MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2026-02-22 21:22:41+00:00
Depends what your research question is, but it's very easy to spoil your experiment.

Let's say you tell it that there might be small backdoors. You've now primed the LLM to search that way (even using "may"). You passed information about the test to test taker!

So we have a new variable! Is the success only due to the hint? How robust is that prompt? Does subtle wording dramatically change output? Does "may", "does", "can", "might" work but "May", "cann", or anything else fail? Have you the promoter unintentionally conveyed something important about the test?

I'm sure you can prompt engineer your way you greater success but by doing so you also greatly expand the complexity of the experiment and consequently make your results far less robust.

Experimental design is incredibly difficult due to all the subtleties. It's a thing most people frequently fail at (including scientists) and even more frequently fool themselves into believing stronger claims than the experiment can yield.

And before anyone says "but humans", yeah, same complexity applies. It's actually why human experimentation is harder than a lot of other things. There's just far more noise in the system.

But could you get success? Certainly. I mean you could tell it exactly where the backdoors are. But that's not useful. So now you got to decide where that line is and certainly others won't agree.
by klodolph | 2026-02-22 21:22:45+00:00
Kind of like databases and web servers, then?

I don’t think “categorically different” has legs. I work on the operations & hosting side of applications like this. There’s an operations burden to maintain, deploy, and scale web servers. There’s a burden to rolling out new Linux kernel versions to servers. But we still do it! There would be a burden to running your own Slack, just like there is a burden to running your own email, and people will choose to pay for hosted versions or host it themselves.

And then there are companies and organizations who have strong incentives to self-host to make compliance easier.
by Barrin92 | 2026-02-22 21:22:58+00:00
well anecdotally from studying Japanese for about a year and a half before moving there, it seems right to me, in particular the part about conscious effort not being able to produce spontaneous speech.

I was embarrassed how little I could say after countless hours of flash cards and other methods. I'd literally just comprehend nothing if someone talked to me. But after a few months of just listening it became much easier. I've thrown all the Anki cards away afterwards, it was just a waste of time.
by ajross | 2026-02-22 21:23:21+00:00
"Groupthink" informed by extremely broad training sets is more conventionally called "consensus", and that's what we want the LLM to reflect.

"Groupthink", as the term is used by epistemologically isolated in-groups, actually means the opposite. The problem with the idea is that it looks symmetric, so if you yourself are stuck in groupthink, you fool yourself into think it's everyone else doing it instead. And, again, the solution for that is reasonable references grounded in informed consensus. (Whether that should be a curated encyclopedia or a LLM is a different argument.)
by enneff | 2026-02-22 21:24:29+00:00
Thanks for doing this. I had basically the same experience with Lima. It is very nice but the defaults are not what I want, and I don't like having to wonder whether I turned off the stuff that I don't want enabled. Better that everything is disabled by default and I selectively turn things on (like networking) as I need them.

I'm gonna give shuru a try. My main concern is being based on Alpine (seemingly the only option?) I may not be able to easily pull in the dependencies for the projects I'm working on, but I'll see how it goes.
by mrtksn | 2026-02-22 21:24:46+00:00
Why do you care about ISPs that much? It's the exactly same thing as an outcome, just different concerns and methods.

Also, when you don't do anything illegal in USA just take away your company either by forcing you to sell it or forcing American companies not doing business with you.

TikTok was removed from Apple AppStore forcefully, then reinstated and forcefully sold.

Why ISP blocking is considered low morale but seizing your stuff high morale endeavor?
by habinero | 2026-02-22 21:25:35+00:00
Yeeeeah, that's not how it works lol. Anyone who does offensive security for more than 5 minutes understands how little protection they have. And true anonymity is much, much harder than you think.

If you act in certain ways, you will probably not get in trouble but I have a lawyer on retainer for a reason lol

The harsh truth is you aren't protecting anything by doing this, because you can't control how (or if!) they fix the problem. All you're doing by accessing the data is for-real committing a felony, and that is an incredibly stupid thing to do.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-22 21:25:39+00:00
> The question we asked is if they can solve a problem autonomously

What level of autonomy though? At one point some human have to fire them off, so already kind of shaky what that means here. What about providing a bunch of manuals in a directory and having "There are manuals in manuals/ you can browse to learn more." included in the prompt, if they get the hint, is that "autonomously"?
by unpopularopp | 2026-02-22 21:25:54+00:00
It's a hobby but not for everyone. I mean if I could just throw away 3,000€ on random projects that might work or not I'd do it in a heartbeat. No different than buying a run down Porsche for 5,000€ and spending 40,000€ on restoration to original. Every hobby is like that but with different entry price points. There is a reason knitting is more popular than something like this (and even that has price tiers from 3€ for an acrylic yarn to upwards 100€ for luxury merino wool yarn)
by jmyeet | 2026-02-22 21:25:57+00:00
> Where and who did you get this idea from? Speculation in China makes speculation in the USA look like child’s play.

This information is so out of date it borders on misinformation. China's real estate market "crashed" at least 5 years ago at this point. And it didn't just crash in the same way that, say, the Toronto condo market has crashed. It crashed because the government burst the bubble, deliberately, to make housing a priority not an investment. Put another way, like I said above, housing people was made a priority over investor returns.

> HSR isn’t used for commuting in China

China's HSR now has over 4 billion passenger movements a year [1]. It's largely an alternative to short=to-medium distance air travel eg Beijing to Shanghai is ~1200km, roughly equivalent to Chicago to NYC. What's commuting got to do with it? Are you comparing to Japan where people might live 2 hours commute away from work for various reasons?

[1]: https://www.chinadailyhk.com/hk/article/626494
by kamyarg | 2026-02-22 21:26:33+00:00
Please make sure to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

...

> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Show HN: mkpw.dev – client-side password generator (no deps, no tracking)
by goforrusty | 2026-02-22 21:26:43+00:00
Built the “happy path” I was missing too often: short URL I can type from memory + 1 click → fresh password in my clipboard.
Won't replace your password manager, just handy in certain cases, like borrowed/shared device, fresh install/new profile, helping someone else (“open this link”), VM/SSH/terminal (just need randomness), etc.

100% client-side (Web Crypto / crypto.getRandomValues). No backend. No analytics/telemetry.
Source: https://github.com/goforrusty/mkpw.dev
(careful: some profanity in code)

P.S.: newpw.dev also works (redirects to mkpw.dev).
Show HN: VS Code extension for dotenv-diff
by chrilleweb | 2026-02-22 21:26:50+00:00
I recently published a VS Code extension for dotenv-diff, this is quite simpler than the dotenv-diff npm package.

The problem: you don't always want to install a dependency.

The solution: a VS Code extension so you don't have to install a dependency — it just works out of the box.

This version of dotenv-diff is simpler, it simply does:

- Warn when you have an environment variable that is used in the code but not defined in .env
- Warn when you have a .env variable that is not used anywhere in the code

Feedback or suggestions are very welcome!
Show HN: A portfolio that re-architects its React DOM based on LLM intent
by Pramit_2002 | 2026-02-22 21:28:07+00:00
Hi HN,
I got tired of the "Context Problem" with static portfolios—Recruiters want a resume, Founders want a pitch deck, and Engineers want to see architecture.

Instead of building three sites, I hooked up my React frontend to Llama-3 (via Groq for <100ms latency). It analyzes natural language intent from the search bar and physically re-architects the Component Tree to prioritize the most relevant modules using Framer Motion.

The hardest part was stabilizing the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) during the DOM mutation, but decoupling the layout state from the content state solved it.

The Challenge: There is a global CSS override hidden in the search bar. If you guess the 1999 movie reference, it triggers a 1-bit terminal mode.

Happy to answer any questions on the Groq implementation or the layout engine!
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-22 21:28:32+00:00
I think overall you're better off creating these yourself. The more you add to the overall context, the more chance of the model to screw up somewhere, so you want to give it as little as possible, yet still include everything that is important at that moment.

Using the agent and seeing where it get stuck, then creating a workflow/skill/whatever for how to overcome that issue, will also help you understand what scenarios the agents and models are currently having a hard time with.

You'll also end up with fewer workflows/skills that you understand, so you can help steer things and rewrite things when inevitably you're gonna have to change something.
by tovej | 2026-02-22 21:28:54+00:00
I don't know what world you live in, but I still definitely need to know the approximation error of the methods I use.

sin(x) has one of the simplest Maclaurin series:

sin(x) = x - x^3/3! + x^5/5! - x^7/7! ...

For any partial sum of that series, the error is always strictly less than the absolute value of the next term in the series. The fact that this was your example of a "difficult" engineering problem is uh, embarrassing.

For good measure, I would of course fuzz any component involving numerical methods to ensure it stays within bounds. _As any competent engineer would_.

And I absolutely work things out on pen and paper or a white board before implementing them. How else would I verify designs? I'm sure you're aware that fixing bugs is cheapest in the design phase.

Are you living in an alternate reality where software quality does not matter? I'm still living in the world where engineers need to know what the fuck they're doing.
by rezonant | 2026-02-22 21:29:06+00:00
Thankfully, since then, Chrome and all other major browsers now ask the user for permission before letting websites send requests to localhost or any local IP addresses. Obviously some users may click through that, but it prevents the behavior from being invisible to the user at least, and gives them a way to say no.

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/local-network-access

PS: I still recommend never installing Meta apps on your phone.

PPS: There are legitimate uses of this functionality, so as a web dev I'm happy the functionality wasn't silently blocked. This gives an opportunity to explain to the user why the permission is needed if the use is legitimate. Would be nice if it could be further scoped though.
by 8aczeh | 2026-02-22 21:29:43+00:00
I'm not sure what you mean with connectivity. I bought mine about 9 years ago, and since then I just use it as my cellphone, I think 4G or LTE. It doesn't get new OS versions, but it gets updates from time to time. It's not clear to me whats being updated, maybe its just the terms of service... . Maybe it's outdated, but to say it's a brick is not exactly accurate, it works fine. I replaced the battery 2 or 3 years ago with one I bought from iFixit for 50 Euros including some tools.
by umairnadeem123 | 2026-02-22 21:29:50+00:00
the format isn't inherently bad, it's the algorithm optimizing for engagement over everything else that's the problem. short video is actually great for tutorials, explanations, behind-the-scenes stuff. i make AI-generated video content and the short form works well for documentary-style clips where you're mixing stills with selective animation.

the real question is whether federation changes the incentive structure enough. if the recommendation algo is still optimized for watch time, you just get tiktok with extra steps. if instances can tune their own ranking, that's actually interesting.
by svilen_dobrev | 2026-02-22 21:30:01+00:00
IMO, software's code is the ink of the book.

Does the book have something to say? or is it just a papermill-filler?

Same question applies to software..

re: anecdote: .PDF written in python: PDF is actually (interpreted) code. Postcript's variant. Very powerful and not-very-human-friendly - you know, reversed-polish-notations and matrixes all-over. Any machine may generate it very, very easy.. as long as it knows how. But.. Nobody has ever written that by hand.. hence.. omnipotent coding-generator writes python to write postscript. is that a Bitter lesson? or irony? or both?
by Niko901ch | 2026-02-22 21:30:23+00:00
Interesting approach using SQLite as the persistence layer for AI agents. The local-first architecture makes a lot of sense for development workflows where latency matters.

One question: How do you handle concurrent writes from multiple agents working on the same project? SQLite has WAL mode, but I'm curious if you've encountered any race conditions in practice, especially when agents are running in parallel.

Also, the MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration is clever - having a standardized way for agents to query project state could really simplify the orchestration layer. Are you seeing other teams adopt MCP for similar use cases?
by umairnadeem123 | 2026-02-22 21:30:34+00:00
as someone who makes video content, the attention media framing is spot on. the platforms don't care about your craft or your audience relationship, they care about watch time metrics.

what's wild is how this distorts the creation process itself. you end up optimizing for the algorithm instead of for quality. every creative decision becomes "will this get recommended" instead of "is this good." i've found that the best content comes from having strong human creative oversight and not just chasing whatever the algo rewards this week.

the no-code tools that promise to automate content creation for these platforms are even worse -- they just produce generic slop that feeds the attention machine. you need to actually care about what you're making, and that means stitching together your own pipeline where you control the decisions.
by GauntletWizard | 2026-02-22 21:30:34+00:00
Absolutely, America does seize domains with the assistance of local authorities[1] for crimes that are in prosecution. You may disagree with the reasoning for these crimes, or disagree that they are crimes at all, but US censorship works as a part of the legal system with well defined due process and remedies.

This is classic whataboutism compared to the outright corporateocracy of la liga's blocking and seizure.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-law-enforcement-assists-bu...
by Bratmon | 2026-02-22 21:30:37+00:00
But won't this solution still need:

1. A payment processor for users to turn money into tokens
2. A payment processor for news sites to turn tokens into money
3. A software provider to handle the actual microtransaction part of this (unless they want to learn how to become software developers themselves)?

It seems to me like all the blockchain does here is to make it so this transaction needs 3 software providers instead of just one!
by david_shaw | 2026-02-22 21:30:52+00:00
This is for sure an inspirational project, but I wish the barrier to entry was lower.

I've noticed e-ink/paper displays having somewhat of a moment right now (especially very small "phone-like" form factors as portable ereaders), and I hope this trend continues.

I'm very far from a meaningful reduction in "screen time," but looking at e-ink displays instead of OLEDs feels like a nice step in that direction.
by umairnadeem123 | 2026-02-22 21:31:12+00:00
from someone who runs AI inference pipelines for video production -- the cost per inference is what actually matters to me, not raw speed. right now i'm paying ~$0.003 per image generation and ~7 cents per 10-second animation clip. a full video costs under $2 in compute.

if dedicated ASICs can drop that by 10x while keeping latency reasonable, that changes the economics of the whole content creation space. you could afford to generate way more variations and iterate more, which is where the real quality gains come from. the bottleneck isn't speed, it's cost per creative iteration.
by randomtoast | 2026-02-22 21:32:07+00:00
I think you could make it work for a fraction of the price if you buy a bunch of low-cost e-ink screens and combine them to create a larger display. The main challenge would be on the software side, as you'd need to control the content so it appears as a single, cohesive screen. However, I think this approach would be more appealing in terms of cost for most people.
Show HN: Building a Low-Power Cognitive Architecture That Learns Without LLMs
by bojo | 2026-02-22 21:32:22+00:00
I've been obsessively tinkering for weeks on Daimon, my pet little non-LLM AI realtime cognitive machine. Still trying to figure out what it can actually achieve besides be a massively fun time sink for me.

~32,500 lines of Zig written with me at the helm of Claude Code.

More research than I can even fathom across computer science, cognitive science, neuroscience, and more. As the post points out - I've lost the ability to actually reason about what is going with its internals. I'm just the high-level architect making suggestions at this point.
by epistasis | 2026-02-22 21:32:36+00:00
It looks like the increase in spending has come from expansion of Medicaid, K-12 education, housing programs and homelessness programs.

I can't speak to the Medicaid expansion or K-12 funding that much, but I do know that the spending on housing programs have been a boondoggle, mostly to fund more first-time purchasers chasing after the same fixed supply of housing, driving up prices even more. And the homelessness problem is created by the refusal to allow housing to be built. Even the supposed successes, like SB 79, have been minor, and not allowed much more building at all. And in more conservative places like Southern LA, state laws attempting to force cities to permit more housing have been met with extreme resistance, even for the small gains that the state laws make.

For K-12 spending, that's been a disaster ever since Prop 13 gutted property tax systems and forced the state to step in to make up the difference. And Prop 13 is at the core of the housing problem as well, incentivizing underuse of land by giving such massive tax breaks to those who stay in a massive house after they have an empty nest (mostly fixed very recently), and inducing severe tax penalties to those who would like to stay in the same location but build a bunch more housing (like Greece's polykatoikias, which solved Athen's severe housing crunch...).

And high housing costs means that all labor is far more expensive than it would be otherwise, which makes building the housing expensive, which makes it difficult to expand the workforce to build housing, etc. etc. etc. Lack of housing is at the core of all rising costs in California, and the bad policies such as Libertarian Prop 13 and NIMBYs are most of it.
by prosody | 2026-02-22 21:32:36+00:00
There's positives and negatives to each. For government domain seizure, there's due process involved but working around it is harder (the service provider either has to acquire a new proper domain or onion domain, then disseminate it to the audience somehow). For ISP level blocking there's limited due process (at least in the cited case of LaLiga seemingly just issuing a complaint to the ISP), but the audience can easily work around with it with a VPN or sometimes just an alternate DNS server.
by avidruntime | 2026-02-22 21:32:52+00:00
Short form content is a medium that isn't going away. Short form content is not inherently harmful, although short form content replacing or displacing other important mediums arguably is. When I think about the issues stemming from short form content, I don't think about the inherent medium, I think about the providers and their capabilities to use the sum of all consumed content by a user in the name of a ulterior motive at scale. While I haven't investigated it too deeply, Loops seems to be an effort in patching that. Is your objection in the marketing language or in the inherent technology?
by maccard | 2026-02-22 21:33:09+00:00
If you're going to be pedantic, you have to be correct.

> In Europe, ISPs and CDNs just block websites willy-nilly at the request of La Liga, for instance

There's so much wrong with this sentence. It's not Europe, it's _Spain_ specifically. La liga aren't just dropping emails to ISPs, they're gaining court orders (now, whether these court orders are warranted, or delivered correctly [0] or not is another question).

> That doesn't happen in USA

It doesn't happen in "Europe" either.

[0] https://www.pcmag.com/news/nordvpn-protonvpn-ordered-block-p...
by metadat | 2026-02-22 21:33:17+00:00
> After spending time on Apple’s M1/M2 Macs (coming from a large x86_64 desktop), going back to x86_64 feels like a regression, both in performance and battery life.

This seems like a flawed premise.

Battery:

Yes, MacBook battery life is really good, but only when you're not doing CPU-intensive tasks. Browsing the web, watching Tube or Netflix, it's amazing. Once you're compiling a bunch of stuff the battery performance tanks and seems just like any other notebook computer.

CPU: Intel Mac performance was horrible, M* is terrific. And so are the latest from AMD Ryzen.

Regardless, FreeBSD is a fantastic OS in so many ways!
by bachmeier | 2026-02-22 21:33:26+00:00
> No wonder it a builder has to build something over 2000 SQFT to make it pencil out.

I'm with you up until that. Maybe there are places where you have to build over 2000 sf due to regulations. For the most part, this is an industry talking point to justify building expensive houses on the limited land that gets zoned for residential. It gets repeated a lot.

You can build smaller houses but you can't charge as much for them. I'm not faulting the builders for maximizing profits, but it's still a talking point. (And in the grand scheme of things, it's not the reason housing is unaffordable.)
by ajross | 2026-02-22 21:34:02+00:00
> In other words, it works.

Well, sure, but that's a ridiculous double standard. You're making the claim (or implying it, at least) that FreeBSD is fundamentally superior because it's a unified piece of software shipped as a holistic piece of artifice or whatever. And that by inferrence it's unlike all that kludgey linux stuff that you can't trust because of politics or whatever.

But your evidence that it's actually superior? "it works". Well, gosh.

You'll tar the competition with all sorts of ambiguous smears, but all you ask from your favorite is... that you got your app to work?