MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nosianu | 2026-02-16 19:28:03+00:00
> The thing that surprises me is that people are simultaneously losing their minds over AI agents while almost no one is exploring playing around with what these models can really do.

I think we all do???

Even if I'm not coding a lot, I use it every day for small tasks. There is not much to code in my job, IT in a small traditional-goods export business. The tasks range from deciphering some coded EDI messages (D.96A as text or XML, for example), summarizing a bunch of said messages (DESADV, ORDERSP, INVOIC), finding missing items, Excel formula creation for non-trivial questions, and the occasional Python script, e.g. to concatenate data some supplier sent in a certain way.

AI is so strange because it is BOTH incredibly useful and incredibly random and stupid. Among the latter, see a comment in my history I made earlier today, the AI does not tell me when it uses a heuristic and does not provide an accurate result. EVERY result it shows me it shows as final and authoritative and perfect. Even when after questioning it suddenly "admits" that it actually skipped a few steps and that's not the correct final result.

Once AI gets some actual "I" I'm sure the revolution some people are commenting about will actually happen, but I fear that's still some way off. Until then, lots of sudden hallucinations and unexpected wrong results - unexpected because normal people believe the computer when it claims it successfully finished the task and presents a result as correct.

Until then it's daily highs and lows with little in between, either it brilliantly really solves some task, or it fails and that includes telling you about it.

A junior engineer will at least learn, but the AI stays pretty constant in how it fails and does not actually learn anything. The maker providing a new model version is not the AI learning.
by mfrankel | 2026-02-16 19:28:23+00:00
The most insightful part of the essay is the focus on everyday experience. People are not reacting to AI because of labor statistics but because of cheating, fake videos, spam, and the loss of visible effort. When effort becomes indistinguishable from automation, trust erodes. That explains the backlash better than unemployment forecasts.

Where the piece misses the point is scale. It treats AI mainly as a labor market shock. Historically, technologies rarely eliminate work outright. They change what humans are valued for. The deeper danger is not mass joblessness. It is weakened thinking, shallow learning, and a breakdown in shared reality. The economic fear is overstated. The cultural damage is understated.
by lanstin | 2026-02-16 19:28:51+00:00
If this was about a useful part of the economy rather than financialized credit access, I would care. Paying 10x to US residents to provide a better Amex experience really doesn’t incentivize anything that is long term useful. Now when materials scientists and skilled scientific technicians are fired from US based jobs, well that is a problem. The economy in the US has fallen prey to the demands of irreality based capital which is seeking, not profit, not good products and healthy trade, but seeking to extract capital and to erect legislative barriers to Adam Smith style competition (between innovative small businesses striving to find an innovative way to push product utility up a bit). If you can’t brag about the good your job is doing for people, life, or history, try again.
by lukeigel | 2026-02-16 19:28:52+00:00
Jmail maintainer and co-creator here. Very excited to see that someone finally made Jemini good!

Our development process has been interesting. Although just Riley and I first made Jmail, it's been really gratifying to see companies, journalists, and fellow developers like Diego rise to the occasion to make this entire suite of apps as high quality and extensive as possible.
by dylan604 | 2026-02-16 19:28:55+00:00
> Were the ads from an app from the store that you had installed?

This is my main concern over installing apps in general but specifically store apps. I've noticed that grocery stores are moving past existing loyalty cards and want you to use their apps for exclusively available digital coupons. The prices I'm seeing are very compelling and are on top of existing loyalty card discounts, and I could see lots of people using the app because of it. The assumed amount of abuse keeps me from lemminging my way through the store.
by saidinesh5 | 2026-02-16 19:28:56+00:00
It really depends on the websites no?

If you're building a "webapp" where you think in terms of components, no point keeping the style sheet separate..

If you're building a "website" which is basically a list of hyperlinked documents with the same styling, having just one style sheet would make sense...

Of course, there's a lot of gray area in between the two...

At the end of the day, the most that most of us can really do is be annoyed at the quirks of these leaky abstractions in the large codebases that's thrust upon us.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-16 19:29:27+00:00
LLMs can use CLI interfaces to compose multiple tool calls, filter the outputs etc. instead of polluting their own context with a full response they know they won't care about. Command line access ends up being cleaner than the usual MCP-and-tool-calls workflow. It's not just Anthropic, the Moltbot folks found this to be the case too.
by asveikau | 2026-02-16 19:29:41+00:00
People see them on the screen so often they think they know them. I guess the term "parasocial relationship" has been common in the last few years to describe this.

I guess for actors and other types of artist specifically, people relate strongly to the work. It can form the basis for life memories. You remember where you were when you heard a song or saw a movie.
by Semaphor | 2026-02-16 19:29:50+00:00
Ohh, wow. First off, thanks for prosody, been using it for several years, ever since I switched from my early 2000s jabber.org account to selfhosted.

And yeah, I get what you are saying, I'm using it the same way you envision snikket, just for my wife and I. Considering how much time I spent on the initial setup, I can very much see wanting a preconfigured version.

I guess the site was just too "non technical" and went over my head when I tried to grok it (before, a while ago, and now before writing the comment), the lack of a download option for the client on the snikket site combined with repeatably talking about invites just rubbed me wrong.

As I have already setup my server, and have gajim/conversations (which afaik are the best modern Windows/Android clients, for Windows probably even the only one storing modern xmpp) for desktop/mobile, I have no need for snikket, but my view now went from negative to very positive ;)
by al_borland | 2026-02-16 19:30:01+00:00
Parents can only subsidize children if they are doing well themselves, most aren’t.

That “learning” phase used to end in the 18-25 range. Getting rid of juniors and making someone get enough experience on side projects to be considered a senior would take considerably longer. Exactly how long are parents supposed to be subsidizing their children’s living expenses? How can the parents afford to retire when they still have dependents? And all of this is built on the hope that the kid will actually land that job in 10 years? That feels like a bad bet. What happens if they fail? Not a big deal when the kid is 27, but a pretty big deal at 40 when they have no other marketable skills and have been living off their parents.

The difference is there are juniors getting familiar with those enterprise products today. If they go away, they will step into it as senior people and be unprepared. It’s not just about the syntax of a different language, I’m talking more about dealing with things like Active Directory, leveraging ITSM systems effectively, reporting, metrics, how to communicate with leadership, how to deal with audits. AI might help with some of this, but not all of it. For someone without experience with it, they don’t know what they don’t know… in which case the AI won’t help at all.

I even see this when dealing with people from a small company being acquired by a larger company. They don’t know what is available to them or the systems that are in place, and they don’t even know enough to ask. Someone from another large company knows to ask about these things, because they have that experience.
by ASalazarMX | 2026-02-16 19:30:20+00:00
They keyboard is bad, yes, but the text selection is maddening! It used to be that double or long tapping a word was enough to highlight it and retype it, now you never know if that will select a word, statement, or whole paragraph, and there's nothing you can do to change that. Even trying to hit the cursor handles at both ends of the selection can become an exercise in frustration.

I've lost count of how many times I've ended retyping a whole statement instead of trying to fix a single autocorrected word.

Apple is becoming the Bethesda of OSs, promising to fix their bugs to maybe extend battery life, when the UX has fundamental flaws.
by apexalpha | 2026-02-16 19:30:25+00:00
Yes, these laws have unintended consequences. I think at the continental scale the EU operates every law or decision has that.

But the current incentives in the fashion market also has unintended consequences: companies producing a lot of garments only to destroy them to protect perceived intellectual property value.

And here's the thing: this brand image value is relative. So by forcing all companies to comply no one has to take the negative brand image hit that would be required to unilaterally decide to do this.
by Telemakhos | 2026-02-16 19:31:06+00:00
That's what's taught in a lot of linguistics and language classes now: rules of spelling and grammar are power games designed to perpetuate one culture while repressing others, rather than tools for clarifying thought. It's fallout from the postmodern search for power dynamics in all things.

A friend recently brought up Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English Language" [0] and the Merriam Webster's Word Matters Podcast episode on it [1]. She had "read" without understanding the former and had listened with credulity to the latter. The podcast savages Orwell for not understanding "how language in general and English in particular actually works" and for his "absolutism" but especially for violating all of his precepts in his essay. Had either my friend or the podcasters bothered to read the essay carefully, they would have found that Orwell explains that he did so deliberately. When I asked my friend to summarize Orwell's essay and distill it to a single thesis, she replied that he was simply prescriptivist and wanted to tell people what to do. That's what the podcast got out of it too. For example, from the podcast:

> A big part of the conversations that we've all had with members of the public or strangers, people who correspond with a dictionary in one way or another, is some kind of membership of a club. "You care about language in the way that I do." There is absolutely a huge moral component that is imposed upon that. We always are judging others by their use of language. We are always judged by our use of language, by the way we spell, by the way we pronounce words. That's just a simple human fact. It's easier for us as professionals to separate that from culture.

The last sentence reminds me of a feedback loop: the "professionals" claim power based on the fact that they see the exercise of power in language rather than on how to use language for communicating clearly. This is how we get to a point where good grammar is a tool for "looking professional" rather than speaking and writing clearly.

I walked my friend back through the actual essay and asked her what Orwell wanted from each point, and she realized that it was, in fact, clarity, not power. Orwell wanted to challenge his readers to think about what they wanted to say before saying it, so that they could say what they meant rather than repeating what they heard commonly said (a note could be made here about large language models and probability).

[0] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-matters-podcast/episode...
by datadrivenangel | 2026-02-16 19:31:11+00:00
The problem with agents browsing the web, is that most interesting things on the web are either information or actions, and for mostly static information (resources that change on the scale of days) the format doesn't matter so MCP is pointless, and for actions, the owner of the system will likely want to run the MCP server as an external API... so this is cool but does not have room.
by raincole | 2026-02-16 19:31:50+00:00
Nay-sayers will tell you all OpenAI, Google and Anthropic 'monkeypatched' their models (somehow!) after reading this thread and that's why they answer it correctly now.

You can even see those in this very thread. Some commenters even believe that they add internal prompts for this specific question (as if people are not attempting to fish ChatGPT's internal prompts 24/7. As if there aren't open weight models that answer this correctly.)

You can't never win.
by Fogest | 2026-02-16 19:32:11+00:00
And what about the kids who get recruited for gang activity and do some pretty messed up stuff as kids? Should that not appear on a public record? This is where the problem lies, you essentially can only ever make it an all or nothing approach as it gets a lot harder to determine what should or shouldn't be apart of a public record. Especially since as you reflected in your comment, this becomes and opinion thing on whether someone thinks it matters or not what crime they did as a kid.

The problem that is happening in most Western countries is that criminal organizations take advantage of the fact that minors get reduced sentenced and that their criminal records are usually kept sealed (unless tried as an adult). Whether it be having them steal cars, partake in organized shoplifting operations, muggings, gang activity, drug dealing, etc...

Your reasoning for why this information shouldn't be public record seems to boil down to the fact that you don't agree with other peoples judgement of someone's past crimes. You'd like to see more forgiveness, and you don't think others will show the same forgiveness, so you want to take away all the access to information because of that. To me that seems like a view from a point of moral superiority.

I'd rather people get access to this information and be able to use their own brains to determine whether they want that person working there. If you were involved in shoplifting at 17 years old, and turn 18, I think it would be very fair for a store owner to be able to use that information to judge you when making a hiring decision. To me it doesn't make sense that you turn a magical age of 18 and suddenly your past poor decisions vanish into a void.
by Asooka | 2026-02-16 19:32:24+00:00
Vim only works for writing if you are writing in a language that uses the latin alphabet. It's one of its bigger failings as a text editor and I have considered if it would be possible to remap everything so it uses only ctrl- and alt- key combinations for commands (those always send the equivalent ascii keycode), but in the end that sounds like a completely new editor.
by gxonatano | 2026-02-16 19:32:37+00:00
I'm upset that there are 700+ courses across 70+ languages, but none is my language, Esperanto, the most successful international auxiliary language of all time, with an estimated 2M-5M speakers worldwide. I'm unable to select Esperanto as the language I want to learn, nor as the language I already speak. This is the kind of thing Esperantists have come to expect of language learning resources which support a low number of languages, but when there's an app which supports 70+ languages, and Esperanto isn't one of them, it feels like a deliberate omission.

There are tons of great reasons to learn Esperanto, but one is its propaedeutic value: learning Esperanto for a year, and then French for a year, leaves you knowing more French than if you had studied only French for two years. Some cite the ease of learning it (I learned it to a conversational level in about two weeks), and some the intuitive grammar (only 16 grammar rules, no exceptions). Whatever the case, the value of learning Esperanto is huge, even if you have no plans to become active in the Esperanto-speaking community.

It's great that Lairner allows one to learn endangered languages and minority languages—I'm learning Irish, for instance, which only has ~200K native speakers, most of whom are in Ireland. Learning Irish (and other Celtic languages) is immensely mind-expanding, and it unlocks a rich literature and culture. But the original literature and culture of Esperanto is even more vast, rich, and international, and is not restricted to any geographic area.

Another issue I want to bring up is the unnecessary conflation of language with geographic region. In Lairner, languages are given flags of nations, as if there's a 1:1 map of language to country. That is a really bad assumption. Languages go beyond the borders of nations. Just think of Basque, for example. Or Esperanto. (And Esperanto has a flag!)

A Turkish speaker can't learn Basque, by the way, using Lairner. Basque is not a language which is supported at all, as far as I can tell, and Turkish doesn't seem to come up as a possible L1 language for most languages. The site says "700+ courses. Every combination." But there is not every combination. To learn Irish, for instance, you have to already know English or German. There's no Chinese -> Irish, or Japanese -> Irish.

If it were me, I'd feature Esperanto as the language everyone should learn first. Then I'd ensure that, using Esperanto, you can learn any other language. That way you wouldn't have to write lessons for every language pair, only X -> Esperanto and Esperanto -> X.
by storus | 2026-02-16 19:33:05+00:00
Just add a DGX Spark for token prefill and stream it to M3 using Exo. M5 Ultra should have about the same compute as DGX Spark for FP4 and you don't have to wait until Apple releases it. Also, a 128GB "appliance" like that is now "super cheap" given the RAM prices and this won't last long.
by armcat | 2026-02-16 19:33:18+00:00
Thank you, and I don't mind at all!

I don't have any professional experience but I did build a pacman clone in Turbo Pascal (on MS DOS) back in the 90s. Also I've been playing games all my life so have a feeling for what's important - collision detection, walkable/collidable areas, speed/timing, some basic NPC logic etc. So that seemed to have been sufficient in this case :-)
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-02-16 19:33:24+00:00
I live in a dense neighborhood, and my kid's bedroom is on the bottom floor. So when they are scalking around looking for something to steal sot hey can buy more drugs, it happens anyways. I'm sure that stealing things is their actual focus, its just an accident of house construction that they wind up at my kid's bedroom window.

> The idea of a bunch of fent users sneaking around neighborhoods trying to be pedophiliac perverts seems far more right-wing fearmongering than anything based in reality.

This is why I hate the far right and the far left. The far left is like "we should just let the fent users steal all of our stuff because they are humans to! Let them poop freely on the sidewalks!", the far right are like "Those are all illegal immigrants lets deport them to El Salvadore". As a moderate, I hate both sides. It is just too bad that Trump is in power right now so the far left gets a huge electoral boost in local elections.
by tom_m | 2026-02-16 19:33:25+00:00
I mean some might say that's like joining a sinking ship. Of course one man's trash is another man's treasure. To each their own.

Hiring in tech has been broken for many many years at this point. There's so much noise and only more noise coming now with AI. To be completely honest it's entire random from my end when hiring. We can't review every application that comes in. It's just impossible. We do weed out some of the spam of course and do get to real people that actually fit the requirements, but there's so many other talented people who would easily fit the role that simple get buried under applications. It's depressing from all sides here. No one should think that they aren't any good or did something wrong or didn't network enough... because the unfortunate truth is that getting a job in tech is a lottery. Something many don't want to admit.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-02-16 19:33:39+00:00
Is convergence necessary?

If a peer says "hey there's a new version of this" and that peer also has pinned that version, then I can get it from them right now, well before the network converges. Yeah maybe it'll take a few hours for the other side of the planet to get the word, but for most data a couple hours or a couple days is fine. Tolerating latencies was kind of the point of calling it "interplanetary".

What's the use case where I'm on the other side of the planet and I somehow end up with a CID which I can't resolve? How did I get that CID so much faster than content to which it refers?
Show HN: RunbookAI – Stop scrolling dashboards at 3 a.m., let AI investigate
by EmTekker | 2026-02-16 19:33:59+00:00
Hey HN, I built this project from personal pain while being on-call.

You get paged at 3 a.m., open six dashboards, grep through logs, check recent deploys, and try to piece together what broke. Most of this is pattern matching that follows a predictable decision tree. Exactly what an AI agent should be doing.

RunbookAI is an open-source project that can understand your infra, ingest runbooks and investigate issues so you have an investigation ready to look at when you get paged at 3am.
by hinkley | 2026-02-16 19:34:44+00:00
It really messes with me though when someone dies before their last film came out. I watched that Batman movie with a knot in my stomach the whole time.

“He’s so good. But he’s gone. WTF.”

I don’t recall who now but there was some actor whose last film came out more than a year after he died, and that felt messed up and I can’t articulate why.
by ActorNightly | 2026-02-16 19:35:32+00:00
I happened to be at Amazon during Covid, and at a certain point during the hiring craze, I was doing like 3 interviews a week. I have interviewed probably close to 500 people so far in my career as software.

Even pre llm, there was a clear indicator of someone who was skilled at coding versus someone who was not. The big thing that differentiated people was curiosity. When someone is curious, they would go look stuff up, experiment, figure out how to build things by failing over and over again, and eventually they would figure it out, but consequently, they have learned quite a lot more along the way.

And then there were people that were just following instructions, who in interviews though that them following instructions was virtue worthy.

Nowdays, this is even easier to tell who is who, because LLMs essentially shortcut that curiosity for you. You don't have to dig through the internet and play around with sandbox code, you can just ask an LLM and it will give you answers.

This is why I specifically said if you are hesitant of starting with LLMs, you should learn how to learn first, which usually starts with learning how to ask questions.
by Seattle3503 | 2026-02-16 19:36:04+00:00
Identity is "infrastructure" government should provide via something like mDLS. A lot of work needs to go into make sure it is secure and it can be used in a way that protects privacy. Eg selective disclosure of attributes for verifying age. Pairwise pseudonyms for identity when your online identity doesn't need to be tied to you real identity, which is most of the time. Something like that would go far in dealing with sybil issues in decentralized systems, which is often the source of a lot of headaches for system designers.