MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrguyorama | 2026-02-18 21:05:32+00:00
This exact sentence (minus the specific version) is claimed every single week.

No, you do not "become scary good" every single week the past 10 years and yet still not be able to drive coast to coast all by itself (which Elon promised it would do a decade ago)

You are just human and bad at evaluating it. You might even be experiencing literal statistical noise.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-18 21:05:34+00:00
> …it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well.

Added emphasis to the most crucial part, in my opinion.

If you can manage to deliver a product that's meaningfully better than the competition, you still have an edge, so long as you're competent at marketing.

Nothing gets people searching for alternatives as consistently as frustration, and a product that was lazily built with AI (vibe coded or otherwise) is going to be full of bugs and papercuts that make using it a poor experience.

This is particularly true for software that sits in the hot path of peoples' workflows, where thoughtless design, misbehavior, and poor optimization chip away at time the user can't afford to spare.

In short: yes, competition will be plentiful but it will also be almost entirely awful, and capable SWEs can capitalize on that. It won't take much to stand out amongst the mountains of garbage that will be generated in the coming years.
by Flere-Imsaho | 2026-02-18 21:06:03+00:00
My feed (UK based) seems to give me the major news stories well before the mainstream (BBC), and I'm taking days if not weeks in some cases. Now it could be that's how the mainstream decides to cover a particular story? What's worrying is when a story is all over X but isn't covered.

To give an example, the recent protests in Iran where being covered on X but the BBC was silent for weeks before finally covering the story (for a few days).
by e12e | 2026-02-18 21:06:12+00:00
The main thing that held me back from using Asahi on my M2 MacBook air - was missing external display. If I read TFA correctly - that should now work with a custom kernel.

If that's true - I'd say MacBook air M2 is probably the new sweetspot - depending on how cheap you could get an M1.

My impression is that until now, MacBook air M1 was the sweetspot.
by AGsist | 2026-02-18 21:07:20+00:00
I’m exploring whether a non-monetary economic protocol can be validated purely as a deterministic state machine.

No token launch.
No deployment.
No market simulation.

Just:

– explicit state surface
– deterministic events
– invariant layers (correctness + safety)
– stress scenarios (S01–S22)

The goal is structural falsifiability.

If the invariant system collapses under adversarial sequencing, I want to know.

Blueprint:
https://github.com/ArturGrandi/gt2-research-track/blob/main/...

Context:
https://github.com/ArturGrandi/gt2-research-track
by jongjong | 2026-02-18 21:07:20+00:00
I agree with the assessment that pure writing (by a human) is over. Content is going to matter a lot more.

It's going to be tough for fiction authors to break through. Sadly, I don't think the average consumer has sufficiently good taste to tell when something is genuinely novel. People often prefer the carefully formulated familiar garbage over the creative gems; this was true before AI and, IMO, will continue to be true after AI. This is not just about writing, it's about art in general.

There will be a subset of people who can see through the form and see substance and those will be able to identify non-AI work but they will continue to be a minority. The masses will happily consume the slop. The masses have poor taste and they're more interested in "comfort food" ideas than actually novel ideas. Novelty just doesn't do it for them. Most people are not curious, new ideas don't interest them. These people will live and breathe AI slop and they will feel uncomfortable if presented with new material, even if wrapped in a layer of AI (e.g. human-written core ideas, rewritten by AI).

I feel like that about most books, music and pop culture in general; it was slop and it will continue to be slop... It was the same basic ideas about elves, dragons, wizards, orcs, kings, queens, etc... Just reorganized and mashed with different overarching storylines "a difficult journey" or "epic battles" with different wording.

Most people don't understand the difference between pure AI-generated content (seeded by a small human input) and human-generated content which was rewritten by AI (seeded by a large human input) because most people don't care about and never cared about substance. Their entire lives may be about form over substance.
by ajb | 2026-02-18 21:07:31+00:00
Historically, what R&D there was, was often done by the state; simply because of being the entity with the most spare capacity to do so. It goes a long way back, Egyptian pharoes and Chinese emperors had written in their histories about how they invented things or made economic improvements. These were most likely done by people under their sponsorship, but nevertheless they saw it as part of their role.
by xpl | 2026-02-18 21:07:46+00:00
> Tesla is famously anything but a car company because their cars are mediocre in every way except the battery range

I can't say that I'm a big fan of this guy... But I can tell you this: I learned to drive only after moving to the U.S. recently, and when I had to choose my first car, I found Tesla to be the best among many I tried. It's just awesome, and I don't even use their FSD, the car itself is superb (at least the latest "3"). Minimalistic, no BS, drives well, quiet, comfortable. The same feeling I had with the first iPhone, compared to other phones.
by RetpolineDrama | 2026-02-18 21:08:01+00:00
Or from the other perspective: Meta and Google have had their finger on the scale for more than a decade (along with old twitter).

In twitters case, you had regime officials directing censorship illegally through open emails and meetings.

It's no surprise that the needle moves right when you dial back the suppression of free expression even a little bit (X still censors plenty)
by sllabres | 2026-02-18 21:08:32+00:00
Sometimes I miss the times where you had a compact development environment, wit one installer. Your source produced a mostly self contained binary in a reasonable size, you had nice debugging support and quick turnaround times for a compiled language even on a small development machines. And all that for attractive price for a perpetual license (Borland times).

Today it seems I have to give the producer my email address for the 'free' "Delphi History PDF".
Well, times have changed. :)
by joshstrange | 2026-02-18 21:08:34+00:00
I'd love the ability to run a command on connection to a server (like "tmux attach -t main") and also a way to create my own buttons in the UI to send things like tmux commands (next window, create window, etc) to make it easier use from my phone.

Also, and I'll probably just buy it to test, but how does it handle copy/paste and STT? Especially with coding agents I use speech-to-text to explain something and that's always hit or miss in terminal apps on iOS in my experience.
by kstrauser | 2026-02-18 21:09:08+00:00
I went to a doctor for something unrelated and ended up getting an MRI that happened to show my upper spine. The neurologist read it and determined that I have a Chiari I malformation[0]. I have no symptoms from this whatsoever. I never have. It's unlikely that I ever will. If it weren't for the MRI, I'd never have known.

Doctors use to think that the degree of it that I have meant I'd have problems with it. After all, people who came in with the symptoms and then had an MRI or CT scan tended to show that level of herniation. Thus, it was assumed, that level of herniation was considered a diagnostic indicator. And then MRIs became cheaper and more accessible, and patients had them for all sorts of other reasons — like I did. Doctors discovered that the degree of "malformation" I have is very common among asymptomatic adults. In fact, you're many times more likely to be perfect fine with it than to experience symptoms.

Well, huh. That doesn't sound like much of a malformation anymore. Or at least, by itself it doesn't mean anything, other than that perhaps you're more likely to have problems than otherwise. On its own? It's more of a normal variation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiari_malformation
by kypro | 2026-02-18 21:09:10+00:00
I really wish these points were made in a non-political / platform-specific way because if you care about this issue it's ultimately unhelpful to frame it as if this is an issue with just X or conservatives given how politically divided people are.

I do share the author's concerns and was also concerned back in the day when Twitter was quite literally banning people for posting the wrong opinions there. But it's interesting how the people who used to complain about political bias, now seem to not care, and the people who argued "Twitter is a private company they can do what they want" suddenly think the conservative leaning algorithm now on X is a problem. It's hard to get people across political lines to agree when we do this.

In my opinion there two issues here, neither are politically partisan.

The first is that we humans are flawed and algorithms can use our flaws against us. I've repeatedly spoken about how much I love YouTube's algorithm because despite some people saying it's an echo chamber, I think it's one of the few recommendation algorithms which will serves you a genuinely diverse range of content. But I suspect that's because I genuinely like consuming a very wide range of political content and I know I'm in a minority there (probably because I'm interested in politics as a meta subject, but don't have strong political opinions myself). But my point is these algorithms can work really well if you genuinely want to watch a diverse range of political content.

Secondly some recommendation algorithms (and search algorithms) seem to be genuinely biased which I'd argue isn't a problem itself (they are private companies and can do what they want), but that bias isn't transparent. X very clearly has a conservative bias and Bluesky also very clearly has political bias. Neither would admit their bias so people incorrectly assume they're being served something which is fairly representative of public opinion rather than curated – either by moderation or algorithm tweaks.

What we need is honesty, both from individuals who are themselves seeking out their own bias, and platforms which pretend to not have bias but do, and therefore influence where people believe the center ground is.

We can all be more honest with ourselves. If you exclusively use X or Bluesky, it's worth asking why that is, especially if you're engaging with political content on these platforms. But secondly I think we do need more regulation around the transparency of algorithms. I don't necessary think it's a problem if some platform recommends certain content above other content, or has some algorithm to ban users posts content they don't like, but these decisions should be far transparent than they are today so people are at least able to feed that into how they perceive the neutrality of the content they're consuming.
by izzydata | 2026-02-18 21:09:35+00:00
Ultimately I think it will be a self correcting problem, but there is going to be an extremely long period of absolute hell. Global warming is eventually going to cause food and water scarcity on a level that will wipe out a huge percentage of the Earths population. Then the Earth will recover from there being fewer humans.

If in 3000 years we discover humans were completely wiped out to the last person I would be pretty surprised.
by scoofy | 2026-02-18 21:09:59+00:00
I'm not trying to say 'everything is fine, nothing bad is happening a world of recurring technology and industrial revolutions.' It's not. The way things are set up is bad.

My point is the author writes a column about how GPTs are ruining the ability for people to make scalable products, because when everyone can make one, nobody cares... my point is that that's not the result of GPTs. It's a result of survivorship bias skewing how we look at things.

When your business is a flywheel than needs to be running to provide a benefit to each user, then getting that flywheel running is a huge problem. The vast majority of non-scalable businesses, almost by definition, provide each customer with a benefit regardless of whether anyone else uses it. That is how you create basic, word-of-mouth, free "earned" marketing.
by bell-cot | 2026-02-18 21:11:16+00:00
Issue 1: Governments which your own gov't likes, or ones which it doesn't? The latter has downsides similar to a black market sale.

Issue 2: Selling to governments generally means selling to a Creepy-Spooky Agency. Sadly, creeps & spooks can "get ideas" about their $500k also buying them rights to your future work.
by tokyobreakfast | 2026-02-18 21:11:34+00:00
> Even HN/Reddit is borderline.

It's the proliferation of downvoting. It disincentivizes speaking your honest opinion and artificially boosts mass-appeal ragebait.

It's detrimental to having organic conversations.

"But the trolls" they say.

In practice it's widely abused.

Using HN as an example, there are legitimate textbook opinions that will boost your comment to the top, and ones that will quickly sink to the bottom and often be flagged away for disagreement. Ignoring obvious spam which is noise, there is no correlation to "right" or "wrong".

That's one advantage old-school discussion forums and imageboards have. Everyone there and all comments therein are equally shit. No voting with the tribe to reinforce your opinion.

What's worse is social media allowed the mentally ill to congregate and reinforce their own insane opinions with plenty of upvotes, which reinforces their delusions as a form of positive feedback. When we wonder aloud how things have become more radicalized in the last 20 years — that's why. Why blame the users when you built the tools?
by cryptonector | 2026-02-18 21:11:44+00:00
Because we (Heimdal) need to make a release, darn it. I'm going to cut an 8.0 beta within a week or two.

Basically, an 8.0 release is super pent up -- years. It's got lots of very necessary stuff, including support for the extended GSS-API "cred store" APIs, which are very handy. Lots of iprop enhancements, "virtual service principal namespaces", "synthetic client principals", lots of PKINIT enhancements, modern public key cryptography (but not PQ), etc.

The issue is that the maintainers (myself included) have been busy with other things. But the pressure to do a release has ramped up significantly recently.
by tavro | 2026-02-18 21:11:48+00:00
> Tab islands just encourages people to have too many tabs open.

i think they exist because people already open tons of tabs. instead of encouraging overload this helps manage it by grouping related pages into clusters. that is actually useful in my opinion. you can see this feature making it into other browsers as well, like firefox, for example.

> who wants to chat with Opera AI when you can chat with so many other AI? I think in 2026 the only way to communicate that your product is different is to reject AI.

i do not like this aspect myself, but all browsers make use of AI to some extent. don't you think this might be a way to survive the competitive browser market?

> Free VPN? Aren't those all scams?

some definitely are, yes, i agree. but i would argue opera's VPN is a browser level privacy tool, it is not meant to replace a full security VPN. i would guess it is mainly used to hide your IP address for websites. does it not do that? you should not view it as a hardcore anonymity solution, i do not think.

---

these are not the technically accurate arguments i was looking for, your arguments are true for many browsers.
by scoofy | 2026-02-18 21:12:18+00:00
I'm trying to respond to this stuff in good faith. Yes, I agree with you. I don't see how this is relevant to the argument. If you are in a non-scalable industry that gets taken over by technology, that sucks. My point was being in the startup game in the first place.

"Becoming a teacher" takes years.

"Becoming a successful scalable business" has no known time frame. It either happens or it doesn't. And whether it does is not particularly correlated to how much time or effort you spend on it.
by miki123211 | 2026-02-18 21:12:43+00:00
Apple has a different problem, too much of a focus on privacy.

Doing AI well (especially on a battery-constrained phone) requires cloud models. SOTA models require Nvidia GPUs (or maybe Trainium / TPUs), definitely not private cloud compute and Mac Minis with no interconnect. I don't think Apple can deliver that, and I don't think they're willing to open up their OS for competitors to do that either.
by nemothekid | 2026-02-18 21:13:23+00:00
>can be fairly safe memory-wise (written a million lines of code in C)

We are currently in a thread, where a major application has a heap corruption error in its CSS parser, and it's not even rare for such errors to occur. This doesn't seem true.

>But automated package managers etc can bring in code under the covers, and you end up with something you didn't ask for.

Last year there was a backdoor inserted into xz that was only caught because someone thought their CPU usage a little too high. I don't think the whole "C is safer because people don't use dependencies" is actually sound.
by degobah | 2026-02-18 21:13:24+00:00
But POTUS 5 months ago:

"If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said global warming will kill the world, but then it started getting cooler. So now they just call it climate change because that way they can't miss. Climate change because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, there's climate change. It's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Climate change, no matter what happens, you're involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their country's fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success."

https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-...
by hannahstrawbrry | 2026-02-18 21:13:54+00:00
These companies can't just pull out of a state like Arizona very easily even if they wanted to. Many of the major tech players have a presence in Tempe or Scottsdale- not to mention the defense work that happens throughout the state. AZ is no California but it's silly to act like it's an economy tech is ready or able to easily write off.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-18 21:14:12+00:00
I didn't say that it was wrong. I said that the field is murky and not suitable for such confident declarations of fact. "Putting a credit card logo on your checkout stimulates spending" is a very different sentence than "An experiment on 130 restaraunt customers and 150 college students found credit card logos stimulated spending among the people tested", and it is abundantly clear that sentences of the latter type do not reliably generalize to entire populations, because humans are ridiculously complex and it is somewhere between very hard and impossible to accurately control for all possible confounding factors. Do they sometimes generalize? I'm sure they do, but there are also times they don't, but the general populace treats them as though these experiments always do generalize reliably and allows them to influence their thinking and discussion of issues to an unearned degree. Such studies can be useful evidence towards a claim, but they are not proof of a claim.
by cheema33 | 2026-02-18 21:14:35+00:00
> There's absolutely no way to contain people who want to use this for misdeeds.

There is no practical way to stop someone from going to a crowded mall during Christmas shopping season and mowing people down with a machine gun. Yet, we still haven't made malls illegal.

> ... if they are allowed to continue.

You may have a fantastic new idea on how we can create a worldwide ban on such a thing. If so, please share it with the rest of us.
by apparent | 2026-02-18 21:14:49+00:00
What does it mean to have someone on a chronological feed, versus the algorithmic one? Does that mean a chronological feed of the accounts they follow? I hardly ever use that, since I don't follow many people, and some people I follow post about lots of stuff I don't care about

from the study:

> We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks
by stetrain | 2026-02-18 21:14:49+00:00
> Is it the algorithm or is it the preference of the Users which is the problem. I'd argue the latter.

> Algorithms serve what Users engage with

User engagement isn't actually the same thing as user preference, even though I think many people and companies take the shortcut of equating the two.

People often engage more with things they actually don't like, and which create negative feelings.

These users might score higher on engagement metrics when fed this content, but actually end up leaving the platform or spending less time there, or would at least answer in a survey question that they don't like some or most of the content they are seeing.

This is a major reason I stopped using Threads many months ago. Their algorithm is great at surfacing posts that make me want to chime in with a correction, or click to see the rest of the truncated story. But that doesn't mean I actually liked that experience.
by buggymcbugfix | 2026-02-18 21:15:25+00:00
Very cool! Although this part feels a bit hand-wavy (or shall I say, AI-wand-wavy?)

<quote>
Machine learning decode: building on our previous work23, here we apply machine-learning-based decode (see section ‘Reading and decoding data’) to account for noise and inter-voxel cross-talk.
</quote>
by ericmay | 2026-02-18 21:15:39+00:00
I think we should just ban social media companies. If you want to create a small community walk outside and create one with your neighbors.

> and by sidestepping that you're then going off into the weeds with some mistaken idea that we can approach the problem by purifying who can use such websites.

On the other hand we have what we have today, propagandists, bots, hatred, &c.

It's like you're complaining about potential problems, but ignoring the current problems happening today are those potential problems.

I am also not "going off into the weeds" because I'm just responding to the OP.
by AlienRobot | 2026-02-18 21:15:51+00:00
I have the impression it's more of a "bait and switch" thing. People get into streaming thinking they can just play games and make money, but then they realize nobody is going to watch someone play game X, they all want to watch game Y, because game Y is popular right now among the people who have the most time to play games and watch streams (kids). So they enter the industry thinking they can just do whatever they want, and quickly realize they have to do infinite things they don't want to actually reach the level of popularity they need.
by fordprefect5 | 2026-02-18 21:15:52+00:00
In a strict out-of-sample benchmark, our method improves real-time hallucination detection over standard approaches from ~64% to ~74%, with statistically decisive gains — even using a small, lightly trained model without extensive optimization.
Open to conversations with investors and partners interested in trustworthy AI.
hashtag#LLM hashtag#AI hashtag#hallucination hashtag#trustworthyai hashtag#TRiSM hashtag#aisafety