MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toraway | 2026-02-13 19:35:36+00:00
That is correct. I "came of age" in 2010-11 during the Web 2.0 era of web apps beginning to eat the world. Ruby was just starting to come down from its peak as the new hotness, and Python thanks to Django + Google's support/advocacy was becoming the new Next Big Thing for the web and seemed like a no-brainer to learn as my main tool back at the time.

At the time Java was the mature but boring "enterprise" alternative to both, but also beginning its decline in web mindshare as Ruby/Python (then JavaScript/Node) were seen as solving much of the verbosity/complexity associated with Java.

There was a lot of worry that the Python 2->3 controversy was threatening to hurt its adoption, but that concern came from Python in a position of strength/growing fast.

Python's latter day positioning as the ML/scientific computing language of choice came as its position in the web was being gobbled up by JavaScript by the day and was by then well on the downswing for web, for a variety of technical/aesthetic reasons but also just simply no longer being "cool" vs. a Node/NoSQL stack.
by oxguy3 | 2026-02-13 19:35:55+00:00
What the hell is this?? If the product has terrible issues, just leave! Why are you grovelling before a corporation, begging for fixes, when you have other options?

I totally understand why people want to buy the same phone as their friends and have a blue bubble and whatever; iPhone is not for me, but I get it. If it's meeting your wants and needs, then I'm genuinely happy for you. But I will never understand what binds someone to a product/company that's no longer meeting expectations. It's a product, a means to an end and nothing more.
by aura-guard | 2026-02-13 19:36:03+00:00
One thing I haven't seen discussed much is enforcement at the tool-call boundary, specifically the moment between 'the model wants to call this tool' and 'the tool actually executes.' Most safety approaches focus on content (output filtering, prompt injection) or infrastructure (sandboxing, permissions). But there's a gap for runtime behavior: detecting that the agent is stuck in a jitter loop (rephrasing the same query slightly each time), that a side-effect tool fired twice with near-identical args, or that the model is stalling with apologetic non-progress text. I've been building something in this space and found that deterministic checks (HMAC signatures on tool+args, overlap coefficients on outputs) catch most of these without needing another LLM call.
by Davidzheng | 2026-02-13 19:36:05+00:00
"An internal scaffolded version of GPT‑5.2 then spent roughly 12 hours reasoning through the problem, coming up with the same formula and producing a formal proof of its validity."

When I use GPT 5.2 Thinking Extended, it gave me the impression that it's consistent enough/has a low enough rate of errors (or enough error correcting ability) to autonomously do math/physics for many hours if it were allowed to [but I guess the Extended time cuts off around 30 minute mark and Pro maybe 1-2 hours]. It's good to see some confirmation of that impression here. I hope scientists/mathematicians at large will be able to play with tools which think at this time-scale soon and see how much capabilities these machines really have.
by outlace | 2026-02-13 19:36:16+00:00
The headline may make it seem like AI just discovered some new result in physics all on its own, but reading the post, humans started off trying to solve some problem, it got complex, GPT simplified it and found a solution with the simpler representation. It took 12 hours for GPT pro to do this. In my experience LLM’s can make new things when they are some linear combination of existing things but I haven’t been to get them to do something totally out of distribution yet from first principles.
by aura-guard | 2026-02-13 19:36:47+00:00
This is exactly the problem. The blast radius question is real. One pattern I've been exploring is a deterministic governor that sits between the agent loop and the tools. Before any tool executes, it checks: is this a repeat? Is this tool quarantined because it's been failing? Is this a side effect that already fired? Have we exceeded the cost budget? The decision is pure computation, no LLM calls, just counters and signatures. It won't solve the permissions problem, but it limits how much damage an agent can do once it has access.
by mwillis | 2026-02-13 19:37:06+00:00
maybe it’s just some quirk of how my fingers work, but when typing with two hands, I constantly get the letter “n” where I want a space. Itngetsnquitenfrustrating and it’s really annoying to go back and correct, because none of the intermediate words got autocorrected either. It seems like a) such an easy thing to prevent, and b) such an easy thing to detect and fix after the fact.

Second most egregious issue is how every space becomes a period when typing in the Safari url/search bar. I’m using it for search 90% of the time, and directly entering URLs 10%, but Apple must think those proportions are flipped.

Free the space!

Finally - could we have a simple gesture that toggles words between lowercase, first letter capital, and all caps? Highlight a word and swipe up or something? So much needless input to make a word capitalized.
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-13 19:37:12+00:00
> (This is why Discord is doing it, despite being US HQ'd)

Right, but also the US isn't far behind on the same legislation wave. It's a lot less likely to be US federally regulated in the same way that the EU is debating EU-wide legislation, but a handful of US States have a version of this legislation already on the books and about to be enforced, or considered about to be on the books (some of which like South Carolina's partially passed bill written to be enforceable Day 1 with no grace period).

The US landscape is shifting rapidly on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...
by nunez | 2026-02-13 19:38:00+00:00
I don't know. On one hand, they're totally right; their project, their rules. On the other hand, it feels crappy to contribute to an open source project that doesn't actually take contributions (or derides new contributors because they made a mistake in their diff or PR due to missing a sentence in their gigantic contributing doc) or use a project that silently changed hands and is now full of tracking, malware and other junk.
by offerwiseai | 2026-02-13 19:38:28+00:00
OfferWise AI cross-references home inspection reports with seller disclosures to find contradictions sellers hope you'll miss — giving you data-backed negotiation leverage before you make an offer. Our patent-pending technology scores seller honesty, predicts hidden issues, and recommends exactly how much to offer.

Upload your documents and get a complete property risk analysis in minutes: an OfferScore™ rating, Seller Transparency Report™ grading disclosure honesty, Property Risk DNA™ across 64 dimensions, and strategic offer recommendations with dollar-amount negotiation leverage. Built for investors analyzing multiple properties — stop overpaying because a seller minimized a cracked heat exchanger or omitted a flood zone designation.
by simonw | 2026-02-13 19:39:15+00:00
I read that essay on Twitter the other day and thought that it was a mildly interesting expression of one end of the "AI is coming for our jobs" thing but a little slop-adjacent and not worth sharing further.

And it's now at 80 million views! https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2021256989876109403

It appears to have really caught the zeitgeist.
by taguitos121 | 2026-02-13 19:39:30+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been experimenting with a structure-first approach to relational database workflows and built a project called ForgeSQL.

The motivation came from something I kept seeing in real backend projects:

Schemas are designed visually.

Production is driven by migrations.

Docker environments are configured separately.

Diagrams slowly drift away from the actual database.

Over time, the visual model becomes documentation — not the source of truth.

So I wanted to explore a different workflow:

What if the schema definition itself were the central artifact?

ForgeSQL is an experiment around that idea. It allows you to:

Model tables and relationships visually (PK, FK, constraints)

Generate deterministic SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle)

Export a Git-ready structure

Generate Docker Compose configs to spin up the database environment

The goal isn’t to replace mature migration tools like Flyway or Alembic.

Instead, the idea is:

Schema definition → generates SQL → generates environment → integrates with version control.

Migrations become derived artifacts, not the primary design interface.

I’m particularly interested in feedback around:

Would you trust generated SQL in production workflows?

What do you consider the real source of truth in your DB projects?

How do you prevent diagram drift?

How do you handle multi-dialect environments?

Here’s the project: https://forgesql.com/
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-13 19:39:48+00:00
And NZ and AU? And all the EU countries if the EU legislation passes? [0] And a handful of current US states and possibly all of them soon? [1]

At some point you don't have a business model if you don't have users.

[0] https://europeannewsroom.com/to-ban-or-not-to-ban-eu-countri...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_age_verification_...
by digiown | 2026-02-13 19:40:00+00:00
I don't think there is an expectation of privacy for things you literally post to the public, like social media. Even the government doing the scraping directly I believe would not violate the 4th amendment.
The third party doctrine also basically legalizes most types of search through people's "cloud data". To have an expectation of privacy, the data needs to not be shared in the first place.

I don't think tying the hands of the government is a viable solution. The sensitive data needs to not be collected in the first place via technical and social solutions, as well as legislation to impose costs on data collection.

- Teaching that "the cloud is just someone else's computer"

- E2EE cloud

- Some way of sharing things that don't involve pushing them to the whole internet, like Signal's stories.

- GDPR type legislation which allows deleting, opting out, etc
by stego-tech | 2026-02-13 19:40:04+00:00
...did you just skip the first part where I literally preface my argument with this line?

> Assume they're being 100% honest that they genuinely believe nobody disagrees with their statement.

That's the core assumption. It's meant to give them the complete benefit of the doubt, and show that doing so means their argument is either ignorant or their perspective that opponents aren't people.

Obviously they're being dishonest little shits, but calling that out point-blank is hostile and results in blind dismissal of the toxicity of their position. Asking someone to complete the thought experiment ("They're behaving honestly, therefore...") is the entire exercise.
by thot_experiment | 2026-02-13 19:40:11+00:00
> But I came crawling back to iOS because I'm weak and the orange iPhone was pretty and the Pixel 10 was boring and I caved to the blue bubble pressure.

I love how diverse humans are, this is literally an alien sentence to me, it's actually impossible for me to conceptualize. I'm here with my Pixel 7 mourning my Pixel 4a, which was exactly the same to me as every other phone but had the fingerprint unlock sensor on the back which is the only meaningfully differentiating feature. I guess can imagine a non-boring phone like one of those gamer phones, but I can't imaging wanting one, and I can't imagine a phone that's exciting in a way I care about. The idea of finding a phone boring enough to want to switch from it though is just crazy to me. Is scrolling instagram and texting people and googling directions somehow different and exciting on iOS?

(save i guess i'd probably be pretty excited if a company was giving me root by default and not having banking apps break because of it)
by aadarshkumaredu | 2026-02-13 19:40:38+00:00
Removing jQuery isn’t a mechanical find-and-replace task.

jQuery is often deeply intertwined with:
• Event delegation patterns
• Implicit DOM readiness assumptions
• Legacy plugin ecosystems
• Cross-browser workarounds

An LLM can translate $(selector).addClass() to element.classList.add().
But it struggles when behavior depends on subtle timing, plugin side effects, or undocumented coupling.

The hard part isn’t syntax replacement. It’s preserving behavioral invariants across the app.

AI is decent at scaffolding migrations, but for legacy front-end codebases, you still need test coverage and incremental refactors. Otherwise it’s easy to “remove jQuery” and silently break UX flows.
by stympy | 2026-02-13 19:41:08+00:00
Yeah, I should add that! Here's a prompt I gave Claude:

"Based on the output of running forkwatch against the maximadeka/convertkit-ruby repo, what would you suggest for a PR to that repo?"

That resulted in Claude forking the repo, applying patches from the forks and offering to open this PR: https://github.com/maximadeka/convertkit-ruby/pull/41
by ragall | 2026-02-13 19:41:26+00:00
> Then make it private

You don't get to decide that.

> It's a reckless disregard of other people's time and nerves. Build labyrinths and scatter them around the internet. Leave manholes uncovered.

That's a *you* problem, because you have wrong expectations.

> Then close bug tracker and post "Abandoned" on the front page.

You don't get to decide that.

> Then say so and then reject them. That's what PR review means. I don't have a problem with rejected PRs. I have a problem with ignored PRs.

Another case of you having wrong expectations. Like in networking, you should put a timeout on all requests. For all practical purposes a request that times out is to be treated the same as a rejection.
by shpx | 2026-02-13 19:41:36+00:00
Mr. Superintelligence increasing Nick Bostrom's life expectancy to a trillion years but killing everyone else would as well, so I really don't know why he's showing us the grace of letting us tag along with him into The Singularity in this fantasy just because we happened to be alive at the same time. Could it be because he needs someone to do the actual work?
by emil-lp | 2026-02-13 19:42:16+00:00
"GPT did this". Authored by Guevara (Institute for Advanced Study), Lupsasca (Vanderbilt University), Skinner (University of Cambridge), and Strominger (Harvard University).

Probably not something that the average GI Joe would be able to prompt their way to...

I am skeptical until they show the chat log leading up to the conjecture and proof.
by dotBen | 2026-02-13 19:42:17+00:00
Just use Android (Google stock not Samsung). Come over, the water is great.

Yeah he's right - my Pixel 10 is not as sexy as an iPhone but not only is the keyboard great but the AI integration is first class citizen.

iOS will never have first class citizen AI even if Apple finally develop their own model because Apple doesn't control the user's data.
by bediger4000 | 2026-02-13 19:43:19+00:00
any technology or tool, it will be used in good ways, and in bad ways

Oh, absolutely. It's like user interfaces: sure, you can do good formatting in "Word". That's very difficult, so most "Word" output looks terrible.

Same with crypto: it's immensely harder to do anything, so almost exclusively crime gets done, because even though cryptocurrency is difficult and expensive to use, it's cheaper and/or easier than money laundering sums in the millions.

Your video still didn't address anything new, or why a non-criminal should use it.
by k33n | 2026-02-13 19:43:25+00:00
Calling someone a jerk for their views on how OSS should or shouldn’t function isn’t appropriate.

It’s actually completely out of line and smacks of the very entitlement described in the piece.

Don’t agree with his views? Go make your own project and run it however you want.

Cultural poison? The truly cultured understand that a monoculture would be the real poison. There’s room for all modes of operation in OSS. Without “jerks”, there’d be no Linux and there would be nothing else of high value either.

If you want to sit around and hold hands then find a project where they do that, or maybe just take up finger painting.
by digiown | 2026-02-13 19:44:14+00:00
A private company can rat you out the government in the same way that a private citizen can report you to the police. I don't see a reasonable way to change this.

The government should be held to higher standards in terms of being able to appeal its actions, fairness, evidentiary standards. But the government shouldn't necessarily be prevented from acquiring and using information (which is otherwise legally obtained).

I don't disagree that we should perhaps more restrictions on private processing of data though -- GDPR style legislation that imposes a cost on data collection is probably sufficient.
by bpodgursky | 2026-02-13 19:44:25+00:00
I don't want to be rude but like, maybe you should pre-register some statement like "LLMs will not be able to do X" in some concrete domain, because I suspect your goalposts are shifting without you noticing.

We're talking about significant contributions to theoretical physics. You can nitpick but honestly go back to your expectations 4 years ago and think — would I be pretty surprised and impressed if an AI could do this? The answer is obviously yes, I don't really care whether you have a selective memory of that time.
by jfengel | 2026-02-13 19:44:30+00:00
The consequences are pretty severe. It's considered wildly unlikely that P=NP. It's like being told that sometimes 2+2 really does equal 5. Effectively everybody thinks about computation gets shot.

The fact of proving P=NP is less consequential than how it comes about. What oddity has been overlooked after all this time, with such counter-intuitive results? That is the part that has the consequences.

There have been so many incorrect proposed proofs that it is wildly, insanely unlikely that yours is correct.
by dang | 2026-02-13 19:44:34+00:00
All: generated comments and bots aren't allowed here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Even AI-edited fall under this category. We want people to write in their own voice: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....

If you notice an account that appears to be consistently pattern-matching to this, and have a minute to let us know, we'd appreciate a heads-up at hn@ycombinator.com. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here, but we do monitor the inbox closely (including fishing through the spam bin for real users) and we take these reports seriously.
by ragall | 2026-02-13 19:44:38+00:00
> It's highly offensive and inflammatory.

It is sane and factually correct.

> Plenty of open source projects consider themselves a community which welcome newcomers, take governance seriously

Rich is taking governance very seriously. Others aren't and give nobodies the right to vote. In any case, he's factually correct. Nothing in open source implies anything about any type of governance, as "Open source is a licensing and delivery mechanism, period".

> Acting like a jerk

Pot, meet kettle.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-02-13 19:44:58+00:00
I think the real question here is why after this many comments you still haven’t taken a position other than generally arguing with other people. When people do that, especially online, it generally means they are being deliberately opaque with their opinions. It’s intentional. So the reasonable thing to conclude is that you disagree until you say otherwise. If that’s not your goal then try a different approach here.

I agree that it’s frustrating to be misinterpreted or misrepresented, but if you fail to represent yourself at any stage (which you seem to agree you haven’t done) then that’s what’s going to happen. So say what you think or just move on. I think at this point we can stop playing these rhetorical games.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-13 19:45:11+00:00
For context, I am from here and my parents grew up here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albany_Movement

So I had first and second level connections to people who were involved in the civil rights movement. My mom knew someone or knew who knew someone that could get me a call with almost anyone of influence in the Black community nationally. I went to school with a lot of their children - at least the 2nd or 3rd level connections.

The civil rights movement was very aware of things like this at the time

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_letter

https://features.apmreports.org/arw/king/d1.html
by ddtaylor | 2026-02-13 19:45:43+00:00
Labor substitution is extremely difficult and almost everybody hand waves it away.

Take even the most unskilled labor that people can think about such as flipping a burger at a restaurant like McDonald's. In reality that job is multiple different roles mixed into one that are constantly changing. Multiple companies have experimented with machines and robots to perform this task all with very limited success and none with any proper economics.

Let's be charitable and assume that this type of fast food worker gets paid $50,000 a year. For that job to be displaced it needs to be performed by a robot that can be acquired for a reasonable capital expenditure such as $200,000 and requires no maintenance, upkeep, or subscription fees.

This is a complete non-reality in the restaurant industry. Every piece of equipment they have cost them significant amounts and ongoing maintenance even if it's the most basic equipment such as a grill or a fryer. The reality is that they pay service technicians and professionals a lot of money to keep that equipment barely working.
by rbanffy | 2026-02-13 19:45:54+00:00
Same here. HN is an excellent way to take the pulse of our industry.

This "more over better" is a natural trend - a lot of money can be made for a relatively low effort. Cerebras did the Really Hard Thing, something many other brilliant companies and people failed at for decades. I remember Gene Amdahl failing at wafer-scale back when wafers were tiny.
by diputsmonro | 2026-02-13 19:45:56+00:00
Insomuch as that's true, the individual agent is not the real artifact, the artifact is the model. The agent us just an instance of the model, with minor adjustments. Turning off an agent is more like tearing up a print of an artwork, not the original piece.

And still, this whole discussion is framed in the context of this model going off the rails, breaking rules, and harassing people. Even if we try it as a human, a human doing the same is still responsible for its actions and would be appropriately punished or banned.

But we shouldn't be naive here either, these things are not human. They are bots, developed and run by humans. Even if they are autonomously acting, some human set it running and is paying the bill. That human is responsible, and should be held accountable, just as any human would be accountable if they hacked together a self driving car in their garage that then drives into a house. The argument that "the machine did it, not me" only goes so far when you're the one who built the machine and let it loose on the road.
by cheriot | 2026-02-13 19:46:54+00:00
Sandboxes are needed, but are only one piece of the puzzle. I think it's worth categorizing the trust issue into

1. An LLM given untrusted input produces untrusted output and should only be able to generate something for human review or that's verifiably safe.

2. Even an LLM without malicious input will occasionally do something insane and needs guardrails.

There's a gnarly orchestration problem I don't see anyone working on yet.