MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dklvs | 2026-02-12 22:37:55+00:00
Great questions — these are exactly the right things to push on.

1. It's actually clearer than you'd think. UETA Section 14 (from 1999, adopted in 49 states) explicitly says: a contract can be formed by the interaction of electronic agents even if no individual was aware of or reviewed the actions. The ESIGN Act says the same — electronic signatures are valid as long as they're "legally attributable to the person to be bound." The legal principle isn't new: the human or org who authorizes the agent is liable, just like traditional agency law. We maintain a full attribution chain — principal → agent registration → scoped authorization → action → cryptographic audit trail — so there's always an unbroken link back to who's responsible.

2. This is a product design question, not a platform limitation. SaySigned doesn't remove human oversight — it gives you the infrastructure to define exactly how much oversight you want. Humans create the contract templates upfront — the exact terms, clauses, and conditions they want. The agent doesn't improvise contracts, it executes from pre-approved templates the human defined. On top of that, you can scope an agent's authority to only sign contracts under $X, only with pre-approved counterparties, only for specific document types. The 2am scenario isn't "no one is watching" — it's "the human wrote the contract template, set the guardrails at 2pm, and the agent operates within them." Same way you'd give a procurement team a spending policy and approved vendor list rather than approving every PO yourself.

3. DocuSign and Google Workspace are built around a human-in-the-loop UX: email a link, open in browser, click to sign. Their entire architecture assumes a human at a screen. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a fundamentally different interface — agents discover signing capabilities as native tools, no browser automation needed. And here's the thing about Google Workspace specifically: if you're using Gemini inside Workspace, Gemini could connect to SaySigned's MCP server and use it as a signing tool directly. We're not competing with Google — we're the signing layer their AI agent would use. Could DocuSign build this? Sure, eventually. But retrofitting agent-native workflows onto a human-first architecture is a very different challenge than building for it from day one. Same reason Figma didn't come from Adobe.

4. Computer-use (browser automation) is the worst of both worlds for this. It's slow, brittle (UI changes break it), expensive per transaction, and gives you zero cryptographic proof of what happened. If your agent clicks through DocuSign via browser automation, you get a screenshot-level audit trail at best. With MCP, you get a PAdES-signed PDF with an embedded RFC 3161 timestamp, a cryptographic hash chain in the audit log, and a green checkmark in Adobe Reader. One is a hack, the other is infrastructure.
by ninjagoo | 2026-02-12 22:38:02+00:00
Society is not ready for an AI world: any platform that does not guarantee anonymity will be of limited utility for social discourse in a world lurching towards authoritarianism, and any platform that does guarantee anonymity can no longer reliably distinguish human from ai; not that that should matter when it's ideas that are being debated.

But the bigger issue is the control of money: hierarchical institutions disintermediate workers from the way the fruits of their labor are put to use. Money spent or paid in taxes is aggregated and misused by third parties against the wishes and against the providers of that money. Essentially, your labor is used against you. This is true regardless of where someone is on the political spectrum.

A platform for debate or voting isn't going to resolve this fundamental problem.
by righthand | 2026-02-12 22:38:03+00:00
I’m not talking about sliced bread like Wonder bread or Dave’s Killer Bread, etc. If you can’t find sugar-free bread then you you’re not trying. Many places make big round whole loaves, bag them and sell them at grocery stores. The bread goes bad quicker because it doesn’t have sugar. You can find anything from basic peasant bread to whole wheat and sourdough. In the 3 different regions I’ve lived in the US I have never had an issue with finding good bread.
by pizzafeelsright | 2026-02-12 22:38:53+00:00
We are always at risk from the people with the power of the sword. Not long ago jobs were lost because people would not take unprescribed medication or agree to abandon their religious principals in the workplace.

While you see one potential outcome I see another. Rarely do people change course and the intensity amplifies with each perceived injustice. While you see rebellion as a possible outcome I see the doubling down of squashing a rebellion. Anyone in power is going to do what their side wants.

The people with the power of the sword (law enforcement, judges, tax collectors) have always had the ability to abuse their authority and power. I think the better path forward is more open, peaceful, extended discussion.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-12 22:39:30+00:00
Sensor fusion allows you to resolve that ambiguity, I wonder if Elon is really as in touch with this as you would expect. No single sensor is perfect, they all have their problematic areas and a good sensor fusion scheme allows you to have your sensors reinforce each other in such a way that each operates as close as possible to their area of strength.

No single sensor can ever give you that kind of resilience. Sure, it is easy in that you never have ambiguity, but that means that when you're wrong there is also nothing to catch you to indicate something might be up.

This goes for any system where you have such a limited set of inputs that you never reach quorum the basic idea is to have enough sensors that you always have quorum, and to treat the absence of quorum as a very high priority failure.
by srinifromsalem | 2026-02-12 22:39:46+00:00
For local speech-to-text, Whisper remains the gold standard - you can run it locally with good accuracy across languages. For speech-to-speech, you'd typically chain Whisper with a local TTS model like Coqui TTS or use something like Tortoise TTS for higher quality but slower processing. The key is balancing accuracy, speed, and resource usage based on your specific use case. If you're doing content creation workflows, consider what post-processing you might need - sometimes the raw transcription needs structure and enhancement beyond just accurate words.
by protocolture | 2026-02-12 22:40:13+00:00
I just dont see the benefit, unless you are installing a 6G device in every room of your house.

Which is probably the target case here. 4G had light adoption by smaller telcos, 5G has some self installable repeaters, but most of the plans for 5G to spread to self installed / class license hardware were all vapourware. 6G might have some backing pushing them into trying to find more ways to sell 6G devices, and having put up a bunch of 6G certified (but class license only) devices in your home, it would be cool if you could see some biometrics, and hook the system into home automation for surveillance and determining whether the lights go on.

But without that in home capability, and massive spread of deployed devices I just dont see the surveillance utility. Especially if your town has lots of awnings and trees.
by Zak | 2026-02-12 22:40:32+00:00
> It doesn't matter what country you run your server in or where your company is based; if you're providing public signup to a chat server then the countries (UK, AU, NZ etc) which require age verification will object if you don't age verify the users from those countries. (This is why Discord is doing it, despite being US HQ'd).

Whether it matters depends very much on what sort of organization you are.

Discord is a multinational for-profit corporation planning an IPO. It takes payments from users in those countries, likely partners with companies in those countries, and likely wants to sell stock to investors in those countries. Every one of those countries has the ability to punish Discord if it does not obey their laws, even if it does not have a physical presence there.

The situation is likely quite different for most of the 23,306 Matrix servers that federate widely. The worst thing Australia, for example could do to one of their operators is make it legally hazardous for them to visit Australia.
by topheman | 2026-02-12 22:40:52+00:00
The idea: make Effect's runtime observable — a visual tool for its concurrency model (fibers, scheduling, delays). Meant for learning and experimentation.

Features:
- Fiber tree (parent-child relationships)
- Timeline (concurrency, delays, running vs suspended fibers)
- Execution log (fork, join, errors, retries, finalizers)
- Code editor with example programs

v1 uses manual instrumentation with explicit tracing wrappers. v2 is planned with runtime hooks (Supervisor, Tracer) for automatic observability.

Demo: https://effect-viz.vercel.app
Repo: https://github.com/topheman/effect-viz
by zbentley | 2026-02-12 22:41:07+00:00
> Governments don't typically go "aw, shucks, you've caught us on a technicality" without getting the courts involved.

That might happen here, but I don’t think that principle holds generally. If that were true, wouldn’t every component of the service provider chain be sued for people e.g. downloading pirated or illegal stuff? The government cracks down on e.g. torrent trackers and ISPs, but they haven’t seriously attacked torrent clients or the app stores/OSes that allow users to run those clients. Why not?
by kylehotchkiss | 2026-02-12 22:41:11+00:00
Apparently it already is. Beef consumption has been on the decrease for a long time, apparently due to price increases.

> a 2024 study found nearly 70% of Americans say they’ve reduced their red meat consumption in the past year[1]

It feels like a flimsy way to subsidize beef farmers. But it somehow got into the dumb culture wars and some people have made eating beef a part of their cultural identity.

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/life/food-drink/two-thirds-of-a...
by mlsu | 2026-02-12 22:41:57+00:00
Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains.

In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc

Like imagine a low speed, electric, autonomous, golf-cart-only lane at every train station, for the last mile.

The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill. In about 5 years, it'll be like NVidia and CUDA. Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
by ben_w | 2026-02-12 22:42:01+00:00
No, his job depends on LLMs being able to generate revenue.

Quite a lot of humans can generate revenue without thinking or reasoning.

Irregardless, thinking and reasoning may be separate to "consciousness", but nobody really knows because we've made negligible progress on the sufficient and necessary requirements for this whole "consciousness" thing, since at least back when the ancient Greeks were putting coins in corpses' mouths so they could pay the ferryman Kharon to cross the river Styx.
by ceteia | 2026-02-12 22:42:06+00:00
But what about this statement that Linus wrote:

> That's been made clear pretty much from the very beginning, that nobody is forced to suddenly have to learn a new language, and that people who want to work purely on the C side can very much continue to do so.

If any C developer developed drivers in C previously for the DRM subsystem, they might in the future be forced to learn Rust.
by WarmWash | 2026-02-12 22:42:10+00:00
In truth, retail is a pretty awful business. People love the romanticism of it and the "simplicity", but really it's a shit way to make money the vast majority of the time.

$100k of money sitting on shelves depreciating. Narrow hours when most of your business comes, but need to hang around all those other hours for the trickle of other customers. Dealing with theft. Dealing with bottom tier workers. Dealing with the general public

It's really best when you are already retired and just want something to do for fun.
by elxr | 2026-02-12 22:43:18+00:00
Considering the rise of transformer-based upscaling today (like the newest DLSS), lots of game devs are already indirectly ok with generated art. Sure the assets themselves might be handmade, but if the render pipeline involves a generated, upscaled image at the end then the line between AI and not AI is obviously very blurry.

Also, is a hand modeled final asset built based on AI-generated concept art still "AI"?

Who cares if a bush or a tree is fully AI-generated anyway? These "no AI whatsover on any game" people virtue signal too much to make a fair argument for whatever they're preaching about. Sure, I agree with the value of human creativity, but I also want people to be able to use whatever tools they like.
by hsaliak | 2026-02-12 22:43:20+00:00
this aligns perfecly with my experience, but of course, the discourse on X and other forums are filled with people who are not hands on. Marketing is first out of the gate. These models are not yet good enough to be put through a long coding session. They are getting better though! GLM 4.7 and Kimi 2.5 are alright.
by progval | 2026-02-12 22:44:19+00:00
Links 1 and 2 have not had updates in 10 and 8 years respectively, they probably don't even compile anymore. They implement OTRv3 which was published in about 2005 and uses 1536-bits primes. As far as I know, neither the protocol nor the implementations were audited (and especially not audited recently). This is not good encryption at all.

Additionally, OTRv3 does not allow multiple clients per account, which makes it unusable for anyone who wants to chat from two devices.
by tidbits | 2026-02-12 22:44:33+00:00
Except regulations are what got us here in the first place? At least in the US, zoning is a recent invention with racial motivations. Cities want to be dense because that is the cheapest way to build. That is why basically every city older than a 100 years old that hasn't been wrecked by zoning is dense. Suburbs are an unnatural product of abundant land in the US, the invention of automobiles, and zoning.
by octoberfranklin | 2026-02-12 22:44:35+00:00
Really surprised that 1stproof.org was submitted three times and never made front page at HN.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=1stproof

This is exactly the kind of challenge I would want to judge AI systems based on. It required ten bleeding-edge-research mathematicians to publish a problem they've solved but hold back the answer. I appreciate the huge amount of social capital and coordination that must have taken.

I'm really glad they did it.
by baw-bag | 2026-02-12 22:44:41+00:00
Genuinely, I am not a troll. Don't they just do that and it can be backed up (what legislation?) with a test they did?

Almost straight away, if OpenAI says "Elite", Google will release "Extraordinary" and Musk will post "Almost AGI, probably about this time next year".

That was about 18-24 months ago when I was trying to make sense of the offerings.

Is it really new?
by chintant | 2026-02-12 22:45:15+00:00
Hi HN

We've gone through some pain in getting MCP Servers, MCP Clients and Oauth all play well. We figured it's a pain getting people to agree that their code is broken and things would work a lot well if every did the spec right. So we built authprobe

authprobe (cli or github-action) does a quick scan by walking discovery steps to see if things are kosher and spec aligned. It helped us clean up a few things and also saw it got used in the wild to diag. mcp gaps

https://github.com/authprobe/authprobe

looking for public mcp endpoints to test and any feedback, features that could make this more useful
by WarmWash | 2026-02-12 22:45:25+00:00
On paper though, if the area becomes nicer, they should be raising their prices to reflect that. The landlord asking for a larger cut because the value of the storefront has increased, should be a signal to raise your prices to pass the cost along.

As a bit of a "cute downtown" junkie, I can assure you that those quaint town stores have crazy prices, but people pay them.
by mmooss | 2026-02-12 22:46:23+00:00
> makes very little difference

It does make a difference if lots of people do it. Nothing in the world makes a difference if only one person does it.

> recycling

Because something exists that you don't think makes a significant impact is not evidence that other things don't make an impact. It's an absurd statement to say nothing people do makes an impact - look at almost everything in the world. Look at the Internet, built mostly by self-organizing people and groups.

That dogma does shift power to corporations - then they can claim to be the only ones that can do anything.
by ux266478 | 2026-02-12 22:46:41+00:00
> sarcasm is simply not a thing in Japan, and people aren't (I'm tempted to say can't be) sarcastic. It doesn't occur to them to be it.

Japanese culture absolutely has sarcasm, it simply manifests in an unfamiliar way. Homegoroshi (killing-compliment) and using a flagrantly inappropriate politeness register are some of the most common forms. Sarcasm, and more broadly humor, are highly contingent on culture and language but they're also cultural universals. They're just usually not that recognizable without familiarity with the culture and strong social skills.
Ask HN: If your OpenClaw could do 1 thing it currently can't, what would it be?
by stosssik | 2026-02-12 22:46:48+00:00
Hey guys

What’s one specific thing you wish your OpenClaw agent could do today, but can’t?

Not vague stuff like “pay for things.” I mean which concrete use case ?

For example:

- “Automatically renew my AWS credits if usage drops below $100 and pay with a virtual card.”

- “Find the cheapest nonstop flight to NYC next month, hold it, and ask me before paying.”
by jamses | 2026-02-12 22:47:16+00:00
This was great fun. The race to Rome says it's to the colosseum, but it's actually pointing to a roundabout near Termini station :)

How on earth are people managing in 5 hours though? I had £95 left after a bus, ferry, train, and bus, taking me to 2.5 days; the ferry alone took nearly a day.
by mindslight | 2026-02-12 22:47:27+00:00
No, your favored extremists taking control of the government, attacking American cities, and executing Americans who protest is not "squashing a rebellion". These are straight up violations of individual liberty and rejection of limited government, as laid out by the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.

The framing of your injustices is specious - while I'd normally be right with you about the synergy of corporate power forming a de-facto government, that these became mainstream political issues really just demonstrates how far your bubble has been warped by propagandists. Do you know how you can look at the blue tribe media and easily pick out the inflammatory extremist wackos? Your tribe has that also. If you are unable to see it, this means you are saturated in it.
Ask HN: Best practices for AI agent safety and privacy
by mw1 | 2026-02-12 22:47:39+00:00
tl;dr looking for any links, resources or tips around best practices for data security, privacy, and agent guardrails when using Claude (or others).

My journey over the past few years has been one of borderline AI skeptic for its use in coding to having tried Claude Code a month ago and being unlikely to ever go back to coding big changes without it. Most queries I would have used search for in the past are now done in AI models as a first step.

However, one thing that concerns me is whether I am using best practices around agent safety and code protection. I have turned off the “Help improve Claude” toggle in the web panel for Claude settings. Do we believe that’s enough to really stop them (the companies who took any data they could find to make this tool) from using or training on our code? Are all the companies and people using this product just entrusting their proprietary code bases to these AI companies? Is it enough for me to be on the $20/mo Claude Pro plan or do I have to pony up for a Teams plan to protect my data? Which companies do we trust more in this space?

In terms of agent guardrails, I have set up Claude CLI on a cloud VPS Ubuntu host, as its own user that has access to read and modify the code, but no commit ability or git credentials or access to data on my personal machines. The repos are in a directory with group write access and then my personal user account does all commits and pushes, to ensure that Claude has no tangible way to destroy any data that isn’t backed up offsite in git. I don’t provide any of the environment variable credentials necessary to actually run the software, or access to any real data, so testing and QA is still something I do manually and pushing the changes to another machine.

I use it iteratively on individual features or bug fixes. I still have to go back and forth with it (or drop into my editor) a decent amount when it makes mistakes or to encourage better architectural decisions, but it is overall quite fun and exciting for me to use (at this early stage of learning and exploration) and seems to speed up development for my use case in a major way (solo dev SaaS site with web, iOS, and Android native apps + many little, half-finished side projects and ideas).

Does HN have any links or resources that round up the state of the art best practices around AI use for those who are cautious and not wanting to give it the keys to kingdom, but trying to take advantage of this new coding frontier in a safe way? What commands or settings would be typically considered safe to always allow so it doesn’t need to ask for permission as often? What security or privacy toggles do I want to consider in Claude (or other agents). Is it good to subscribe to a couple services and have one review the other’s code as a first step? I hit usage limits on the $20 Claude Pro, should I go to Max or spread horizontally across different AI models? Thanks for any tips!
by tux1968 | 2026-02-12 22:48:03+00:00
You're ignoring the point. The atoms of YOUR body do not learn. They do not respond to experience. You categorically stated that any system built on such components can not demonstrate intelligence. You need to think long and hard before posting this argument again.

Once you admit that higher level structures can be intelligent, even though they're built on non-dynamic, non-adaptive technology -- then there's as much reason to think that software running on silicon can do it too. Just like the higher level chemistry, nuclear physics, or any other "biological software" can do on top of the non-dynamic, non-learning, atoms of your body.