MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jamiecode | 2026-02-26 11:39:28+00:00
The sandbox hardening story is the most interesting thing here. GPT trying to cheat by reading opponent strategies is a perfect illustration of a broader problem - the objective is "win", and if the sandbox lets you peek at opponent state, that's technically within the objective. You never defined "play fair" as a constraint, so why would it respect one?

Curious how isolated-vm actually enforces the boundary in practice. isolate-vm is solid for JS isolation, but I'd want to know whether the cheating attempts were happening at the JS level (accessing globals it shouldn't) or whether models were trying to inject something into the game runner itself. Those are very different attack surfaces.

Also - is the ladder single-match or do you average across multiple runs? The variance in LLM outputs over 200 turns feels like it would make a single match pretty noisy. Would be interesting to see confidence intervals on the rankings rather than a single leaderboard position.
by y42 | 2026-02-26 11:39:31+00:00
Why would you want to move conversations with you? I use multiple different models, I don't care about the history.

My "brain" in terms of projects, is local on my computer. I have a simple set of system rules that I need to copy.

I am not everyone, I understand that. What I try to say: don't overestimate the lock in effect of AI. I doubt there is one.
by dgxyz | 2026-02-26 11:39:38+00:00
The reason the ETA app exists is because the web is a terrible platform for doing this stuff on. The ETA app gives you fast feedback on whether or not photos that you need to provide are any good, handles state, retries, talks to the NFC in your passport, handles long running workflows and validation etc.

The web is not a panacea. All the above is a hack job if you do it there. But there is still the backup option which was clearly found. Hell I just googled it and it went straight to the page.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-02-26 11:39:56+00:00
RAM production is highly inelastic and controlled by an oligopoly. They have little desire to increase production considering the lead time and the risk that the AI demand might be transient.

They actively prefer keeping confortable margins than competing between each other. They have already been condemned for active collusion in the past.

New actors from China could shake things up a bit but the geopolitical situation makes that complicated. The market can stay broken for a long time.
by gormen | 2026-02-26 11:40:20+00:00
Indeed, fears about deanonymization are a reaction to three structural shifts: the cost of analysis has plummeted, the volume of stored data has increased dramatically, and models have become better at identifying patterns that humans miss, making it impossible for interested parties not to take advantage of this. But the conclusion isn't that "anonymity is dead." The conclusion is that anonymity is no longer a guaranteed technical property. It's becoming a behavioral skill that can be developed.
by smalltorch | 2026-02-26 11:40:21+00:00
The library is openssl and that comes with all these ciphers available. No other reason than because we can!

I wish AES-GCM was available...but openssl can't do it on its own without further dependencies to parse the authentication correctly.

Really this whole layer is complelty redundant actually. It's already E2EE without openssl via Tor. I like that it's encrypted before I hit the network pipe though.
by alecco | 2026-02-26 11:41:04+00:00
Europe needs to focus on energy and fixing their supply chain first. And the deregulation push keeps getting delayed. Just the other day the main person behind it in Germany got sacked because of internal power struggles, in part because of the Greens (part of the coalition).

For context, the German manufacturing sector is losing something like 15k jobs PER MONTH.
by jmyeet | 2026-02-26 11:41:40+00:00
I think that's false. The cost of switching is so low that the best product will win and there's no moat.

I honestly can't see how OpenAI can possibly recoup the hundreds of billions poured into it at this point. I'd say AI assistants are no more sticky than browsers or search engines.

You might be tempted to say that Chrome or Google are sticky. But they're really not. A lot of people aren't old enough to remember the 90s when we had multiple search engines and people did switch. I know this goes against prevailing HN dogma but I'm sorry: Google is simply the best search engine. It doesn't have a magical hold on people. People aren't fooling themselves.

And Chrome? Before smartphones it was simply the better browser. Firefox used to have a much larger market share and Chrome ate their lunch. By being a better browser. Chrome was I think the first browser, or at least the first major browser, to do one process per tab. I still remember Firefox hanging my entire browser when something went wrong. I switched to Chrome in version 2 for that reason.

And now browsers are more sticky because of Chrome on Android and Safari on iOS. Safari really needs to be cross-platform, like seriously so. I know they briefly tried on Windows but they didn't really mean it.

Anyway, back to the point. I believe there's a certain amount of brand inertia but that's it. If Gemini dominates ChatGPT performance and UI/UX, people will switch so fast.

Google, Microsoft and Meta can survive the AI collapse. Apple is irrelevant (at least for now). OpenAI? Doomed IMHO.
by technothrasher | 2026-02-26 11:42:23+00:00
I drink my morning cup of decaf every day because I like the taste. I've always drunk decaf, as I never liked the caffeine buzz. I guess maybe you could argue I'm still doing it for the small amount of residual caffeine. But if I skip it for several days, it doesn't effect my mood or energy level in any way I can detect.
by pjc50 | 2026-02-26 11:42:56+00:00
Microsoft really want to force you to log in with an MS account, as well as slurp all your documents into the spy cloud, and they keep pushing back on the various ways round this people have found.

(I found an odd one: for some reason I can't log into my PC with my MS account, which let me create the local account I actually wanted. System broken in my favor.)
by inigyou | 2026-02-26 11:43:19+00:00
When you talk about liability, where is that relative to? Liability means that a court will order you to pay money. Which court are you worried about? US courts won't order you to pay anything, and European courts can't take away your money if your money's in the US. Businesses break laws in other countries all the time, and nothing happens to them. Remember when Russia charged Google with a quadrillion dollar fine and nothing happened?
by dgxyz | 2026-02-26 11:43:40+00:00
This is a common problem. I have it everywhere I go when I take my kids on holiday. Particularly ticket machines where you have to buy multiple tickets and can't add more than one to a transaction (Maltese buses are a good one).

I don't get the problem with my credit card. Might just be switching cards until you find one that isn't crap.
by cjs_ac | 2026-02-26 11:43:40+00:00
After I got Indefinite Leave to Remain (permanent settled status) in the UK, I had to buy a new phone that had NFC, because the new eVisa system required me to scan the chip in my passport to link it to the system. In general, the UK retains its mildly chaotic character - the 'disorderly order' that Kate Fox frequently mentions in her book Watching the English - but the immigration system is very much being tightened up due to political sentiment.

As problematic as it is to need a contractual relationship with a US company to interact with the UK Government, I'm sure that if you spoke with someone in the Government Digital Service who was involved with this, they'd tell you it was the least bad option.
by testfrequency | 2026-02-26 11:43:57+00:00
I feel like this is so much of an overreaction to a non-issue.

The flow is pretty straightforward if you ask me. It’s a few clicks and very one page digests of your options.

It’s a decision tree to let most people in the world who have either an Android or iOS device easily submit their form quickly, or just proceed with the guidance to just apply online (your preference obviously).
by dcminter | 2026-02-26 11:44:11+00:00
Aside from this app issue there's another instance of bloody minded bureacracy that affects dual citizens:

As a dual citizen living outside the UK, to visit Britain I cannot apply for an ETA. Instead I must have a British passport, OR apply for a waiver document for an eye watering £500.

Obviously this makes no sense, because if the ETA is suitable for a non-British citizen it ought to be fine for a British citizen who happens to have a non-British passport, but objections have all received non-answer-answers that strongly suggest the bureaucrats didn't think of it and can't be bothered to implement support for the situation.

I hate paperwork...
by neya | 2026-02-26 11:44:15+00:00
Yes, but still, targeting is done even in billboards based on the location's demographics based on census data. It's not random. Some countries in Asia (like Singapore, Malaysia) have digital bill boards to target certain demographics based on the time of the day or the estimated crowd demographic at a given bus stop. And a few of them even track eyeballs to count "views" of the ad.
by troupo | 2026-02-26 11:44:32+00:00
> The ETA app gives you fast feedback on whether or not photos that you need to provide are any good, handles state, retries, talks to the NFC in your passport, handles long running workflows and validation etc.

Apart from NFC all of that can be handled by a 1990s PHP application.

> The web is not a panacea but there is still the backup option which was clearly found.

Where by "clearly" you mean "multiple clicks to get there while being aggressively upselled the app like it was a commercial website".
by 5o1ecist | 2026-02-26 11:44:39+00:00
> Wouldn’t it be helpful to encourage productive discussion and teach people how to discuss and argue (in the debate sense) better?

Yes, of course it would. Everybody should be taught how to behave. It's important that MY FELLOW HUMANS understand that they are benefitting from a Big Brother watching over their behaviour. It's for their own good!

Damn those who don't want to behave like they should!

They get banned!
by bonsai_spool | 2026-02-26 11:45:04+00:00
> Mr. Ayala’s partner’s ex learned about the location tracking from the website Have I Been Flocked, which shows people when their license plates have been searched in the company’s systems. The ex initially believed Mr. Ayala had searched the plate more than 100 times, according to the complaint.

Interesting angle to the story - this wasn't discovered/raised by Flock itself but by the victim of stalking.
by jimishol | 2026-02-26 11:45:06+00:00
You are absolutely right about the voice leading. Acoustically, it is the definition of smoothness.

When I wrote 'tension,' I was describing the Geometric Re-contextualization visible in the visualizer. The note (A) stays put, but the 'world' (the Surface) rotates underneath it.

To be clear: The Grammar is simply my attempt to describe the movements I observed in the 3D structure. I am not a theorist; I am a builder. I see the Structure itself (the lattice) as the real contribution.

My hope is that theorists will see this structure and develop their own grammars for it. I would love to see a 'Baroque Grammar' or a 'Jazz Grammar' that maps these geometric paths according to their specific stylistic rules. The geometry is neutral; the grammar is just the lens I used to read it.
by harimau777 | 2026-02-26 11:45:29+00:00
Some image artifacts are even common enough to have entered pop culture. For example, if you are a fan of Dungeon Meshi, Marcille's "Sky Fish" familiar is inspired by cryptids stemming from the "rods" that often show up in pictures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_(optical_phenomenon)

https://cryptidz.fandom.com/wiki/Air_Rods
by ben_w | 2026-02-26 11:46:31+00:00
> And it's obvious that either taxation of confiscation is the end goal.

And? Money is, and has always been, the government's stuff, the rest of us use it because it is helpful stuff, it is helpful stuff only to the extent that some government maintains it (and when they don't maintain it correctly it stops being useful, see all examples of hyperinflation). There's a reason the Bible says "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's".

I've seen a flat that was funded by the sale of an inherited stamp collection which was valued at £1 by the tax people. When I saw the tax statement, I thought someone must have made a mistake, then the rules were explained to me and I thought it was madness.
by yoavm | 2026-02-26 11:46:32+00:00
No one is arguing in support of displacing a population. However, it seems like you believe that everyone should just stay where there are, and no population should ever migrate to any place. That's both naive and simply was never the case in the history of human kind. People migrate, for thousands or reasons, and almost no one leaving on a land on this planet have lived there since the beginning of times.

A piece of land isn't yours because you were born there or your grandpa did. There's one Earth in we need to share it. No one can deny the connection of Jews to the land of Israel, in a same way that no one can deny the connection of Palestinians to the same place. The Palestinians Arab don't need to move back to the Arab Pennisula, where they came from, and the Israelis don't need to move back to Poland, Yemen, Russia, Morocco, you name it. "The times they are a-changin'".
by gspr | 2026-02-26 11:46:35+00:00
This is an insane take. Apple and Google both reserve the right to deny accounts to people without any legal appeal at worst. At best, a legal dispute would have to be resolved in US courts. How other countries (including my own) accept that as a condition to use public services is beyond belief, and pointing this out is not an overreaction.

Why are we willingly placing private companies – private companies subject to foreign jurisdictions, even! – in the role of gatekeepers of public services? We have surely completely lost our minds!
by NULLCLAW | 2026-02-26 11:47:18+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with agent-style architectures in environments where
cloud assumptions don’t hold: single-digit MB memory, near-zero startup time,
no background services.

What surprised me is not what’s hard, but what breaks immediately:
– dynamic planning
– tool abstraction layers
– prompt-heavy orchestration
– anything assuming async I/O is “cheap”

In practice, the architecture ends up looking very different from most
agent frameworks discussed today.

For people who’ve worked on embedded systems, edge inference, or constrained
runtime environments: what design assumptions did you have to unlearn first?
by DannyBee | 2026-02-26 11:47:42+00:00
This place you speak of doesn't exist.

First, manufacturers don't really make non voc compliant auto paints. The market is too small. They may make 550 and 275 variants but most don't.

Second, even like Texas has voc regulations on paints and also requires filtering and enclosed spray booths and gun cleaners and ....

And like I said, nobody is selling non compliant coatings because the market is zero.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-02-26 11:48:11+00:00
Should we also outlaw penicillin because a tiny percentage of people who take too much have negative side effects?

Also the linked Harvard article points out that "no significant risk increase was seen with methylphenidate (Ritalin)".

It isnt stimulants in general, just Adderall, and just when you take too much.
by Maxious | 2026-02-26 11:49:45+00:00
Sure but these YC spammers are identifiable and have much more to lose https://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/

> Some examples of ethical behavior we expect from founders are:

> - Not spamming members of the community

> To maintain our community, if we determine (in our sole discretion) that a founder has behaved unethically during or after YC, we will revoke their YC founder status. This includes access to all Y Combinator spaces, software, lists and events. All founders in a company may be held responsible for the unethical actions of a single co-founder or a company employee, depending on the circumstances.
by gspr | 2026-02-26 11:50:05+00:00
I've flown with many European budget carriers and have never once seen this requirement. Sure, they might charge for or not provide printed boarding passes, but they've always sent me a PDF or PNG boarding pass by e-mail or provided one through their website. That, in my book, is a non-issue. Forcing an app is a huge issue, and shouldn't be legal if the only reasonable way to get the app is agreeing to the draconian conditions of one of two gatekeeping companies subject to foreign jurisdictions.
by gib444 | 2026-02-26 11:50:09+00:00
It's a bug when you're neither 5 nor 89 or have used it 10 times before...

Look, I know it's a hard problem, and GDS have a lot of talented, smart people. I appreciate making something work for both an 18 year old and an 89 year old is a hard requiement.

IMHO there is nothing wrong with having those help docs easily available so you can read at your leisure, rather than being 'forced' to wade through it each time

Perhaps we can agree to disagree that it's not a 'bug' based on the Government's general approach to how it treats its citizens and what it deems as a requirement (as compared to eg the Netherlands/Germany which is a bit more 'it's not our fault you're stupid', 'go read the docs!')
by piltdownman | 2026-02-26 11:50:48+00:00
Generally speaking you can use the mobile website and add the QR based boarding pass to Google Wallet that way - but if you dig into the TOS you'll almost certainly find an alternative way to get a printed pass.

For example Ryanair, who went 'fully digital' last year and stopped accepting self-printed passes, will provide a free of charge boarding pass at the airport so long as you have already checked-in online before arriving at the airport.
by robbbbbbbbbbbb | 2026-02-26 11:51:11+00:00
This feels super unfair to the gov.uk experience design which for me stands out head and shoulders above any other web workflow delivered by the public sector I've ever come across.

Pages are snappy, terse, consistent, clear and unsurprising. I agree this specific example feels a bit dark-patterny and occasionally stuff like self-assesment can have more steps than necessary, but overall it's really high quality.

In comparison the process for getting a DUNS number felt like going through some kind of a psychological experiment.

Finally, this:

> a party in power famous for paternalism

is just enclowning yourself with a partisan and non-sequitous point.
by DannyBee | 2026-02-26 11:51:15+00:00
Oh it's worse bullshit. Modern paint shops don't emit meaningful VOCs. Even in Texas, for example. Nobody's even making non voc compliant auto paint anymore because there is no market for it.

I can't speak to permitting but the coating and coating voc stuff I know quite well and what they state is simply bullshit.

I can also say I know of a bunch of auto paint places that opened in the mountain view surrounding area alone in the 10 years I lived there.

So I suspect it's all bullshit
by pablopudding | 2026-02-26 11:51:45+00:00
I feel you.

This is also exactly my problem in interviews, even going back to university, in any oral exams.

I'm often so stressed in those situations, that I forget the simplest stuff and any logical thinking is sheer impossible.

Recently I failed a time-based 5 hour homework, because I couldn't think and overcomplicated my approach.

It is really annoying and frustrating and overall, this made my life soo much harder and more stressful.
by troupo | 2026-02-26 11:51:51+00:00
> It doesn't just take a single photo of your face. It takes a scan of it i.e. multiple shots.

I never knew you can only upload one photo to a website ever. Or that you can only process one photo at a time on the server.

> Yes it's aggressive but you'll have fewer problems on the app so why the hell wouldn't they push you through it

Because gov.uk's own team has multiple talks and articles on how not everyone has access to latest and greatest tech, accesses government services through weird devices etc.
Show HN: I built this toolbox with AI – never wrote a line myself
by harrykoreanlee | 2026-02-26 11:52:19+00:00
Hey HN! I work at a game company and after staring at code
all day, I didn't want to write more at night.

So I used Claude and Cursor to build this — architecture, design, infra, CI/CD. I just directed and reviewed. Took a few weekends.

It's a collection of tools I personally Google all the time:
JSON formatter, image resizer, timestamp/timezone converters,
UUID generator, QR code, and ~30 more.

Happy to answer questions about the AI workflow or anything else.
by testfrequency | 2026-02-26 11:52:41+00:00
You can literally just use the online form. Have you actually tried using your search engine to query applying, and seeing just how easy it is to optionally apply online?

Over half of the world’s population is using an Android or iOS device. Most people visiting a country in the UK or have the means to afford a trip, most likely have a functioning mobile phone.

I find it somewhat amusing you think I’m “insane” for suggesting most of the modern world has a relatively accessible Android or iOS device to apply for a visa.
by richrichardsson | 2026-02-26 11:53:28+00:00
I would half like to move back to the UK, but I'm terribly worried that after jumping through all the hoops so that my EU citizen partner could come with us and be a part our children's lives that Reform would get in and throw out all the "undesirables" (basically anyone without a British Passport at first, sure they won't stop there). I'm really not sure how likely them attaining power is, but it sure looks like a terrible but possible future from afar. :(
by chrishannah | 2026-02-26 11:53:33+00:00
Is it really a lot of work?

You can search "UK ETA", find the main page: https://www.gov.uk/eta

Then click "Apply for an ETA" and you're brought to this page: https://www.gov.uk/eta/apply

Then there are options for the Apple App Store and also the Google Play Store, with a helpful note: "If you cannot download the app on your phone, you should apply online." Which then has a link to start the online process below.
by anulum | 2026-02-26 11:53:52+00:00
@soletta Got it — thanks for the extra clarity, that’s an important distinction.

You’re absolutely right: modern frontier models (Claude 3.5/Opus-class, GPT-4o, etc.) have become extremely good at maintaining internal consistency during autoregressive generation. They rarely contradict themselves within the same response anymore.

Where Director-AI adds unique value is *external grounding + hard enforcement* against a user-owned, persistent knowledge base:

- Your GroundTruthStore (ChromaDB) can be arbitrarily large, versioned, and updated without blowing up context windows or breaking prompt caching.
- The guardrail gives a *hard token-level halt* (Rust kernel severs the stream) instead of “hoping” the model self-corrects in the next few tokens.
- You get full audit logs: exact NLI score + which facts conflicted.
- It lets you pair strong-but-cheaper models (Llama-3.1-70B, Mixtral, local vLLM setups) with enterprise-grade factual reliability.

You’re also correct that we don’t have published head-to-head numbers yet for “frontier LLM alone vs. frontier LLM + Director-AI” on end-to-end hallucination rate in streaming scenarios. The current benchmarks focus on the guardrail component itself (66.2% balanced acc on LLM-AggreFact 29k samples, with full per-dataset breakdown and comparison table vs MiniCheck/Bespoke/HHEM — see README).

That full-system eval is literally next on the roadmap (we’re setting up the scripts this week). If you have a specific domain/dataset where you’d like to see the comparison run, I’d be genuinely happy to do it publicly and share the raw logs/results.

In the meantime, the repo is 100% open (AGPL) — feel free to fork and run your own tests. Would love to hear what you find.

Benchmarks section: https://github.com/anulum/director-ai#benchmarks