MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daxfohl | 2026-02-21 19:26:30+00:00
Yeah, even for simple things, it's surprisingly hard to write a correct spec. Or more to the point, it's surprisingly easy to write an incorrect spec and think it's correct, even under scrutiny, and so it turns out that you've proved the wrong thing.

There was a post a few months ago demonstrating this for various "proved" implementations of leftpad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45492274

This isn't to say it's useless; sometimes it helps you think about the problem more concretely and document it using known standards. But I'm not super bullish on "proofs" being the thing that keeps AI in line. First, like I said, they're easy to specify incorrectly, and second, they become incredibly hard to prove beyond a certain level of complexity. But I'll be interested to watch the space evolve.

(Note I'm bullish on AI+Lean for math. It's just the "provably safe AI" or "provably correct PRs" that I'm more skeptical of).
by replooda | 2026-02-21 19:26:43+00:00
Trying to grasp is like playing some sort of malice–stupidity 5D chess. Do they realize such a ban would be unenforceable? Even if it were, would they really strive inflict something like Windows Server as the sole foundation of the Internet as a whole? Do they realize that if their wildest surveillance wet dreams came true, everything got the perfect backdoor, the perfect backdoor would be just as perfect for any of their enemies who managed to wield it? If they do realize, do they care? Again, they're not just dinosaurs or politicians, they're both, so who knows.
by otterley | 2026-02-21 19:27:16+00:00
Why is not spending resources to develop infrequently-used features that aren't revenue streams "stifling"? Granted, I too would love to have nice UIs for those out of the box, but > 99.9% of Mac users don't care, and 3rd-party developers can pick up the slack and maybe make some money filling the gap.
by znzjzjsj | 2026-02-21 19:27:51+00:00
> But then often immigration isn't the problem

There has never been a successful multiracial democracy in history. There are many books on this - one was even on Obamas summer reading list awhile back.

> The real problem is that people are not making living wages and wages are not catching up to cost of living

Importing labor devalues native labor. This is outside of the cultural change, etc. These are real problems.

> They'd rather not solve immigration

Because they serve the rich and the rich benefit from immigration at the expense of natives. Immigration is a solved problem. Do it only when needed or when it benefits the people, not a select few.
by godelski | 2026-02-21 19:28:00+00:00
Security clearances are probably a really good example of Goodhart's Law.

One reason for all these questions is really to determine if someone can be blackmailed, and thus a security risk. (Big reason they look at your financials and why debt can cause you to lose clearance) But the letter of the law trumps the spirit. A common lie these days is about weed usage. You may get or entirely rejected for having smoked in the past even if you don't today (e.g. you tried it once in college but didn't like it). So everyone lies and it creates a system where people are even told to and encouraged to lie, like in TFA. The irony being that this is exactly what creates the situation for blackmail! Now you can get blackmailed for having that past thing cause you to lose your job as well as lying on your clearance form.

Honestly it seems smarter to let the skeletons out of the closet. Spill your secrets to the gov. Sure, maybe the gov can blackmail you but a foreign government can't blackmail you for something that the gov already knows. You can still have filters but the dynamic really needs to change. Bureaucracy creates its own downfall. To reference another comment, I'd rather a functional alcoholic have a clearance and the gov know about it than a functional alcoholic have a security clearance and the gov not know about it (or pretend to not know). We've somehow turned clearance checks into security risks. What an idiotic thing to do
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-02-21 19:28:10+00:00
Touch humans in some way.

AI interaction is fundamentally unsatisfying. (I have a theory as to why; see below.) An AI can get you results, maybe even the results you wanted, but it can't give you a genuine smile. Even when we're surrounded by things that get us results, we still want the smile. So if you're doing something where you interact with people face to face, at least some of the time, that's a decent place.

In my large town/small city, there's an ice cream shop that closes between Thanksgiving and roughly March 1st. I would love to own a business that people cared as much about as they care about that place opening for the year.

-----

Why is interacting with an AI unsatisfying? I wonder if it doesn't come down to information theory. AI output has too little information in it.

You compute the information in a text by going symbol by symbol. Normally "symbol" means one character or byte. But you could do it by going word by word (or word part by word part) instead. Here you can see the problem: an AI gives you whatever word is the most probable next word, given the context. That's lower information than human output, which would give a wider variety of next words, and therefore a higher (Shannon) information content.

Yes, you can change that by increasing the temperature of the AI. Can you do that enough to give human-equivalent information content without destroying the coherence of the output? (Merely high Shannon information isn't the only goal. The insane may have high information in their output, but they are incoherent enough that it doesn't matter.)
by legitster | 2026-02-21 19:28:55+00:00
Wolfenstein 3D was pretty squarely a WWII fantasy shooter. Only later does it get into the alternate history post-war stuff which does get somewhat more squarely political.

I think it cuts both ways. The Wolfenstein franchise has obviously relished in violence against Nazis, but also inadvertently is part of the trend of glorifying them.
by CommonGuy | 2026-02-21 19:28:59+00:00
Insufficient mock data in the staging environment? Like no BYOIP prefixes at all? Since even one prefix should have shown that it would be deleted by that subtask...

From all the recent outages, it sounds like Cloudflare is barely tested at all. Maybe they have lots of unit tests etc, but they do not seem to test their whole system... I get that their whole setup is vast, but even testing that subtask manually would have surfaced the bug
by wink | 2026-02-21 19:29:06+00:00
First of all, hardly anyone cares (default email signatures etc.pp even if the people don't want that - but you said legally bindign, and I think that just usually never happens.).

And second, at least in Germany it's also somewhat of a bullshit situation that 80% of the people who do a "normal" Computer Science degree don't have that (Diplom-Informatiker/M.Sc), but the 20% who happen to study at a certain uni in a certain degree (that is mostly related, but not the default Computer Science/Software Engineering one) are/were getting their "Diplom-Ingenieur".
by andrewaylett | 2026-02-21 19:29:49+00:00
I approve of Renovate's distinct recommendations for libraries vs applications.

For a library, you really want the widest range of "allowed" dependencies, but for the library's test suite you want to pin specific versions. I wrote a tool[1] that helps me make sure (for the npm ecosystem) my dependency specifications aren't over-wide.

For an application, you just want pinned specific dependencies. Renovate has a nice feature wherein it'll maintain transitive dependencies, so you can avoid the trap of only upgrading when forced to by more direct dependencies.

The net result is that most version bumps for my library code only affect the test environment, so I'm happy allowing them through if the tests pass. For application code, too, my personal projects will merge version bumps and redeploy automatically -- I only need to review if something breaks. This matches the implicit behaviour I see from most teams anyway, who rely on "manual review" but only actually succeed in adding toil.

My experience is that Renovate's lock file maintenance makes update a whole load safer than the common pattern of having ancient versions of most transitive dependencies then upgrading a thread of packages depended on by a newer version of a single dependency.

1: https://www.npmjs.com/package/downgrade-build
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-21 19:30:18+00:00
> You don't actually "lose" capacity, you just move to higher-valued special niches within the overall industry

That's not what people mean by "lose" capacity.

Suppose DRAM companies expand capacity because prices are high, then demand levels off, the price crashes, and they all go out of business except for the one in China which gets a government bailout. That's fine, right? We're not interested in making DRAM, that's a fungible commodity, we want to make iPhones or something. (They make those too anymore, but never mind that.)

What happens now if China restricts what you can buy to give an advantage to their own companies who are trying to displace you in the higher-valued special niches? Or just raises the price for you and not them? What if there's a trade war? Or a conventional war?

When you still have a domestic industry, you go to them and have a source for the commodity. If only one country becomes the sole global supplier and that country isn't even particularly friendly, that's bad.
by vinay_ys | 2026-02-21 19:30:19+00:00
> that require legal to get involved and you do end up with documents that sound excessively broad

If you let your legal team use such broad CYA language, it is usually because you are not sure what's going on and want CYA, or you actually want to keep the door open for broader use with those broader permissive legal terms.
On the other hand, if you are sure that you will preserve user's privacy as you are stating in marketing materials, then you should put it in legal writing explicitly.
by drdaeman | 2026-02-21 19:30:23+00:00
I understand the rationale, but don’t you see how this idea contradicts autonomy of decisions for able-minded people? Such good intentions tend to be a pavement on roads to bad places.

I’d rather suggest to inform about all the potential benefits and drawbacks, but leave decisions with the individual.

Especially given that it’s not something irreversibly permanent.
by mindslight | 2026-02-21 19:30:35+00:00
The fundamental problem is that it can't, because the current administration does not support democracy, which relies on the rule of law. Its leadership style is based on fomenting division to rally true believers, rather than broad-appeal attempts at constructive policy. So appeals to come together to celebrate what we have in common come off as hollow Orwellian doublespeak.

So the question is in the realm of how do you celebrate someone's birthday when their wife just died? Yes, it's the country's 250 birthday, but we're currently going through a very dark period that does not reflect well onto the lofty ideals we take as our country's founding.
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-21 19:31:56+00:00
Existing local income taxes are imposed by local authorities. Because states (unlike the federal government) have general police powers, there generally must be authority for the local agency to do so in state law, but this is not the same as state taxes which are redistributed to local governments (which also exist.) Some states include in their laws allowing local jurisdictions to impose income taxes provisions for collection and distribution to the taxing authority by the state tax agency alongside state income taxes, to avoid the expense of duplicated administrative function, but I don't see how that changes the essential local character of the tax.
by sinkasapa | 2026-02-21 19:32:53+00:00
Lean 4 is uses constructive logic. If a closed world assumption requires that a statement that is true is also known to be true, and that any statement that is not known to be true is therefore false, that is not true of constructive systems. I only use Rocq, but I believe the type theories in Rocq and Lean 4 are basically similar variations on the Calculus of Constructions in both cases, though there are important differences. In a constructive theory something is true if a proof can be constructed, but the lack of a proof does not entail that something is false. One needs to prove that something is false. In constructive type theory, one can say, that something is true or false.
by ZitchDog | 2026-02-21 19:33:27+00:00
I've created my own "claw" running in fly.io with a pattern that seems to work well. I have MCP tools for actions that I want to ensure human-in-the loop - email sending, slack message sending, etc. I call these "activities". The only way for my claw to execute these commands is to create an activity which generates a link with the summary of the acitvity for me to approve.
by bluesnowmonkey | 2026-02-21 19:33:44+00:00
> They don't know that the reason you price things the way you do is rooted in a competitive dynamic that never got written down anywhere.

So maybe you should write it down?

I see this going differently than they do. An exoskeleton that makes you 5% stronger is not a game changer. Companies that lean fully into agents won’t just be “humans, but a little better.” They’ll move orders of magnitude faster, make decisions in less time, do it ask more efficiently. It will be no contest.
by KPGv2 | 2026-02-21 19:33:50+00:00
I think they mean you never write types for your variables or functions. They don't mean you can't create types. That's the reference to Hindley–Milner type system and type inference. You don't have to say

x : Nat
x = 5

You just say x = 5

I personally don't like that you don't seem to be able to manually describe the type for a fn/var, because it's very useful when prototyping to write stubs where you provide the typedef but then the actual variable/function is just marked as "todo"
by ollybrinkman | 2026-02-21 19:33:57+00:00
The challenge with layering on top of LLM agents is payment — agents need to call external tools and services, but most APIs still require accounts and API keys that agents can't manage. The x402 standard (HTTP 402 + EIP-712 USDC signatures) solves this cleanly: agent holds a wallet, signs a micropayment per call, no account needed. Worth considering as a primitive for agent-to-agent commerce in these architectures.
by ollybrinkman | 2026-02-21 19:34:13+00:00
The deeper issue here is that centralized identity verification creates honeypots. You hand over real identity data to verify yourself, and now that data lives in LinkedIn's systems indefinitely. The alternative direction is zero-knowledge proofs for identity — prove you're a real person without revealing which person. Projects like World ID are going this direction. The irony is that for AI agents, none of this matters: they don't have identities to verify, which is actually a feature.
by ollybrinkman | 2026-02-21 19:34:30+00:00
Openness at the OS level matters less if the platform layer above it is closed. Even on Android you're dependent on Google Play Services for payments, push notifications, and maps — all closed. The real battle is at the API and payments layer. The web had a brief moment of openness there, but we ended up with Stripe, Twilio, etc. as de facto monopolies. The next round will be interesting with AI agents that can programmatically switch providers based on price.
Ask HN: Do You Love My "Assess Idea" (AI) Robo-Reply Side Project Idea?
by burnerToBetOut | 2026-02-21 19:34:47+00:00
Chime in, HN, with the feasibility of the following idea for a side project…

_____________

User Story

As a reader logged in to Hacker News on a locally running web browser, I want a process running on my device that polls for "Show HN" posts and automatically replies to them — as me — with the results of an LLM-analyzed critique of the posted projects discovered by the process.

Acceptance Criteria

• A brutally frank critique of the posted "Show HN" project is given by a state-of-the-art LLM

• A count of existing projects functionally identical to the post being critiqued is displayed

• A list of authoritative learning resources on whatever the LLM determined the author is probably trying to accomplish is provided

• …???…

_____________

FWIW: Even with the well-documented initial inertia-reducing powers of today's coding agents, it's super, super unlikely that I'll ever get around to implementing this idea myself.

I'd be totally cool with somebody else taking a swing at it, though.
by lesuorac | 2026-02-21 19:35:01+00:00
> The military is unfortunately chock full of functional alcoholics. As long as they don't get caught drunk on the job, seen partying too much, DIU, or admit anything to their doctor, they keep getting renewed their clearance.

Well yeah. If it's not affecting your job then what's it matter? If your a closet alcoholic then sure that's something the Russians could hold over you.

There's millions of people with clearances; that's impossible to staff at below market wages and also above average moral(?) standards.
by refulgentis | 2026-02-21 19:36:41+00:00
It's not a strong claim. It's a settled one. The literature on blue light filters and screen-emitted blue light at display intensities is clear and has been for years, even if approaching it from first principles isn't convincing, or the first principles aren't known.

The thing about color science is that everyone has eyes, so everyone assumes they already have the full picture. One can experience warm light feeling "nicer," and the jump to "this is physically helping me" feels so self-evident that anyone saying otherwise must be the one making a strong claim. But "I prefer the aesthetic" and "this is physiologically beneficial" are two completely different statements, and only one of them survives controlled study.

I don't care if people use night shift. I'm not trying to take anyone's warm tint away. But we are now in an era where consumer displays are pushing luminance levels that are physically, measurably significant - not "I feel like it's bright" significant, but "this is a fundamentally different amount of light entering your eye" significant. Getting the basics right matters now in a way it didn't when we were all staring into dim LCDs and the worst case was people shifting white balance so the color temperature was incandescent, not D65.
by TheAngush | 2026-02-21 19:37:00+00:00
Funky and weird JRPG titles and games with cartoony graphics and ridiculous titles are (a) a small percentage of the PlayStation library given that >99% of games are cross-platform, (b) not nearly global enough in their appeal or sales figures to make any disinterested persons the outliers, and (c) in my experience, many of them also release on Xbox, Switch, and/or PC.

I own no consoles and am neutral on JRPGs and cartoony graphics, so I have no skin in this game. But you seem oddly focused on writing off a functionally identical piece of hardware based on the existence of one particular genre that doesn't interest you.
by matheusmoreira | 2026-02-21 19:37:23+00:00
Reminder that false positives are not only possible but likely. I remember one instance where you could get people banned by sending them a specific string of characters over chat. Anticheat was scanning the entire contents of RAM looking for it.

These days anticheat software is likely to snap at anything. Who knows what they think of the development tools Hacker News users are likely to have on their computers? They really hate virtual machines for example. There's no telling how they'd react to a debugger or profiler.
by lostlogin | 2026-02-21 19:38:13+00:00
> even accept Euro for payment.

Pre Brexit, I encounter a shop that did this in London and was surprised.

Having just been over there again, it's not hard to be entirely cashless, so the convenience isn’t missed.

Italians seem to like dealing in cash, with various taxis and hotels being cheaper if you pay cash. I guess that means it’s off the books?
by IMTDb | 2026-02-21 19:38:22+00:00
So human become just a provider of those 6 digits code ? That’s already the main problem i have with most agents: I want them to perform a very easy task: « fetch all recepts from website x,y and z and upload them to the correct expense of my expense tracking tool ». Ai are perfectly capable of performing this. But because every website requires sso + 2 fa, without any possibility to remove this, so i effectively have to watch them do it and my whole existence can be summarized as: « look at your phone and input the 6 digits ».

The thing i want ai to be able to do on my behalf is manage those 2fa steps; not add some.
by Someone1234 | 2026-02-21 19:38:42+00:00
I will say, in a lot of cases, they aren't BS-ing/lying with intent. Just the general way their minds work seemingly isn't compatible with the very idea of laying out the process in its entirety (inc. the warts/hacks/workarounds).

So what ultimately winds up happening is, you'll roll out the process according to the official way, and then it is drip-drip-drip of changes as you find out the real-world version.
by robocat | 2026-02-21 19:40:02+00:00
> the USA

Only technically do you not need a VISA.

In practice you need to apply for ETSA - requiring a biometric photo and your phone number and social media details and a destination contact address.

So you don't need a VISA, but you do need to fill out the equivalent and get authorization. Flights require the ETSA (so you cannot wing it) and the airline checked properly.

Plus the ETSA App is awful (I've had better experiences from this world countries). And there's another app you should install (customs declaration?).

Do not visit the USA unless you're desperate to (my strong recommendation).
by rdtsc | 2026-02-21 19:40:22+00:00
> When I handed the form in to the security officer, he scanned it quickly, looked me over slowly, then said, ``Explain this''--pointing at the FBI question. I described what had happened. He got very agitated, picked up my form, tore it in pieces, and threw it in the waste basket.

> He then got out a blank form and handed it to me, saying ``Here, fill it out again and don't mention that. If you do, I'll make sure that you never get a security clearance.''

It's important to "see like the government" when dealing with the government (pun on "seeing like a bank" by https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/ if anyone didn't catch the reference).

Everything fits into bins and categories with checkmarks and such. As an entity it has no "bin" for "investigated as Japanese spy as a joke when was a child". So you have to pick the closest bin that matches. However, that doesn't mean the same government later won't turn around also punish you for not picking the right "bin". Not "realizing" that it's its own fault for not having enough categories i.e. bins for you to pick. And, some may argue, that's a feature not a bug...