated like disposable props, but once in a while, someone chooses to keep a character running over a longer timeframe or something else causes them to become "alive". ST is quite unclear how they deal with ethics in those situations.

I think there was a Voyager episode where Janeway spends a longer period with a Galileo Galilei character and progressively changes his programming to make him more to her liking. At some point she realizes this as "problematic behavior" and stops the whole interaction. But I think it was left open if she was infringing on the Galileo character's human rights or if she was drifting into some kind of AI boyfriend addiction.
by joshuamorton | 2026-02-18 20:39:10+00:00
Correct, but you can also reject filters that will take longer statically. The point is not "any arbitrary CEL program will run in less than 10us", it's that I can encode "do not allow filters that take more than 10us to evaluate" an then have a very high degree of confidence that that will be true for any user provided filter that is accepted (and if I'm wrong it'll be...11us, not 5s)

In the common use-cases for CEL that I've seen, you don't want to skip evaluation and fail open or closed arbitrarily. That can mean things like "abusive user gets access to data they should not be allowed to access because rule evaluation was skipped".

You also may have tons of rules and be evaluating them very often, so speed is important.
by BeetleB | 2026-02-18 20:39:25+00:00
I'll admit I'm not up to speed on Claude Code, but can you get it to look at a company's job openings each day, and notify you whenever there's an opening in your town.

All without writing a single line of code or setting up a cron job manually?

I suppose it could, if you let it execute the crontab commands. But 2 months after you've set it up, can you launch claude code and just say "Hey, stop the job search notifications" and have it know what you're talking about?

This is a trivial example. People are (attempting to) use it for more significant/compex stuff.
by jcalvinowens | 2026-02-18 20:39:30+00:00
Really happy to see this.

In the meantime, if you use bind as your authoritative nameserver, you can limit an hmac-secret to one TXT record, so each webserver that uses rfc2136 for certificate renewals is only capable of updating its specific record:

key "bob.acme." {
algorithm hmac-sha512;
secret "blahblahblah";
};

key "joe.acme." {
algorithm hmac-sha512;
secret "blahblahblah2";
};

zone "example.com" IN {
type master;
file "/var/lib/bind/example.com.zone";
update-policy {
grant bob.acme. name _acme-challenge.bob.acme.example.com. TXT;
grant joe.acme. name _acme-challenge.joe.acme.example.com. TXT;
};
key-directory "/var/lib/bind/keys-acme.example.com";
dnssec-policy "acme";
inline-signing yes;
};

I like this because it means an attacker who compromises "bob" can only get certs for "bob". The server part looks like this:

export LE_CONFIG_HOME="/etc/acme-sh/"
export NSUPDATE_SERVER="${YOUR_NS_ADDR}"
export NSUPDATE_KEY="/var/lib/bob-nsupdate.key"
export NSUPDATE_KEY_NAME="bob.acme."
export NSUPDATE_ZONE="acme.example.com."

acme.sh --issue --server letsencrypt -d 'bob.example.com' \
--certificate-profile shortlived \
--days 6 \
--dns dns_nsupdate
by Bender | 2026-02-18 20:39:35+00:00
IF Copack LLC d.b.a. Initiative Foods issued the recall after the FDA detected higher‑than‑normal levels of patulin in a sample collected through the agency’s Total Diet Study.

No illnesses or injuries have been reported.

Patulin is a mycotoxin produced by molds that can grow in fruits such as apples. Long-term exposure can lead to adverse health effects, including potential immune suppression, nerve damage, headaches, fever and nausea, according to the FDA.
by amelius | 2026-02-18 20:39:37+00:00
> He gives one the best pieces of advice I've ever heard: if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it is NOT scalable.

You mean like opening a restaurant?

Too bad delivery services like Uber Eats totally own the market now.

Starting a hotel? Booking.com and Airbnb are there to take your profit margins away!
by barfiure | 2026-02-18 20:39:51+00:00
This person is confused. Trump was a well known pussy grabber for decades. Epstein was anything but a secret, it seems, given how many politicians and celebrities and moguls he rubbed elbows with. Jerry stopping by the island for a lemonade and a spot of lunch with his high school aged girls? Yeah.

It comes down to this: you can have visibility into things and yet those in power won’t care whatsoever what you may think. That has always been the case, it is the case now, and will continue to be in the future.
Show HN: Sports-skills.sh – sports data connectors for AI agents
by andreantonelli | 2026-02-18 20:40:19+00:00
We built this because every sports AI demo uses fake data or locks you behind an enterprise API contract.

sports-skills gives your agent real sports data with one install command. No API keys. No accounts. For personal use.

Eight connectors out of the box: NFL, soccer across 13 leagues with xG, Formula 1 lap and pit data, NBA, WNBA, Polymarket, Kalshi, and a sports news aggregator pulling from BBC/ESPN/The Athletic.

npx skills add machina-sports/sports-skills

Open for contributions.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-02-18 20:40:39+00:00
Two ways to frame it:

Provenance is a DAG, so you get a partial order for free by topological sort. That can be extended to a compatible total order. Then provenance for a node is just its ordering. This kind of mapping from objects to the first N consecutive naturals is also a minimal perfect hash function, which have n log n overhead. We can't navigate the tree to track ancestry, but equality implies identical ancestry.

Alternatively, we could track the whole history in somewhat more bits with a succinct encoding, 2N if it's a binary tree.

In practice, deterministic IDs usually accept a 2^-N collision risk to get log n.
by chunktort | 2026-02-18 20:40:41+00:00
Built this after hitting real latency issues in production. LangChain added 250ms+ overhead before the LLM was even called — routing, validation, and middleware stacked up fast.

The core realization: most "orchestration" is just routing + retry + caching. Those three things don't require 47 packages or 15MB of dependencies.

What it actually is: ~15KB of Python, 2 runtime deps (httpx + pydantic). Benchmarks on 1,000 requests showed 65ms avg vs LangChain's 420ms, 3MB memory/request vs 12MB.

The part I'm most proud of: the testing layer. MockLLMClient lets you inject deterministic responses so you can test agent routing and retry logic without hitting any APIs. Hard to do that cleanly with LangChain's abstractions.

214 tests, 91% coverage. Live demo at ct-agentforge.streamlit.app if you want to try it without cloning.

Happy to go deep on any part of the architecture.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-18 20:40:46+00:00
It's not more complex in C or C++, you just have less of a culture of buying into a whole eco-system. C and C++ play nice with the build system that you bring, rather than that you are forced into a particular way of working.

It's 'just a compiler' (ok, a bit more than that). I don't need to use a particular IDE, a particular build system, a particular package manager or even a particular repository.

That is not to throw shade on those other languages, each to their own, but I just like my tools to stay in their lane.

Just like I have a drawer full of different hammers rather than one hammer with 12 different heads, a screwdriver, a hardware store and a drill attachment. I wouldn't know what to do with it.
by jfengel | 2026-02-18 20:40:50+00:00
It won't, for the same reason that the hype of non-digital gold is perennial.

Economists put the gold standard behind them decades ago. It's practically universally agreed that it's too inflexible to base an economy on. Fans of the gold standard want an absolutely rock-solid place to put their money, but that's not compatible with a dynamic economy.

Further, there is always going to be demand for some way to conduct illegal transactions. (Not all purposes for that are nefarious, though there's more demand for that.) That doesn't have to be "digital gold", and not all digital gold is suited to that task, but there is enough overlap between the goals that it's going to mean that there will always be something.
by iamnothere | 2026-02-18 20:40:58+00:00
If you need examples for left wing censorship in the US: the federal government (primarily through CISA) worked for years through NGOs to pressure companies on moderation policy, going so far as to suggest particular accounts or individuals needed scrutiny. California is currently suing several website operators for offering blueprints for 3D printed guns. A few blue states are experimenting with hate speech bills again (typically focused on islamophobia or antisemitism), although they will likely face a successful 1A challenge if they pass.

Both Ds and Rs have been attacking Section 230; Mark Kelly wants to strip those protections when sites “amplify content that caused harm.” KOSA is a looming bipartisan threat.

Left radicals are as virulently against free speech as those on the right, often calling for allies to “shut down” or even physically harm opponents.

Schools are a particularly difficult battleground for free speech, with actions against scholars from both left and right: https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/scholars-under-fire

If you are left wing, you probably don’t think some of these are censorship, others do, that’s why I said it was a good thing that left and right disagree with each other here. In many ways they cancel each other out, although they do a lot of damage to free speech along the way.

It’s also true that currently in the US the primary threat comes from the right, as a consequence of the right being in power. Internationally it is reversed.
Show HN: UltraPlot 2.0 – semantic legends, better layouts, faster imports
by cvanelteren | 2026-02-18 20:41:01+00:00
UltraPlot v2.0.1 is out!

UltraPlot is a Matplotlib wrapper aimed at keeping Matplotlib’s flexibility while making common plotting workflows faster and more consistent.

v2.x focuses on semantic legends (categorical/numeric/size/geo), more reliable layout + axis-sharing in complex grids, guide architecture cleanup, CI hardening, and much faster import times via lazy loading.

We also launched a new docs site with a gallery: https://ultraplot.readthedocs.io/

Code: https://github.com/Ultraplot/UltraPlot

Feedback is very welcome, especially on legend API ergonomics and layout behavior in real figures.
by idiotsecant | 2026-02-18 20:42:32+00:00
This phrase is stupid and it gets repeated so much. It's pure vapid mangement consultant dreck. Imagine I told you that my car was running kind of hot and I needed to replace old coolant to make the system work better. If you told me 'ThE PuRpOsE oF a SyStEm Is WhAt It DoEs' I would think you were missing some braincells.

Sometimes the purpose of a system is what it's supposed to do and it needs some small maintenance to make it work right.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-02-18 20:43:22+00:00
I'm getting two genuinely held narratives here

1. Some people call Openclaw an RCE in a tin: "<RCE in a tin>, operator pulls pin, tin goes boom"

2. Some have a very different framing: "There's no such thing as the RCE in a tin, it's all fake news, therefore it couldn't go boom"

Well either way people need to be more responsible, both sides agree to that much. But the safety implications of boom vs not boom might be a problem for a while.

The really uncomfortable position is : "This thing has real but unreliable capabilities, which is exactly the most dangerous configuration."

On the upside, once you've Named The Problem, there's several ways forward from there, at least.
by zamadatix | 2026-02-18 20:43:48+00:00
Times for things like "age of the universe" are usually given as "cosmic time" for this reason. If it's about a specific object (e.g. "how long until a day on Earth lasts 25 hours") it's usually given in "proper time" for that object. Other observers/reference frames may perceive time differently, but in the normal relativistic sense rather than a "it all needs to wind itself back up to be equal in the end" sense.
by rbanffy | 2026-02-18 20:43:49+00:00
When doing feature detection for execution path selection, it’s sometimes useful to run some quick benchmarks to see which path is objectively best.

Now we have two-ish implementations or x86, but back in the 1980s and 1990s we had quite a few, some with wildly different performance characteristics.

And, if we talk about ARM and RISC-V, we’ll have an order of magnitude more.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-18 20:44:21+00:00
> Hint: Money is a nice thing to have but it is very definitely not a moat.

in this context i think where money becomes a moat is when you consider Google can keep advancing their LLMs and tools while operating at a loss because they have the cash and revenue to do that. They'll just keep going and wait for everyone else to go bankrupt and then the whole AI market is theirs. In that way money, and the ability to out last your competitors, is the moat.
by nikcub | 2026-02-18 20:44:29+00:00
My peak number of orders p.a was in 2023: 215 orders

In 2025 it was 27 orders

I expect it to be even lower this year. I didn't even buy my eero router upgrade from Amazon.

I largely attribute this to poor quality products, horrible search interface, trying to sort through the dropship spam, and prices no longer being as competitive.

Amazon used to have decent-quality "amazon native" brands like Anker, Eufy, Eero etc. but there are better alternatives to buying all of these products now
by BeetleB | 2026-02-18 20:44:50+00:00
If you can come up with a technical and legal approach that contains the misdeeds, but doesn't compromise the positive uses, I'm with you. I just don't see it happening. The most you can do is go after operators if it misbehaves.

I've been around since before the web. You know what made the Internet suck for me? Letting people act anonymously. Especially in forums. Pre-web, I was part of a local network of BBS's, and the best thing about it was anonymity was simply forbidden. Each BBS operator in the network verified the identity of the user. They had to post in their own names or be banned. We had moderators, but the lack of anonymity really ensured people behaved. Acting poorly didn't just affect your access to one BBS, but access to the whole network.

Bots spreading crap on the web? It's merely an increment over the problem of allowing anonymous users. You can't solve one while maintaining anonymity.
by gjkim042 | 2026-02-18 20:45:21+00:00
Hello HN, I built Axon because I wanted to run Claude Code fully autonomously but didn't want to give it free reign over my laptop.
The insight was simple: Kubernetes already solves the hard problems. Isolation? Pods. Ephemeral environments? Jobs. Credential scoping? RBAC + Secrets. Scheduling dozens of agents? That's just scheduling. So --dangerously-skip-permissions inside an ephemeral Pod isn't actually dangerous — the blast radius is zero for the host.

Axon is a Kubernetes controller (a few CRDs, no external dependencies) that wraps AI coding agents as Jobs. You apply a Task, Axon spins up an isolated Pod, the agent works autonomously, and you get back a branch name, PR URL, and exact cost in USD.

The part I'm most excited about is TaskSpawner. It polls GitHub Issues and creates a Task for each match. I use this to develop Axon itself — every open issue gets picked up by an agent that investigates, opens a PR, and self-reviews. If it gets stuck, it labels the issue axon/needs-input and stops. Remove the label, it re-queues on the next poll. The full setup is here: https://github.com/axon-core/axon/blob/main/self-development...

Current state: Claude Code is the primary agent today. The agent type is pluggable (single switch in job_builder.go) and I added Codex, Gemini CLI, and OpenCode support. Written in Go, Apache 2.0 licensed — fully open source.

A few things I'd genuinely love feedback on: * Is the CRD design (Task / Workspace / AgentConfig / TaskSpawner) intuitive or over-abstracted? * Would a web UI add value, or is kubectl + CLI enough for this kind of tool? * Anyone running autonomous agents in production today? Curious what problems you've hit.

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or the experience of letting agents develop their own framework. Contributions welcome!
by joe_the_user | 2026-02-18 20:45:37+00:00
Well, if someone could create a drop-in replacement for Oracle-DB, Adobe Creative or AutoCad in a month of vibe-coding, I think they could prosper without having their own good idea. I would like to see something like this.

But if you're just talking the fairly simple apps that a single very talented programmer could pump out before this, sure, yeah.
by yegle | 2026-02-18 20:45:43+00:00
I think people commenting misunderstood what CEL offers.

Remember the famous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule?

> Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

CEL is a well specified, reasonably fast "embeddable" language with familiar syntax. I'm sure there are other languages that fits the description though.
by prmph | 2026-02-18 20:46:05+00:00
You are not making sense.

> Just on HN alone, throughout 2023 - 2025 we were seing like one new TODO app show up on HN weekly!

This response shows you missed my point entirely. I am saying a todo app does not a PKM make! I'm not interested in a vibe-coded todo app, it is useless to me.

> Because money is the moat, and they have it!

You're sidestepping issue and contradicting yourself. I asked: if cloning is so easy, why has no one cloned the JetBrains IDEs, for example?

Remember, I'm not talking about what happens after the cloning. Are you saying no one has cloned Jetbrains because it takes a lot of money to do so? That would contradict your claim that AI makes it easy.
by Covzire | 2026-02-18 20:46:05+00:00
By March 2020, the early John's Hopkins data showed a clear trend of those demographics who were actually vulnerable of serious harm, namely the elderly and those with already compromised immune systems. We knew even back then, that children and healthy adults were NOT at risk from COVID-19, even the early strains which were much more virulent than the later ones. It was censored, over and over, by Twitter, Facebook and even HN.
by mikepurvis | 2026-02-18 20:46:26+00:00
"We need more funding into open protocols that decentralize algorithmic ownership; open platforms that give users a choice of algorithm and platform provider; and algorithmic transparency across our information ecosystem."

This sounds like a call to separate the aggregation step from the content. Reasonable enough, but does it really address the root cause? Aren't we just as polarized in a world where there are dozens of aggregators into the same data and everyone picks the one that most indulges their specific predilections for engagement, rage, and clicks?

What does "open" really buy you in this space?

Don't get me wrong, I want this figured out too, and maybe this is a helpful first step on the way to other things, but I'm not quite seeing how it plays out.
by u1hcw9nx | 2026-02-18 20:46:33+00:00
If you go far beyond nanoseconds, energy becomes a limiting factor. You can only achieve ultra-fast processing if you dedicate vast amounts of matter to heat dissipation and energy generation. Think on a galactic scale: you cannot have even have molecular reaction speeds occurring at femtosecond or attosecond speeds constantly and everywhere without overheating everything.
by scarecrowbob | 2026-02-18 20:46:38+00:00
I am glad you feel that _I_ have a high level of compassion for my fellow humans.

If someone posts "but Obama" in response to a bunch of -hand written letters from children in what I consider to be a literal concentration camp- then I'm going to think that person has transcended a lack of "integrity" or "critical thinking skills" into becoming a literal monster.
by kristianp | 2026-02-18 20:46:40+00:00
Looks like Berkeshire Hathaway is one way to invest in US shares ex-AI. Except for their smallish holding in Google, they now don't own the big AI spenders, whose shares have risen so much in the past year.

I guess they don't see value in Amazon shares any more. AI spend will probably hit their aws profits.

Note that the listing of shares they own doesn't include the companies that are subsidiaries. Like Geico and other insurance companies, BNSF Railway, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, etc.
by jonkratz | 2026-02-18 20:46:41+00:00
I just finished 75 Hard and one thing that surprised me was how hard it was to find a really minimal way to track progress. Most of what I found was either overly complicated or bundled into big habit apps. So I built something simple for myself and put it up at 75hardcalculator.com.

You enter your start date and it shows:
• What day you’re on
• How many days are left
• Your exact finish date
• A simple 75-day visual so you can see the days stacking up

No account needed. Just a clean way to see where you are and how close you are to Day 75. If you’re in the middle of it (or about to start) and want something minimal, it might help.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-18 20:46:47+00:00
I don’t know if I buy the explanation that this was due to the feed algorithm. It looks like an artifact of being exposed to X’s current user base instead of their old followers. When Twitter switched to X there was a noticeable shift in the average political leanings of the platform toward alignment with Musk, as many left-leaning people abandoned the platform for Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads.

So changing your feed to show popular posts on the platform instead of just your friends’ Tweets would be expected to shift someone’s intake toward the average of the platform.