MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by trwnbs | 2026-02-24 02:39:54+00:00
Why? Because JS in the browser is a huge attack surface. Obscurify is designed for anonymous use, with a Tor hidden service, crypto payments, and no account verification required. If you're a privacy-minded individual, and you're using big lab's apps, they are tracking your conversations and using your data against you. With Obscurify you can keep your identity anonymous while having your chats. I don't like when I have someone watching over my shoulder when chatting with AI. Hope someone finds this useful.
by h4kunamata | 2026-02-24 02:41:34+00:00
>Apple may not design for repairability, but what you are saying is not true. I have personally purchased and installed genuine replacement displays on MacBooks with no involvement from Apple.

Which year?? It used to be like that, no anymore.

It is public knowledge that Apple has locked its hardware via firmware. It must be performed by authorised only.
You can check YT, that guy in the USA that defends the "right to repair" movement, etc.
by marcus_holmes | 2026-02-24 02:42:07+00:00
> Also, in this particular instance, arguing both that "Viking" is an imaginary identity that no one really has today, AND that it's being stolen from someone else and erased, is absurd. Other Nordic commenters here have discussed contexts in which the term "Viking" is used today, and it sounds like the same semi-cheeky spirit that everyone else uses it.

No, I think this is part of the point, if not the entire point.

There were actual Vikings. Not a genetic ethnicity, but a profession that others would recognise. Real people really called themselves Vikings, and probably took some pride in that identity.

Making up some bullshit ethnicity around Vikings erases that. Those real people's history becomes polluted with the made-up bullshit. For example: modern Dark Age and Early Medieval re-enactment groups are having a real problem with people joining who are cosplaying the utterly inaccurate Vikings series. They're not interested in learning about the real Vikings, the real people who did incredible things and who are much more interesting (but less photogenic).

So yes, "Viking" is an imaginary identity that no-one really has today, and yes, it is being stolen from actual real people who existed.

edit: and not all Vikings were Northern European white dudes, something you'd know if you read the article or knew anything about actual Vikings.

edit edit: in fact, everything about that statement is wrong. There were Vikings in Southern Europe. There were Vikings in North America. There were brown Vikings. There were female Vikings.
by jerkstate | 2026-02-24 02:43:05+00:00
I write a lot of tech docs with AI so I can add some substance here. First of all, you do tell it what you’re writing about - you can give it reams of documentation on related systems, terminology, and source code. Stuff that would take you weeks to consume personally (but you probably know the gist of it from having read or skimmed it before). Let’s say you are writing a design doc for a new component. After all of this stuff describing the environment is in its context (you don’t have to type it all out, you can copy paste it, use an MCP to suck it in from a DB, read it from a file, etc), you describe at a high level what architecture choices and design constraints to make (for example, needs to be implemented with this database, this is our standard middleware, etc) and it will fill in blanks and spit out a design for you. Then you refine it - actually this component needs to work like that, unit testing strategy needs to be like this, and so on. Now give me the main modules, code stubs, suggest patterns to use, etc. continue to iterate - it will update the entire doc for you, make sure there are no dead or outdated references, etc. extremely powerful and useful.
by enraged_camel | 2026-02-24 02:44:49+00:00
Yes. We needed to do a huge migration project that would otherwise have taken us six months and/or cost more than $100k. With the help of Opus 4.5 we finished it in three weeks for a total token cost of $1200. I posted about it last month.

So if you want to think of it in economic terms, some software consulting firm that would otherwise have made six figures instead did not. The vast majority of the money we would have spent stayed in our pocket. Slight decreases like this in “velocity of money” no doubt add up to significant sums.
by hugs | 2026-02-24 02:45:32+00:00
openclaw is the napster of itunes.

people who have been around long enough know that we're currently in the wild west of networked agentic systems. it's an exciting time to build and explore. (just like napster and early digital music.) eventually some big company will come along and pave the cow paths and make everything safe and secure. but the people who will actually deliver that are likely playing with openclaw (and openclaw like systems) now.
by lehmacdj | 2026-02-24 02:45:51+00:00
They have good margins on inference at API costs, i.e. $5/$25 per mtok input/output. They are almost certainly making losses on subscriptions, at least if people max out rate limits.

In the past 30 days I have burned $78.19 in API token costs with my $20/month Claude Pro subscription. In January I burnt over $300 in API token costs.
by tclancy | 2026-02-24 02:45:57+00:00
Yeah, I think (completely biased as a long-time developer who is happily playing with AI for building stuff) people using AI to build their own tooling will be like a hot rod scene from the '60s. Lots of buzz, definitely some cool stuff, but in reality probably physically smaller than the noise around it.

Off to bust my virtual knuckles on something.
by weevil | 2026-02-24 02:46:40+00:00
I think most people just assume it's magic, and are too awestruck by the hype to think critically.

Financially this feels similar to Uber's business plan in the 2010s; undercut the market with unsound pricing propped up by venture capital (PE was literally subsidising taxi fares; they admitted this and their intention to readjust, but no one seemed to care) then stop manipulating the market and allow fares to even out at (gasp) what it cost to get a cab before Uber.

The difference here is that the LLM market is human productivity; enormous subsidies are afforded to Anthropic, OpenAI etc. in the form of VC or compute credit, but eventually those debts will be called in, the free-to-use aspect will vanish because it's simply not profitable, and we'll be left with several premium products that only a few people will actually pay for, and even then that may not be enough to cover their costs. That's when the bubble will burst.
by fyredge | 2026-02-24 02:48:12+00:00
I think we're speaking past each other. I'm talking about the way a single user can create multiple accounts on a single platform to create the illusion of consensus. If you repeatedly see a single user creating many posts / comments on a single topic, it quickly satiates your attention.

With an approved ID, it will be trivial to enforce 1 ID 1 account on 1 platform. This is not possible now.

To my knowledge, no country has tried it before up until recently. The issue of government distrust is valid, but that shifts the problem to one of government accountability, not accessibility. Demand the rule of law to be upheld, hold those in power accountable and be vigilant of their trespasses, do not abdicate what little power you hold. That is what is required for civil society to function properly.
by lioeters | 2026-02-24 02:48:16+00:00
To save others a search, here's the podcast with Wolfram.

Stephen Wolfram on Computation, Hypergraphs, and Fundamental Physics - https://podbay.fm/p/sean-carrolls-mindscape-science-society-... (2hr 40min)

I'm a fan of his work and person too. Not a fanatic or evangelical level, but I do think he's one of the more historically relevant computer scientists and philosophers working today. I can overlook his occasional arrogance, and recognize that there's a genuine and original thinker who's been pursuing truth and knowledge for decades.
by mikepurvis | 2026-02-24 02:48:18+00:00
I would guess that by the time a response is being emitted, 90% of the actual work is done. The response has been thought out, planned, drafted, the individual elements researched and placed.

It would actually take more work to condense that long response into a terse one, particularly if the condensing was user specific, like "based on what you know about me from our interactions, reduce your response to the 200 words most relevant to my immediate needs, and wait for me to ask for more details if I require them."
by blakec | 2026-02-24 02:48:20+00:00
I built one of these by accident over two months on Claude Code. ~15,000 lines of hooks, skills, and agents. I never set out to build an orchestration layer. I fixed one problem (stop the model from suggesting OpenAI). Then another (inject date and project context). Then another (catch credentials in tool calls). Then the solutions started stepping on each other, so I built dispatchers. Then dispatchers needed shared state. Then state needed quality gates. By the time Karpathy named the concept, my setup already looked like this.

"Just existing tech repackaged" is accurate and beside the point. Dropbox was just rsync repackaged. The value is in how it comes together, not the individual pieces.

What's actually missing that nobody's built yet: declarative workflow definitions. Everything I have is imperative bash. Want to change the order something runs? Edit a 1,300-line script. A real Claws system would define workflows as data and interpret them.
by szmarczak | 2026-02-24 02:48:28+00:00
> I don’t care about immich etc, you just gave me the impression of someone who loves going after people

Man I don't want anything else but success for everybody. Once someone fs up, there's nothing bad in improving. Dismissing people because they are pointing bad things out doesn't help (referring to Immich).

> Your primary participation here appears to be fir claiming that are people committing scams

If their website makes fun of their "scam mark" (idonutbelieve.com), then maybe it's not just me? Maybe all other people from YT, Reddit, X are reasonably skeptical? If the battery turns out to actually be real, that's great! (I actually mean it.)

Having said all that, despite our disagreements, have a nice day. Maybe we just set off on a wrong foot and the future will be brighter.
by mncharity | 2026-02-24 02:48:35+00:00
Hmm... TikTok has apparently long had "text enhanced with background" genres, and TIL, text posts since 2023. So text is ok. But non-independent items? For generative storytelling, "here is a next paragraph for the story", swipe left/right might work? Want to avoid "I don't much like this new paragraph, but I'm afraid to lose it and be stuck with something worse". Swipe left/right and up for continue? Swipe down to revisit old choices? Maybe present new text bolded, appended to old text, for context. Or a "next page of a picture book" idiom. A text field for direct creative or editorial intervention - speech to text. Maybe a side channel input for "story and background should now be soporific". Generative bedtime stories, but incrementally collaboratively created... Thanks for the brainstorming prompt.
by mountainriver | 2026-02-24 02:49:48+00:00
Honestly it’s been a breath of fresh air to have most of the gatekeeping in software be removed.

Seems that it was by and large just people wanting to feel important, and holding onto their positions.

Apps need great security, but security can also get out of control. Apps need good abstractions and code hygiene but that too can get out of control.

I’ve fallen in love with programming all of again now that I’m not so tied down by perceived perfection.
by mrtksn | 2026-02-24 02:49:51+00:00
I think this is probably going to be the mainstream. Once you are able to define what you need LLMs are able to produce it. If you are able to understand what is delivered, it ends up working as expected.

I needed and embedded document based database, a friend of mine with 30 years experience was vibe coding a database in Rust and I asked him if he can make it support Swift and be embedded in iOS and in few minutes he delivered that using Claude. Then I started vibe coding on it with Codex adding features I wanted and integrating it into my project. It worked as expected. I think it is close to reaching parity with MongDB, years of work vibe coded in a weekend.

There’s going to be fundamental changes in how we program computers and consequently the IT industry.
Show HN: Mouse Tester – visualize raw mouse input in the browser
by greey2026 | 2026-02-24 02:49:54+00:00
Mouse Tester combines a visual button map (left/right/middle/side buttons) with targeted diagnostics for two of the most common real-world issues: unintended double-clicks and scroll wheel jumping/direction problems. It’s designed to be fast, simple, and instantly understandable—so users can confirm what’s happening within seconds.
by jibal | 2026-02-24 02:50:22+00:00
Darwin was not puzzled.

“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.”

And in a letter to Asa Gray, professor of natural history at Harvard:

"The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder, but when I think of the fine known gradations, my reason tells me I ought to conquer the cold shudder.”
by chasd00 | 2026-02-24 02:50:43+00:00
curious to know where you are in Dallas if you don't mind. I'm in Oak Cliff in the Winnetka Heights neighborhood. This past New Years and July 4th were especially bad, people were double parked on I30 on the bridge to downtown, and the gunfire and fireworks were nonstop. DPD has basically given up, there's going to be a tragedy on day and everyone is going to be like "how could have this have happened!?".
by josephg | 2026-02-24 02:50:51+00:00
The Linux driver in this case is ISC licensed. There’s no legal or ethical problem in porting it. This is open source working as intended.

I feel like the jury is still out on whether this is acceptable for GPL code. Suppose you get agent 1 to make a clear and detailed specification from reading copyrighted code (or from reverse engineering). Then get agent 2 to implement a new driver using the specification. Is there anything wrong with that?
by Spivak | 2026-02-24 02:50:57+00:00
I don't use it but am thinking about it because it's very roughly the agent I built myself but with a community around it so I have to do less work fiddling with it.

Please people use protection and run this stuff in its own dedicated VM. Treat it like a coworker, they have their own dev setup separate from yours. Any AI from the last few years can even do the work of writing a libvirtd script to handle everything for you. It's touching your data but it least it can't accidentally rm rf your machine.
by selridge | 2026-02-24 02:51:20+00:00
You gonna go read up on some 0% success rate strategies on the way?

What I’m saying is that we act as though claims about these scaling laws have never been tested. People feel free to just assert that any minute now the train will stop. They have been saying that since the Stochastic parrots.

It has not come true yet.

Tomorrow could be it. Maybe the day after. But it would then be the first victory.
by tinfoilhatter | 2026-02-24 02:52:13+00:00
The Budapest Memorandum provided security assurances, not guarantees. As I said in one of my previous comments, the situation is far more complex than Russia bad, Ukraine good. If you want to talk bout the Budapest Memorandum you also have to talk about NATO expansion, what has gone on in Ukraine since and the diplomatic policies of Western powers.

Acceptable conditions to end the war would be whatever prevents the sacrifice of Ukraine's working-age male population. Otherwise, as I also said in my previous comments, there will be no more Ukraine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum
[2] https://globalgeopolitics.co.uk/2025/12/06/how-a-non-binding...
by addled | 2026-02-24 02:52:56+00:00
Agreed. I noticed myself having a harder time stopping at the end of the day since I started using AI tools in earnest.

I naturally have a hard time stopping when almost done with something, but with AI everything feels "close" to a big breakthrough.

Just one more turn... Until suddenly it's way later than I thought and hardly have time to interact with my family.
by marcus_holmes | 2026-02-24 02:53:17+00:00
I don't think anyone has a problem with saying "my family came from Ireland", or even "my family was forced to flee Ireland because the British are bastards". Or even "Irish American" would be OK.

The problem we all see is that you're saying that you are Irish. If you weren't born in Ireland, your parents weren't born in Ireland, you don't speak Irish, you don't pay taxes in Ireland, you can't vote in Irish elections, you wouldn't join the Irish military, you don't understand Irish culture, or know anything about Irish history, then in what way are you Irish?

You're not. But you have redefined "Irish" to mean something else. And that's what pisses people off. There are actual Irish people out there. Invent your own identity.
by cyanydeez | 2026-02-24 02:53:52+00:00
The toy examples aren't the savings. Do the calculations with a json list of 100 objects and you'll find that compress increase more significantly.

So yeah, one time object return isn't impressive. Once those objects are in an array, then there's a much more remarkable compression.

While reading, I started wondering if we'll see an LLM constructor that'll take a API and some actual browser use and create a model that maximizes these types of message-centric compression.
by gregw2 | 2026-02-24 02:55:24+00:00
As someone who has worked on many-TB-sized "custom" sharded systems with 30-150 shards at multiple (ok, 2) employers, a key challenge to the overall sharding landscape is unsharding all the data back at the analytics layer.

This at a minimum often involved adding back a shard key to the physical data, or partitioning, and/or physical data sorting easily in the "OLAP" layer. And a surprising number of CDC and ETL toolkits don't make it easy to parameterize a single code/configuration base, nor handle situations like shards being down at different times for maintenance or fetching data from each shard at a time of day specified by its end-of-day or handling retransmissions or reconciliation or gaps or data quality of a single shard when back in an unsharded landscape. SQL UNION ALL to reunite shards works, until it doesn't.

YMMV but would be curious if you have a story/solution/thoughts along these lines. It's easier if you shard with unified analytics/reporting in mind on day one of a sharded system design, but in the worlds I've lived in, nobody ever does. But maybe you could.
by acuozzo | 2026-02-24 02:56:00+00:00
> I want to wash my car

The question doesn't clearly state that the user wants to have his car washed at the car wash.

"I want to wash my car" is far less clear than "I want to have my car washed". As reasonable alternative interpretation is DIY.

Even better: "I wish to have my car washed by the crew and/or machinery at the local car wash business".

https://imgur.com/tCSPwYp
by nerevarthelame | 2026-02-24 02:56:23+00:00
In George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language," [0] one of his primary recommendations for writing well is to "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."

"It's not just X, it's Y" definitely seems to qualify today. It's a stale way to express an idea.

I hadn't revisited that essay since LLMs became a thing, but boy was it prescient:

> By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms [and LLMs], you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself ... But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

[0]: https://bioinfo.uib.es/~joemiro/RecEscr/PoliticsandEngLang.p...
by Karrot_Kream | 2026-02-24 02:57:17+00:00
I saw the original tweet before it got lampooned everywhere, looked at the author's bio, and it felt obviously like engagement bait to me. Why would someone actually post about how "humbled" they are that their LLM assistant deleted their emails, and this person is a VP at Meta? I may be wrong but it feels obviously written to go viral. All it would have taken is for the author to not post and nothing would have happened. I was originally tempted to make fun of the author myself but decided not to feed what I thought was obvious engagement bait.

Moral outrage about how everything is in decline is absolutely the viral currency of social media and HN is no exception. I find it amazing how few people doubt the sincerity of the original post. Probably hundreds of thousands of aggregate words spent on how everything is going downhill, but not one on the intentions of the original post.
by falcor84 | 2026-02-24 02:58:57+00:00
Why? Are you arguing that insects are purely automatons? I personally don't have a strong view on insects, but my intuition is that there are different degrees of consciousness, and feel natural to attribute some consciousness to insects, and even individual amoebas, and maybe even (as in Chalmers's famous example) to thermostats.

I would draw a separate line around sapience, and particularly the capacity for suffering, maybe indeed attributing it to mammals and birds but not insects, but consciousness seems more widespread to me.
by interestpiqued | 2026-02-24 02:58:59+00:00
The problem is, part of their whole appeal is being on the "frontier" of model development. So what happens when scaling gets too expensive or we reach some sort of end state for LLMs? They will lose their differentiation and it seems like a non negligible chance their pricing power collapses. The entire reason they make so much money is because they spend so much to be on the frontier.