MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-17 05:44:26+00:00
This is largely reactionary and false on both counts.

AI has been good for years now. Good doesn't mean perfect. it doesn't mean flawless. It doesn't mean the hype is spot-on. good means exactly that, it is good at what is intended to do.

It is not destroying open source either. If anything, there would be more open source contributors using AI to create code.

You can call anything done by AI "slop" but that doesn't make it so.

Daniel and the curl project were also over reacting. A reaction was warranted, but there were many measures they could have taken before shutting down bug reporting entirely.

If you replace "AI" with "junior dev", "troll" , "spammer", what would things be like then? If it is scale, you can troll, spam and be incompetent at scale just fine without the help of AI.

It's gatekeeping and sentimentality amplified.

I can't wait for people who call everything slop to be overshadowed by people who are so used to LLMs that their usage isn't different than using a linter, a compiler, an IDE, just another tool good at certain tasks but not others. abusable, but with reasonable mitigations possible.

I keep reading posts about what open source users are owed and not owed. Github restricting PRs, developers complaining about burnouts. Have you considered using AI "slop" instead? give a slop response to what you consider to be a slop request? Oh, but no, you could never touch "AI", that would stain you! (I speak to the over-reactors). You don't need AI, you could do anything AI can do (except AI doesn't complain about it all the time, or demand clout).

What is the largest bottleneck and hinderance to open source adaption? Money? No, many, including myself are willing to spend for it. I've even lucked out trying to pay an open source project maintainer to support their software. It's always support.

Support means triaging bugs, and feature requests in a timely manner. You know what helps with that a lot? A tool that understand code generation and troubleshooting well, along with natural language processing. A bot that can read what people are requesting, and give them feedback until their reports meet a certain criteria of acceptability, so you as a developer don't have to deal with the tiring back and forth with them. that same tool can generate code in feature branches. fix people's PR's so it meets your standards and priorities. highlight changes and how they affect your branch, prioritize them for you, so you can spend minimal time reviewing code and accepting or rejecting PRs.

If that isn't good for open source then what is?

Bad attitude towards AI is destroying open source projects led by people entrenched in an all-or-nothing false dichotomy mindset against AI. And AI itself is good. not great, not replace-humans-great, but good enough for it's intended use. great with cooperative humans in the decision making loop.

Use the best tool for the task!

that should be like #2 in the developer rule book, with #1 being:

It needs to work.
by st-msl | 2026-02-17 05:44:27+00:00
What's interesting to me isn't the self-generated finding (everyone here has correctly identified the methodology issue). It's Table 4 buried on page 6.

Healthcare +51.9pp. Manufacturing +41.9pp. Software Engineering +4.5pp.

The domains where models have the weakest priors from pretraining benefit the most from external procedural knowledge. That's not surprising on its own, but there's an implication I haven't seen anyone raise: these are exactly the enterprise domains where that procedural knowledge is most proprietary and most dangerous to lose between sessions.

The paper's entire architecture is single-player. A SKILL.md sits in a directory, one agent reads it, session ends. When Agent A at a bank figures out the right approach to parsing 13F filings (0% to 75% with the right skill in this paper), that knowledge dies with the context window. Agent B starts from scratch.

We're building shared memory infrastructure for agents at Memco (https://memco.ai) and this paper maps directly to what our enterprise design partners keep telling us — the problem isn't writing skills, it's that procedural knowledge doesn't compound across agents, sessions, or teams. The paper even shows 2-3 focused skills outperform comprehensive docs, which is a retrieval problem masquerading as an authoring problem.

The question this paper should be asking isn't "can agents write their own skills" — it's "what infrastructure makes skills accumulate and transfer?" Static files in a folder is the wrong primitive for that.
by kristiandupont | 2026-02-17 05:44:35+00:00
I shared this tool for remembering recurring tasks on LinkedIn: https://github.com/kristiandupont/balls-in-the-air and it got quite a bit of attention.

No login or signup is required so it's very easy to try out and quite fun to play with, which probably helped. I think the time people are willing to invest in something before getting some sort of reward is approaching sub-second territory.
by ggm | 2026-02-17 05:44:38+00:00
Does this not also say that Octopi (wrong I know, but we all love a fake archaism) are strongly visually aware of their own state, overriding proprioception with visual signal?

considering we're told they have widely distributed neural structure akin to "brain" in their arms, this is doubly confusing: The arm brain is saying "nothing to see here" and the skin colour change is saying COMMAND OVERRIDE CPU ALERT
by Swizec | 2026-02-17 05:44:49+00:00
> Interest rates have fallen, not to near 0 as they were, but down from highs with no apparent effect.

Hey it turns out that going from decades of stability to 1 or 2 years of total fuckaroundery has economic impacts. Who knew?

This on top of the general trend that the post-ww2 USA gravy train has been ending for a couple decades now.
by farkanoid | 2026-02-17 05:46:06+00:00
Somewhat related - I've been working on a design using Nordic's NRF52840 SOC for work; Intensely focusing for the past few weeks on antenna tuning for maximum BLE range.

Part of the testing involves using the 'nRF Connect' app, which lists all nearby Bluetooth devices, plots signal strengths, and allows for some rudimentary communication. It doesn't seem to be Nordic-specific.

I'd frequently leave the app open scanning during development late in the evening, and rarely, an unidentified Bluetooth LE device would pop up for a few minutes then disappear.

Turns out it was my dad's pacemaker, which sends telemetry via Bluetooth to a 4G gateway they gave him (this only happens after he lies down with little movement apparently).

This prompted me to look into pacemakers and deactivation after death of course. I wish I hadn't, it turns out they leave it in the corpse unless it's scheduled for cremation.

Because of the aforementioned research, and the open field tests I was performing, it somehow devolved into me having a nightmare where I was RF testing at a graveyard, and the app suddenly displaying a bunch of pacemakers underground.

...I really hope this isn't possible - The signal through 6ft of dirt and concrete would be marginal but still detectable.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-02-17 05:46:12+00:00
This is cyclical. There is nothing particularly onerous about the current situation compared to previous cycles at this point. An adult will experience a few of these cycles over their career. You should be prepared for it to happen.

I understand that it might be shocking for a young person who has never lived through this before. It also sucks to enter the job market at the bottom of one of these cycles. The bottom almost never lasts more than a year or two, which seems like an eternity while you are in it.

The article opens with someone who was making six-figures at 47 years old in a low-cost-of-living part of the country. They’ve seen a few of these cycles already and with a modicum of prudent planning would be well-positioned to ride it out.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-17 05:46:31+00:00
Very cool. Some feedback:

- I think it would be a very large improvement if the actual diary pages/transcriptions were more accessible. I found the LLM summaries completely uncompelling, and did not particularly appreciate having to scroll through 5+ pages of LLM summary to get to the part where I could actually read the diary entries for a given month.

- The dates of the diary entries for many months are broken. For example, in the final month, all of the entries are labelled 1945-03-19. From a cursory examination, I believe the dating broke 24th July 1941 and was broken for every month from there to the end.

- The page for Nov 1941 seems entirely broken. For some reason, the dates labelling the pages are described in a different format that included the name of the month rather than a numeric representation, the pages are out of order, and then all manner of months are mixed in. The first pages are "November 1941", "April 1941", "October 2 1941", "October 3 1941", "November 4 1941", "November 12 1941", "November 7 1941" ... and so on. The LLM summary notes an "Event", a construction project that took place from 1931 to 1934, despite this being the entry for Nov 1941.
by jwilliams | 2026-02-17 05:46:38+00:00
This post confuses me a little. With my tests I try not to "reach inside" systems unless it's quite a specific integration test. Especially databases. In this case I feel like we're just... testing known PostgreSQL behavior?

Or to put another way; as others have observed, this could be solved with atomic updates and in some case SERIALIZABLE. These are right tools for balance operations - and if they’re used I’m not sure they need testing in this manner?
by seanhunter | 2026-02-17 05:47:20+00:00
Old string instruments generally remain playable[1] so it most probably wouldn’t be too delicate to play. However most old Amati and Stradivarius instruments will have had a refit during the Romantic period to play on metal strings. This massively increases the string tension compared to the gut strings that would have been used in the original design. This refit often involves a new bridge, soundpost and nut[2] and (if it happened) would have moved the position of the soundpost relative to the bridge. So you’d want to undo all that to hear it in its original state. You’d also want to remove the end pin and use a historically accurate bow as cello players used to play by sort of cradling the cello in their legs rather than having it on a pin and the bow changed shape.

Gut strings have more resonance and a much better sound (in my opinion) at the expense of being less loud and much harder to keep consistently in tune. The romantic movement led to larger forces in the orchestra and more brass, which meant strings had to be louder and in greater numbers to get a balanced sound, and obviously being able to stay in tune over the course of the (longer and longer) pieces of music was convenient!

Here’s an example of a historically-informed performance of the Bach cello suite no 1 in G so you get an idea what the gut strings and bow sound like. https://youtu.be/cGnZHIY_hoQ?si=J1GMF4Yg2h4dQ6-A

Source: Wife is an “early musician” albeit not a string player and teaches at a couple of big conservertoires in London. I was a professional bass player (not early music, Jazz and similar) so know about string set up from that. Have lots of early musician friends.

[1] Unlike old wind instruments (recorders etc) where the players’ breath causes the instrument to degrade so they literally become unplayable over time. That is why even though we have renaissance recorders for example, they are in museums and modern reproductions made by copying their measurements etc play better than the originals. That’s not true of old string instruments. There are 16th century string instruments out there being played all the time.

[2] That’s not as radical as it sounds. The soundpost plays a crucial role in the sound production of the instrument as it transmits the resonance of the strings into the body of the instrument but it’s basically just a piece of dowling rod. The nut and bridge would conventionally be replaced whenever you put a new fingerboard on, which happens a lot as you wear them out.
by Jashwanth01 | 2026-02-17 05:48:09+00:00
Thanks for the feedback.. that makes sense.

I’ve updated the post to include a direct link to the repository. I appreciate the note about keeping the HN submission lighter and letting the linked page speak for itself.

This project is engineering-focused rather than academic research, so there isn’t a peer-reviewed paper at this stage. The goal was to explore practical deployment tradeoffs in nearest-neighbor systems.

I’ll consider writing a blog post focused on lessons learned and design decisions that’s a good suggestion.
by D-Machine | 2026-02-17 05:48:10+00:00
Insofar as they are testing very broken and simple "skills" (as evidenced by comments in this thread), and still find net significant net positives in some cases, negatives in others, and huge variability overall, I actually think this is a fun paper providing support that, at least if you count using skills here, you can, in general, very objectively be holding it right/wrong.
by nextaccountic | 2026-02-17 05:48:49+00:00
The major trouble with StackOverflow is that nominally duplicate questions may have different answers if asked on 2011 vs 2026 - and the trouble is that answer rankings (the thing that determines what answers are in the top) don't decay over time. So if someone try to answer an old question with up to date info, they won't garner enough upvotes to overcome the old, previously correct but now outdated accepted answer at the top. (even with a ranking decay, there is little incentive to give a new up to date answer to a established thread - people are more likely to contribute to brand new threads)

It would be better to allow duplicates in this specific case, but mark the old thread as outdated and link the questions in such a way that one can see the old thread and compare it to the new thread.
by piloto_ciego | 2026-02-17 05:48:50+00:00
I've lived through a few of these now too, maybe not as many as you, I don't know, but...

I do think this time is a little bit different. I don't think a lot of these jobs are coming back. Maybe ever.

I'm not saying I'm some crazy woodland luddite maniac, I mean, I'll be tailscaling into the business VPS from the cabin... but... yeah, I think this time is a bit different. I think stuff like this has happened before with like "John Henry was a Steel Driving Man" sort of vibes? But a lot of people are going to try to out-machine the machines right now, and I think that's a losing strategy?

We'll see in 10 years, and I'm in a bit of a privileged position that I'm able to do this, so I don't envy the folks who are struggling right now? But, more concretely, I do think this is different. Interest rates are absolutely part of it, but there's so much deviation from the historical norms right now that I think normalcy bias is a loosing move.

Personally, I'm adapting - also, I'm playing with robots, but that's mostly because it's fun.
Ask HN: How does the cost of CPU-bound computations scale in cloud computing?
by jason_s | 2026-02-17 05:48:51+00:00
Let's say that I'm a rich mathematician (that would be nice) and want to sponsor some computation that takes a certain gargantuan number N of floating or integer operations, and it can be parallelized easily in the cloud, and my programmers have come up with a reasonably efficient implementation, which I benchmark with some smaller-scale tests. The I/O and storage costs are low; the bulk of the cost is going to be pure computation.

Now I'm ready to get out my checkbook.

What factors influence the cost of such a computation in today's cloud computing market?

How does the price scale with N and the rate at which I want to complete the problem? (for example, if it takes 1000 AWS instances 10 months or 10,000 AWS instances 1 month, am I going to pay the same? I'm assuming the length of time to run this is less than a year, so not long enough that the cost would decrease significantly during the computation.)

Are there aspects of flexibility that would decrease the price? (example: the cloud servers can put my computation on hold or throttle the CPU anytime they want in the short term, as long as the average rate my computation is running in any given day is, say, more than 80% of full-speed)

Lenstra used the term "dollardays" to describe the cost of breaking cryptographic keys as something that scales with the capital cost of the computing equipment (40 million dollardays = 40 days on $1 million worth of computers, or 1 day on $40 million worth of computers) but with cloud computing it seems more like it would be a piecework pricing structure.
by donkeybeer | 2026-02-17 05:48:57+00:00
Correct, I haven't yet seen any evidence humans are nore than what you call pingpong balls. You are a bunch of ping pong balls. So if the inputs and outputs are same as a person, there is no way to know whether this so called consciousness exists or not. If you are being consistent, its equally impossible to say from outside if another "human" is "conscious" as it is for an ai or the piece of paper. If the inputs and outputs are same then I don't give a shit about meaningless ill defined terms like that.
by dang | 2026-02-17 05:49:38+00:00
Submitted title was "Study: Self-generated agent skills are useless". That's against the site guideline: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
by keyhanimo | 2026-02-17 05:50:23+00:00
Seeing things go crazy with examples of OpenClaw agents going rogue prompted me to think about what it means that software can now exercise its own judgment, as opposed to what software used to be: instructions for rule following that were followed to the letter. Wrote a full blog post on it here: https://www.digitvibe.com/ai-agents-and-the-rise-of-judgment...
by jonmagic | 2026-02-17 05:51:09+00:00
Yeah, they've got it backwards. I tried to sum it up in thisistheway.to/ai but what's been working for us is that every agent miss is a learning opportunity:

1. Capture the miss — What did the agent do? What did reality say?

2. Diagnose — What didn't it see? Missing data, constraint, feedback, or boundaries?

3. Choose a primitive — Observability, instructions, tooling, guardrails, or verification?

4. Encode as artifact — Version-controlled, repeatable, not just memory.

5. Promote to gate — When it's worth enforcing, make it a gate.

Every harness I setup includes this process in the primary set of agent instructions.
by jimminyx | 2026-02-17 05:51:36+00:00
Gavriel (creator of NanoClaw) here. This is the correct answer. It's more dogfooding than testing though.

This is describing the structure of an Obsidian vault that is mounted in the container as an additional directory that claude has access to. Me and my co-founder chat with NanoClaw in WhatsApp and get daily briefings on sales pipeline status, get reminders on tasks, give it updates after calls, etc.

You can see that I described the same vault structure on twitter a few days before starting to build NanoClaw: https://x.com/Gavriel_Cohen/status/2016572489850065016?s=20

I accidentally committed this - if you look at the .gitignore (https://github.com/qwibitai/nanoclaw/blob/main/.gitignore) you can see that this specific file is included although the folder it's in is excluded. There's some weirdness here because the CLAUDE.md is a core part of the project code that gives claude general context about the memory system, but is then also updated per user.

Interesting tidbit is that adding instructions for this specific thing (additional directory claude is give access to) is no longer necessary because claude now automatically loads the CLAUDE.md from the added directory.
by Animats | 2026-02-17 05:52:27+00:00
What is the equipment at [1] in the video? It looks like a huge room of large centrifugal blowers not connected to any ductwork. Is that some random AI-generated picture? From Los Alamos National Laboratory?

For comparison, here are some large centrifugal blowers from The New York Blower Company.[2] They're a standard industrial item, but unrelated to X-ray machines.

[1] https://youtu.be/tq_AFsq86sw?t=25

[2] https://www.nyb.com/radial/
by rurban | 2026-02-17 05:52:58+00:00
This was 2015, and we still have no
-Wdeadcode, warning of removal of "dead code", ie what compilers think of dead code. If a program writer writes code, it is never dead. It is written. It had purpose. If the compiler thinks this is wrong, it needs to warn about it.

The only dead code is generated code by macros.
by nowittyusername | 2026-02-17 05:53:01+00:00
Do you have any resources or youtube videos that might also help someone understand the lcm context management a bit better. I think there's something to this, but i'm having trouble wrapping my head around it. i learn well with analogies and im trying to really grok the concept here. If there are other ways you could explain it it would be appreciated. mind you i have built my own agents from scratch so im not a total novice in these areas. my agents already manage context with sub-agents and multi layered conversational histories with RAG thrown in there. But i dont want to make wrong assumptions about your implementations and miss the nuanced important bits. regardless, ill try my best to reread the article and hash it out on my own, thanks for the paper.
by BeeOnRope | 2026-02-17 05:54:06+00:00
Relevant section:

> Compiler controlled memory: There is a mechanism in the processor where frequently accessed memory locations can be as fast as registers. In Figure 2, if the address of u is the same as x, then the last load μ-op is a nop. The internal value in register r25 is forwarded to register r28, by a process called write-buffer feedforwarding. That is to say, provided the store is pending or the value to be stored is in the write-buffer, then loading form a memory location is as fast as accessing external registers.

I think it over-sells the benefit. Store forwarding is a thing, but it does not erase the cost of the load or store, at least certainly on the last ~20 years of chips and I don't think on the PII (the target of the paper) either.

The load and store still effectively occur in terms of port usage, so the usual throughput, etc, limits apply. There is a benefit in latency of a few cycles. Perhaps also the L1 cache access itself is omitted, which could help for bank conflicts, though on later uarches there were few to none of these so you're left with perhaps a small power benefit.
by lawstkawz | 2026-02-17 05:55:17+00:00
That’s entropy for you.

Society is a Ship Theseus; each generation ripping off planks and nailing their own in place.

Having been online since the late 80s (am only mid 40s...grandpa worked at IBM, hooked me and my siblings up with the latest kit on the regular) I have read comments like this over and over as the 90s internet, 00s internet, now the 2010s state of the "information super highway" has been replaced.

Tbh things have felt quite stagnant and "stuck" the last 20 years. All the investment in and caretaking of web SaaS infrastructure and JS apps and jobs for code camp grads made it feel like tech had come to a standstill relative to the pace of software progress prior to the last 15-ish years.
by kmoser | 2026-02-17 05:55:30+00:00
Do you know of any similar organization that would be interested in tackling a lavishly written and illustrated school newspaper published in Germany from 1902-1906? It's about 50 issues total, each about 12 pages long, and I've already scanned them all; I just need somebody to do the heavy lifting of setting up the OCR/transcription pipeline that can handle old German script. (Bonus: the newspaper was co-created by the future wife of a pretty famous person.)