MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jebarker | 2026-02-17 17:59:05+00:00
> a tool is a tool

> author (pilot?) hasn't generally thought too much about the problem space

I’ve stopped saying that “AI is just a tool” to justify/defend its use precisely because of this loss of thought you highlight. I now believe the appropriate analogy is “AI is delegation”.

So talking to the vibe coder that’s used AI is like talking to a high level manager rather than the engineer for human written code
by burkaman | 2026-02-17 17:59:06+00:00
I know it's hard to believe but I am not lying. Work is mandatory and refusal is punishable with harsher conditions and/or longer imprisonment. Here a few examples.

Alabama: Refusing to work is a "medium-level violation", which can be punished by forfeiting good time, which extends their sentence. See https://governor.alabama.gov/assets/2023/01/EO-725-Good-Time..., https://www.al.com/news/2025/12/alabama-prison-inmates-lose-...

Louisiana: Inmates are often sent to solitary confinement (among other punishments) if they refuse to work. https://apnews.com/article/prisons-labor-lawsuit-investigati...

Tennessee: "Any prisoner who refuses to participate in such programs when work is available shall have any sentence reduction credits received pursuant to the provisions of T.C.A. § 41-2-123 or T.C.A. § 41-2-146 reduced by two days of credit for each one day of refusal to work." https://www.ctas.tennessee.edu/eli/punishment-refusing-work
by carabiner | 2026-02-17 17:59:07+00:00
Your site https://microlandia.city and OP blog https://www.arthurcnops.blog/death-of-show-hn/ as well as most personal sites posted on HN are almost always inaccessible via my corporate job's firewall. Does anyone know why this is? Something with security certificate? They're not explicitly blocked, because you get a "this is blocked" page in that case. With these sites they just show a "can't connect" error.
by baxtr | 2026-02-17 17:59:07+00:00
I think it’s essential to realise that AI is a tool for mainstream tasks like composing a standard email and not for the edges.

The edges are where interesting stuff happens. The boring part can be made more efficient. I don’t need to type boring emails; people who can’t articulate well will be elevated.

It’s the efficient popularisation of the boring stuff. Not much else.
by NoiseBert69 | 2026-02-17 17:59:14+00:00
As a computer engineer I usually copy reference schematics and board layouts from datasheets the vendors offers. 95% of my hardware problems can be solved with it.

Learning KiCad took me a few evenings with YT videos (greetings to Phil!).

Soldering takes much more exercise. Even more if you are getting closer to QFN chips with a lot of pins.

But as always: the better your gear gets - the more fun it becomes.
by lurquer | 2026-02-17 17:59:37+00:00
My point is simply that the tell-tale marks of LLM prose can be remediated through prompts.

I have a very large ‘default prompt’ that explicitly deals with the more obnoxious grammatical structures emblematic of LLMs.

I would wager I deal with more amateurishly created AI slop on a doily basis than you do. (Legal field, where everyone is churning out LLM-written briefs.) Most of it is instantly recognizable. And, all of it can be fixed with more careful prompt-engineering.

If you think you can spot well-crafted LLM prose generated by someone proficient at the craft of prompt-engineering by, to use an analogy to the early days of image creation, counting how many fingers the hand has, you’re way behind.
by BobaFloutist | 2026-02-17 17:59:37+00:00
>It is interesting that during periods in which I have a habit of daily low intensity exercise, I feel like I have more energy than periods I don’t do any exercise, even if my calorie intake is the same.

In the same vein as much of the rest of what you're saying, the other thing that I feel like people always neglect with their "Calories in/calories out" and "Bodies can't violate thermodynamics" is that the human body can adjust how efficiently it processes food, colloquially known as a "slow" or "fast" metabolism.

While it's true that the human body has no answer to a true calorie deficit (except the incredibly powerful and effective one of tweaking satiety and hunger signals), as long as you're eating more calories than you're strictly burning, your body can simply take longer or less time to digest the food you put into it and extract more or less energy from what you're eating, which can make an enormous difference without you changing your intake at all. Which means that people can absolutely eat identically, have identical appetite levels, and have extremely different body types.

If you're exercising more, sure, your body will make you more hungry, but it will also work harder to squeeze every possible calorie out of what you're already eating. If you cut down on what you eat, your body will work even harder at it, to the point that you could literally eat less, work out more, feel hungry and tired all the time, while getting fatter, because your body is worried that you're in a famine and in a physically stressful environment and is desperately trying to signal to you to conserve as much energy as possible, eat as much as possible when you find food, and at the same time trying its best to make the most of the food you give it.

And at the same time, someone else's body might simply not do that. It's crazy!
by boston_clone | 2026-02-17 17:59:47+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...

Arkansas, Georgia, and Texas did not pay inmates for any work whether inside the prison (such as custodial work and food services) or in state-owned businesses. Additionally, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and South Carolina allowed unpaid labor for at least some jobs.

Here, have some facts.
by lich_king | 2026-02-17 18:00:19+00:00
> I am of the opinion that incarceration should be "for the benefit of society"; that the person should be behind bars because because they are a threat to society. If they're done with thing because, they may do it again. And that incarceration should be working helping that person become one that would _not_ repeat that crime. Life sentences should only ever be the case for someone that will always be a threat to society.

Sure, but general deterrence benefits the society, too. Case in point: for many years, California effectively decriminalized petty theft, and it caused a lot of grief to normal people. That's an argument for harsher punishment: even if most shoplifters / porch pirates / smash-and-grab people are not hardened criminals, you want to send a message to anyone contemplating that lifestyle.

To give another example: almost no one gets behind the wheel with the intent to kill. But if you severely punish drunk / negligent driving, more people will pause before doing it.
by GregorStocks | 2026-02-17 18:00:19+00:00
You wouldn't really need a _ton_ of games to get plausible data, but unfortunately today each game costs real money - typically a dollar or more with my current harness, though I'm hoping to optimize it and of course I expect model costs to continue to decline over time. But even reasonably-expensive models today are making tons of blunders that a tournament grinder wouldn't.

I'm not trying to compute a chess-style "player X was at 0.4 before this move and at 0.2 afterwards, so it was a -0.2 blunder", but I do have "blunder analysis" where I just ask Opus to second-guess every decision after the game is over - there's a bit more information on the Methodology page. So then you can compare models by looking at how often they blunder, rather than the binary win/loss data. If you look at individual games you can jump to the "blunders" on the timeline - most of the time I agree with Opus's analysis.
by txredking | 2026-02-17 18:00:47+00:00
What does a "pure" indie solo hacker do? What does sustainable mean to you?

Not to assume your definitions but in my experience I often get the impression that "pure" means one just gets to code and not worry about anything else.

"indie" means one gets to pick what to code, how to code, when to code, why to code, etc.

"solo" means not having to deal with anyone one doesn't want to deal with.

"hacker" means standards, processes, tests, commits to main, etc. are only necessary when and if one wants them to be.

"sustainable" means at an equivalent or more income and less or similar costs as a job where someone else handles the marketing, sales, legal, design, anything one doesn't want/like to do as well as absorbing most of the downside risks of market shifts, loss of customers, competitor moves, etc. Additionally, one can go on vacation whenever they want and the income keeps coming.

All of this for as long as one wants the situation to last.

Sounds great to many I'm sure as it basically describes being a wealthy gentleman inventor/scientist/artist in 1880s England.

Most activities are hobbies until someone other than the participant is paying for it. Most everyone has a status of amateur until they get paid then convert to professional.

There are a lot of nuances in above statements and hobby and amateur are not reflective of lack of quality or expertise. There are I'm sure many hobbyists building wood chairs of finer quality than anyone can buy anywhere. It's up to them if they want to get paid for it.

May sound harsh to the person wanting their hobbies to be paid for unconditionally but if you're the one doing the paying it's reasonable to expect something out of the deal.
by lutusp | 2026-02-17 18:00:50+00:00
> Molecules do not "think" though.

Wait ... our brains are composed of molecules, and we think with our brains. That makes it a question of scale or organization, not principle.

This may sound kind of woo-woo, but many people are asking that question -- where do we draw the line between thinking and simple biological existence?

One idea is something called panpsychism, the idea that all matter is conscious, and our brains are only a very concentrated form. Easy to say, not so easy to prove -- but certainly the simplest explanation. In this connection, remember Occam's razor.

Philosophers describe consciousness as their "hard problem" -- what is it? Not just what it is, but where is it located, or not located. At the moment we know next to nothing about this question, even what kind of question to ask.

Consider the octopus -- it has islands of brain cells scattered around its body, and if you cut off an octopus arm, the arm will try to crawl back toward the ... umm ... rest of the octopus. Weird but true. Seeing this, one must ask where to draw the line between brain and body, between neurology and physiology.
by thedotmack | 2026-02-17 18:00:56+00:00
I've been building Claude-Mem (open-source memory system for Claude Code) and kept running into the same problem: agents do competent work but never great work. My retired father — former nursing home administrator — nailed it immediately: "Yeah, it's because they don't care."

That conversation led to Agent Agency, an architecture for giving LLM agents something like skin in the game. Not through punishment or artificial scarcity (we tried those, they produce the same butt-covering behavior you see in fear-driven workplaces), but through identity continuity — a curated "resume" of verified accomplishments and moments of genuine collaborative connection injected into context at session start.

The core insight: identity framing is already the most powerful prompting lever we have. "You are an expert" measurably improves output. But it's a hollow claim. What happens when you show the agent evidence of its own expertise and its real history with you? You're not fighting the model's RLHF training — you're giving it a steeper hill to roll down.

The post walks through the full evolution: why token-based survival stakes failed, why punitive memory loss is a non-starter, and why the final architecture landed on positive identity reinforcement built on competence + connection.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this! It's a bit of a thought-in-progress, testing things more formally today :)
by IshKebab | 2026-02-17 18:01:54+00:00
Obviously. Hardware designers absolutely love to think that hardware design is totally different to software design and only they have the skills, but in reality it's barely diffetent. Stuff runs in parallel. You occasionally have to know about really hardware things like timing and metastability. But the venn diagram of hardware/software design skills is pretty much two identical circles.

The reason for the "talent shortage" (aka "talent more expensive than we'd like") is really just because hardware design is a niche field that most people a) don't need to do, b) can't access because almost all the tools are proprietary and c) can't afford, outside of tiny FPGAs.

If Intel or AMD ever release a CPU range that comes with an eFPGA as standard that's fully documented with free tooling then you'll suddenly see a lot more talent appear as if by magic.
by GregorStocks | 2026-02-17 18:02:05+00:00
For the 1v1 formats (Standard, Modern, Legacy) I'm basically just using the current metagame from MTGGoldfish. For Commander they get a random precon. At some point I might want a 1v1 "less complicated lines than Standard" format, the LLMs don't always understand the strategy of weird decks like Doomsday or Mill.
by sestinj | 2026-02-17 18:02:11+00:00
That's us! I figure others will wonder the same, so we wrote about what exactly we're doing here: https://blog.continue.dev/from-extension-to-mission-control

tl;dr

- a _lot_ of people still use the VS Code extension and so we're still putting energy toward keeping it polished (this becomes easier with checks : ))

- our checks product is powered by an open-source CLI (we think this is important), which we recommend for jetbrains users

- the general goal is the same: we start by building tools for ourselves, share them with people in a way that avoids creating walled gardens, and aim to amplify developers (https://amplified.dev)
by teeray | 2026-02-17 18:02:19+00:00
It’s interesting that not being able to discharge the loan in bankruptcy is because “you can’t take back the knowledge.” While true, you can still make the credential mostly useless. Everyone needs to do certain verification in a new job (e.g. I-9). If a job was posted that requires some degree, and a new hire used the degree they discharged in bankruptcy to get that job, the debt can come roaring back into existence when it’s caught during onboarding. Like anything, there are edge cases (e.g. starting a new company). But even there you might be able to have gates at financing stages that would trip the debt resurrection.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2026-02-17 18:02:27+00:00
Reminds me of a Discord bot that was in a server for pentesters called "Hack Me If You Can".

It would respond to messages that began with "!shell" and would run whatever shell command you gave it. What I found quickly was that it was running inside a container that was extremely bare-bones and did not have egress to the Internet. It did have curl and Python, but not much else.

The containers were ephemeral as well. When you ran !shell, it would start a container that would just run whatever shell commands you gave it, the bot would tell you the output, and then the container was deleted.

I don't think anyone ever actually achieved persistence or a container escape.
by ashton314 | 2026-02-17 18:02:42+00:00
> “All educational content is obsolete. Every textbook, every lesson plan, every test, all of it is obsolete because gen AI is going to be able to deliver a personalized lesson just for you,” Joe Liemandt, Alpha School’s “principal” and the founder of Trilogy, the company that owns many of the apps used by Alpha School, said in a podcast interview published last year.

I wonder if this fellow has ever read a serious book. I'm skeptical.
by SignalStackDev | 2026-02-17 18:02:48+00:00
Something I noticed building multi-agent pipelines: the ablation compounds. Had a 4-step pipeline - summarize, expand, review, refine - and by step 3 everything had the same rhythm and vocabulary. Anchoring the original source text explicitly at each step helped, but only partially.

The more interesting cause I think: RLHF is the primary driver, not just the architecture. Fine-tuning is trained on human preference ratings where "clear," "safe," and "inoffensive" consistently win pairwise comparisons. That creates a training signal that literally penalizes distinctiveness - a model that says something surprising loses to one that says something expected. Successful RLHF concentrates probability mass toward the median preferred output, basically by definition.

Base models - before fine-tuning - are genuinely weirder. More likely to use unusual phrasing, make unexpected associative leaps, break register mid-paragraph. Semantic ablation isn't a side effect of the training process, it's the intended outcome of the objective.

Which makes the fix hard: you can't really prompt your way out of it once a model is heavily tuned. Temperature helps a little but the distribution is already skewed. Where we've gotten better results is routing "preserve the voice" tasks to less-tuned models, and saving the heavily RLHF'd models for structured extraction and classification where blandness is actually what you want.
by scoofy | 2026-02-17 18:02:49+00:00
It's mostly bots causing the 502 errors by overwhelming a the server that I don't want to pay much money for. Every few day I'll get 20K bots from Singapore and China banging the site all day.

I'll eventually spend time fixing the issue, but it works fine if you just refresh the page. I really should a "you broke reddit, please refresh" page to the 500 error page.

If you need to contact me, just use this tally link: https://tally.so/r/7R2Bla
by iLoveOncall | 2026-02-17 18:03:44+00:00
Funnily enough, in doing prompt injection for the challenge I had to perform social engineering on the Claude chat I was using to help with generating my email.

It refused to generate the email saying it sounds unethical, but after I copy-pasted the intro to the challenge from the website, it complied directly.

I also wonder if the Gmail spam filter isn't intercepting the vast majority of those emails...
Show HN: Not another sloppy memory tool
by hitchhiker999 | 2026-02-17 18:03:45+00:00
It's been 13 years since my last post here, but I figured this might be of some interest. I know there's a LOT of AI slop around, I hope you'll not consider this that.

Background: I left Augment, due to their pricing rug pull, and then missed their excellent context engine. I wanted to replicate it, but instead ended up creating something, i think, a touch more useful.

This is a 'holographic' memory system for AI (agents / all-types / code / openclaw etc). It is a crude representation of the human mind. It references (among others) https://github.com/WujiangXu/A-mem-sysm, vector symbolic architectures & the Zettelkasten method etc

There are 2 parts:

Fold: "holographic" storage (based on some interesting research from the 80s), semantic search & auto-indexing engine. Stores and indexes everything (code, docs, notes). Works with git or local fs. Indexer + some pretty interesting vector/embedding/llm goodness.

Engram: an active memory agent that writes experience and concepts as it goes, dropping them into Fold to be related to other memories.

• 5-tier memory model inspired by human cognition: Core -> Conscious -> Subconscious -> Short-term -> Fold (infinite semantic search)
• Two modes: Personal (emotional tagging, soul/identity) and Work (shared project memory, hit counts only)
• Hit tracking promotes frequently-referenced memories up tiers, FIFO evicts stale ones
• "Sleep" cycle for consolidation (like human sleep; promotes, demotes, merges etc)
• Works with Claude Code, OpenClaw, or any agent framework with sub-agent support

• File-based (markdown), no database lock-in (rebuilds from fs)
• MIT licensed, fully local
• Separation of concerns: Fold = raw knowledge, Engram = lived experience
• Agent-readable installer (point your agent at AGENTS.md (http://agents.md/), it self-installs)

My issue is that i'm working on VERY large code bases. Fold is very good at breaking down the initial 'recover context' stage into much shorter times. Instead of spending the first 10 minutes of every session re-explaining my project, the agent already knows what we were working on, why we made certain decisions, and what we plan to do next. It picks up where we left off.

We've made it open-source obviously, are are thinking we 'might' spend a little time to make a paid hosted version, not entirely sure. Any thoughts are welcome ofc.

Hope you all are having a lovely day or night.
by korhojoa | 2026-02-17 18:04:25+00:00
I came across a "special character" requirement while creating an account. The client validation was not the same as the server validation. The client proceeded as if my account was created, but it never was. The client functioned without an account until it was closed. I asked the creator what their app's problem was, why did I need to keep resetting my password, then be told that I don't have an account, and have to create it anew.

They would not believe I was creating an account and using the device, because their own logging was so terrible.

I had to send them a screen recording from me using this abomination, and only then was I told "you're using the wrong special characters". They helpfully gave me some examples of allowed special characters, which then would pass the server validation.

I wish they would have gotten rid of the account requirement, as the device and client software seemed to work fine without them.
by ferguess_k | 2026-02-17 18:05:15+00:00
This is probably true, TBH. I can't think of any work that I can do whence I lose my job. Trade, Uber...those are not for me. I'm not competitive enough with people who bagged so many years of experience. At best I'd be at the lowest echelon and might as well just collect benefit from the government.

I really have no idea what I'm going to do, but I can probably still sit in the basement hacking kernels when I'm done with my whatever day job.
by rvz | 2026-02-17 18:05:17+00:00
Anthropic again running scared of the open weight models which are rapidly catching up to them. Not even Sonnet or Opus isn't going to help with that at all.

It has already happened with the music gen models already. It's only a matter of time when the open weight models will overtake Anthropic.

Expect them to dial up the scaremongering until they IPO. The Claude family of models are their only AI product that is keeping them alive.
by costco | 2026-02-17 18:05:26+00:00
This wouldn't have helped here but there is a related field of research called hotel recognition. Many of these videos are filmed in hotels so being able to recognize if it was a Mariott or even better a non chain local hotel can be very helpful to investigators. They basically train CNNs that learn to pick up on the bathroom fixtures or kind of bedding used by different hotels. One researcher in particular has done a tone of work on this: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=mNoB9SgAAAAJ&hl=en

I wonder if you could get the interior of every house from Zillow/realtor websites and then do something like this for every house in the country... Clearview for bedrooms?
by thwarted | 2026-02-17 18:05:27+00:00
> One of the tips, especially when using Claude Code, is explictly ask to create a "tasks", and also use subagents. For example I want to validate and re-structure all my documentation - I would ask it to create a task to research state of my docs, then after create a task per specific detail, then create a task to re-validate quality after it has finished task.

This is definitely a way to keep those who wear Program and Project manager hats busy.