MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ibestvina | 2026-02-16 10:22:55+00:00
There's a whole industry of "illusions" humans fail for: optical, word plays (including large parts of comedy), the Penn & Teller type, etc. Yet no one claims these are indicators that humans lack some critical capability.

Surface of "illusions" for LLMs is very different from our own, and it's very jagged: change a few words in the above prompt and you get very different results. Note that human illusions are very jagged too, especially in the optical and auditory domains.

No good reason to think "our human illusions" are fine, but "their AI illusions" make them useless. It's all about how we organize the workflows around these limitations.
by aleph_minus_one | 2026-02-16 10:23:39+00:00
> imo audio DSP experts are diametrically opposed to AI on moral grounds.

Can you elaborate on this point? I don't know the moral grounds of audio DSP experts, and thus I don't understand why in your opinion they wouldn't take an offer if you really pay them some serious amount of money.

Just to be clear: considering what a typical daily job in DSP programming is like, I can imagine that many audio DSP experts are not the best culture fit for AI companies, but this doesn't have anything to do with morality.
by zokier | 2026-02-16 10:24:43+00:00
> There are a few high resolution satellites but there frame is very small and not suited for complete coverage. If they are geostationary they cant look anywhere, or they have to look at an angle giving oblique photos. If they are moving then they are only over the part of the earth once per several days (weeks/months?)

Pleiades Neo advertises 30cm resolution with possibility for twice a day visits for a location. They are operating on sun-synchronous orbits with afaik global coverage. They also advertise that they can capture up to 2 million km² daily. So Earth imaging satellites are pretty good these days.

That being said, it is true that Google Maps etc heavily rely on aerial imagery instead of satellites.

Airbus does have some sample images available on their website if you want to see what actual satellite imagery looks like: https://space-solutions.airbus.com/resources/satellite-image...
by ben_w | 2026-02-16 10:24:55+00:00
> most people spent most of their time to sustain themselves

Do they? Or do they get convinced by adverts that their lives won't be complete unless they spend more than they can afford on an endless stream of shiny promises?

I've always found it very easy to put a huge fraction of my income to one side because all my hobbies are cheap or free.

I've sometimes expressed surprise at how much other people buy, or spend regularly, and in one case the response was approximately "of course I need to spend £2500/month after my mortgage, there's the £50/month phone and same for internet, there's Netflix, I eat out twice a week, there's the car (which I like taking across the channel to France and driving around a lot), there's …"

Meanwhile, I'm mostly content living off my €1k/month passive income, of which 25% is spent on mandatory social and health insurance; and the only thing I'm unsure about at this income level is visiting friends and family on the other end of a 2h flight where the airport isn't all that close to any of them.
by rsynnott | 2026-02-16 10:24:55+00:00
In this case, the article was quoting a blog post, so presumably the editor (it _does_ look like there was one) took the arguably-not-unreasonable stance that _obviously_ the author wouldn't have fabricated quotes from a blog post they're literally linking to, that would be _insane_, nobody would do that. And thus that they didn't need to check.

And that might be a semi-justifiable stance if dealing with a human.

One of the many problems with our good friends the magic robots is that they don't just do incorrect stuff, they do _weird_ incorrect stuff, that a human would be unlikely to do, so it can fly under the radar.
by nilslindemann | 2026-02-16 10:25:04+00:00
It is also not extraordinary to do that.

I have achieved these results around 2015, sitting at home, relaxed. I was not in a match situation observed by millions. Such a situation can knowingly lead to blunders like Kramniks overlook of mate in 2.

I also sometimes "cheated" by aborting the game when I was tired and continuing it the next day (if at all). That's what the player in a match can not do.

I also sometimes restarted a game at a specific position. Can also not be done in a match. Finally, they used better hardware in these matches. I had eight threads on my old Laptop and I used four of them. The Laptop itself was bought around 2005. Between 2000 and approximately 2020 I trained every day and I was on my peak. I am still around 2400 on Lichess today, without training.

So, I hope it does not sound that extraordinary any more. It isn't. Maybe it is now, but not then.
by kachapopopow | 2026-02-16 10:25:30+00:00
ok I kind of disagree here with the assement, the models are actually intelligent enough to interpret "walk or drive" as the car ALREADY being there (otherwise why would you ask the question?? or having one of those pick up the car from carwash services), but they're also missing the context clue that "drive" means that their car is at their house - not the carwash.

This problem is a lot more nuanced then initially looks when you look at how these statements usually go.

Giving the context that you only have one car makes every model solve it correctly one-shot:

the car wash is 50 meters away do I drive or walk to wash my car? (I only have one car)

Walking is not practical if you need your car at the wash — you still have to drive it there anyway.
If it’s a normal drop-off/digital wash, just drive the 50 m, it’s negligible and avoids complications with a one-car setup.

Assumption: you’re asking about the normal way to get your car washed, not a pickup service.

(5.3 codex spark)
by linmob | 2026-02-16 10:25:47+00:00
With not-quite current hardware as supported by Pocketblue, performance is not that much of an issue, despite the OnePlus 6 being introduced in 2018. GNOME Shell mobile is quite smooth on it.

That said, if you want to start without the entire Linux desktop stack, you can, and there's even a project that already does something like that IIUC: https://sr.ht/~mil/framebufferphone/
by alt187 | 2026-02-16 10:26:33+00:00
> But I can think of one possible reason: SQLite has been known to have memory safety vulnerabilities, whereas this codebase is written in Rust with no unsafe code.

I've lost every single shred of confidence I had in the comment's more optimistic claims the moment I read this.

If you read through SQLite's CVE history, you'll notice most of those are spurious at best.

Some more context here: https://sqlite.org/cves.html
by aurareturn | 2026-02-16 10:26:35+00:00
For Nvidia and AMD, it's the same question.

Can Nvidia design a better AI chip than their customers? Can AMD design a better server CPU than their customers?

Nvidia is proving they can. Arm has already lost the performance and efficiency crown to Apple and will likely lose soon to Qualcomm, if not already.

I think the GPU business is also fundamentally different than CPUs. For CPUs, it's all about interoperability. The ISA is the same. You can swap out any RAM easily. You can run Windows, iOS, Android, Linux. The only thing you're differentiating on is performance, efficiency, and the chip size.

For GPUs, everything is custom from the ISA to dev tools to rack designs to memory design. There are far more ways to differentiate. Nvidia can differentiate through ISA, CUDA, chip design, rack design, networking chips, etc.
by Joker_vD | 2026-02-16 10:26:57+00:00
You know, I regularly lose or forget my baseball caps (at least once per Summer, and usually I go through 2 or 3). I wish there was a nationally-mandated register of headwear, with obligatory chipping at the points of sale. Not even entirely joking.

On a more serious note, it's interesting to note that some property never gets any ownership marks on it, some gets it customarily but only out of convenience, there is no legal obligation to do so, and for some property it is legally-mandated by the state but owners largely find it cumbersome.
by jasongi | 2026-02-16 10:27:06+00:00
Future models know it now, assuming they suck in mastodon and/or hacker news.

Although I don't think they actually "know" it. This particular trick question will be in the bank just like the seahorse emoji or how many Rs in strawberry. Did they start reasoning and generalising better or did the publishing of the "trick" and the discourse around it paper over the gap?

I wonder if in the future we will trade these AI tells like 0days, keeping them secret so they don't get patched out at the next model update.
by DharmaPolice | 2026-02-16 10:27:19+00:00
I think a good rule of thumb is to default to assuming a question is asked in good faith (i.e. it's not a trick question). That goes for human beings and chat/AI models.

In fact, it's particularly true for AI models because the question could have been generated by some kind of automated process. e.g. I write my schedule out and then ask the model to plan my day. The "go 50 metres to car wash" bit might just be a step in my day.
by u1hcw9nx | 2026-02-16 10:28:16+00:00
Gemini 3 fast

----

That depends entirely on how much you enjoy a good comedic spectacle!

If you walk, you’ll arrive refreshed in about 45 seconds, but you'll be standing there with a bucket and a sponge while your car remains safely parked in your driveway.

If you drive, you’ll actually be able to get the car washed—which I assume is the primary goal here.

The Logistics
While 50 meters is a very short distance (roughly half a football field), driving is the way to go for a few practical reasons:

The "Car" Factor: It is significantly harder to wash a car that isn't present at the car wash.

The Wet Interior: Even if you managed to carry your car there (impressive!), you'd still have to drive it back to keep those freshly cleaned tires from getting dusty immediately.

Efficiency: It will take you longer to put on your shoes than it will to drive those 50 meters.

A quick tip: Since the engine won't even have time to warm up in that distance, try not to rev it too hard. Just a gentle roll over to the bays will do.

Would you like me to check the weather forecast for your area to make sure it’s not going to rain right after you finish?

----
by squigz | 2026-02-16 10:28:28+00:00
Apparently also called Bronstein Shuffle (which also sounds like a fun dance)

A key part seems to be alternating turns placing pieces. I wonder if this would result in top level gameplay converging on certain opening placements? If so, I wonder how not taking turns but deciding on placement privately beforehand might affect gameplay.

Anyway, maybe when the pros get sick of Chess960 they'll give this a shot :)
by zvadaz | 2026-02-16 10:28:51+00:00
Imagine a $100m VC fund.

They invest $1m into your startup for a 20% ownership stake.

You use that money wisely, hit profitability and decide you don’t need to raise more money. 10 years later, you sell your business for $30m.

You still own 80% of the company and walk away with $24m. For you, the founder, this is a life-changing triumph.

Now, here's the VC’s ledger:
- Company Sale Price: $30m
- VC Ownership: 20%
- Cash returned to VC: $6m
- VC Goal: $300m (assume 3x+ target return on $100m)
- Progress toward goal: 2%

Even though you built a healthy business, your success only moved the needle by 2% for the VC. From their perspective, the time and space you took in their portfolio was “wasted” because you didn’t have the potential to return the fund.

This is why VCs push founders to go “big or bust.” They would rather you take a 90% risk of going bankrupt trying to become a $1bn “unicorn” than settle for a 90% chance of becoming a $30m business.

In the VC model, a $30m exit and a $0 exit look almost exactly the same.

This is why the "raise once and done" or "seedstrapping" approach doesn't work for VCs.

But, that doesn't mean it won't work for other types of investors.

Or, does it?
by account42 | 2026-02-16 10:29:57+00:00
> It seems like a common factor of having a static space stations that lends itself well to story arcs. The other Treks were based on exploration, so they make sense to reset each episode as they travel to a new region.

I think it's more a industry trends thing - Voyager also had longer story arcs as did many other sci-fi series released after B5.
by epolanski | 2026-02-16 10:30:16+00:00
> Idk why people claim React is bloat

Because it's very hard to control it's rendering model. And the fact that multi billion dollar startups and multi trillion dollar companies hiring ivy league charlatans still have bloated low-performing websites written in react (that don't even need react...) clearly states the issues aren't that trivial.

> React has always been tracking what component relies on what state, independent of the compiler.

This still needs a complete parsing and analysis of your components and expressions. Which is why there is no single very performing UI library that can avoid directives.
by abm53 | 2026-02-16 10:30:25+00:00
> If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions and algorithms, you're exactly the kind of programmer AI will replace.

The most successful engineers are the ones who can accurately assess the trade-offs regarding those things. The things you list still may be critical for many applications and worth obsessing over.

The question becomes can we still achieve the same trade-offs without writing code by hand in those cases.

That’s an open question.
by NoboruWataya | 2026-02-16 10:30:48+00:00
How well does it work on the supported devices, including for things like calls, SMS, GPS, camera, bluetooth etc? The OnePlus 6/6T is in the "community" category of supported devices for postmarketOS and (like most devices in that category) has a laundry list of issues with hardware support that either need workarounds or just don't work at the moment. Does Pocketblue have the same limitations?

Mobile Linux is a super interesting but difficult area so always good to see another effort in the space, hopefully Pocketblue and postmarketOS can benefit from each other.
by robinsonb5 | 2026-02-16 10:30:58+00:00
There's certainly something to be said for stable, uncomplicated and minimalist tooling that wont evolve out from under you and leave you with something that won't just-work five years from now.

I guess that's why Tcl is so popular in the EDA arena. I can stick some custom JTAG tooling in a Cyclone II design and talk to it by Tcl-scripting the 15-year-old software - and be confident that the same code (both in the FPGA and on the host computer) would work with the latest software and a current device.

Having said that, Tcl's not entirely free of compatibility and fragmentation frustrations: I sometimes wish that OpenOCD used full-fat Tcl rather than JimTcl, just so that I could make use of Tk. Being able to plot a histogram of data collected from the FPGA or make clickable buttons to trigger events is very useful.
by rsynnott | 2026-02-16 10:31:53+00:00
> Using an AI tool doesn’t imply that they thought it would make up quotes

He covers AI for Ars Technica. Like, if he doesn't know that chatbots make shit up...

FWIW I suspect that a lot of the problem here was that he was _working while he had a high fever_. This is a really bad idea.
Show HN: Vocalinux // 100% offline voice typing for Linux
by jatinkrmalik | 2026-02-16 10:32:03+00:00
Show HN: Vocalinux – 100% offline voice typing for Linux
I built this because I wanted voice dictation without sending my voice
data to cloud services.
Vocalinux is a privacy-focused, open-source dictation tool that runs
entirely on your Linux machine:
- Local speech recognition (whisper.cpp, VOSK, or OpenAI Whisper)
- Works offline, no network required
- Universal compatibility (X11/Wayland, any app)
- Voice commands: "period", "delete that", "new line"
Installation: one-line curl command with auto-detection for GPU/CPU
GitHub: https://github.com/jatinkrmalik/vocalinux
Questions and feedback welcome!
by tgv | 2026-02-16 10:33:05+00:00
> Us having to specify things that we would never specify

This is known, since 1969, as the frame problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_problem. An LLM's grasp of this is limited by its corpora, of course, and I don't think much of that covers this problem, since it's not required for human-to-human communication.
by Jach | 2026-02-16 10:33:27+00:00
Good point, it was sloppy of me to call them same-generation, I distracted myself with thinking about Kasparov's long reign at the very top which I view as defining a sort of competitive era ("generation") that was shared for the majority of Karpov's active career at the top levels as well, even though it extends past that and Karpov had his own period prior to the Kasparov rivalry. It's interesting to bring that back to the question of how much age matters though since Karpov kept playing and was also still very strong against the even newer players (Anand and Kramnik being 18 and 24 years younger) for most of the 90s too.
by epolanski | 2026-02-16 10:34:21+00:00
When 99% of React apps (websites tbh, with very few needs for complex reactivity...) including those built by multi billion/trillion $ companies, struggle to produce non-bloated, non-slow, accessible websites, you know that the library is simply too complex to tame.

Of course React can be performant, but still, you're getting a PhD in its internals and hooks to get what you have in vue/nuxt/svelte whatever out of the box.
by friendzis | 2026-02-16 10:34:45+00:00
> It's beyond insulting to take a candidate with good swe foundation, that also list advanced degrees with mathematics and quantum physics, or perhaps a top grade in philosophy, and think they won't be able to handle the Google Cloud GUI.
> The industry moved away from "smart and get things done" because companies were unwilling to invest the few months to half a year required to get a new person to peak productivity

I guess it highly depends on where you are. Majority of the interviews I have attended were "We have this <problem>/<client request> and do not have expertise/capacity to solve/deliver. Can you come in and start closing tickets? yes/no". SRE with extensive experience in Ansible is barely eligible for a junior role at a shop using Puppet, a frontender working with Angular is unwanted at a react shop, Oracle DBA is a leper in the eyes of Postgres shop.

I am at my current place mostly because in the interview I have said "Hey look, buddy. I'm an engineer. That means I solve problems, not problems like "What is beauty?" Because that would fall within the purview of your conundrums of philosophy." My team does not have a single "Certified Foobarizer Expert", but tickets tend to move through the pipeline one way or another.
by readingnews | 2026-02-16 10:35:39+00:00
I will admit, I type exclusively on 40% keyboards. I used to have a Happy Hacking Keyboard, (in fact, the original Happy Hacking Keyboard (HHKB) with separate PS/2, Sun and ADB cables, still have the board and cables), then the HHKB USB, then the HHKB 2. One day I saw a 40%, in fact an original "minivan" by "The Van Keyboards" and thought I would give it a shot. For someone who uses the computer all day, this was an advancement over the HHKB in the same way the HHKB was an advancement over the 104:

* Your hands move a lot less during typing.

* Your hand is much (_much_) closer to the mouse to grab it.

Even though there is a slight learning curve using layers, after a short while it becomes just like the muscle reflex for "hit shift to use the alphanumerics", etc. When I have to run into the data center or go somewhere and use a "real" keyboard for a moment, I am reminded of just what a huge time difference it is to grab the mouse, or reach for keys like PGUP/PGDWN, etc. It may not be for everyone, but I advocate for giving small keyboards (even split ones) a try.
by andy12_ | 2026-02-16 10:35:42+00:00
You do understand that the mechanism through which an auto-regressive transformer works (predicting one token at a time) is completely unrelated to how a model with that architecture behaves or how it's trained, right? You can have both:

- An LLM that works through completely different mechanisms, like predicting masked words, predicting the previous word, or predicting several words at a time.

- A normal traditional program, like a calculator, encoded as an autoregressive transformer that calculates its output one word at a time (compiled neural networks) [1][2]

So saying "it predicts the next word" is a nothing-burger. That a program calculates its output one token at a time tells you nothing about its behavior.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.06981

[2] https://wengsyx.github.io/NC/static/paper_iclr.pdf
by anvevoice | 2026-02-16 10:35:51+00:00
One practical mitigation we've found effective: aggressive context summarization between tool calls rather than passing raw outputs through. Instead of feeding 500 lines of tool output back into the next prompt, extract the 5-10 facts the agent actually needs and pass a structured summary.

The quadratic cost curve is real, but it's also a sign that most agent architectures are doing too much in a single context window. Breaking tasks into smaller, isolated sub-tasks with their own context (essentially a tree of short conversations rather than one long one) keeps each individual call cheap while still allowing complex multi-step work.

The tricky part is designing the "handoff" between sub-tasks — what information gets passed forward and what gets dropped. Too much and you're back to quadratic growth. Too little and the agent loses coherence.