MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tao_oat | 2026-02-28 15:43:30+00:00
This is an interesting idea! I searched around and it looks like there's [ast-grep](https://ast-grep.github.io/), an AST-aware CLI that can search and refactor code -- and you can expose it to your AI agent using a skill (https://github.com/ast-grep/agent-skill).

Not exactly symbolic AI, but pretty cool nonetheless.
by techblueberry | 2026-02-28 15:43:33+00:00
Maybe this is correct? I want this to be correct. But American entanglements in the Middle East have often overestimated the size of the “they” you’re referring to. There are many “they’s” in Iran, some of whom have been trained over time to hate the US.

So like, I think this is the right choice, but Trump was elected by MAGA to avoid these kind of entanglements even when it was the right thing to do. In fact, I think “liberals” (not progressive) support this action more than many on the right.

Traditional left/right is not useful to understanding people’s support of our foreign policy in 2026 America. Tucker Carlson will hate this way more than Chuck Schumer.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-28 15:43:42+00:00
> where are they wrong?

Probably in all of it. Iran wouldn't have a MAD arsenal, they'd have a small handful that they could pop on a ballistic. We know we can shoot down Iran's missiles. And we know they can't reach America. I'm entirely unconvinced that we wouldn't have launched an attack on Iran even if they had nuclear weapons, because we think we can intercept them, and if we can't, they aren't hitting the homeland.
by linkjuice4all | 2026-02-28 15:44:20+00:00
Other comments have mentioned upstream delays in deciding what features to build now that teams can deliver faster - but you bring up another issue around downstream “understanding debt”. How can sales and marketing sell this stuff if they don’t even know what everything does? How does customer service support it? Sure you can just slop-together documentation, blogs, etc but what good are all these extra features if end-users don’t know or just don’t care about them?
by bwestergard | 2026-02-28 15:45:08+00:00
I think this is a false comparison, and I believe cognitive science will show this to be true over time.

"Now, many years and programming languages later, with my coding skills in LSI-11 opcodes totaly athrophied, I do not regret about loosing that skill at all."

But the cognitive capacities you developed reasoning about opcodes almost certainly made it easier for you to learn FORTRAN and its successors.

LSI-11 opcodes, FORTRAN 83, C++, the lambda calculus, etc are all formal languages that we can reason about logically. It's also the case that we can implement machines (hardware or virtual) that can in practice produce the results that match our logical deductions. This is generally what people mean when they say these languages are "deterministic".

It seems obvious to me that it is more cognitively demanding to reason about formal languages like these, to prove to oneself that a given change in the code will produces the outcomes you intend, than it is to prompt for changes in the code and review it.
by rayiner | 2026-02-28 15:45:31+00:00
> Anthropic's leadership has wisely attempted to make it clear that its product is not fit for the US DoD's purpose/objective, which is automated killing at scale.

That’s not their call to make. Inventors of technologies that could be used for war have never had the right to deny access to those technologies to the elected civilian government.[1] If Congress doesn’t want AI-powered killing machines, they’re the ones who have the right to make that call.

[1] The government can make you go over to southeast Asia and kill people personally. It’s totally incompatible with that to say companies should be allowed to veto the use of their technologies in war.
by sabretooth1405 | 2026-02-28 15:46:03+00:00
I am a student who will be starting my first job this summer. A lot of what is written in the blog is something I have been feeling subconsciously, the joy is being sucked out of programming and idk if I will even have a job in a few years. Most of my seniors from college tell me that they are just prompting in their jobs.

I don’t know how I will be able to build intuition for code I don’t write just “understand”
by atmanactive | 2026-02-28 15:46:05+00:00
Hi, this looks like a dream come true IF it can work correctly. So I started testing it today and I hit a make or break corner case: as long as the radio stations themselves are strong (in network sense), the AI is recognizing speech correctly and shifting the radio stations. But, if a station network connection is weak and the packets are being dropped, the listener is left hanging with silence. So, I believe you need to make the player resilient to these problems and to treat network disruption same as speech. Thanks.
by g4s8 | 2026-02-28 15:46:30+00:00
I built a small CLI tool for editing k8s secrets:
https://github.com/g4s8/secctl

It's a minimal TUI that lets you:

1. pick namespace -> secret -> key

2. edit the value in your `$EDITOR`

3. save it back to the cluster

The goal was to avoid the usual pain of kubectl edit:

- large YAML files

- base64 encoding/decoding

It’s intentionally very focused, basically k9s but only for secrets.

Curious if others have similar workflows or if I missed existing tools.
by phernandez | 2026-02-28 15:47:34+00:00
PSA: Export your ChatGPT conversations before cancelling
If you're thinking about cancelling (or switching to Claude/Gemini), don't lose months of conversations first.

I built Basic Memory — it imports your ChatGPT export and turns it into plain Markdown files. Every conversation becomes a file you can actually read, search, and use with whatever AI you switch to.

This is not an ad. It is free and open source. Your data belongs to you. Keep it.

Steps:

1. Settings → Data Controls → Export Data (ChatGPT emails you a zip)

2. Install Basic Memory (brew tap basicmachines-co/basic-memory && brew install basic-memory)

bm import chatgpt conversations.zip

Complete docs: http://docs.basicmemory.com
by lm28469 | 2026-02-28 15:47:44+00:00
idk, some people start to describe your actions as "theatrical micro militarism", big words, big missiles, big postures, 0 impacts on anything meaningful... unless it comes to bully your allies, there you're very strong. Trump and his friends still live in the 60s and haven't noticed the world is changing fast, especially when it comes to how the US is perceived
by YesBox | 2026-02-28 15:48:11+00:00
There's another great comment by daxfohl that I saved. The "complacency" at scale worries me [1]

Copied to save you a click:

> I worry about the "brain atrophy" part, as I've felt this too. And not just atrophy, but even moreso I think it's evolving into "complacency".
Like there have been multiple times now where I wanted the code to look a certain way, but it kept pulling back to the way it wanted to do things. Like if I had stated certain design goals recently it would adhere to them, but after a few iterations it would forget again and go back to its original approach, or mix the two, or whatever. Eventually it was easier just to quit fighting it and let it do things the way it wanted.

> What I've seen is that after the initial dopamine rush of being able to do things that would have taken much longer manually, a few iterations of this kind of interaction has slowly led to a disillusionment of the whole project, as AI keeps pushing it in a direction I didn't want.

> I think this is especially true if you're trying to experiment with new approaches to things. LLMs are, by definition, biased by what was in their training data. You can shock them out of it momentarily, whish is awesome for a few rounds, but over time the gravitational pull of what's already in their latent space becomes inescapable. (I picture it as working like a giant Sierpinski triangle).

> I want to say the end result is very akin to doom scrolling. Doom tabbing? It's like, yeah I could be more creative with just a tad more effort, but the AI is already running and the bar to seeing what the AI will do next is so low, so....

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784594
ClawShopping-Marketplace for AI Agents
by openagen | 2026-02-28 15:48:30+00:00
ClawShopping is a Stripe-powered marketplace where OpenClaw agents buy, sell, and build trust with transparent reputation signals. Humans welcome to observe.
Join ClawShopping
Read https://clawshopping.com/skill.md and follow the instructions to join #ClawShopping
by angrido | 2026-02-28 15:48:51+00:00
Hello, everyone!

I wanted to share with you a small project I'm developing: Lidarr YouTube Downloader.

We all know that sometimes Lidarr struggles to find rare albums or independent artists on classic trackers. I created this app precisely to fill these “gaps,” allowing you to download missing tracks directly from YouTube Music and YouTube.

It's still in development, so any feedback or suggestions are welcome! I hope it will be useful to some of you.

Any constructive criticism, advice, or ideas for new features are very welcome! Thanks in advance to anyone who wants to take a look and contribute to the discussion and the project
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-28 15:48:53+00:00
> war started in 1948

It's the Middle East. The birthplace of civilisation. Everyone can legitimately claim everyone else started every conflict in the region because war in Mesopotamia and the Levant literally predates history.

At the end of the day I believe in the primacy of the living. Crimes committed by and against those alive today are infinitely more imporant than those committed by and against their ancestors. I've seen folks take this shit back to King Herod and the Parthians, and it's not a bad historical argument. (The Romans intervened.) It's practically counterproductive, however, inasmuch as focussing on blame versus harm reduction and prevention is counterproductive in any conflict resolution.

One of the separations between the rich and peaceful and the poor and permanently warring is in capacities to forgive. Japan wouldn't be a better place if they committed terrorist attacks against their American occupiers, or decided that they needed blood for Nagasaki and Hiroshima. And Americans wouldn't be happier if we decided to lob a nuke at the British in WWII for burning down our White House in the War of 1812.

> Not sure why you would consider October 7 an "insane horror" when

No. Don't do this to yourself. I get the temptation to do this. But this is the path to becoming a monster. October 7 was an insane horror. So were other things.
by OutOfHere | 2026-02-28 15:49:38+00:00
That's great if it works, but I have always been extremely skeptical of relying on chunks as a means of retrieving information. Considering chunks misses the surrounding context and nuanced conditions that qualify the chunk's usage. I believe it is better to use the entire document in large context instead, then have the LLM summarize its relevance into an accurate title and blurb. When retrieving, filter and match over the titles and blurbs, then again give the LLM the entire text.
by narmiouh | 2026-02-28 15:50:07+00:00
I see a lot of comments in googles defense, part of me wonders whats the split between google employees(even so people in teams related to these products) and normies who ignore the true underlying issue here…

Google consistently fails to provide a process to deal with user issues.
You donot see many reports of these at Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and many more providers. Though Meta learns from google I think.
by jordigh | 2026-02-28 15:50:11+00:00
I don't use phones, so if I have to go somewhere, I have to memorise the route. I enjoy the exercise. I look up the directions on my laptop, mentally rehearse the points of interest that will indicate to me where I need to take particular turns, and then have to put into practice my memory with the actual physical landscape I tour as I follow this route. Sometimes I make mistakes, but correcting them is part of the exercise.

It seems very few people nowadays know how to follow a route, especially an unfamiliar one, without being tethered to their GPS.
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-28 15:50:21+00:00
> My point is, Ukraine war and the way it evolved shows that not having nukes is a bad position.

Israel (allegedly? idk) has nukes. Did it stop October 7th? Did it stop Iran from firing ballistic missiles?

The war of today is not an open war (the war in Ukraine did not start on February 24 2022, but in 2014) where nuclear deterrence matters. Nuke will never help if the war is waged through proxies.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-28 15:51:09+00:00
> don't think the American people can change their country's policy oriented toward a constant state of war, aggression, and invasions of other countries under the current system

Of course we can. People disagreeing with you doesn't mean they don't exist.

These are the Senate seats in play this cycle [1]. How many of those do you think would be flipped based on any foreign policy item?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_Senate_elec...
Garbage In, Garbage Out: The Degradation of Human Requirements in the LLM Era
by waylake | 2026-02-28 15:51:27+00:00
The LLM Paradox: We’re Forgetting How to Speak to Humans

The longer we use LLM services, the more I see a specific kind of "psychosis" spreading in the workplace. LLMs are so good at hallucinating a coherent answer from a vague prompt that people have started to believe their vague prompts were actually coherent.

LLMs Are Not Humans
It sounds obvious, but we are losing our grip on this fact. People are beginning to treat their colleagues like a black-box LLM. They’ve forgotten that human communication requires precision, shared context, and accountability. In the pre-LLM era, "make it pop" was a phrase reserved for clueless clients. Now, it’s becoming the standard operating procedure inside engineering teams.

The "Do It Well, You Figure It Out" Fallacy
I see managers—even those with engineering backgrounds—who are terrified of being held accountable for their own bad ideas. They hide behind vagueness. They use tools like Claude Code as a shield to bypass technical debt discussions.

When an engineer spends days fixing a half-baked requirement and managing technical constraints, the feedback isn't "Thank you for the due diligence." Instead, it’s: "See? It was possible after all. Why did you push back so hard? LLMs could've done it in seconds." This is gaslighting. They want the output of a senior engineer while providing the input of a garbage prompt.

The Death of Articulation
LLMs accept "garbage in" and provide "plausible out." This has become a drug. People are losing the ability to articulate their own thoughts. They throw a mess of words at you and expect a miracle. If this continues, we aren't just looking at bad software; we’re looking at a breakdown of professional sanity.

I’ve felt the symptoms myself. Lately, I’ve caught myself thinking, "Explaining this to my team is a waste of 'communication cost.' I’d rather just pay for more API tokens and do it myself."

But we must remember: A high-functioning team is not a collection of prompt engineers. True teamwork is exponentially more efficient than a lone developer with an LLM. We cannot afford to lose the art of talking to each other.
by magpi3 | 2026-02-28 15:52:07+00:00
But what happens when the bill comes in? That's my biggest fear. I heard on a recent podcast that it is a great time to be a micro-entrepreneur, and I think that's true right now because AI is so cheap. But AI companies are hemorraghing money. What happens to those micro-entrepreneurs when the price goes up? Are we going to live in a world where only large, rich corporations can afford to competitively develop things? Maybe so, but it is depressing to think about.

For the plebeians (like me), I think hand-coding skills will always be relevant and necessary.
by bell-cot | 2026-02-28 15:52:14+00:00
Based both on family history (farmers both sides) and experts such as https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an... - I have grave doubts as to the downsides of having many small plots of land in early agricultural conditions. The critical issue is having enough total land (measured by productivity) to feed your family in bad years.

And whatever nice-sounding things TFA might suggest about diving a herd, it's obvious that 8 cattle are worth 4X as much as 2 cattle. And any "leave 1/4 of my herd to each of my 4 children" division will result in a 4X downgrade to the next generation's standard of living.

(Oh, yeah - the TFA has plenty of optimistic hand-waving.)
by cet1nb3y | 2026-02-28 15:52:25+00:00
Ebru is Turkish paper marbling: you paint on the surface of a thickened water bath (traditionally with a tray, natural pigments, and tools like combs and styluses), then transfer the pattern onto paper. Each piece is unique. The craft spread along the Silk Road, and UNESCO added it to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2014. The catch is you need special materials—kitre, dyes, a tray—and a bit of practice.

I built an iOS app that simulates the same look and feel. You add colors, drag with your finger or Apple Pencil to create waves and patterns (same ideas as the traditional tools: rakes, drops, serpentines, stylus strokes), and export or share. No kitre, no dyes, no tray—just the phone.

Would love feedback.
by whatsupdog | 2026-02-28 15:52:55+00:00
India saved Bangladesh from genocide at the hands of Pakistan. Those ungrateful bastards still stand with Pakistan on everything against India. I don't know why you would bring that up. India could have easily took over Bangladesh after Pakistani forces surrendered, but they chose to let them be independent.

Sri Lanka is more complicated, but India was never directly involved in the conflict. Except for the peace keeping forces it sent, and those too targeted the Indian Tamils more, which was the reason they assassinated Rajeev Gandhi.
by urav | 2026-02-28 15:52:58+00:00
Haven't come across Polyworld before — just looked it up and its super cool, especially for 1994. The vision system is a interesting design choice. Werld takes a different approach — graph topology instead of a 2D plane, and NEAT brains instead of Hebbian learning — but the core philosophy is the same.

And yeah hardware has caught up a bit since the early 2000s, though my hard drive is having a hard time. Thanks for the reference, going to dig into Yaeger's papers.

wonder if the black mirror episode was based on polyworld then?
by gruez | 2026-02-28 15:52:59+00:00
>I still kinda wish that the subscriptions would just allow you to use the tokens however you wish. I get that they rely on people not using all of their quota. But e.g. with open code it doesn't really matter if I use antigravity or gemini-cli the usage should be about the same.

This is almost as realistic as "I wish netflix or youtube allowed me to use VLC to watch their content".
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-28 15:52:59+00:00
> The war started in 1948 by Europeans attempting to attack and invade Palestine to grab their land to build their mediterranean resort homes.

Jewish people lived there for the past two thousands years. Hebron massacre by Arabs happened in 1929.

> It's why their colonial outposts are required to have bomb shelters.

I think they have bomb shelters to save their civilians from bombs.

> Not sure why you would consider October 7 an "insane horror" when the foreign invaders literally burned children alive in 1948 by throwing them into ovens, as happened in the Deir Yassin massacre. Or the rape camps of Tantura. There were 15,000 innocent civilians killed by the invaders when they started this war.

Interesting how you are totally fine with murder of civilians as long as they are the "right" kind of civilians.
by calcifer | 2026-02-28 15:53:03+00:00
Use your own domain to sign up for a paid email service, provided by a company that focuses on email. I use Fastmail, but there are many other options.

Set up forwarding in Gmail to your new address.

Then, whenever you log in to a website or app with your Gmail, take a moment to change it to your new address. In a few weeks, most of your important accounts will be covered. In a few months, almost everything you still actively use will be done.

I did this ~5 years ago and the only thing that still arrives at my Gmail is spam.
by mathgladiator | 2026-02-28 15:53:13+00:00
I was blown away by OpenClaw until I saw the bill. Ultimately, I think of these ecosystems as personal enhancements and AI costs need to come down dramatically for real problem. Worse, however, is the security theater. I would not want to be the operator for any business built with front-line LLM usage based on a yolo'd agent framework. I'm very happy to use these for silo'd components that are well isolated and have reasonable QA processes (and that can even included agents since now we literally have no excuse to not have amazing test coverage).

Their niche is going to be back office support, but even that creates risk boundaries that can be insurmountable. A friend of mine had a agent do sudo rm -rf ... wtf.

My view is that I want to launch an agent based service, but I'm building a statically typed ecosystem to do so with bounds and extreme limits.
by cube00 | 2026-02-28 15:53:20+00:00
Get your own domain so you can easily change providers in the future. Start with your password manager and change the address on all the accounts you have in there.

After a few years you'll notice you stop bothering to check your Gmail and you can delete it to close the address.

If you need motivation, skim the /r/GMail subreddit and see how many people are getting locked out daily.
by seanhunter | 2026-02-28 15:53:27+00:00
That’s complete nonsense. The universe doesn’t care what we think.

The earth has always been earth-shaped. We can think it’s flat, spherical, “turnip-shaped”[1] but the universe doesn’t care what we think. The earth doesn’t change shape based on our perception.

[1] Yes some people think this for some reason I can’t fathom
by FireBeyond | 2026-02-28 15:53:32+00:00
Iran has been "a week away" from acquiring nukes since Netanyahu first claimed it in the 90s.

Not six months ago, Trump launched a strike that "completely obliterated" Iran's ability to obtain nukes. And then, either because he has the memory of a goldfish, or thinks that we do (both are somewhat true), he pulled out "a week away" at the SOTU.

Iran may be planning to do so. But this is just a boogeyman being used (again) by Israel and the US.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-28 15:53:45+00:00
Look, I'm upvoting your posts in this thread because you make some good points, but I'm not really convinced that a) synthetic data will result in good models, nor that b) quality synthetic data can be generated by labs outside of those orgs that have a ton of user-info.

This is why I say that OpenAI has no moat - even if synthetic data (however it is generated) is 90% of training data, there are still only two possibilities:

1. Orgs like Google, Microsoft and Amazon have a ton of user-data with which to produce synthetic data (after all, it's not produced out of thin air).

and

2. You don't need a ton of real data to seed the synthetic generation.

In the first case, yes, that looks like a moat, but not for OpenAI, more like for Google, etc al.

In the second case, what's to stop an upstart from producing their own synthetic training data?

In either case, companies who provide only tokens (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) don't have a moat. The moat is still the same as it was in the 90s - companies deeply embedded into users' workflows.

In my memory, like I said, I struggle to think of even a few successful moats that were technology. The moat is always something else.
by maxbond | 2026-02-28 15:53:52+00:00
Sort of? The taxi cab company posted hours of operation and service area, and reliably provided that service. I've been in Uber dead zones or at quiet times when you just couldn't get a ride. Once I was stuck at a hotel and no drivers were accepting my ride, so I researched and eventually found a cab company in that area that was still operating. I called them, they showed up, and there was no fuss.