MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mdnahas | 2026-02-08 12:56:04+00:00
Related: My grad school had a shared bin/ directory with common local tools. Of course, that directory was after /bin and /usr/bin in the PATH so that no one could override “ls” or “more”. So… one grad student added scripts with names that matched common typos: “sl” and “mroe”!

Sure enough, they got run. The scripts didn’t take over your account. They ran “ls” and “more”. They may have also logged your username in a file so he could lord it over you.
by roxolotl | 2026-02-08 12:56:22+00:00
LLM are an embodiment of the Pareto principle. Turns out that if you can get an 80% solution in 1% of the time no one gives a shit about the remaining 20%. I agree that’s terrifying. The existential AI risk crowd is afraid we’ll produce gods to destroy us. The reality is we’ve instead exposed a major weakness in our culture where we’ve trained ourselves to care nothing about quality but instead to maximize consumption.

This isn’t news really. Content farms already existed. Amusing Ourselves to Death was written in 1985. Critiques of the culture exist way before that. But the reality of seeing the end game of such a culture laid bare in the waste of the data center buildout is shocking and repulsive.
SpaceX-xAI Merger: Nobody's Talking About the von Neumann Elephant in the Room
by juanpabloaj | 2026-02-08 12:57:04+00:00
Consider the breadcrumbs Musk has already dropped:

- Explicitly mentions "self-replicating infrastructure" and "robots building robots"
- Talks about lunar factories manufacturing satellites to deploy "deeper into space"
- Plans for Optimus to become "the first self-replicating machine capable of building civilization on any viable planet"
- xAI data centers in orbit as a solution to Earth's energy constraints

Now connect the dots:

- Phase 1: Orbital data centers (we are here).

- Phase 2: Lunar manufacturing facilities.

- Phase 3: Asteroid mining operations with AI-driven robots.

- Phase 4: Self-replicating systems in the asteroid belt.

- Phase 5: Exponential expansion, von Neumann probe-style

The technology is essentially ready. Researchers have already demonstrated 3D-printed neural network circuits, autonomous mining concepts, and self-assembly systems using extraterrestrial materials. Von Neumann himself argued that mining entire asteroid belts would be most effective through self-replicating spacecraft leveraging exponential growth.

*Here's the thing:* You can't exactly tell investors "I'm building autonomous self-replicating AI swarms to consume the asteroid belt" without triggering every regulatory alarm, science fiction panic, and grey goo scenario imaginable.

But "clean energy data centers in orbit"? That's just responsible environmental stewardship.

The orbital infrastructure isn't the destination—it's the bootstrap. Once you have AI development in space, lunar manufacturing, and autonomous mining operations, you're literally one breakthrough away from machines that can replicate themselves using asteroid resources. And once that starts, the growth curve becomes... problematic to model using conventional corporate finance.

I'm not saying Musk is definitely building von Neumann probes. I'm just saying that if you were going to build von Neumann probes, this is exactly how you'd pitch it to Wall Street.

Sleep tight, everyone. Our new self-replicating robot overlords will be energy-efficient and carbon-neutral.

---

Edit: For those asking "why would he do this?"—the man wants to make humanity a Kardashev Type II civilization. He's said this. Multiple times. With a straight face.
by throwaway290 | 2026-02-08 12:57:31+00:00
> Lots of people just aren't that bothered by gore videos

and here again you are alluding to that access you have to what goes on in other people's heads. although of course "lots of" is relative. i'd say 0.01% of population is lots enough in this case.

> they are well-adjusted members of society

a psycho can function just great in society. maybe this work is great for a psycho. however, majority of people aren't that.

> I dunno what to tell you.

right back at ya buddy
by simonw | 2026-02-08 12:57:42+00:00
Comments like "X is the right track [...] Then finish with a question?" do have a bit of an LLM smell to them.

The finishing with a question thing is prevalent with both accounts on Twitter, presumably because it "drives engagement" with the accounts.

It's particularly frustrating because it amplifies how much time is wasted - people don't just waste time reading comments by bots, they then invest effort in thinking about and replying to them.
by hdgvhicv | 2026-02-08 13:00:10+00:00
What is a continuous stream. I was knocked unconscious for a few minutes in 2007 when I came off a bike. Am I the same person today as I was in 2005?

On the other hand dementia eats away at memories and personality. My grandmother doesn’t remember having children (who are now in their late 70s), a husband (she had two), but does remember (mostly) life as a child. She wasnt unconscious though.

(It’s basically the inevitable same end game as the rom com “50 first dates”)

As you say it’s philosophical - a bit like Triggers Broom. Or 1 minute Time Machine in a way.
by bmitch3020 | 2026-02-08 13:02:19+00:00
I could see this becoming useful to denounce contributors. "This user is malicious, a troll, contributes LLM slop, etc." It could become a distributed block list, discourage some bad behavior I've been seeing on GitHub, assuming the denounce entries are reviewed rather than automatically accepted.

But using this to vouch for others as a way to indicate trust is going to be dangerous. Accounts can be compromised, people make mistakes, and different people have different levels of trust.

I'd like to see more attention placed in verifying released content. That verification should be a combination of code scans for vulnerabilities, detection of a change in capabilities, are reproducible builds of the generated artifacts. That would not only detect bad contributions, but also bad maintainers.
by plz_throw | 2026-02-08 13:04:19+00:00
As is said, not trying to rude or sarcastic or anything.

I do not use any of the apps and just had a short look at the respective pages to see what they are. Both clearly state the repsective apps purpose, both have images of the apps.

I thought it was (in both cases) pretty clear what the respexctive app is and what not.
by HexDecOctBin | 2026-02-08 13:04:26+00:00
Back when I was on Android, there used to be a launcher by Nokia called Z Launcher. The idea was simple: the home screen could only show the six apps. However, you could draw a letter on the home screen with your finger, and it would be recognised and used as a beginning of the search query for app names. Of course, you would only get six search results, but you could always draw the next character to get better results.

And there was some basic ML to learn which app was more likely to be used at which time, location, etc. so that the right app could be shown at the right time without having to scribble anything. It was the most efficient way to launch apps I have ever used.

According to Wikipedia [1], it got removed in 2018 which is right before I switched to iOS. I do remember trying to replace it with KISS Launcher[2], but it just wasn't the same.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_Launcher

[2] https://kisslauncher.com/
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-08 13:05:11+00:00
I think you're making an awful lot of assumptions there and have failed to provide even ballpark specifications for the thing you're supposedly refuting. Weight seems to be a secondary characteristic related only to size. There are also plenty of examples of "small" dragons in fantasy literature.

We've already got examples of dinosaurs that come fairly close to qualifying so I'm sure something vaguely in the ballpark is within the realm of possibility. Exactly how close to the mark though I have no idea.

For example, what would you make of something visually resembling a massive western dragon but with a largely hollow body? I don't think that would disqualify it in most people's eyes. Pushing the concept a bit farther could yield something vaguely like a living cross between a hot air balloon and a deep-sea anglerfish with a weaponized tail.

Vaguely related to that hypothetical, we've got examples in the fossil record of 2 foot wide dragonflies estimated to have weighed in at under 150 grams. There's a pretty large solution space to explore here.
by K0balt | 2026-02-08 13:06:33+00:00
I think the author is using local-first as in “your files stay local, and the framework is compatible with on-prem infra”. Aside from not storing your docs and data with a cloud service though, it’s very usable with cloud inference providers, so I can see your point.

Maybe the author should have specified that capability, even though it seems redundant, since local-first implies local capability but also cloud compatibility, or it would be local or local-only.
by Retric | 2026-02-08 13:08:10+00:00
And he’s just wrong.

> what good is free energy to anyone if the retail price has only one trajectory.

The underlying economics means someone is always paying for that, you can pay for more expensive fossil fuels in your taxes or on your electric bill but it’s going to happen either way.

Granted we have a legacy of fossil fuel, nuclear, and yes early renewable projects but if you have zero subsidies of any kind going forward we get to a 100% emissions free grid because today that’s the cheapest option,

Burning fossil fuels has had an over a century of technical development and global scale it isn’t getting dramatically better to catch up it just loses and renewables just keep getting more appealing over time.
by kakacik | 2026-02-08 13:08:12+00:00
When in doubt, google. I had to google that word myself as a non-native speaker, nothing sexual there.

Bowing down to one's mother ain't something to scorn on. As Jim Jefferies and many others said, show them some proper respect since there won't be another person in your life that will ever love you more, or even equally... at least under normal circumstances
by squigz | 2026-02-08 13:08:16+00:00
Sounds like you might be talking about Jake Seliger, and indeed, his and Bess' fight to get treatments was rather eye-opening for me too.

Jake's blog where he posted throughout his entire illness: https://jakeseliger.com/

Bess' blog: https://bessstillman.substack.com/

It was a heartbreaking story to follow, and one that hit me a lot harder than I thought it would when Jake died.
by arrowsmith | 2026-02-08 13:09:29+00:00
I don't understand this perspective. I've never learned so much so fast as I have in the last few months. LLMs automate all the boring rote stuff, freeing up my time to focus exclusively on the high-level problem-solving. I'm enjoying my work more than ever.

To be fair, I might have felt some grief initially for my old ways of working. It was definitely a weird shift and it took me a while to adjust. But I've been all-in on AI for close to a year now, and I have absolutely zero regrets.

I can't believe I used to _type code out by hand_. What a primitive world I grew up in.
by hirako2000 | 2026-02-08 13:10:08+00:00
Isn't it what "evaluating a model where they can get a % of your business in exchange for letting you use code generated by their AI models" precisely mean?

If they find that this business model is most profitable for OpenAI, and that they can somehow release models better than any competitor, wouldn't they say they want royalties ? That's what Unity (the game engine) does so it wouldn't be unseen.
by refactor_master | 2026-02-08 13:10:17+00:00
It’s interesting then to ask if this will behave the same as big orgs? Eg once your org is big and settled, anything but the core product and adjacent services become impossible, which is why 23 often see a 50-person company out-innovating a 5k person company in tech (only to be bought up and dismantled, of course, but that’s besides this point).

Will agents simply dig the trenches deeper towards the direction of the best existing tests, and does it take a human to turn off the agent noise and write code manually for a new, innovative direction?
Show HN: RepoSherlock – repo onboarding in minutes (map, run, risks)
by kemal-arslan | 2026-02-08 13:10:47+00:00
Hi HN! I built RepoSherlock to speed up onboarding to unfamiliar repositories.

It analyzes a GitHub repo (URL or local path) and outputs:
- an architecture/dependency map (+ hotspots)
- runnable quickstart guidance
- risks (license/CI/config signals)
- actionable issues (incl. “good first”)

Killer feature: with --try-run, it attempts real install/test/build/start steps in a sandbox and attaches evidence/timeouts to the report bundle.

Repo + demo GIF: I’ll add in the first comment.
Feedback welcome on: try-run reliability, report format, and what heuristics you’d want next.
by darthnebula | 2026-02-08 13:11:02+00:00
What he does with his own money is none of anyone's business. I live in a state where it is pretty evenly divided between parties. I have friends who support Trump and friends who don't like him. All of them are nice people who have valid reasons for who they support. Demonizing people because they don't agree with you is detrimental to society and it is not sustainable.
by arrowsmith | 2026-02-08 13:11:56+00:00
> Were there similar gnashing of the teeth and wails of despair when compilers were first introduced?

Yes, at least according to ChatGPT:

"Compilers didn’t arrive to universal applause; they arrived into a world where a chunk of programmers absolutely believed the machine could not be trusted to write “real” code—until the productivity wins (and eventually the performance) became undeniable."

Damn that sounds familiar.
by chung8123 | 2026-02-08 13:12:16+00:00
AI slop is similar to the cheap tools at harbor freight. Before we used to have to buy really expensive tools that were designed to last forever and perform a ton of jobs. Now we can just go to harbor freight and get a tool that is good enough for most people.

80% of good maybe reframed as 100% ok for 80% of the people. It is when you are in the minority that cares about or needs that last 20% where it is a problem because the 80% were subsidizing your needs by buying more than the need.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-08 13:12:43+00:00
Note that Samsung devices with OneUI 8 remove bootloader unlocking altogether, making it impossible to 'root' the device or load LineageOS on it. The Xcover 7 is a newly released Samsung device that will most likely receive that update (it's live already in some regions), and even if you tried to stay on OneUI 7 the community is just unlikely to support it (as with other Samsung devices that are in the same boat today) since most devices in the wild will not be unlockable.
by keyringlight | 2026-02-08 13:13:03+00:00
Even if we do leave, it's unlikely that we do so for a very long time so taking care of the planet makes sense even if you intend to discard our crib. Similarly in the nearer term if we had a unified goal to colonize a near planet/moon that's still going to take a huge long term effort to do more than the equivalent of putting a tent up on an island off the coast to get that colony established (if it can ever be self-sufficient).
by muzani | 2026-02-08 13:14:17+00:00
GPT-5 used to do this on release, but seems to have reverted back, especially on the codex versions. This may well be a feature.

I joked that this is the side effect of asking it to act like a senior software engineer. It tends to talk back and do its own thing. There was that one time when the thought processes went "I'm a full stack engineer" > "I'm expanding my connections on LinkedIn" > "I'm establishing myself as a tech writer" > "I'm evaluating classes in professional writing". It does have introspection capabilities, but one could argue it's just a bug or emergent.

Anyway, option 1: why not just use Sonnet? Heck you can use Haiku if you're giving it clear instructions. The thinking ones do perform worse on clear tasks. You also get your rolled back version.

Option 2: Use role prompting [0]
Give it some junior engineer role where it's expected to follow instructions exactly as given.

[0] https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...
by hirako2000 | 2026-02-08 13:14:28+00:00
The difference being that Airlines and food delivery did make a profit, just figured they had to do these tricks to earn some more. Mature businesses resort to lowering quality, fake scarcity.

Here the scarcity is real, and profits are nowhere to be seen

These schemes will soon fall apart entirely when an open weight model can run on Groq/Cerebras/SambaNova at even higher speeds and be just fine for all tasks. Arguably already the case, but not many know yet.
by frankie_t | 2026-02-08 13:16:10+00:00
If slop doesn't get better, it would mean that at least I get to keep my job. In the areas where the remaining 10% don't matter, maybe I won't. I'm struggling to come up with an example of such software outside of one-off scripts and some home automation though.

The job is going to be much less fun, yes, but I won't have to learn from scratch and compete with young people in a different area (and which I will enjoy less, most likely). So, if anything slop gives me hope.
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-08 13:16:14+00:00
containers are fine for basic isolation but the attack surface is way bigger than people think. you're still trusting the container runtime, the kernel, and the whole syscall interface. if the agent can call arbitrary syscalls inside the container, you're one kernel bug away from a breakout.

what I'm curious about with matchlock - does it use seccomp-bpf to restrict syscalls, or is it more like a minimal rootfs with carefully chosen binaries? because the landlock LSM stuff is cool but it's mainly for filesystem access control. network access, process spawning, that's where agents get dangerous.

also how do you handle the agent needing to install dependencies at runtime? like if claude decides it needs to pip install something mid-task. do you pre-populate the sandbox or allow package manager access?
by randallsquared | 2026-02-08 13:16:24+00:00
They can, by putting what they just "learned" into the context window. Claude Code does this without (my) prompting from time to time, adding to its CLAUDE.md things that it has learned about the project or my preferences. Currently this is limited to literally writing it down, but as context windows grow and models continue training on their own usage, it's not clear to me how that will significantly differ from an ability to "learn information they currently do not have".
by roomey | 2026-02-08 13:16:29+00:00
Genuine question, when people talk about apple silicon being fast, is the comparison to windows intel laptops, or Mac intel architecture?

Because, when running a Linux intel laptop, even with crowd strike and a LOT of corporate ware, there is no slowness.

When blogs talk about "fast" like this I always assumed it was for heavy lifting, such as video editing or AI stuff, not just day to day regular stuff.

I'm confused, is there a speed difference in day to day corporate work between new Macs and new Linux laptops?

Thank you
by lins1909 | 2026-02-08 13:16:55+00:00
>Demonizing people because they don't agree with you is detrimental to society and it is not sustainable.

Surely there's a difference between demonising people who disagree on the value of mushrooms in meals and demonising people who support a bigot?

Also, you lot conveniently pick and choose when to apply this, as I'm sure no one would make the same arguments for people who supported Hitler.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-08 13:17:15+00:00
A coworker made a sort of cartoon, pompous jerk says "Who dares disturb the ineffable blah blah blah"

Cleaning lady: "Sorry I had no idea you wasn't effable, I'll come back later"

that is to say since effable as a slang term for some someone that one might like to have sex with exists, it is a reasonable pun to make with ineffable as being, well, not effable. However one should probably be able to realize the ineffable in question is not a pun on the slang term and figure things out. Somewhat embarrassing really.

on edit: added in disturb, must have missed it because very tired.
by EMM_386 | 2026-02-08 13:17:21+00:00
> An automated way to achieve this would be awesome.

The author can easily do this by creating a simple memory tool call, announcing it in the prompt to the LLM, and having it call the tool.

I wrote an agent harness for my own use that allows add/remove memories and the AI uses it as you would expect - to keep notes for itself between sessions.
by mystraline | 2026-02-08 13:17:57+00:00
Its existential dread, of being useless and of not being able to thrive.

Its being compared to that of a slop machine, and billionaires claiming that its better than you are in all ways.

Its having integrity in your work, but the LLM slop-machines can lie and go "You're actually right (tells more lies)".

It all comes down to that LLMs serve to 'fix' the trillion dollar problem: peoples wages. Especially those engineers, developers, medical, and more.
by Levitating | 2026-02-08 13:17:59+00:00
> So similar to IBM in the 80s

In 1980 IBM earned 3.56 billion dollars[1] (15 adjusted for inflation). Apple earned 416.16 billion in 2025, Alphabet 402.8 billion.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/17/business/earnings-ibm-net...
by ricardobeat | 2026-02-08 13:18:10+00:00
> The fact that an idle Mac has over 2,000 threads running in over 600 processes is good news

Not when one of those decides to wreck havoc - spotlight indexing issues slowly eating away your disk space, icloud sync spinning over and over and hanging any app that tries to read your Documents folder, Photos sync pegging all cores at 100%… it feels like things might be getting a little out of hand. How can anyone model/predict system behaviour with so many moving parts?
by attila-lendvai | 2026-02-08 13:18:10+00:00
if it's Felleisen, then i'm surprised. i've met him on a conference for a couple of days about a decade ago, and my memory is of a nononsense guy with whom our vision of programming resonated a lot.

i was coming from the CL side of the isle, i hadn't known his work prior to that.
Show HN: agent-ledger – Idempotent tool execution for AI agents
by itsimri | 2026-02-08 13:18:36+00:00
I built agent-ledger to prevent agents from running the same tool calls multiple times (after a crash, a webhook retry, or LLM retry after a timeout). Without it, you can get duplicate side effects (emails sent twice, tickets created twice) and no way to tell what already executed.

It's a small Python library that sits at the tool call boundary. It hashes (workflow_id, tool, args) into an idempotency key and keeps it in a ledger. It runs the handler once, replays the stored result on retry.

It also supports human-in-the-loop approval flows. The approval is bound to the exact payload hash, so you can't approve one action and execute a different one. And since every effect has a lifecycle (processing → succeeded/failed/denied), you can see exactly what changes the agent has made to your external systems/APIs.

Key features:
- Deduplication of tool calls by hashing them into a stable idempotency key
- Exactly-once execution if downstream APIs support idempotency keys (pass effect.idem_key to Stripe, etc.)
- Human-in-the-loop approvals (intent-bound to exact tool call args)
- Queryable effect receipts — what ran, what failed, what's pending approval
- Postgres for production, in-memory for prototyping

Github: https://github.com/rune0-dev/agent-ledger Website: https://rune0.com

Would love feedback on the lib, edge cases you've hit with agents doing real side effects, or any feature ideas.
by simonw | 2026-02-08 13:19:22+00:00
I enjoy the kind of problem solving you are describing there too. That's why I like being able to point LLMs at them first - if they can find the fix I get to save a bunch of time and spend it on more interesting problems, and if they can't find the fix then I know I'm going to have a great time digging into a really gnarly problem myself!