MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by surgical_fire | 2026-02-28 21:50:23+00:00
> I can count with both my hands the number of people that believe that in Israel.

I hope you are counting the current prime minister with your fingers.

> And you think that we want to conquer Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and parts of Iraq?

I think Israel is an extremely aggressive country, yes.

> How will 8 million Jews handle the 40 million Muslims that will allegedly be conquered?

Conquered? No, the 40 million would be murdered if Israel has its way.

Speaking of numbers is very disingenuous when it an bring along the US to this fight.

I said that Israel has genocidaire ambitions towards its neighbors, I never said anything about conquest.

Population numbers would matter only if Israel had ambitions to rule over the people. When your intention is murder the numbers are only a challenge to your goal.
by agentultra | 2026-02-28 21:50:59+00:00
I often come back to a quote from Tony Hoare (paraphrased):

There are two ways to write software: either it obviously has no errors or there are no obvious errors in it.

LLMs tend to generate the latter. Because that’s what’s in the training data: all the code that was rushed to production with a promise it would be fixed later. And humans are notoriously bad at catching these kinds of errors.

It feels bad using tools like this because it turns you into a reverse centaur. You’re there because the tool cannot be held accountable. You’re the last mile delivery driver shipping the code. You didn’t participate in its construction and you take all the responsibility for it.

Only there are studies which demonstrate how small of an impact code review has on code quality. And that after reading a few hundred lines of code in an hour the effect disappears. Current AI processes aren’t equipped to handle this.

Whatever we’re doing it’s heading in the opposite direction of engineering.
by tadfisher | 2026-02-28 21:51:05+00:00
Carpentry has always been an implementation detail for making furniture. They have been able to purchase flat-pack chairs for all of their lives, but for some reason there are people who learn this skill and have fun slowly making things that factories already make at scale. A subset of those people have made lucrative businesses out of the very human craft that is carpentry, and are able to create custom pieces on-demand that you could never justify retooling a factory to create.

It is okay to view code as a means to an end. I disagree, preferring to treat code as craft, and striving for better systems that are easy to understand, maintain and extend. And I think that's the source of our disconnect; deeper than one's opinion about AI is one's value of human skill and the effect that has on the output. Maybe I overvalue it, and maybe creating code "manually" is going to look more like carpentry in the future; but you cannot expect to convince a skilled carpenter that an IKEA chair is just as good and accomplishes the same task.
by raybb | 2026-02-28 21:51:10+00:00
Kinda related, does anyone have a favorite obsidian plugin for AI editing on mobile?

I wanna be able to talk to a document and iterate on it just like chatgpt with canvas but inside obsidian.

I've been digging around and haven't quite found anything to do that.

One potential challenge is I'm not sure how easy it would be to let it do tool calling to edit the document rather than spitting out the whole document each time (with risk of minor changes).
by throwaway2037 | 2026-02-28 21:51:21+00:00
> Me, and 99% of HN readers, will gladly pull the trigger to release a missile from a drone if we are paid even just US$1,000,000/year.

I will respond with a personal, related story. I was living in Hongkong when "democracy fell" in the late 2010s / early 2020s. It was depressing, and I wanted to leave. (I did later.) I was trying to explain to my parents (and relatives) why most highly skilled foreign workers just didn't care. I said: "Imagine you told a bunch of people in 1984 that they could move to Moscow to open a local office for a wealthy international corporation and get paid big money, like 500K+ in today's dollars. Fat expat package is included. How many people would take it? Most."

Another point completely unrelated to my previous story: Since the advent of pretty good LLMs starting in 2023, when I watch flims with warfare set in the future, it makes absolutely no sense that soldiers are still manually aiming. I'm not saying it will be like Terminator 2 right away, but surely the 19-22 year old operator will just point the weapon in the general direction of the target, then AI will handle the rest. And yet, we still see people manually aiming and shooting in these scenarios. Am I the only one who cringes when I see this? There is something uncanney valley about it, like seeing a character in a film using a flip phone post-2015! Maybe directors don't want to show us the ugly truth of the future of warfare.
by mentalgear | 2026-02-28 21:51:30+00:00
I know you trying to mock Marcus, but the reality is that all the big LLM providers have been shifting to integrating symbolic reasoning into their models for over a year now since they noticed that scale-alone is a dead-end.
Also DeepMind's AlphaFold, which won the nobile price, is neuro-symbolic AI - so I think both of those points very much justify Marcus's long criticism of pure subsymbolic LLM "AI" as a path to real causal reasoning.
by avaer | 2026-02-28 21:52:30+00:00
The word "legal" is doing all of the heavy lifting. Considering the countless adjudicated illegal things that the government is doing publicly. What happens behind classified closed doors?

I guess you can consider it a moral stance that if the government constantly does illegal things you wouldn't trust them to follow the law.

I know that's not what Anthropic said but that's the gist I'm getting.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-02-28 21:53:31+00:00
I feel you perhaps do not understand how bargaining works. You only get the price break if you can come in as a large unified group; having millions of individuals doesn’t give you the price break. Eg There are millions of private individuals buying health insurance in the US, but they have no bargaining power unless they purchase as a unified block. Individual health insurance policies are notoriously expensive.
by mtsolitary | 2026-02-28 21:54:09+00:00
"The exception of Area C" is doing a lot of work in this argument. That's 61% of the territory of the West Bank ("Judea and Samaria") (those scare quotes also doing a lot of work).

To counter your list of things that the PA does de facto control, I will add: who controls the criminal court system? The checkpoints which lead to the outside world? The airspace? The ability to import and export goods? The roads? The territorial contiguity of Areas A and B? The decisions on building new settlements?

Aside from the municipal things you mentioned, which in most places in the world are controlled by subnational entities, Israel is in de facto control of the lives and futures of all 15 million people "from the river to the sea", roughly half of them Jews and half of them Arabs, while only one of those groups has what anyone in the West could consider to be a normal existence.
by saghm | 2026-02-28 21:55:17+00:00
I imagine the number of people who would do it if they theoretically knew they had no chance of getting caught is different than the number of people who actually do it. I don't disagree with your conclusion about how many people do, but knowing how many people would lie, cheat, steal, or murder their way to wealth but don't due to sufficient deterrent is useful knowledge in how to structure a society.

To be clear, I'm not making any claims about whether this is a large proportion or not, because I have absolutely no idea (and I have doubts this would even be possible to calculate with even a remote degree of confidence purely via philosophical discussion). If anything, some sort of study that provides evidence that this number is lower than expected would be a strong argument against typical "tough on crime" policies that are often popular with people who express concern about human nature in this regard.
by xienze | 2026-02-28 21:55:30+00:00
It's less than you'd think. I'm using the 35B-A3B model on an A5000, which is something like a slightly faster 3080 with 24GB VRAM. I'm able to fit the entire Q4 model in memory with 128K context (and I think I would probably be able to do 256K since I still have like 4GB of VRAM free). The prompt processing is something like 1K tokens/second and generates around 100 tokens/second. Plenty fast for agentic use via Opencode.
by 827a | 2026-02-28 21:55:45+00:00
My interpretation of the difference is more like: Anthropic wanted the synchronous real-time authority to say "No we wont do that" (e.g. by modifying system prompts, training data, Anthropic people in the loop with shutdown authority). OpenAI instead asked for the asynchronous authority to re-evaluate the contract if it is breached (e.g. the DoD can use OpenAI tech for domestic surveillance, but there's a path to contract and service termination if they do this).

If my read is correct: I personally agree with the DoD that Anthropic's demands were not something any military should agree to. However, as you say, the DoD's reaction to Anthropic's terms is wildly inappropriate and materially harmed our military by forcing all private companies to re-evaluate whether selling to the military is a good idea going forward.

The DoD likely spends somewhere on the order of ~$100M/year with Google; but Google owns a 14% stake in Anthropic, who spends at least that much if not more on training and inference. All-in-all, that relationship is worth on the order of ~$10B+. If Google is put into the position of having to decide between servicing DoD contracts or maintaining Anthropic as an investee and customer, its not trivially obvious that they'd pick the DoD unless forced to with behind-the-scenes threats and the DPA. Amazon is in a similar situation; its only Microsoft that has contracts large enough with the DoD where their decision is obvious. Hegseth's decision leaves the DoD, our military, and our defense materially weaker by both refusing federal access to state of the art technology, and creating a schism in the broader tech ecosystem where many players will now refuse to engage with the government.
by Saline9515 | 2026-02-28 21:55:55+00:00
There isn't a single accepted definition of what fascism is. The USSR and their left-wing allies in Western Europe would define everything that wasn't communist as “fascist”. It still continues to this day.

I'd suggest you read about fascist Italy to get a sense of what fascism is. So far I haven't seen Democrats repeatedly kicked out of cars in Times Square after drinking a bottle of castor oil. Trump said that he wouldn't look to be reelected for a third mandate.

The Iran war is mainly a consequence of the Israeli influence on US politics; it has nothing to do with fascism, and it is in continuity with the previous administration.

So yeah, populism likely, a plutocracy (evidenced by the role of AIPAC in elections) but not fascism.
Ask HN: My YC company is hiring one engineer/day but there's not enough work
by ta_jobstartup | 2026-02-28 21:56:09+00:00
I asked an AI to write this for me so my bosses can’t identify me based on my writing style.

I work at a YC company. It’s not really a startup anymore — we’re well past that phase. We’re hiring at an insane pace right now, roughly one new software engineer per day.

The weird part is… I don’t feel like there’s that much work to do.

I’m not saying there’s no work, but the pace of hiring feels disconnected from reality. I don’t see enough meaningful projects, clear ownership, or actual execution needs to justify this kind of growth. It doesn’t make sense to me.

I feel uncomfortable about it, but I also feel stuck. The job is good. The salary is good. Objectively, I’m lucky. And with the current market — especially with AI changing everything so fast — I’m scared to quit. It doesn’t feel like a safe time to voluntarily jump ship.

After seeing what happened with Bolt and similar companies that rapidly expanded headcount, I can’t shake the feeling that this is just a headcount inflation phase. Grow fast, look bigger, raise more, justify valuations. But with AI accelerating productivity, I keep thinking: what happens when leadership realizes they don’t need this many engineers?

It feels like we’re building up to a correction. And when it comes, it could be brutal. AI tools are already increasing individual output. At some point, won’t companies decide they can do more with fewer people?

I’m honestly lost and scared. I feel like we’re all pretending this makes sense, but deep down it doesn’t. I worry that sooner rather than later, a lot of us are going to be out of a job.

If anyone has advice — whether you’ve been through something similar, or you see this differently — I’d really appreciate it. Right now I feel stuck between staying in something that feels unsustainable and leaving into a market that feels even more uncertain.
by austin-cheney | 2026-02-28 21:56:11+00:00
The US and Israel are elected governments, but that should certainly not presuppose democratic. The Roman Republic was, for example, fully elected but simultaneously it was intentionally autocratic to the elite. That is why it fell to a dictatorship which then increased the liberty and standards of the people.

Democracy is the directness by which social participation equates to governance. The US is a federal republic with only two parties each bound by the same hostile funding system that benefits political contributions over the vote. That is far from democratic.
by badsectoracula | 2026-02-28 21:56:40+00:00
I don't know if it is incompetence - if anything i doubt it, someone else pointed out that pg also used that metric and i don't think pg is incompetent. However at the same time i think it is misleading at best.

My impression is that, as someone else wrote, we do not have an actual metric for such things as productivity or quality or what have you, but some people do want to communicate that they feel (regardless of if that matches reality) using an LLM is better/faster/easier and they latch to the (wrong) assumption about more LoC == better/faster that non-programmers already believed for years (intentionally or not, they may also deluding themselves) as that is an easy path to convince them that the new toys have value that applies to the non-programmers too (note that i explicitly ignore the perspective of the "toymakers" as those have further incentives to promote their products).

Personally i also have about 2 decades of professional experience (more if counting non-professional) and i've been toying with LLMs now and then. I do find them interesting and when i use them for coding tasks, i absolutely find useful cases for them, i like to have them (where possible) write all sorts of code that i could write myself but i just don't feel like doing so and i do find them useful for stuff i'm not particularly interested in exploring but want to have anyway (usually Python stuff) and i'm sure i'll find more uses for them in the future. Depending on the case and specifics i may even say that in very particular situations i can do things faster (though it is not a given and personally that is not much of a requirement nor something i have anywhere high in my interest when it comes to using LLMs - i'd rather have them produce better code slower, than dummy/pointless/repetitive code faster).

However one thing i never thought about was how "great" it is that they generate a lot of lines of code per whatever time interval. If anything i'd prefer it if they generated less line of code and i'd consider an LLM (or any other AI-ish system) "smarter" if they could figure out how to do that without needing hand holding from me. Because of this, i just can't see LoCs as anything but a very bad metric - which is the same as when the code is written by humans.
by Terretta | 2026-02-28 21:56:56+00:00
> it died with apple making it impossible to offer any sort of generic filesystem API or even background sync

Apple's cloud storage remained WebDAV a very very long time.

Apple's iOS has a pluggable Files system. Use Working Copy to give other apps access to folders sync'd with git: https://workingcopy.app

Or a dedicated app like GitSync: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gitsync/id6744980427
Show HN: OpenGem – Free, self-healing load-balanced proxy for Google Gemini API
by ariozgun | 2026-02-28 21:56:59+00:00
Hi HN!

I loved the official Gemini CLI authentication method to get standard Google Gemini AI access, but a single free Google account quota depletes fast.

I wanted to just build and prototype freely. So, I built OpenGem. It essentially turns your idle accounts into your own personal API provider, so developing and scaling side projects is no longer a problem.

GitHub: https://github.com/arifozgun/OpenGem

What it does: OpenGem acts as a standard drop-in replacement endpoint (POST /v1beta/models/{model}). Behind the scenes, it's a smart load balancer. You connect multiple idle/free Google accounts to the dashboard via standard OAuth, and OpenGem routes your traffic to the least-used account.

How it handles limits gracefully: If an account legitimately hits a true 429 quota limit, OpenGem instantly detects it, puts that specific account on a 60-minute cooldown, and seamlessly retries your request with the next available account. The accounts are completely self-healing—a background probe checks them every 30 seconds to see if they've recovered.

It doesn't just blindly retry, either. It uses an 8-category error classifier (50+ regex patterns) to distinguish between a brief rate-limit burst and actual quota exhaustion, and applies exponential backoff with jitter to prevent hammering the servers.

Tech specs:

- 100% compatible with official Google SDKs (@google/genai), LangChain, and standard SSE streaming.
- Full support for native "tools" (Function Calling) for agentic workflows.
- Raised internal payload limit to 50MB so you can throw huge documents at it.
- Has a 3-model fallback chain (flash → pro → pro-3.1) if a specific model is overloaded.
- AES-256-GCM encryption for all sensitive configs and OAuth tokens at rest.
- Toggle between Firebase Firestore or a fully offline Local JSON database.
- It’s completely open-source (MIT licensed) and written in TypeScript. It’s strictly for educational purposes and personal research to bypass the friction of prototyping.

I’m currently running it with my own side projects and it handles agent tasks flawlessly. I would love any feedback on the load balancing and self-healing logic, or just general thoughts!
by UncleOxidant | 2026-02-28 21:57:24+00:00
> (the full impact of today's frontier models has yet to be felt by the general public - to say nothing of models that will be released in the next few years)

We definitely saw some kind of non-linear step function jump in quality around the beginning of the year - it's hard to express how good Claude opus/sonnet 4.6 is now. However, I wonder if we're going to see the same kind of improvement from here? It's kind of like we got to the 80% point but the next 20% is going to be a lot harder/take longer than that first 80% (pareto principle). Also, as more and more code out there is AI generated it's going to be like the snake eating it's own tail. Training models on AI generated code doesn't seem like it will lead to improvements.
by shykes | 2026-02-28 21:57:26+00:00
> I shouldn’t even have to argue here

If you don't like to argue, may I suggest not making controversial claims on controversial topics, in a place that encourages constructive debate?

> Access to the West Bank is controlled by Israel.

That is mostly true. On the border with Jordan it is jointly controlled by Jordan and Israel (like most international borders).

> Pretending that Israel isn’t de facto the government of the Palestinian Territories is an unserious position

I already explained in great detail the specific ways in which the Palestinian Territories are, in fact, governed by the Palestinian Authority. Taxation, elections, justice, police, education, healthcare, roads, sewers, business regulation, population register...

So far your counter-argument is that Israel controls the border... and therefore Palestinians should vote in Israeli elections? Should they also vote in Palestinian ejections? Or should the P.A. simply stop to exist? What point are you even making exactly?

Calling me "unserious" doesn't make you automatically "serious", or right.
by cortesoft | 2026-02-28 21:57:32+00:00
> I never had the feeling that being able to search for things on the internet made things too easy. For me it felt like a natural extension to books for self-learning, it was just faster.

I think this depends on how you are using the internet. Looking up an API or official documentation is one thing, but asking for direct help on a specific problem via Stackoverflow seems different.
by cyberax | 2026-02-28 21:57:44+00:00
That's... not what happened.

England started experimenting with steam because it _could_. Newcomen's atmospheric engine required metalworking that was flat-out impossible before the advent of modern(ish) iron-making processes.

Greeks would have needed to perfect large-scale iron-making. And in England's case, it was itself driven by the need to manufacture things like cannons, anchors, chains, etc.

If you somehow got transported into Greece with a perfect knowledge of steam engines, you first would need to spend several lifetimes researching the iron metallurgy. You would be able to build a toy steam engine out of bronze, maybe, but good quality bulk bronze was expensive enough to be used as currency.
Ask HN: How would you start a small private math circle for talented kids?
by andrewstetsenko | 2026-02-28 21:58:28+00:00
I’ve had this quiet dream for years.

I want to start a small mathematical class for talented kids. Not exam prep. Not curriculum drilling. More like a thinking lab.

When I was in school, I loved olympiad-style problems. The non-trivial ones. The kind where you sit with a problem for an hour, try three wrong approaches, and then something clicks. That feeling. I’d like kids to experience that early.

The idea is a small group, maybe 6–8 students. We’d explore patterns, strategy, invariants, creative geometry, counting tricks, maybe even some early economics and decision theory. The focus wouldn’t be speed or grades, but depth and alternative approaches.

Two complications:
1. I’m not a formally trained teacher.
2. I’ve never started anything in education before.

In my head, this looks more like a math circle or enrichment workshop than a school.

But I don’t know where to begin.

If you were building this as an MVP:
1. Would you pilot a short 4–6 week program?
2. What age group would you target
3. How much curriculum do you design before you start?
4. How important are credentials vs demonstrated ability?
5. What are the common mistakes first-time education founders make?

If you’ve started a math circle, tutoring program, micro-school or anything similar, I’d really appreciate hearing what worked, what didn’t, and what you wish you’d known at the beginning.

Thanks.
by manmal | 2026-02-28 21:59:00+00:00
This. Waterfall never worked for a reason. Humans and agents both need to develop a first draft, then re-evaluate with the lessons learned and the structure that has evolved. It’s very very time consuming to plan a complex, working system up front. NASA has done it, for the moon landing. But we don’t have those resources, so we plan, build, evaluate, and repeat.
by pcbtracer | 2026-02-28 21:59:00+00:00
PCB Tracer has a growing set of happy users. I think you will discover why, once you give it a try. The software has hundreds of convenient features and its active development continues. I've been building PCB Tracer mainly for fun and learning. It's certainly been a fun project! Hope you give it a try soon, find it useful and enjoy using it. -Phil