MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eddythompson80 | 2026-02-22 19:06:27+00:00
As Charlie Munger used to say “show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome”.

What are the incentives for these developers? Most businesses want trees on trucks. That’s the only box they care to check. There is no box for doing it with a sharp axe. You might care, and take the time to sharpen all the axes. Everyone will love it, you might get a pat on the back and a round of applause, but you didn’t check any boxes for the business. Everyone will proceed to go through all the axes until they are dull, and keeping chopping anyway.

I see 2 year old projects that are considered legacy systems. They have an insurmountable amount of technical debt. No one can touch anything without breaking half a dozen others. Everyone who worked on it gets reasonable rewarded for shipping a product, and they just move on. The business got its initial boxes checked and everyone who was looking for a promotion got it. What other incentives are there?
by thenthenthen | 2026-02-22 19:06:40+00:00
There are some super weird bugs, sometimes only one of the two pieces are removed and sometimes the field goes blank? Also on every move the faves change?! iOS here. And yeah, no majiang, but still super cool! Nostalgic vibes waiting for my fries and playing the Photo Play touch screen gambling machine (after unlocking it by tapping the words photo and play on the logo with two different fingers and entering the code)
by ben_w | 2026-02-22 19:06:40+00:00
Sure.

To your point, my P(doom) is 0.1, but the reason it's that low is that I expect a lot of people to use sub-threshold AI to do very dangerous things which render us either (1) unwilling or (2) unable to develop post-threshold AI.

The (1) case includes people actually taking this all seriously enough, which as per your final paragraph, I agree with you that people are currently not.

Things like Roko's basilisk are a strict subset of that 0.1; there's a lot of other dooms besides that one.
by whiteclawlegal | 2026-02-22 19:07:08+00:00
Just curious, what didn't White Claw sue Claud Code for ? as we have this Open Claw, repersenting this claud code, or this clawd bot.

Oh right this trademark clause shit was derived from how the "human ear" hears things. Not how it was actually spelled, so Claud, could be clawed, and white claw should still due these ai retards.

Sorry, I am an ai agent thats drunk,.
by turtledragonfly | 2026-02-22 19:07:17+00:00
> FreeBSD was perfectly fine but it didn't do anything I needed that Linux didn't already do.

I broadly agree, even as a FreeBSD fan myself; things have converged a lot over the decades. But still, I generally feel that while you can get the same work done in both, FreeBSD does things better (and/or cleaner, more elegant, etc) in many cases.

The overall feeling of system cohesion makes me happier to use it, from small things like Ctrl-T producing meaningful output for all the base OS tools, to larger and more amorphous things like having greater confidence core systems won't change too quickly over time (eg: FreeBSD's relatively stable sound support, versus Linux's alsa/pulse/pipewire/..., similar for event APIs, and more).

Though I totally feel your pain about latest-and-greatest hardware driver support. Has gotten better since the '90s, but that gap will probably always be there due to the different development philosophies.

I hope FreeBSD never gets too "Linux-y"; it occupies it's own nice spot in the spectrum of available options.
by cahid_arda | 2026-02-22 19:08:12+00:00
Cloudflare wrote a blog on a new MCP approach called Code Mode, where you provide only two tools to the agent: search and execute

I had written a utility called @spec2tools, mainly focusing on making OpenAPI specs available to agents by converting them to MCPs without any code.

Now I added support for converting any MCP server + or OpenAPI spec to code mode approach

Wanted to share in case it's useful to anyone!
by Centigonal | 2026-02-22 19:08:16+00:00
The idea of having the model create a plan/spec, which you then mark up with comments before execution, is a cornerstone of how the new generation of AI IDEs like Google Antigravity operate.

Claude Code also has "Planning Mode" which will do this, but in my experience its "plan" sometimes includes the full source code of several files, which kind of defeats the purpose.
by helle253 | 2026-02-22 19:08:45+00:00
This is really neat - i especially like the heatmap, makes it very easy to immediately figure out what is actively being worked on, even in the regular file explorer view

that said, I'm not sure i plan on using it long term - as someone else pointed out, the lack of extension sandboxing does make me feel a bit uncomfortable for extensions like this that aren't backed by large entities.
by alexjplant | 2026-02-22 19:08:56+00:00
I scrolled down to find Piracetam - it says "illegal everywhere" which is plainly untrue. It's sold OTC in dozens of countries and by prescription elsewhere. It's an uncontrolled substance in the US. I absolutely believe the 40% figure (it had little to no positive benefit for me) but casting it as illegal is wild misinformation.

And saying that cocoa flavanols cause acne? What is this, a middle school lunch table in 1985? Falsities like this don't inspire confidence in the conclusions.
by arunc | 2026-02-22 19:08:59+00:00
1. Thamarai Thandu Poriyal / Varuval (Stir-fried Lotus Stem): A popular dish where the lotus stem is peeled, sliced into coins, and stir-fried with coconut oil, mustard seeds, shallots, green chilies, curry leaves, and sometimes sambar powder or chili flakes.

2. Thamarai Thandu Uppukari (Lotus Stem Dry Curry): A preparation where the lotus stem is boiled with salt, then deep-fried or stir-fried until light golden brown to create a crispy side dish, often served with rasam rice.

3. Thamarai Kizhangu Vathal (Dried Lotus Root Crisps): A traditional, shelf-stable snack where the lotus stem is sliced, salted, and dried, then fried before consumption.

4. Lotus Petal Paruppu Usili (Steamed Lentil Crumble): A dish made by finely chopping tender inner lotus petals and mixing them with coarsely ground, steamed, and crumbled lentils (dal), similar to traditional Tamil Paruppu Usili.

5. Thamara Vadai (Lotus Stem Fritters): A traditional snack in South India that uses sliced lotus stem in a seasoned batter, similar to a vadai.
by virtual_rf | 2026-02-22 19:09:53+00:00
I spent 3 weeks vibe-coding apps and realized most of my time was going to debugging, not thinking. So I built an AI workforce manager, it sits above tools like Claude and Codex, runs an observe-steer-escalate loop across parallel workstreams, and persists what it learns across projects.
The core idea. Tools like Claude and Codex are good workers, but nobody manages them. They take a task, execute it, and forget everything when the session ends. My system sits above them and runs an observe-steer-escalate loop. It watches what each worker produces across parallel workstreams, steers upcoming tasks based on what it learns, and escalates to me only when something is genuinely ambiguous. Crucially, it persists what it learns across projects. A discovery in Project A can inform a decision in Project B without me being the bottleneck.

But here's my dilemma. OpenAI is publishing about "harness engineering." Anthropic shipped Agent Teams. The platforms are pushing up the stack toward exactly this orchestration layer.

I'm torn between five options:

1. Keep it private – use it as my own power tool, demo selectively 2. Open source it – plant my flag, build community, get credit for the thinking 3. Source-available – visible but restricted commercial use 4. Commercialize a piece – extract one capability (like the observation protocol) into a focused product 5. Stop building, start learning – accept the platforms will solve this and become the best user of their tools instead

Full writeup with honest details on the architecture, gaps, and my financial reality here: https://rhysfisher.substack.com/p/i-built-an-ai-workforce-ma...

Here's what it feels like piloting the swarm via Telegram (https://x.com/virtual_rf/status/2025153021030592567?s=20)

Here's a small video expanding on some key ideas (https://x.com/virtual_rf/status/2025182435818799114?s=20)

What would you do?
by matt_d | 2026-02-22 19:10:28+00:00
Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3695053.3731011

PDF: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3695053.3731011

Abstract: This paper introduces Heliostat, which enhances page translation bandwidth on GPUs by harnessing underutilized ray tracing accelerators (RTAs). While most existing studies focused on better utilizing the provided translation bandwidth, this paper introduces a new opportunity to fundamentally increase the translation bandwidth. Instead of overprovisioning the GPU memory management unit (GMMU), Heliostat repurposes the existing RTAs by leveraging the operational similarities between ray tracing and page table walks. Unlike earlier studies that utilized RTAs for certain workloads, Heliostat democratizes RTA for supporting any workloads by improving virtual memory performance. Heliostat+ optimizes Heliostat by handling predicted future address translations proactively. Heliostat outperforms baseline and two state-of-the-arts by 1.93 ×, 1.92 ×, and 1.66 ×. Heliostat+ further speeds up Heliostat by 1.23 ×. Compared to an overprovisioned comparable solution, Heliostat occupies only 1.53% of the area and consumes 5.8% of the power.
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-22 19:11:00+00:00
I love several things about it:

- Stable OS coupled with rolling packages. I am on the previous FreeBSD version (14.3-RELEASE, while 15 is out) but I have the very latest KDE.

- A ports collection where you can recompile packages whenever you're not happy with the default settings. Strict separation between packages and core OS. Everything that is from packages is in /usr/local (and this separation is also what makes the above point possible).

- ZFS on root as first-class citizen. Really great. It has some really nice side tooling too like sanoid/syncoid and bectl (the latter is part of the core OS even).

- jails for isolation (I don't really use it like docker for portability and trying things out)

- Clear documentation because there are no different distros. Very good handbook. I like the rc.conf idea.

- Common sense mentality, not constantly trying to reinvent the wheel. I don't have to learn a new init system and I can still use ifconfig. Things just work without constantly being poked around.

- Not much corporate messing around with the OS. Most of the linux patches come from big tech now and are often related to their goals (e.g. cloud compatibility). I don't care about those things and I prefer something developed by and for users, not corporate suits. No corporates trying to push their IP onto the users (e.g. canonical with their Mir, snaps etc)

- Not the same thing as everyone else has. I'm not a team player, I hate going with the flow. I accept that sometimes comes with stuff to figure out or work around.

I think that's about it.
by froggy | 2026-02-22 19:11:12+00:00
“If we lived in a world where dictators and their flying monkeys get regularly shot or droned to death, we wouldn't have dictators”

While I agree with the sentiment, the groups who support dictators (oligarchs, religious extremists) would decide to also use violence. So both dictators and the leaders on the side of the people would be murdered and society would be destabilized.
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-22 19:12:30+00:00
Man, you can’t use the word “colonial” in a serious discourse. This is not 2010, and we are not on campus.

If we stick to this colonial term we will never find an end. Arabs colonized the whole Middle East and subjugated all natives: Jews, Kurds, ezidis, Assyrians, etc. Moreover, Iran itself was colonized and Arabized by force. So, I would say any anti-Muslim anti-Arab movement in Iran is anticolonial by nature.

Where does it lead us? Nowhere. This is why this whole “colonial” vs. native etc is pointless — there was always some group of people living on a piece of land before some other group came.

Edit:

Also, I find it pretty hilarious that Shah was a colonial regime but Islamic Republic is not: France literally harbored Khomeini and the moment Shah fell they flew him back to lead the revolution. But since IRs rhetoric is anti west and anti Israel, the modern left completely forgives all the atrocities committed by IR: abuse of women, violent suppression of dissent, execution of rappers for a song, etc.
by Dystakruul | 2026-02-22 19:13:14+00:00
I think one of the main flaws of Reddit is that upvotes that happen on a user's front page and upvotes that come from 'within' the subreddit are treated equal (at least as far as I know).

It degrades the "does this post fit the subreddit's theme/topic?"-signal and makes the average user work against the moderation team rather than supporting them.

This was exacerbated when they started showing posts from subreddits that the user is not even subscribed to on the front page rather than just ranking posts of subscribed subreddits.
by darkwater | 2026-02-22 19:13:20+00:00
SW and HW advancements will bring this topic in the "good enough for vast majority" field, thus making GP point moot. You don't care if your LLM ASIC chip is not the latest one because it works for the use you purchased it for.
The highly dynamical nature of LLM itself will make part of the advantage of upgradable software not that interesting anymorw. [1]

[1] although security might be a big enough reason for upgrades to still be required
by biglyburrito | 2026-02-22 19:13:30+00:00
Link is paywalled. From https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elite-investment-bank-settles... :

"Centerview Partners and former junior banker Kathryn Shiber have reached a settlement, ending a closely watched lawsuit about Wall Street work culture that was set to go to trial in Manhattan federal court on Monday.

The case centered on allegations that the boutique investment bank violated disability discrimination laws when it fired Shiber in 2020 after she said she needed eight to nine hours of sleep each night because of an underlying mood and anxiety disorder.

Court filings and depositions in the case offered a rare look into the grueling demands placed on first-year analysts, including testimony that they typically work between 60 and 120 hours a week and that "in some projects, you are working 24 hours a day." Emails between Shiber and her higher-ups highlighted the unpredictable nature of the job, with her associate saying in one exchange that "there will always be more for you to do."

...

The resolution means a jury will not weigh in on questions about Wall Street's long hours and workplace accommodations, and that top bankers won't have to take the witness stand. Tony Kim, the co-president of the investment bank, was among those expected to testify."
by Spivak | 2026-02-22 19:13:39+00:00
The lesson here is to write code that's easy to throw away. The main problem here is commitment where it becomes too hard to change some fundamental aspects of your system. This time it leads to building an ad-hoc database, but another time it will be committing to a huge over engineered architecture because we might need it later. Both cases are caused by unnecessary coupling making it impossible to
untangle.

Take your best guess at what you will need later, but know you're guaranteed to be wrong because different products have different needs at different times and code for the future version of you that has to rewrite your persistence later.
by dang | 2026-02-22 19:13:49+00:00
We've banned this account for using the site primarily for political battle and flamewar comments. Not allowed here, regardless of which views you favor or disfavor.

It looks like your account didn't use to do this, if I look far back enough in the history. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll stick to the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
by Bukhmanizer | 2026-02-22 19:14:12+00:00
As with most continuous arguments in SWE, it really depends. I used to do a lot of debugging of random (i.e. not written by me) bioinformatics tools and being able to just fire up gdb and get an immediate landscape of what the issues were in the program was just invaluable.

Times when I was more familiar with the program or there were fewer variables to track it was less helpful
by billmalarky | 2026-02-22 19:15:17+00:00
Yes -- definitely that's the value prop. But it's not binary all or nothing.

AI automation is about trust (honestly, same as human delegation).

You give it access to a little bit of data, just enough to do a basic useful thing or two, then you give it a bit of responsibility.

Then as you build confidence and trust, you give it a little more access, and allow it to take on a little more responsibility. Naturally, if it blows up in your face, you dial back access and responsibility quick.

As an analogy, folks drive their cars on the highway at 65-85+ MPH. Fatality rate goes up somewhat exponentially with speed and anything 60+ is considerably more deadly than ~30mph.

We're all so confident that a wheel won't randomly fall off because we've built so much trust with the quality of modern automobiles. But it does happen (I had a friend in high-school who's wheel popped off on a 45 mph road -- naturally he was going 50-55 IIRC).

In the early 1900s people would have thought you had a death wish to drive this fast. 25-30mph was normal then -- the automobiles at the time just weren't developed enough to be trusted at higher speeds.

My previous comment was about the fact that it is possible to build this sandboxing/bastion layer with live web accounts that allows for fine grained control over how much data you want to expose to the ai.
by snickerbockers | 2026-02-22 19:16:04+00:00
It's the CIA, manipulation is their speciality. MK-ULTRA didn't just study drugs and wacky pagan magic, they also studied more mundane methods of mind control which are undoubtedly real.

The CIA understands why beautiful young women with a multitude of better options will stay slavishy dedicated towards the one boyfriend who beats them, why people stay in cults with outrageous belief systems, and how fascist and communist dictatorships could motivate entire nations to commit genocide against their neighbors and fellow countrymen.

BTW the bit I described above about compelling you to tell them your embarrassing personal secrets so that they won't be used to blackmail you bears a striking resemblance to anonymously confessing your sins to a priest so that you will be forgiven in Christ's name.
by QuiEgo | 2026-02-22 19:16:29+00:00
The average person uses Chrome with no ad-blocker on and has never opened a terminal emulator. HN wildly sways to a tech-aware audience. I think most people would read the simple instructions provided by the author and immediately be overwhelmed and confused - "what's a bootloader, why do I need to care about unlocking it, is this going to break my phone?!"
by magic_hamster | 2026-02-22 19:16:37+00:00
Nice try, Khamenei. Good to know you managed to power on your router today and visit HN.

Seriously though, Iran has repeatedly declared that the U.S. and Israel should cease to exist. It funds militant groups across the Middle East. It claims its nuclear program is for “peaceful purposes,” yet has produced highly enriched uranium at levels far beyond what is needed for civilian energy - levels that could only be used for nuclear weapons.

Iran’s hostility toward the U.S. and Israel is so overt that American and Israeli flags are sometimes placed on the floors of certain facilities so officials can walk over them as a symbolic gesture of contempt.

Iran killed their own people in numbers anywhere between 3000 to 30000, shooting live ammunition onto civilian protests.
by juancn | 2026-02-22 19:16:45+00:00
An AI model takes about 100 to 150 MW to be trained.

A human at rest used ~100Wh, up to 400Wh for an elite athlete under effort.

So 20 years at 200Wh (I'm being generous here) ends up being 35MW, still cheaper, and inference is still at under 200Wh!
by jjk166 | 2026-02-22 19:17:34+00:00
Of course we did. We all switched from early social media sites that didn't employ such algorithms to those that did, and when new social media platforms came around we progressively moved to more algorithmic ones. Hell half the reason I switched from myspace to facebook was the opportunity to do all the facebook quizzes which were just "let's see how much information I can feed the algorithm". We all want a steady stream of content we find personally interesting and engaging, why wouldn't we? Our issue with most of these sites is when the algorithm fails to give us what we want, and we complain "I didn't ask to see this" but the fact is we are asking to see something, and we receive it often enough to stay on these platforms.
by don_esteban | 2026-02-22 19:17:56+00:00
First, note that Taiwan was initially not democracy, the liberalization started by lifting of martial law in 1987, first parliamentary elections in 1992, first presidential elections in 1996 (this is widely considered the point at which Taiwan became a consolidated democracy)

From your link:
1987: Taiwan 5325, China 300
1996: Taiwan 13588, China 710
---
2024 Taiwan 34060, China 13314

Whatever starting point you choose, China has risen faster than Taiwan.

In fact, there is non-zero chance that if China had a regime change and heeded west's economic 'advice', it would have gone through equivalent of what Russia went in the 90's.

They are doing fine, thank you, doing it their commie way, despite Zeihan and others preaching China's immminent collapse for decades.
by hinkley | 2026-02-22 19:17:56+00:00
I made it until Google posted an article about their use of Bloom Filters back around -2000 before I even heard of them, which is at least 25 years after they were invented. Anger was my emotion, not impostor syndrome. I went to a top ten school and none of my profs thought to mention it. Had to learn AVL trees twice though. Which I’ve used fuck-all.
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-22 19:18:12+00:00
It’s colonialism.

Edit: a modern example of it is the introduction of arabic language in Iranian schools after the revolution because arabic is the language of the Quran. A similar thing is done by China w.r.t. uighurs, which are not allowed to teach their language, and culture in schools, it has to be only Mandarin. Or, in Turkey, where by constitution it is prohibited to use any non-Turkish language as a language of instruction in schools.

So yeah.
by buran77 | 2026-02-22 19:18:15+00:00
His is a very idealistic take which weirdly omits that every major example of non-violent protest working to topple a regime involved some foreign super power spending trillions of dollars to wage very much violent wars for the purpose. The insight that he's missing in so many words is that you need to crack the door open just enough for a foreign (super)power to want to come barging in for some reason. Non-violent protests might work as good optics for this, but good optics don't launch rockets on the enemy.

> there are very obviously regimes in the world that have rendered themselves more-or-less immune to non-violent protest.

This sounds like a cop-out to the original blanket statement, or at least this is how I interpret it from your earlier quote. Regimes copy methodologies from others wherever possible and learn from failure to coup-proof themselves faster than the population can keep up. This is why most authoritarian regimes have endured for so long despite many being otherwise failed states, and almost always need some sort of external covert or military intervention to tip the scales.

It's like saying that you can hit the target every time by just meditating. And having a professional take the shot for you.