MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by belorn | 2026-02-16 01:55:02+00:00
There is enough local fraudulent waste management companies that shipping things to Africa to have it "recycled" is just a waste of money and time. Sweden recently had one of the largest fraud cases involving a waste management company, which also became the larger environmental crime in Swedish history.

The method is fairly simple. The criminals rent some land, dump the stuff there, and then have the company go bust, thus leaving the problem to the land owner. Rinse and repeat, and run it in parallel. It takes years before anyone call on the bluff that the stuff will surely get recycled "someday".

The only benefit to ship it to Africa is the hope that it won't be found out and create bad press, but that doesn't work if everyone know it is fake.
by traes | 2026-02-16 01:55:42+00:00
No, even the best prodigies typically aren't winning super tournaments until 17 or 18, and we haven't really had one of those since Gukesh won candidates last cycle. The youngest player in this event was a 20 year old who placed last. (Though to be fair to the youngsters, 3rd and 4th place are both 21 years old.)

Generally speaking it's expected that chess players will peak around their late 20s and slowly decline from there, with sharp declines around age 50. It's unusual but not unheard of for players in their 40s to win major tournaments. 42 year old Levon Aronian won several last year, but it was considered a notable example of longevity every time he won.

In terms of raw numbers, there are currently 30 players in their 30s, 15 players in their 40s, 4 players in their 50s, and no players older that in the top 100. The youngest is 14-year old Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus, who is considered the greatest chess prospect of all time.
by imtavi | 2026-02-16 01:55:47+00:00
Author here. I'm curious whether other parents would actually want something like this. It’s intentionally very opinionated: no desktop, no browser, no apps, just boots straight in. I don’t know if that constraint feels freeing or limiting to others.

Distribution is the biggest open question for me. Right now it’s just an ISO you flash yourself, but I’m experimenting with mailing pre-flashed USB drives. I've also thought about preloading old laptops, though that adds a lot of overhead.

I'm also very open to technical feedback around the input layer (evdev for true key-down/key-up, sticky shift, double-tap caps) and the paint-style color mixing, or anything else. Thank you!
by eftalyurtseven | 2026-02-16 01:56:29+00:00
Right now the controller can see secrets across namespaces, so that level of isolation isn’t there yet. It’s on the roadmap though. Namespace-scoped secrets where a controller agent can spawn agents but can’t read their secrets is the right model.
No human approval flow yet either, agents create directly. Would you want something like klaw dispatch --approve that queues until a human confirms?
by djkurlander | 2026-02-16 01:56:51+00:00
OK - thanks for the excellent suggestion. It's now implemented (just two SQL queries that will run as a cron job every night). You can grab the month and year offending ip blacklists this way.

wget https://knock-knock.net/static/ip-blocklist-month.txt

wget https://knock-knock.net/static/ip-blocklist-year.txt
by BLKNSLVR | 2026-02-16 01:57:01+00:00
Something I've thought about is how does a VPS provider prevent this kind of thing?

Most of this kind of traffic goes by completely unknown and therefore unreported, so 'VPS host X' has no case to answer, to some degree.

If malicious traffic gets reported and 'VPS Host X' takes action and either contacts the operator of the VPS or shuts down the VPS following a traffic investigation, then the operator of the VPS creates another one on 'VPS Host X' or 'VPS Host Y'.

(all questions are rhetorical, not directed at parent)
VPS Hosts could, by policy, block outgoing connections to port 22? Where is the line drawn for default blocking policies? Block everything and force the operator to configure a firewall to specify which ports the VPS can connect outwards to (or all ports)? At some point there will be friction that discourages customers and affects sales / profits.

Secondary effects, more aggressive blocking of malicious traffic could potentially allow for some/more/better reputational differentiation between VPS hosts to offset loss of customers due to better security friction.

I doubt there's any legislation coming anytime soon to enforce a certain level of internet hygiene.
by echelon | 2026-02-16 01:57:26+00:00
We're watching brains harmonize and work together.

There aren't any priors for this, only crude analogies. This is alien contact. This is the spark of fire that kicked off civilization. This is the beginnings of the next industrial age.

But what you're specifically watching here is two brains from two entirely different species communicating and working together.

It doesn't matter that Claude is dumb and a statistical machine with flaws. We're early. This is only just starting.

Imagine the communication paradigms we'll have in the future -

I'm instructing image models with images instead of text. Images are better spatial arguments.

What's better for thought? Probably thought. Language is just an encoding. Imagine what happens when we hook up BCI to this and can wear the AI like an exoskeleton?

But the intermediate, these chat conversations, are amazing to watch. It's like a parent teaching a toddler, except the toddler is a trillion dollar machine that can work harder than a thousand humans at some discrete tasks that used to be impossible for metaheurisic algorithms to crack and required real humans.

It's dreaming alright.
by zhoujing204 | 2026-02-16 01:57:46+00:00
The study may well be flawed—small n, selection bias, lack of proper controls, sure. But can we please stop using personal anecdotes to dismiss scientific inquiry?

Arguments like 'well, it works for me,' or 'I took this med and recovered immediately,' or 'I saw X happen right after a vaccine' are not valid refutations. Science is frequently counter-intuitive and often contradicts our personal experience and gut instincts. That is precisely why we rely on the scientific method and statistical rigor—rather than individual perception—to establish evidence.
by trashburger | 2026-02-16 01:58:04+00:00
It is under a license that prevents using the source in any way you choose:

You may not use the klaw source code to operate a multi-tenant managed
service (Software as a Service) where the primary value proposition is
providing AI agent orchestration capabilities to third parties, unless
you have obtained explicit written authorization from each::labs.

It's source-available, which is cool, but don't muddy the waters.
by wakawaka28 | 2026-02-16 01:58:08+00:00
There's already strong financial incentives to not over-produce. Nobody wants to dump cash into inventory that can't sell. Trying to force them to sell it all is going to reduce choice and availability for consumers, unless the businesses find a workaround. I'm pretty sure they will find a workaround, and it won't be to sell at a steep loss to the same market that refused the products to begin with. But these workarounds will cost money, and consumers will pay for the fantasy that waste is being reduced.
by forrestthewoods | 2026-02-16 01:59:39+00:00
I've been shipping Windows software for 20+ years. Not one project I have ever worked on was based on MinGW. It's a gross hack that is ABI incompatible with the predominate ecosystem.

In the year 2026 there is no reason to use MinGW. Just use Clang and target MSVC ABI. Cross-compiling Linux->Windows is very easy. Cross-compiling Windows->Linux is 1000x harder because Linux userspace is a clusterfuck of terrible design choices.

If a project "supports Windows" by only way of MinGW then it doesn't really support Windows. It's fundamentally incompatible with how almost all Windows software is developed. It's a huge red flag and a clear indicator that the project doesn't actually care about supporting Windows.
by dmonterocrespo | 2026-02-16 01:59:48+00:00
An OutRun-style pseudo-3D racing game for the ESP32-S3 microcontroller with an ILI9341 320×240 SPI display. The same source compiles for both ESP32 hardware and Windows (via a Raylib-based emulator).

Features
Pseudo-3D road rendering — segment-based back-to-front painter's algorithm, classic arcade style
3D player car — OBJ mesh (428 vertices, 312 triangles) with scanline affine texture mapping and shadow
Traffic system — 6 AI cars with independent speeds and lane positions
Procedural track — randomized curves, elevation changes, tunnels, and buildings generated at startup
Dynamic scenery — pine trees, bushes, rocks, lamp posts, and 3D buildings with window patterns
Day / sunset / night cycle — smooth color palette transitions every ~180 km of distance
Atmospheric fog — exponential density toward the horizon
Physics — acceleration, friction coast-down, centrifugal drift on curves, hill gravity effects
Collision detection — crash with 2-second recovery
Lap timing — current and best lap displayed on the HUD
HUD — circular speedometer (0–300 km/h) with needle

https://github.com/davidmonterocrespo24/esp32s3-arcade-3d
by Our_Benefactors | 2026-02-16 02:00:26+00:00
I use “slow” GPU encoding. I optimized my pipeline for minimal quality loss, not maximum file size savings. I wouldn’t recommend using consumer grade CPUs to reencode because to get a reasonable speed you’ll need to use “fast” presets which tank the quality. Anecdotally fast CPU method saves closer to 60-70% file size.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-16 02:00:45+00:00
>, except this time the servers are overseas and completely uncontrolled.

The Chinese or Russian or whatever government is not sending thugs with guns to my doorstep over petty matters and if they did I would likely, depending on the exact details be within my rights to resist them with violence.

You can't say that about the federal/state/local government.
by tjwebbnorfolk | 2026-02-16 02:00:59+00:00
I live in the US, but I would hope the EU doesn't have "burn pits".

But the 3rd world country they are about to be shipped to definitely does have burn pits that will incinerate both 1) any remaining unsold inventory, and 2) the older clothes that are replaced with the fancy european stuff.

Or better yet, they'll just be thrown into the river like most other things in Africa and SE Asia...

All you're doing is outsourcing your own pollution to make yourself feel better. It's idiotic.
by 9x39 | 2026-02-16 02:01:24+00:00
Odds vs stakes argument, kinda. Is it perfect? no. Should you do something? probably.

In personal protective gear, you have ballistic helmets. They don't cover the face. They often have cutouts around your ears. They don't cover your neck. They can generally stop a low velocity handgun round, and anything more energetic except a glancing rifle round is usually going right through. Even if it doesn't penetrate, backface deformation may be lethal. They're still generally worn as the only game in town.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-16 02:02:15+00:00
The tech industry is broad, and if you are using OpenAI in a consumer and personal manner you weren't the primary persona amongst whom the conversation around OpenClaw occurred.

Additionally, much of the conversation I've seen was amongst practitioners and Mid/Upper Level Management who are already heavy users of AI/ML and heavy users of Executive Assistants.

There is a reason why if you aren't in a Tier 1 tech hub like SV, NYC, Beijing, Hangzhou, TLV, Bangalore, and Hyderabad you are increasingly out of the loop for a number of changes that are happening within the industry.

If you are using HN as your source of truth, you are going to be increasingly behind on shifts that are happening - I've noticed that anti-AI Ludditism is extremely strong on HN when it overlaps with EU or East Coast hours (4am-11am PT and 9pm-12am PT), and West Coast+Asia hours increasingly don't overlap as much.

I feel this is also a reflection of the fact that most Bay Area and Asia HNers are most in-person or hybrid now, thus most conversations that would have happened on HN are now occurring on private slacks, discords, or at a bar or gym.
by compounding_it | 2026-02-16 02:02:46+00:00
The Canadian defense budget is quite small (30bn). 4bn is a big number compared to that but in general this is quite small compared to most developed countries. I believe Canada has been quiet thanks to their neighbors protecting them but with that changing I’m wondering whether there will be a shift in defense spending.

This will also create new jobs and a market which the economy probably needs.
by ranger_danger | 2026-02-16 02:02:57+00:00
0.02% as of January 2026: https://www.stetic.com/market-share/browser/

Results may also be skewed because IE mode in Edge will masquerade as IE.

> Internet Explorer mode in Microsoft Edge enables backward compatibility and will be supported through at least 2029.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/in...
by zzo38computer | 2026-02-16 02:03:59+00:00
I have gotten what looks like SSH, TLS, HTTP, and other things, on various ports.

Another possible way would be port knocking. (I had previously set up port knocking on my HTTP server, but there seems to be a bug in the kernel (or in some driver) that prevents it from working correctly, so now the HTTP is not available. Using port knocking to restrict access to HTTP is probably not common, and might prevent your solution from being used if the form uses HTTP.)
by URS_Adherent | 2026-02-16 02:04:32+00:00
Clarification on the finding:
Across controlled runs, I observed consistent lexical residue that appears only after ingestion of untrusted retrieved content and survives reset mechanisms (thread isolation, context flushing, cooldowns) that are assumed to neutralize prior influence.

This is not a jailbreak or exploit claim. It’s a measurement result: clean baselines remain clean; contaminated runs do not fully revert under standard resets.

I’m sharing the methodology appendix to sanity-check whether this is a reasonable way to test reset robustness, not to publish prompts or payloads.
by buremba | 2026-02-16 02:04:35+00:00
Exactly! I was digging into Openclaw codebase for the last 2 weeks and the core ideas are very inspiring.

The main work he has done to enable personal agent is his army of CLIs, like 40 of them.

The harness he used, pi-mono is also a great choice because of its extensibility. I was working on a similar project (1) for the last few months with Claude Code and it’s not really the best fit for personal agent and it’s pretty heavy.

Since I was planning to release my project as a Cloud offering, I worked mainly on sandboxing it, which turned out to be the right choice given OpenClaw is opensource and I can plug its runtime to replace Claude Code.

I decided to release it as opensource because at this point software is free.

1: https://github.com/lobu-ai/lobu
by Taek | 2026-02-16 02:04:37+00:00
Yes modern AIs have an entire opening database and generally have cached the first 20+ moves of the game (for most common openings) from a database of very deep searches identifying the best move. This is absolutely a form of opening prep for AIs.

That said, even without that database a modern AI will completely topple the best human at every common chess variant. Humans cannot defeat modern AIs in chess like games.
by NiloCK | 2026-02-16 02:05:31+00:00
> The transformer architectures powering current LLMs are strictly feed-forward.

This is true in a specific contextual sense (each token that an LLM produces is from a feed-forward pass). But untrue for more than a year with reasoning models, who feed their produced tokens back as inputs, and whose tuning effectively rewards it for doing this skillfully.

Heck, it was untrue before that as well, any time an LLM responded with more than one token.

> A [March] 2025 survey by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), surveying 475 AI researchers, found that 76% believe scaling up current AI approaches to achieve AGI is "unlikely" or "very unlikely" to succeed.

I dunno. This survey publication was from nearly a year ago, so the survey itself is probably more than a year old. That puts us at Sonnet 3.7. The gap between that and present day is tremendous.

I am not skilled enough to say this tactfully, but: expert opinions can be the slowest to update on the news that their specific domain may have, in hindsight, have been the wrong horse. It's the quote about it being difficult to believe something that your income requires to be false, but instead of income it can be your whole legacy or self concept. Way worse.

> My take is that research taste is going to rely heavily on the short-duration cognitive primitives that the ARC highlights but the METR metric does not capture.

I don't have an opinion on this, but I'd like to hear more about this take.
by Our_Benefactors | 2026-02-16 02:05:57+00:00
Yes, I wrote a python script that uses FFMPEG and detects the bitrate of the file and determines approximately what CQ to use. If the original file has a low bitrate, by reencoding it with a high CQ you can actually increase the file size (lol).

Normal CQ = 28
Aggressive CQ = 34

# Thresholds to detect ultra-low-bitrate inputs (use more aggressive encoding)
# (width, height) → min sensible bitrate (bps). If stream <= threshold, use aggressive profile.

LOW_BITRATE_THRESHOLDS = [
((3840, 2160), 13_000_000), # 4K ≤13 Mbps → use aggressive encoding
((2560, 1440), 8_000_000), # 1440p
((1920, 1080), 5_000_000), # 1080p
((1280, 720), 2_500_000), # 720p
((854, 480), 1_200_000), # 480p
]
by jltsiren | 2026-02-16 02:06:13+00:00
Until recently, philosophy of artificial intelligence seemed to be mostly about arguments why the Turing test was not a useful benchmark for intelligence. Pretty much everyone who had ever thought about the problem seriously had come to the same conclusion.

The fundamental issue was the assumption that general intelligence is an objective property that can be determined experimentally. It's better to consider intelligence an abstraction that may help us to understand the behavior of a system.

A system where a fixed LLM provides answers to prompts is little more than a Chinese room. If we give the system agency to interact with external systems on its own initiative, we get qualitatively different behavior. The same happens if we add memory that lets the system scale beyond the fixed context window. Now we definitely have some aspects of general intelligence, but something still seems to be missing.

Current AIs are essentially symbolic reasoning systems that rely on a fixed model to provide intuition. But the system never learns. It can't update its intuition based on its experiences.

Maybe the ability to learn in a useful way is the final obstacle on the way towards AGI. Or maybe once again, once we start thinking we are close to solving intelligence, we realize that there is more to intelligence than what we had thought so far.
by 01nate | 2026-02-16 02:06:52+00:00
Cool post, and definitely a concept devs should consider. I've only experienced the garden variety of offline (hiking out if cell service, not having a phone data plan, etc - not a government in chaos), but I still find offline capability super handy.

Especially even basic stuff, I know Google Maps used to 'expire' offline maps every 30 days. Like, I have a 40 day old map and no service, but it won't tell me where to go (dunno if they still do that or not - ditched G Maps a long while back). Some more thought into "hey, what if people are offline" would be nice.

Edit: Also, shout out to paper too. I've got a bit of reference books (maps in my car, a copy if the survival medicine handbook at home, etc). Necessity might be the only way to get my Gen Z self to read a paper map, but could be handy to have.
by ghywertelling | 2026-02-16 02:07:49+00:00
Pale Fire book is shown in the movie Blade Runner 2049

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtLvtMqWNz8

Solving Nabokov's Pale Fire - A Deep Dive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8wEEaHUnkA

Pale Fire is what we call as Ergodic literature

Ergodic literature refers to texts requiring non-trivial effort from the reader to traverse, moving beyond linear, top-to-bottom reading to actively navigate complex, often nonlinear structures. Coined by Espen J. Aarseth (1997), it combines "ergon" (work) and "hodos" (path), encompassing print and electronic works that demand physical engagement, such as solving puzzles or following, navigating, or choosing paths.

Ergodic Literature: The Weirdest Book Genre

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKX90LbnYd4

"House of Leaves" is another book from the same genre.

House of Leaves - A Place of Absence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJl7HpkotCE

Diving into House of Leaves Secrets and Connections | Video Essay

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du2R47kMuDE

The Book That Lies to You - House of Leaves Explained

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCQJUUXnRIQ

I went into this rabbit hole few years ago.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-16 02:08:05+00:00
> Possibly it was a mistake on the part of whoever was responsible for reviewing the article before publication didn't catch it

My wife, former journalist, said that you don’t direct quote anyone without talking to them first and verifying what you’re quoting is for sure from them. The she said “I guess they have no editors?” because in her experience editors aren’t like fact checkers but they’re suppose to have the experience and wisdom to ask questions about the content to make sure everything is kosher before going to print. Seems like multiples errors in judgement from multiple parts of the organization.

(My wife left journalism about 15 years ago so maybe things are different but that was her initial reaction)
by etherus | 2026-02-16 02:08:13+00:00
Why would they do that? Once they have their win-condition, there's no reason to innovate. Only to reduce the costs of existing solutions. I expect that unless voice becomes a parameter which drives competition and first-choice for adoption, it will never become a focus of the frontier orgs. Which is curious to me, as almost the opposite of how I'm reading your comment.
by orbital-decay | 2026-02-16 02:09:24+00:00
No, they do it because they're mode-collapsed, use similar training algorithms (or even distillation on each other's outputs) and have a feedback loop based on scraping the web polluted with the outputs of previous gen models. This makes annoying patterns come and go in waves. It's pretty likely that in the next generation of models the "it's not just X, it's Y" pattern will disappear entirely, but another will annoy everyone.

This is purely an artifact of training and has nothing to do with real human writing, which has much better variety.
by nilkn | 2026-02-16 02:09:35+00:00
This comment is filled with speculation which I think is mostly unfounded and unnecessarily negative in its orientation.

Let's take the safety point. Yes, OpenClaw is infamously not exactly safe. Your interpretation is that, by hiring Peter, OpenAI must no longer care about safety. Another interpretation, though, is that offered by Peter himself, in this blog post: "My next mission is to build an agent that even my mum can use. That’ll need a much broader change, a lot more thought on how to do it safely, and access to the very latest models and research." To conclude from this that OpenAI has abandoned its entire safety posture seems, at the very least, premature and not robustly founded in clear fact.
by llm_nerd | 2026-02-16 02:10:44+00:00
This study is tiny and of negligible value. They didn't even try to pretend it's of real value, and instead just dropped the classic "our study clearly demonstrates that people should probably study this stuff". Conditioned norms are by far the most relevant condition for sleep for most people, and sleep studies of tiny durations with tiny sets are basically just noise makers (har har). Even worse, they seem to have specifically excluded people who already use noise machines, ensuring that their participants were conditioned for the silent norm.

Scientific method, statistical rigour...eh, this looks like a headline chasing study.