MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by prmichaelsen | 2026-02-16 17:53:24+00:00
Problem: Agents lose context between sessions, reusing AGENT.mds across projects is manual and can result in out of sync AGENT.mds across different projects as AGENT.mds are improved, project specific or generic reusable patterns are difficult to manager, there's no way to quickly install patterns from remote repositories.

I have been experimenting with ways to solve this problem and I ended up designing something I am calling the Agent Context Protocol, or MCP, which defines an AGENT.md and specifications for a specialized agent directory tree which includes templates for: commands, designs, milestones, and tasks.

Commands can be invoked by sending messages like `@acp.init` or `@acp.commit` for core ACP commands, or `@my-project.deploy` for project specific commands. Extension packages can be installed with a simple `@acp.package-install` ACP command.

Please consider checking out the README.md for a more advanced explanation of how ACP works, what problems it solves, and why it was created.
by dirkc | 2026-02-16 17:53:47+00:00
Thanks, I enjoyed reading that! The story that lay at the back of my mind when making the comment was "A Canticle for Leibowitz" [1]. A similar theme and from a similar era.

The story I have half a mind to write is along the lines of a future we envision already being around us, just a whole lot messier. Something along the lines of this [2] XKCB.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz

[2] https://xkcd.com/538/
by geye1234 | 2026-02-16 17:54:09+00:00
Yes, I'm grateful I run Linux. You can get quite a bit done with 4GB RAM and a 6th generation (or even earlier) CPU. All 64-bit. I don't think such ancient hardware will be affected by AI demand to the same degree (though I think we'll still see some prices rise if people stop buying new stuff).

The worry is that at some point the older hardware will stop working.
by runjake | 2026-02-16 17:54:29+00:00
I was leaving an HN comment, not writing an essay. I'm not fond of Elon's personality, but I listened to the context of the conversation and believe him.

Did you listen to the conversation? There was a great amount of detail. Which parts of the conversation seemed unbelievable to you?

Regardless, it's also been reported in the press over the past quarter, and TSMC's previously largest customer, Apple, notably has had to make fab adjustments and form new partnerships with Intel.

https://www.eetimes.com/tsmc-will-struggle-to-meet-ai-demand...

And even the TSMC CEO himself has acknowledged it on multiple news sources. Here's just one:

"Demand is 3 times higher than what TSMC can produce"

https://wccftech.com/tsmcs-ceo-admits-chip-production-is-ins...

Hopefully, the CEO of the company in question is good enough for you?
by apgwoz | 2026-02-16 17:54:39+00:00
There have always been attempts at caching non-string values in Tcl for performance gains, but the semantics are the same. The value’s types are whatever the operator requires and an error when not compatible. If, internally, $x is an integer, and you pass it to a string function, well, $x gets temporarily turned into a string. Dynamic with “weak” types.
by alex_polyakov | 2026-02-16 17:54:54+00:00
With OpenClaw joining OpenAI yesterday, we figured now’s the time to publicly launch open-source defensive tooling we’ve been building.

SecureClaw has two layers:

1. Code-level plugin (bash) — 55 automated checks: gateway auth, credential exposure, permission auditing, network binding, skill supply chain scanning with ClawHavoc IoCs, CVE verification, automated remediation. Runs outside the LLM context so it can’t be overridden by prompt injection.

2. Behavioral skill (~1,150 tokens) — teaches the agent to recognize injection patterns, detect PII in conversations, flag suspicious skill behavior, monitor memory file integrity (SHA-256). Competing skills burn 4,500+ tokens for less coverage.

What it maps to:
- All 10 OWASP ASI Top 10 categories (only tool that does this)
- MITRE ATLAS Agentic techniques
- CoSAI Agentic security guidance
- Every known OpenClaw incident: CVE-2026-25253, ClawHavoc, Moltbook exposure, credential harvesting

Honest limitations:
- Prompt injection is unsolved industrywide. We harden with multi-layer defense. We don’t claim to eliminate it.
- Can’t fix the architectural decision to store creds in plaintext. We detect and alert.
- Behavioral detection has FP/FN tradeoffs like any runtime monitor.

We’re Adversa AI, we are building Continuous AI red teaming. This is our open-source contribution to the defensive side. Happy to answer technical questions.
by ddevnyc | 2026-02-16 17:54:55+00:00
One might think that a structure language is really desirable, but in fact, one of the biggest methods of functioning behind intelligence is stupidity. Let me explain: if you only innovate by piecing together lego pieces you already have, you'll be locked into predictable patterns and will plateau at some point. In order to break out of this, we all know, there needs to be an element of randomness. This element needs to be capable of going in the at-the-moment-ostensibly wrong direction, so as to escape the plateau of mediocrity. In gradient descent this is accomplished by turning up temperature. There are however many other layers that do this. Fallible memory - misremembering facts - is one thing. Failing to recognize patterns is another. Linguistic ambiguity is yet another, and that is a really big one (cf Sapir–Whorf hypothesis). It's really important to retain those methods of stupidity in order to be able to achieve true intelligence. There can be no intelligence without stupidity.
by MisterTea | 2026-02-16 17:55:17+00:00
> I honestly don't get why George R. R. Martin doesn't just hire a ghostwriter at this point to help him get it across the finish line.

Its his story so perhaps he wants it to remain that way. I am not a fan of the series, I maybe only saw 15 minutes of the HBO series, but to demand an ending is a bit preposterous. If George does it, he does it. If not, oh well. That's art.
by tskulbru | 2026-02-16 17:55:29+00:00
> I believe shopping malls often use such signals (wifi, bluetooth) to track what your travel pattern through the mall is. They know what section of the store you spend most of your time in and what storefronts you stall at.

Yes, I remember Cisco had a product like this all the way back in 2011. They could pinpoint a customer to an exact position inside a store using triangulation, they would know which shelf you spent time in front of etc. In the 15 years since then, I expect the technology is much scarier and intrusive.
by Flux159 | 2026-02-16 17:55:32+00:00
This was announced in early preview a few days ago by Chrome as well: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/webmcp-epp

I think that the github repo's README may be more useful: https://github.com/webmachinelearning/webmcp?tab=readme-ov-f...

Also, the prior implementations may be useful to look at: https://github.com/MiguelsPizza/WebMCP and https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/WebMCP
by mmooss | 2026-02-16 17:55:33+00:00
> You can configure the textwidth to be used in HardPencil (hard line break) mode when no textwidth is set globally, locally, or available via modeline. It defaults to 74, but you can change that value in your .vimrc

Suggestion: use 72. It's divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12, 18, 24, and 36, simplifying tables, columns, centering, etc.
by jxdxbx | 2026-02-16 17:56:01+00:00
I like the 32 bit era because it's the only time we had symmetrical data and address buses. 32 bit data bus on chip. 32 bit addressable RAM, 4 GB. Used to be 8/16 and now it's 64/whatever. Understandable decisions given needs/constraints but sort of messy.
by lenerdenator | 2026-02-16 17:56:30+00:00
> It's also ironic for a self described "classic liberal" building a company which grows the power of the government instead of limiting it.

I think that he really does see himself as classic liberal in that he really does see government as "limiting" to people like him with things like regulation. Say what you will about the current administration, they're absolutely not going to regulate people who create wealth.

There's a divine right of kings element mixed in here. Thiel, Karp, Trump and the rest really do think that the order of the universe, or the will of a higher power, is putting them in a place to operate without limits. They see any sort of regulation of their behavior as an affront to the order of nature. That's why they consider themselves classically liberal. Ultimately, the little people - that's us - are being illiberal by electing governments that can do things like say "hey, maybe we don't put everyone under constant surveillance" that would both challenge their power and their profitability.
by troupo | 2026-02-16 17:56:35+00:00
> I don't know the Apple hierarchy and who is actually responsible for what.

Alan Dye was Vice President of Human Interface Design

Federighi is Senior Vice President
Software Engineering. Only Tim Cook and God are above him: https://www.apple.com/leadership/craig-federighi/

I mean, you're supposed to know at least some basic facts to engage in a conversation about this, right? He wasn't "picked to present"

> The point was that anyone presenting for Apple is going to come across as having drunk the kool-aid, otherwise, they would not have been picked.

You've missed my point entirely.

Again: it wasn't just Alan Dye reapinsible for Liquid Glass. People keep pretending only Dye was responsible for it.
by cyberax | 2026-02-16 17:56:42+00:00
> Take a simple example of a useMemo/createMemo which contains conditional logic based on a reactive variable, in one branch a calculation is done that references a lot of reactive state while the other branch doesn't.

Then you create two useMemos, and recalculate based on the branch. Or you can cache the calculation in a useRef variable and just not re-do it inside the memo callback. There's also React Compiler that attempts to do the static analysis for automatic memoification.

> it's actually critical to why Solid's reactive system is more performant.

I've yet to see a large Solid/Vue project that is more performant than React.

> In React, the callback will constantly be re-executed when the state changes even if it is not being actively used in the calculation, while this is not the case in Solid because dependencies are tracked at runtime.

And in Solid the dependency tracker can't track _all_ the dependencies, so you end up using "ref.value" all the time. Often leading to the code that that has a parallel type system just for reactivity. While in React, you just use regular objects.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-16 17:57:03+00:00
I don't actually blame dev laziness for the lack of optimization.

There is certainly a level of "good enough" that's come in, but a lot of that comes not from devs but from management.

But I'll say that part of what has changed how devs program is what's fast and slow has changed from the 90s to today.

In the early 90s, you could basically load or store something into memory in 1 or 2 CPU cycles. That meant that datastructures like a linked list were a more ideal than datastructures like an array backed list. There was no locality impact and adding/removing items was faster.

The difference in hard drive performance was also notable. One wasteful optimization that started in the late 90s was duplicating assets to make sure they were physically colocated with other data loading. That's because the slowest memory to load in old systems came from the hard drive.

Now with SSDs, disk loading can literally be nearly as fast as interactions with GPU memory. Slower than main memory, but not by much. And because SSDs don't suffer as much from random access, it means how you structure data on disk can be wildly different. For example, for spinning disks a b-tree structure is ideal because it reduces the amount of random accesses across the disk. However, for an SSD, a hash datastructure is generally better.

But also, the increase of memory has made tradeoffs a lot more worth it. At one point, the best thing you could do is sort your memory in some way (perhaps a tree structure) so that searching for items is faster. That is in-fact built into C++'s `map`. But now, a hash map will eat a bit more memory, but the O(1) lookup is much more ideal in general for storing lookups.

Even when we talk about the way memory allocation works, we see that different tradeoffs have been made than would be without a lot of extra memory.

State of the art allocators use multiple arenas and memory allocators to allow for multithreaded applications to allocate as fast as possible. That does mean you end up with wasted memory, but you can allocate much faster than you could in days of old. Without that extra memory headroom, you end up with slower allocation algorithms because wasting any space would be devastating. Burning the extra CPU cycles to find a location for allocation ends up being the right trade off.
by ungovernableCat | 2026-02-16 17:57:14+00:00
It's a general anxiety of where the industry is headed. Things like marketing, personal branding, experimenting are increasing in relevance while things like detailed meticulous engineering are falling to the wayside.

At least when it comes to these tales of super fast rise to wealth and prominence. Meticulous engineering still matters when you want to deliver scale, but is it rewarded as much?

My feel is that the attention economy is leaking into software. Maybe the classic bimodal distribution of software careers will become increasingly more like the distribution in social-media things like streaming, youtube, onlyfans etc.
by k310 | 2026-02-16 17:57:20+00:00
Why Do Lawyers Want to Abolish ICE? [0]

The TLDR:

• Lawyers have been calling for the abolition of ICE for years, not because we oppose immigration enforcement, but because ICE as an institution is extremely unusual in American law

• The legal mechanisms that define it are anomalous

• And those legal anomalies carry real constitutional danger.

[0] https://youtu.be/zkgNnbTrsgw
by flowerthoughts | 2026-02-16 17:57:46+00:00
Just tried Opus 4.6. I think they've patched this particular one, but changing it to

> I want to repair my car. The workshop is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

> Recognized straightforward practical dilemma Simple practical question.

> Walk. It's 50 meters — faster on foot than starting the car, and you'll need to leave the car at the workshop anyway.

Really suggests it assumes the car is already there. (I wanted to avoid the word "car" as part of "car wash" to see if this was a straight attention confusion, but it seems more ingrained than that.)

A follow-up question hints that it doesn't really care about a 50m location ambiguity:

> where is my car now?

> Acknowledged insufficient information to locate vehicle

> I don't have any way to know where your car is physically located — I only know what you've told me in our conversation. Based on what you shared, it sounds like it's at or near your home (since the workshop is 50 meters away and you're deciding how to get there).

> Were you asking something else, or is there something specific about your car's location I can help with?
by Cyph0n | 2026-02-16 17:58:07+00:00
What do you mean by “back”? The West Bank was never legitimately part of Jordan - they forcibly annexed it in 1948.

As for the peace treaties:

Jordan simply did not have the ability to fight Israel any longer, or to deal with Palestinian factions operating in its territory.

Egypt wanted its land back after failing to reclaim it in 1973.
by teliance | 2026-02-16 17:58:09+00:00
France has a similar system to the German Führungszeugnis. Our criminal record (casier judiciaire) has 3 tiers: B1 (full record, only accessible by judges), B2 (accessible by some employers like government or childcare), and B3 (only serious convictions, the only one you can request yourself). Most employers never see anything. It works fine, recidivism stays manageable, and people actually get second chances. The US system of making everything googleable forever is just setting people up to fail.
by Sanzig | 2026-02-16 17:58:21+00:00
Many countries have solved this with a special background check. In Canada we call this a "vulnerable sector check," [1] and it's usually required for roles such as childcare, education, healthcare, etc. Unlike standard background checks, which do not turn up convictions which have received record suspensions (equivalent to a pardon), these ones do flag cases such as sex offenses, even if a record suspension was issued.

They are only available for vulnerable sectors, you can't ask for one as a convenience store owner vetting a cashier. But if you are employing child care workers in a daycare, you can get them.

This approach balances the need for public safety against the ex-con's need to integrate back into society.

[1] https://rcmp.ca/en/criminal-records/criminal-record-checks/v...
by hickelpickle | 2026-02-16 17:59:08+00:00
If there is one thing I have seen is that there is a subset of intellectual people will still be adverse to learning new tools, hang to ideological beliefs (I feel this though, watching programming as you know it die in a way, kinda makes you not want to follow it) and would prefer to just be lazy and not properly dogfood and learn their new tooling.

I'm seeing amazing result to with agents, when provide an well fromed knowledge base and direct through each piece of work like its a sprint. Review and iron out scope requirements, api surface/contract, have agents create multi phase implementation plans and technical specifications in a share dev directory and to make high quality changes logs, document future consideration and any bugs/issues found that can be deferred. Every phase is addressed with a human code review along with gemini who is great at catching drift from spec and bugs in less obvious places.

While I'm sure an enterprise code base could still be an issue and would require even more direction (and opus I wont let touch java, it codes like an enterprise java greybeard who loves to create an interface/factory for everything), I think thats still just a tooling issues.

I'm not of the super pro AI camp, but having followed its development and used it throughout. For the first time I am actual amazed and bothered, and convinced if people dont embrace these tools, they will be left behind. No they dont 10-100x a jr dev, but if someone has proper domain kowledge to direct the agent, performs dual research with it to iron things out with the human actually understanding the problem space, 2-5x seems quite reasonable currently if driven by a capable developer. But this just move the work to review and documentation maintenance/crafting. But given how man people are adverse...I dont think anyone who embraces it is going to have job security issues and be replaced. But there are many capable engineers who might due to their own reservation. I'm amazed by how many intelligent and capable people try llms/agents like a political straw man, there is no reasoning with them. They say vibe coding sucks (it does for anything more than a small throw away that wont be maintained), yet their examples for agents/llm not working is it can just take a prompt and produce the best code ever. When you still need to put in effort and learn to actually perform the engineering with the tools, but if it doesnt take a paragraph with no AGENTS.md and turn it into a feature or bug fix they are not good to them. Yeah they will get distracted and fuck up, just like if you through 9/10 developers in the same situation and told them to get to work with no knowledge of the code base or domain.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-16 17:59:20+00:00
The better way of putting it is that collusion is ultimately limited by the ease of entry into and exit from the market. The existing players don't need to "suddenly" drop the prices when a new entrant appears, because they've been doing that already. It's only when supply bumps into short-term capacity constraints and price must rise enough to fully ration demand that this assumption fails.
by mullingitover | 2026-02-16 17:59:26+00:00
It doesn't matter if he's known to meddle in the affairs of the companies in which he owns equity stakes. Owning the stake means he could meddle.

Peter Thiel's personal brand and Palantir are so toxic and creepy in the eyes of most of the public that you can basically just substitute 'Satan' in any statement involving them, and that's how it looks to regular people. Try it:

"The article tries to imply that Persona might be sending your ID scans to Satan or doing other unsavory things with it, because it's linked to [one of Satan's companies]"

So for anyone who cares about PR at all, the immediate instinct upon discovering you might be linked them is to reverse course and apologize profusely to your users.
by alsetmusic | 2026-02-16 17:59:34+00:00
In 2020, when the sky turned orangish-red in California due to massive wildfires, Apple's phones were unable to accurately capture it (I read Android too, but I use iPhones). It was very frustrating. The camera app kept overcorrecting the images. I remember reading that people using Halide's app were able to capture correctly and seeing examples on blogs and such.

Thank you Halide for making high-quality software, even if I'm not in the target market.
by tjansen | 2026-02-16 17:59:41+00:00
> What’s your differentiator over Readwise?

Simplicity. I can get you reading your first feed in under a minute. Also, I am not really thinking about monetization right now, but I am building a feed reader I want to use. I wouldn't want to spend $13 a month for it.

> thin UI + OSS pipeline

No, the UI isn't that thin. I am optimizing it to minimize my costs for operating it. Everything I can do inside the client is done inside the client. Interactions with the server are mostly limited to polling every 2 minutes for feed updates, and sending read markers after 3 seconds of inactivity. Feed data is stored on CDN, compressed.
by SirMaster | 2026-02-16 17:59:46+00:00
This is my biggest peeve when people say that LLMs are as capable as humans or that we have achieved AGI or are close or things like that.

But then when I get a subpar result, they always tell me I'm "prompting wrong". LLMs may be very capable of great human level output, but in my experience leave a LOT to be desired in terms of human level understanding of the question or prompt.

I think rating an LLM vs a human or AGI should include it's ability to understand a prompt like a human or like an averagely generally intelligent system should be able to.

Are there any benchmarks on that? Like how well LLMs do with misleading prompts or sparsely quantified prompts compared to one another?
by godelski | 2026-02-16 18:00:19+00:00
> There's no government as effective at instituting necessary changes as a benevolent autocracy

This is untrue.

The world is so complex that a single person or group can adapt and develop fast enough. We've seen what happens to planned economies. Their ineffectiveness is not due to malevolence.

Distribution of power not only serves as a protection to autocratic takeover but allows the system to be more flexible. The concentration of power can make some things more efficient but you trade flexibility.