MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gauravbsinghal | 2026-02-18 03:45:12+00:00
Great question. We use frontier models (Claude, Gemini class) without fine-tuning. The insight that changed everything for us: prompt engineering alone hits a ceiling fast for offensive security.

What matters more than the model:

1. Architecture over prompts. Cipher isn't one agent with a great prompt — it's multiple agents with distinct roles (recon, attack, verification) that coordinate. The "judge" agent that tries to disprove findings is more important than the attacker agent.
2. Tool use over reasoning. The model doesn't "know" how to pentest — it reasons about what tool to use next based on what it's learned so far. We give it real tools (not simulated ones) and let it chain them.
3. Invariant-based testing over checklist-based. Instead of "try SQLi on every input," Cipher defines security properties ("User A can't access User B's data") and tries to violate them. This catches logic bugs that no scanner finds.

Since you're studying security — the best thing you can do is get really good at manual pentesting first.
Understanding why an attack chain works is what lets you build agents that reason about it. The prompts matter less than the mental model you encode into the system's architecture.

Happy to chat more — feel free to DM or join our Discord.
A Local-Algebraic Route to Emergent Gravity (100 Pages)
by berndtzl | 2026-02-18 03:46:49+00:00
I've been developing a framework called Observer Patch Holography (OPH), which attempts to derive spacetime geometry and gravity from purely local quantum information structure.

Instead of assuming global spacetime, the construction starts with local operator algebras attached to observer patches and imposes Markov consistency constraints on overlaps. Under these conditions, metric structure and gravitational dynamics emerge from entropic consistency requirements.

The full derivation is ~100 pages and draws from algebraic QFT, operator algebras, and quantum information theory:

https://zenodo.org/records/18288114

For accessibility:

- Conceptual book: https://oth-book.lovable.app
- Interactive notebook (with diagrams + video):
https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/d5249760-6ce8-44a0-927b-ccf90402711a?artifactId=fb7c0ebd-4375-4997-9cae-6558ff8977b4

I’d especially appreciate critique from people familiar with algebraic QFT, holography, or quantum Markov states. If it fails, I’d love to know precisely where.
by chucksmash | 2026-02-18 03:47:31+00:00
Interesting. Different strokes I suppose. I loved this show but in the beginning they put too much emphasis on Lee Pace's character for my taste. Just kind of "ooooh, what will the brooding. mysterious maverick in a suit with a dark past do next? So unpredictable" and it didn't really resonate with me like the later seasons did.

In the same way that the beginning of Parks and Rec feels like they were setting out to make a version of The Office before it really became its own thing, the first season of HaCF felt like "what if we had a Don Draper type but instead it was Texas in the 80s?"
by johnnienaked | 2026-02-18 03:48:29+00:00
I think you're really overstating things here. Entry level positions are the tier at which replacement of senior positions happen. They don't do a lot, sure, but they are cheap and easily churnable. This is precisely NOT the place companies focus on for cutbacks or downsizing. AI being acceptable at replacing unskilled labor doesn't mean it WILL replace it. It has to make business sense to implement it.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-02-18 03:50:33+00:00
Even today, people still discuss Carl Sagan and his Astronomy 490 course structure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Pc3IuVNuO0

The articles posted UFO cult study reference is part of the reading list. =3

"On Liberty" (John Stuart Mill, 1859)

https://gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm

"Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds" (Charles Mackay, 1852)

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm

"The Evolution of Cooperation" (Robert Axelrod, )

https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/Breakthrough/book/pdfs/axel...
by troad | 2026-02-18 03:50:39+00:00
Because you get to have housing, or you get to be right, but you don't get both. You'll never build the necessary coalition if you spend half the time weaving in truth telling about slavery and indigenous genocide.

The left has forgotten what power and politics is. It's not cathartic posting. That's why we keep losing.

Was it right that the gay marriage fight required us to seek the approval and acquiescence of straights for same-sex love? God no, it was grotesque. Did we win? You bet your ass we did. If the trans fight wasn't fought in the idiotic way it was, Trump wouldn't have had his best attack ad, and this might be a much better world for trans people.

I don't give a flying fig about who was in the wrong in the 50s about race (as if there's any doubt about that). Outcomes > talking. Do you want houses or not?
by donatj | 2026-02-18 03:50:56+00:00
I genuinely enjoyed it and do recommend. As another commenter mentioned, Lee Pace's performance is stand out.

My only real critique is that it has the same problem as Mr. Robot.
The writers and script are clearly very tech-literate, but the spoken lines are awkwardly delivered with odd intonation because the actors clearly have no understanding of what the words they're saying mean.
by josephg | 2026-02-18 03:52:03+00:00
I think validation is already much easier using LLMs. Arguably this is one of the best use cases for coding LLMs right now: you can get claude to throw together a working demo of whatever wild idea you have without needing to write any code or write a spec. You don't even need to be a developer.

I don't know about you, but I'd much rather be shown a demo made by our end users (with claude) than get sent a 100 page spec. Especially since most specs - if you build to them - don't solve anyone's real problems.

Demo, don't memo.
by ordu | 2026-02-18 03:52:16+00:00
Oh, you are looking for interesting tech related blogs? I think you have not read the whole thing and missed the link: https://dynomight.substack.com/p/horse

> I guess that what really bothers me is living in such a disordered universe. Did you know that this is the most compact known way to pack 11 squares together into a larger square?

> [ a picture of really disordered 11 squares inside of a larger one]

> Really makes you think about the mindset of whoever made the universe, am I right?

> Few people seem quite as bothered by this aspect of reality as I am. So, since I can’t enjoy this kind of game, I thought I’d try to ruin it for everyone by showing that it’s extremely easy for machines.
by com2kid | 2026-02-18 03:52:18+00:00
Prior to industrialization if you wanted to paint something you had to know how to mix your own paints.

And make your own brushes.

Before the printing presses came along, putting up flyers was not even imaginable.

Signs for businesses used to hand carved.

Then printed. A store sign was still produced by a team of professionals, but small businesses coils reasonably afford to print a sign. Not often updated, but it existed.

Then desktop publishing took off. Now lone graphic designers could design and send work off to a print shop. Small businesses could now afford regularly updated menus, signage, and even adverts and flyers.

Now small businesses can make their own creatives. AI can change stylesheets, write ad copy, and generate promotional photos.

Does any of this have the artistry of hand carved signs from 600 years ago? Of course not.

But the point is technology gives individuals control.
by cjonas | 2026-02-18 03:52:59+00:00
This "single pane" attack isn't really the thing you should be most worried about. Imagine the agent is also connected to run python or create a Google sheet. I send an email asking you to run a report using a honey pot package that as soon as it's imported scans your .env and file systems and posts it to my server. Or if it can run emails, I trick it into passing it into an =import_url in Google sheets (harder but still possible). Maybe this instruction doesn't have to come from the primary input surface where you likely have the strongest guardrails. I could ask you to visit a website, open a PDF or poison your rag database somehow in hopes to hit a weaker sub agent.
by johnnienaked | 2026-02-18 03:54:14+00:00
Well said. In music, it's very similar. The jarring, often out of key tones are the ones that are the most memorable, the signatures that give a musical piece its uniqueness and sometimes even its emotional points. I don't think it's possible for AI to ever figure this out, because there's something about being human that is necessary to experiencing or even describing it. You cannot "algorithmize" the unspoken.
by imiric | 2026-02-18 03:54:52+00:00
> trained out

No need. Just add one more correction to the system prompt.

It's amusing to see hardcore believers of this tech doing mental gymnastics and attacking people whenever evidence of there being no intelligence in these tools is brought forth. Then the tool is "just" a statistical model, and clearly the user is holding it wrong, doesn't understand how it works, etc.
Show HN: Verified 16.7M Mac chip architecture on $60 Android phone
by jltackett | 2026-02-18 03:55:31+00:00
Over 6 weeks I built and verified a complete chip architecture on a $60 Android phone using Termux, iverilog, and Yosys.

Phoenix 4096×4096 specs:
- 16,777,216 MAC units (analog in-memory compute)
- 50,331 TOPS @ 3GHz (25× NVIDIA H100)
- 512 deterministic reasoning cores
- 2 TB/s memory bandwidth
- All verified in simulation

Hardware verified (15/15 passing):
- Half Adder → Full Adder → 8/16/64/128/256-bit ALUs
- 8-bit CPU (Fibonacci working)
- RISC-V core
- FPU (IEEE 754)
- GPU SIMD
- Complete Phoenix SoC

Also built:
- ULA compiler: Plain English → 12 languages (Python, Rust, Java, Assembly, COBOL, Fortran, C, C++, Go, Kotlin, Solidity, TypeScript)
- RF presence detection: 2-person tracking via WiFi signals, no cameras, 91% gesture accuracy

All code on GitHub: https://github.com/jltackett1980-cell

Built in Sikeston, MO on a $60 Android. No laptop. No cloud. No funding.

Looking for: Chip designers, semiconductor engineers, anyone interested in open silicon or analog computing. Want to tape out with Efabless or similar.

Live demo available
by chrismarlow9 | 2026-02-18 03:55:48+00:00
The slow part as a senior engineer has never been actually writing the code. It has been:

- reviews for code

- asking stakeholders opinions

- SDLC latency (things taking forever to test)

- tickets

- documentations/diagrams

- presentations

Many of these require review. The review hell doesn't magically stop at Open source projects. These things happen internally too.
by seneca | 2026-02-18 03:56:28+00:00
I thought Halt and Catch Fire was fairly well known, especially in the tech world.

Season 1 was absolutely killer. I like that they tried to capture different eras per season, but subsequent seasons got progressively weaker.

I still think Gordon's final scene is one of the best pieces of writing in TV drama history. Took my breath away the first time I saw it.
by tptacek | 2026-02-18 03:57:07+00:00
Seasons 3 and 4 did a really good job of capturing what it was like being in the industry and in SFBA in the mid/late 1990s, better than anything I've seen. I worked at McAfee (then NETA) at the time and the MCAF-ish stuff was uncanny; the last gasp of cubicle culture in the software product industry.

I liked the storytelling in it, but, like I said earlier, it's pretty Six Feet Under-ish, in that as it progresses it is less and less about the original concept of the show and more about the relationships between characters built up over years of episodes. Whether that's a good or bad thing for you depends in part on how much fan service you want; it's why I find Mr. Robot completely unwatchable.
by austin-cheney | 2026-02-18 03:57:34+00:00
Imposter syndrome is the result of pretending to be something you know to be false. That might come from getting in over your head by dishonesty during a job interview or it could come from an employer setting unrealistic expectations and you lying about compatibility to retain employment.

To solve for imposter syndrome the following steps must occur:

1. Apply introspection. Know exactly why you are not qualified and try to figure out how you got there.

2. Talk to your supervisor about this. See if they can work with you or help you with training options.

3. Stop being afraid, because it’s time to man up. Realize you have some work to do to catch up outside the office. If you are so unqualified that you can never catch up then it’s time to start exploring other options much sooner than later. Don’t put this off hoping it will fix itself, like a coward.

I spent 15 years as a JavaScript developer. That is the land of perpetual imposters. Nobody knows what they doing in JavaScript as your regular corporate employee and will lie through their teeth about it while putting on a face saving show and simultaneously crying on the inside. The constant insecurity was so toxic.
by bubblewand | 2026-02-18 03:57:55+00:00
What counts as “concretely”? And I don’t recall it calling sales bullshit.

It identified advertising as part of the category that it classed as heavily-bullshit-jobs for reason of being zero-sum—your competitor spends more, so you spent more to avoid falling behind, standard red queen’s race. (Another in this category was the military, which is kinda the classic case of this—see also, the Missile Gap, the dreadnought arms race, et c.) But not sales, IIRC.
by mikepurvis | 2026-02-18 03:58:19+00:00
Fair. On typing the comment I stopped for a moment to think about other potential examples but I don't know if it's really helpful to speculate. And honestly I'm also just not sure what you could be uncertain about on the road where it's time insensitive enough that pulling over and putting on the four ways is a valid interim option.

I was just in SF last week and there was an intersection where a cop was directing traffic even though the stoplights were still operating overhead. Multiple waymos correctly obeyed the cop, and I assumed that's just something they can do visually, but it might also be a case where they would have a remote supervisor watching the video feed and affirming "yes, that's your signal to make the left turn you want to make" or "no, you can't go that way, turn right instead".
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-02-18 03:58:30+00:00
> Has a simple, user-friendly GUI application

> Also includes a console (command-line) application which supports batch processing

> The image building library is a self-contained assembly (DLL) and could easily be used in other .NET applications

Aside the actual function of the thing (which is also very nice), I'd like to take a moment to call out someone doing the nicest way to structure a project:) If only every application was like that, we'd be better off.
by KPGv2 | 2026-02-18 03:59:51+00:00
> These bots are just as human as any piece of human-made art, or any human-made monument.

No one considers human-made art or human-made monuments to be human.

> You wouldn't desecrate any of those things, we hold that to be morally wrong

You will find a large number of people (probably the vast majority) will disagree, and instead say "if I own this art, I can dispose of it as I wish." Indeed, I bet most people have thrown away a novel at some point.

> why act like these AIs wouldn't deserve a comparable status

I'm confused. You seem to be arguing that the status you identified up top, "being as human as a human-made monument" is sufficient to grant human-like status. But we don't grant monuments human-like status. They can't vote. They don't get dating apps. They aren't granted rights. Etc.

I rather like the position you've unintentionally advocated for: an AI is akin to a man-made work of art, and thus should get the same protections as something like a painting. Read: virtually none.
by mbh159 | 2026-02-18 04:00:43+00:00
The 8% one-shot / 50% unbounded injection numbers from the system card are more honest than most labs publish, and they highlight exactly why you can't evaluate safety with static tests. An attacker doesn't get one shot — they iterate. The right metric isn't "did it resist this prompt" but "how many attempts until it breaks." That's inherently an adversarial, multi-turn evaluation. Single-pass safety benchmarks are measuring the wrong thing for the same reason single-pass capability benchmarks are: real-world performance is sequential and adaptive.
by _jss | 2026-02-18 04:01:47+00:00
Merely for the viability part: I use the $20/mo plan now, but only as a part-time independent dev. I will hit rate-limits with Opus on any moderately complex app.

If I am on a roll, I will flip on Extra Usage. I prototyped a fully functional and useful niche app in ~6 total hours and $20 of extra usage, and it's solid enough and proved enough value to continue investing in and eventually ship to the App store.

Without Claude I likely wouldn't have gotten to the finished prototype version to use in the real world.

For Indy dev, I think LLMs are a new source of solutions. This app is too niche to justify building and marketing without LLM assistance. It likely won't earn more than $25k/year but good enough!
by SoftTalker | 2026-02-18 04:02:15+00:00
Agree. I remember in school in the 1980s reading that a good programmer can write about 10 lines of code a day (citing The Mythical Man-Month) and I thought "that's ridiculous, I can write hundreds of lines a day" but didn't understand that's including all the time understanding requirements, thinking about design, testing, debugging, etc. Writing the code is a small portion of what a software engineer does.
by jaggederest | 2026-02-18 04:03:04+00:00
It's trickier than you think! Even for the modern era, the railroad tycoon games are surprisingly deep and sophisticated economic simulations. I still haven't found one to equal Railroad Tycoon 3, which has this kind of neat reactive diffusion field pricing engine.

The modern equivalents (I'm thinking of Transport Fever 2) while they are fun games just lacks the ability to build and manipulate a real economy by doing things like e.g. putting an industry in a town and then transporting goods there to satisfy the industry, making both your train line and the industry wildly profitable.
by laurieg | 2026-02-18 04:05:27+00:00
People who do lots of work and ship lots of projects tend to have a certain level of mess in their workshops. Creation is repeated cycles of trial, play, reflection and tidying.

For anyone thinking about trying out Obsidian, here are some problems I have solved with it:

- Remembering where I met someone, what we talked about and then connecting up with them at a later date. My ability to remember names is easily 10x because of obsidian.

- Seeing who in my family's birthday is coming up soon and their address so I can send them a card.

- Graphing how far I've run for each day/week and any quick training notes.

- Showing me friend's restaurant suggestions on a map when I've got a free evening and I want to try something new.

And all of this stored locally and synced onto many devices.

If you're curious I highly recommend starting simple. Don't worry about plugins, just write a quick daily note every day about the information that is important to you. When you feel like you're outgrowing that, adopt a structure that fits you and solves your problems.
by lmeyerov | 2026-02-18 04:05:56+00:00
Performance.

Our code looks like pure pandas (fancier SQL) wrapped as HTTP service (arrow instead of json), so the expressivity is more of a step backwards. We already did the work of turning awkward irregular code into relational pipelines that GPUs love.

Our problems are:

- Multi-tenancy. Our users get to time share GPUs, so when getting many GPU tasks big & small, we want them co-scheduled across the many GPUs & their many cores. GPUs are already more cost effective per Watt than CPUs, but we think we can 2x+ here, which is significant.

- Constant overheads. One job can be deep, with many operations, so round-tripping each step of the control plane, think each SQL subexpression, CPU<>GPU is silly and adds up. Small jobs are dominated by embarrassing overheads that are precluding certain use cases. We are thinking of doing CPU hot paths to avoid this, but rather just fix the GPU path.
by westurner | 2026-02-18 04:06:06+00:00
ScholarlyArticle: "Supersonic flow and hydraulic jump in an electronic de Laval nozzle" (2025)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16321 :

> The crossover from subsonic to supersonic flow coincides with a discontinuity in the local electrochemical potential, analogous to the hydraulic jump observed in supercritical classical fluids Gilmore et al. (1950). We identify the electronic shock through combined global transport and local Kelvin probe force microscopy (KPFM), confirming the presence of compressible electron flow

Additional "imaging for electron vortices"
from
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919958 re: the kondo effect and hydrodynamics :

> [ nanoscale scanning magnetometer, terahertz pump–probe spectroscopy ]
by krautburglar | 2026-02-18 04:06:44+00:00
> done something in 2004, no? When all the Baltic states were added into NATO

Russians weren't happy about that either, but they were too weak to do anything other than complain. Now they are strong enough to retaliate. George Kennan was absolutely gutted by how stupid that expansion was[1].

> Stop trying to pretend that Ukrainians have no agency and are just a cardboard cutout with Uncle Sam standing behind it.

90%+ of mankind does what the signals (radio/newspaper/television/movies/music/textbooks/social media) tell them to do. Money controls the signals. Our Epstein class controls the money (global reserve currency). At least it used to. Ukrainians get the "fell for it" award. Only way to survive this onslaught is to block the outside signals the way the Iranians or the Chinese do. Europeans are slow, because they are only beginning to figure this out.

Their war would have been over before it began if it weren't for the funds and equipment we have furnished.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_F._Kennan#Opposition_to...
by freakynit | 2026-02-18 04:06:53+00:00
The first issue created by someone other than the author is from geohot himself.. the goat: https://github.com/Zaneham/BarraCUDA/issues/17

I would love to see these folks working together on this to break apart nvidia's strangehold on gpu market (which, according to internet, allows them to have an insane 70% profit margins, thereby, raising costs for all users, worldwide).
by danielvinson | 2026-02-18 04:07:09+00:00
This is actually really interesting to me, but the way to determine if you should mulligan is if the 7 cards you are looking at is better than the average 6 cards in your deck. Given that games in most higher power formats end in the first 2-3 turns, the number of cards isn’t as important as the quality generally. So it’s really just math to determine what an “average” hand looks like.
by aresant | 2026-02-18 04:08:43+00:00
It's a tech story wrapped in a soap opera wrapped in one of the all time finest soundtracks ever played by an incredible group of actors and written by artists - it is singular!

PS - Christopher Cantwell - one of the writers and showrunners - has written a library of wonderful comic books worth investigating

PPS - ATX TV did a 10 year anniversary interview with a handful of the cast and crew that's worth watching if you're a fan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6L1suN-mGE
by Dimittri | 2026-02-18 04:08:49+00:00
totally get the 'token wastage' point—sending noise to an LLM is literally burning money.

but an other maybe bigger cost might be your time reviewing those 'bandaid fixes.' if you're merging only 30%, that means you're spending 70% of your review bandwidth on PRs that shouldn't exist right?

we deduplicate before the claude analysis with the alert context and after based on the rca so we ensure we have no noise in the PRs you have to review

why don't you trust an agent to triage alerts+issues?