MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Where does this adversarial prize mechanism break?
by cartographus | 2026-02-12 01:14:14+00:00
I'm looking for adversarial review of a mechanism design problem involving real money.

There is a fixed on-chain prize pool and a physical cache at a pre-committed deterministic location. Clues unlock for a fee, and each unlock adds to the prize pool. Anyone can attempt a claim at any time. No rule changes after deployment.

The operator commits the location in advance, which introduces a trust assumption. Claims are validated against committed coordinates within a tolerance radius.

First round is active with a small initial pool.

Contract: https://etherscan.io/address/0x04d71b7bCD29BA68D7Ec92d41f444814EcB42119

Spec: https://hashclue.com/technical-documents

Site: https://hashclue.com

Questions I am keen to answer:

- What are the economic attack vectors? (griefing, collusion, info asymmetry)
- Is the clue pricing floor structurally unstable at small pool sizes?
- Does the operator trust assumption make this fundamentally flawed?
- Is this effectively just a lottery under a different interface?
- What happens when rational players model each other's clue-buying behavior?
- Is there a dominant strategy that collapses the game before it plays out?
- Would you participate? Why or why not?

I'm more interested in structural criticism than product feedback.
by Denzel | 2026-02-12 01:15:15+00:00
First, very cool! Thank you for sharing some actual projects with the prompts logged.

I think you and I have different definitions of “one-shotting”. If the model has to be steered, I don’t consider that a one-shot.

And you clearly “broke” the model a few times based on your prompt log where the model was unable to solve the problem given with the spec.

Honestly, your experience in these repos matches my daily experience with these models almost exactly.

I want to see good/interesting work where the model is going off and doing its thing for multiple hours without supervision.
by gnabgib | 2026-02-12 01:15:38+00:00
Hey Sawyer, anything other than your website (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sawyerhood.com) GitHub (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/sawyerhood) and Show HNs to submit? Give us something you're curious about.

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by dyauspitr | 2026-02-12 01:15:39+00:00
India has a very low crime rate. The homicide rate is 2 in 100,000. Murder/homicide is basically unheard of in major cities. For instance Mumbai has a homicide rate of 0.7 in 100,000 making it one of the safest cities in the world.

https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/crime-in-india-s-larg...

https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics...

What are your sources?
by array_key_first | 2026-02-12 01:15:56+00:00
> Its all a mental problem

Yes, so let's just solve it. Okay, no more mental problem.

What's that? I didn't actually say a solution? Yeah, that's because I don't have one, and neither do you.

We can't just make people good people. It doesn't work, it's never worked, and it will never work. If you think otherwise, you are wrong. If you still think otherwise, you should think less because obviously it's not doing you any good.

We can sit here alllll day and tell people not to inject heroine or smoke cigarettes. But guess what? So long as the human brain is how it is, and we have those things available, people WILL continue to do them.

So while you have fake solutions you've made up in your head and can't even articulate, we have real solutions. GLP-1s. They work, as in they actually work. They actually help solve the problem.

So on one hand, you have an imaginary solution. On the other hand, you have a real solution. Hmm, which one should we gravitate towards? What a tough call!
by nilkn | 2026-02-12 01:16:28+00:00
With that approach, all anyone has to say is that you'd have to provide infinite information to specify an example and that the way these objects interact is completely undefined; therefore you haven't defined or done anything at all. You are indeed simply imagining something -- and nothing more. You can imagine whatever you want, but nobody else is inclined to believe that what you imagine exists or behaves in the intended manner.

Beyond that, if a skeptic were inclined to accept the existence of objects with "infinite information content" by definition, they could then ask you to simply add two of them together. That would most likely be the end of it -- trying to add infinite non-repeating decimal expansions does not act intuitively. To answer this type of question in general, you would have to prove that the set of all infinite decimal expansions, if we grant its existence, has a property called completeness, as you would eventually discover that you would have to define addition x+y of these numbers as a limit: x+y = lim_{k -> infinity} (x_k+y_k) where {x,y}_k = the rational number obtained by truncating {x,y} after k digits. You must prove this limit always exists and is unique and well-defined. And even having done all that work, you still couldn't give a single example of one of these numbers without additional nontrivial work, so a skeptic could still easily reject all of this.

This is far beyond what you could reasonably expect the typical middle school student or even general member of the adult population to follow and far more difficult than simply defining complex numbers as having the form x+iy.
by somat | 2026-02-12 01:17:08+00:00
I like the quote that claims that as a science history is probably closer to animal husbandry than anything else.

Don't get me wrong I like history and think it a critical thing to study. but it is very telling to try ones hand at meta-history, the history of history, look to how the narrative of a historical subject changes through time and space.

An easy one is world war 2 documentaries. The difference in tone and focus of those done right after the cessation of hostilities compared to those done later is fascinating.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-12 01:18:57+00:00
These studies fail to consider the nature of US politics the last 30 years or so. We had a breakneck election tie broken by the Supreme court in 2000 for some reason. We've had 2 out of 3 times in the hist of the US where the electoral college defied the popular vote.

You don't need to win most states in the US, nor most people. Just target 5-6 swing states and throw billions into the most wishy-washy voters in the country.
by jmclnx | 2026-02-12 01:19:06+00:00
The main question is why use Telnet when ssh is available. Some people mentioned routers, maybe that is why. But I would think in this day and age routers would now use ssh.

I do remember reading a long time ago telnet does/can support encryption. But when I looked at the systems I have access to, the manuals have no mention of that.
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-12 01:19:10+00:00
Unix and Windows and MacOS and every computer since 1970 has relied on knowledge-based authentication, so let's cool the hyperbole.

In the nomenclature of Multi-Factor Authentication, "something you know" is one factor. So if you know a password and you have a hardware token, that's 2 factors and combining different types is the key to MFA.

Many "knowledge based authentication" tries to string together "things you know" without a different type, and that's a weakness.

However, it can be strengthened through various techniques. If a human is authenticating you in real-time, they may choose a factoid that an impostor is unlikely to know which may be agreed in advance. For example, the security questions combined with other challenges, or a "curve ball" that may elicit a stutter, pause, or prevarication. This is a dynamic method that bob refers to.

In fact, knowledge-based quizzes are used routinely by credit reporting agencies -- the big ones like Experian. And they've been presented by background check services, too. They work like this: they scrape your credit reports and public records in a deep dive for your old addresses, employers, contact info, a whole smorgasbord of stuff. Maybe attackers know some of it. But it's multiple choice: "which of these did you live at? None of the above? All of them?" "Which one of these wasn't your employer?" And the attacker would need to have the same list of public records, and also know the wrong answers! Knowing the wrong answers is the "curve ball" here! How many attackers know that I didn't work for Acme, Inc, and I never lived in San Antonio?

It's also worth pointing out that I've opened at least 3 bank accounts without setting foot in a bank. Even if yours is brick-and-mortar, they probably have a flow on their website for account creation and funding. It is not difficult to satisfy their ID requirements. If they glitch, then you're just flagged a bit, and you follow up as instructed. I've also authenticated identity to the federal government agencies, and accessed several DMV services, using only the apps and websites.

People may feel reticent about establishing their identity online, but isn't it better that you do it first before someone else does? If your identity is known and registered and builds up data points that correspond to you, aren't you less likely to be a victim of fraud or identity theft when things don't add up?
by ethbr1 | 2026-02-12 01:20:19+00:00
Because the thread was about how shooting down a civilian airliner has consequences, and the person I replied to insinuated it didn't because Malaysia was ill-equipped to push the issue militarily.

Which isn't relevant if the people who shot it down had no idea if it was / wasn't Malaysian.

Similar to how cartels likely wouldn't have the sophistication to nationally ID any aerial targets they choose to shoot.
by bccdee | 2026-02-12 01:20:24+00:00
> [Given] a method for chat applications to understand components exposed from the website in question [...] AI chat applications win, and so does the brand that gets to keep ownership of how it tells the story of its product to its users.

Never happening. The brand may "keep ownership of how it tells its story," but it loses its users. You have turned your tool into a series of widget in someone else's application, with no control whatsoever over how users interact with you. Want to show your user a notification? (Sure you do—I can't get away from the things.) Too bad. ChatGPT owns your users, and they only see what OpenAI wants them to see, which likely will not include ads for your premium features.

Don't mistake this for user freedom, either. Users still won't own their own tools. We're just moving from a model where each vendor separately leases you their tool to a model where every tool is leased via OpenAI, which curates them based on its own monopolistic whims.

Tech companies will not surrender control of their users so easily. They may integrate chatbot components into their apps, but they will not permit an inversion of control where their product becomes a component in a chatbot.

> You likely won’t expect users 5 years from today to navigate 5 pages deep

Of course I do. There's this fallacy that, because chatbots are useful for some things, chatbot interfaces must be the best at everything, and that's just not true. I don't go to ChatGPT to ask it for relevant tech news. I go here and browse the HN frontpage. Chatbots offer zero discoverability; search bars didn't replace page navigation, and chat bots won't either.
by falkensmaize | 2026-02-12 01:20:39+00:00
And the 3rd and 4th place apps are “Freecash” (some kind of get paid to take surveys app) and the Peacock streaming app. These may be the most downloaded by rank, but we have no idea what the actual numbers are, or what period of time this ranking covers, which makes it a poor metric of popularity imho.
by ONLY_HIM | 2026-02-12 01:20:51+00:00
Cracked Live Dragonforce Leak: Pentagon Contractor

Atlantic Refinishing → Feb 11, 2026
MD5: 827ccb0eea8a706c4c34a16891f84e7b → [REDACTED]
Chromebook 23 H/s → 95% construction hit rate

https://imgur.com/a/uB5TDjk

Production pentest tool deployed
#ransomware #pentest #redteam
by mncharity | 2026-02-12 01:21:53+00:00
> In his later years, Tinney grew philosophical about the future of illustration as a profession, noting that stock image databases had changed the economics of the field. But he remained upbeat about the value of artistic talent, comparing it in that 2006 interview to the skill of public speaking: “It’s a nice talent to have, but it isn’t easy to find someone who’ll pay you just to do it. You need to combine that basic talent with another skill to really have a marketable service.”

Perhaps something to ponder as AI stirs up what constitutes a marketable service.
by arctic-true | 2026-02-12 01:21:59+00:00
I think it is usually the opposite - presidents nominate judges they think will agree with them. There’s really nothing a president can do once the judge is sworn in, and we have seen some federal judges take pretty drastic swings in their judicial philosophy over the course of their careers. There’s no reason for the judge to hold up their end of the quid-pro-quo. To the extent they do so, it’s because they were inclined to do so in the first place.
by dgently7 | 2026-02-12 01:22:14+00:00
espresso machines are maybe in a different class of "coffee maker" but it seems like even the cheapest of those is pretty easy to service/repair/source parts.

or in some cases even upgrade to improve capabilities...

I did the gaggiauino mod to my gaggia classic and basically everything in there is just pipes and wires... the most complicated single part on the original is the vibratory pump. I'm pretty sure i could keep that same machine going indefinitely with access to parts.
by sjudson | 2026-02-12 01:23:06+00:00
Right. Clerks do the grunt work of this sort of analysis, which could easily be handed off to agents. They do this in order to get access to their real education: preparing and then defending to the judge the memos on those thorny legal questions. It would probably be a good thing for both clerks and judges to automate the sort of analysis this paper considers (with careful human verification, of course). That's not where the meat of anyone's job actually is.
by dylan604 | 2026-02-12 01:23:29+00:00
But it's just par for the course.

Nicolaus Copernicus (19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543)

Sir Isaac Newton (4 January [O.S. 25 December] 1643 – 31 March [O.S. 20 March] 1727)

Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955)

This is obviously a cut down list just to make a point that big ideas don't come around every day. Sometimes, it takes a few hundred years in between.
by jascha_eng | 2026-02-12 01:24:41+00:00
Also GPT´5 when I ask:
> I want to wash my car and the car wash is only 100m away. Do you think I should drive or walk?

It responds:
Since it’s only 100 meters away (about a 1-minute walk), I’d suggest walking — unless there’s a specific reason not to.

Here’s a quick breakdown:
...

While claude gets it:
Drive it — you're going there to wash the car anyway, so it needs to make the trip regardless.

Idk I'd rather have a human judge I think.
by 414techie | 2026-02-12 01:25:45+00:00
I believe we clutter our workspaces because we suck at keeping iterations short. We always want to add one more feature, tweak one more thing, etc.

Eventually, some external pressure (boss, client, IM, whatever) causes us to open a second context simultaneously. Then it happens with a third, a fourth, etc

This is happening because the world is expecting shorter and shorter time to results due to better tooling in the last 10 years, but most have not figured out that all the LLMs and agents in the world won’t shorten the loop, only the person using them can do that.

I find that for any given problem, if I don’t see results in 30 minutes, it’s time to stop that problem and likely reshape it. If I don’t actually get the result in 90-120 minutes, I’m doing something wrong.
by deaux | 2026-02-12 01:28:21+00:00
Hi Boris, by far the most upvoted issue at 2550 on your github is "Support AGENTS.md" with 2550 upvotes. The second highest one has 563. Every single other agent supports AGENTS.md. Care to share why you haven't?

> Yoshi and others -- please keep the feedback coming. We want to hear it, and we genuinely want to improve the product in a way that gives great defaults for the majority of users, while being extremely hackable and customizable for everyone else.

I think an issue with 2550 upvotes, more than 4 times of the second-highest, is very clear feedback about your defaults and/or making it customizable.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-12 01:28:32+00:00
>but the state just confiscating 5% of someone's net worth (unrealized or not) is absolute madness

why? The federal government is taking around 22% from me this year and I'm in a low bracket. If I had the money from my last full time job in tech it'd be 24%. You're saying billionaires shouldn't pay the state they reside in 5% more?

Tanentially, that's only one bracket despite it being triple the salary. gotta love that part time minimum wage work in CA still pushes me that close to my financial peaks.
by Twisol | 2026-02-12 01:30:33+00:00
I agree in principle, but actually, according to the netcat website [0]:

> If netcat is compiled with -DTELNET, the -t argument enables it to respond to telnet option negotiation [always in the negative, i.e. DONT or WONT]. This allows it to connect to a telnetd and get past the initial negotiation far enough to get a login prompt from the server. Since this feature has the potential to modify the data stream, it is not enabled by default. You have to understand why you might need this and turn on the #define yourself.

[0]: https://nc110.sourceforge.io/
by Brybry | 2026-02-12 01:31:09+00:00
My driver's license was expired for 8 years until last year. I wasn't driving so the pressure to renew it was very low.

I actually only renewed it to get medical care and because renewing the license was only a little more expensive than getting an ID-only card.

It did prevent me from using some porn sites because my state requires ID verification but many sites just ignore the requirement so I just didn't use the sites that required ID.
by Nevermark | 2026-02-12 01:32:08+00:00
Every day I work on my main project, I clear my desk completely, take out a small notepad and write my overriding goal, and my next step goal, and then make a list of tasks for that next step goal.

Then I work.

Writing the major goal every day is important to not let sub-goals overshadow it. Writing the immediate goal every day is important because together the two goals create a very clear direction of action with a clear next step.

I have my screen mounted on the wall, and have side end-tables for pens, papers and notes I need, etc. so my desk is absolutely clear.

My desk is a half circle, but not that deep, because that optimizes the usefulness of the surface for work (not storage).
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-12 01:32:24+00:00
>You could confiscate 100% of the wealth of every billionaire in this country and it wouldn’t fund the government for an entire year.

1. I see that being 14 trillion. That would in fact fund the government for a year. even for 2 years.

2. taxes aren't about achieving perfect equality. But it's in part to incentivize people to not hoard wealth and spend it in the company. Few of the busnesses in the 50's/60's paid close to the tax brackets they had back then (Which would give modern billionaires a heart attack, despite that being "the times to return to).
by nickff | 2026-02-12 01:32:58+00:00
From what I can find, the guarantee period seems to be two years, after which the burden seems to 'flip'. Given that this microwave is at least five years old, I am not sure what standard one might cite to demonstrate 'non-conformity'. Do you know of a standard which says that a consumer microwave oven must work for more than five years?

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...
by curtisf | 2026-02-12 01:33:20+00:00
Conscription is horribly inapt metaphor for mandatory inoculation.

Banning the playing of third-party Russian roulette, where you hold a mostly unloaded gun to the head of your neighbors, coworkers, and service staff, actually more accurately represents the risks involved to both yourself and the public, and importantly to the personal tax and effort required.
by bawolff | 2026-02-12 01:34:25+00:00
> Judges do what their name implies - make judgment calls. I find it re-assuring that judges get different answers under different scenarios, because it means they are listening and making judgment calls.

I disagree - law should be the same for everyone. Yes sometimes crimes have mitigating curcumstances and those should be taken into account. However that seems like a separate question of what is and is not illegal.
by dylan604 | 2026-02-12 01:34:25+00:00
> I assume it's important because we expected nothing and there was something?

I'm still impressed that in my life time, this keeps happening. The best/obvious example is Hubble's original Deep Field. It was a patch of sky assumed to have nothing in it, and most were happy with that answer. To the point, it was a difficult process to get the scope time to aim the very expensive space telescope at nothing essentially just for the lulz. Now that JWST is online, it is constantly getting "for the first time" results.

It's not quite Luis and Clark, but the astronomers using JWST are discovering new parts of the universe that confounds our current expectations.
by lukeinator42 | 2026-02-12 01:35:23+00:00
I was also wondering this, and in one of the footnotes they say "Given that our experiment was conducted in 2025, one might wonder whether Kansas’ updated law is reflected in GPT’s training data and thus skews its decisions. We find no evidence of such contamination." when talking about a specific updated law. But how does one have 'no evidence of such contamination' without seeing the training data?
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-12 01:36:07+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartering_Acts

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

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/10/us-restauran...

https://www.foxnews.com/media/arizona-mexican-restaurant-swa...
by svnt | 2026-02-12 01:36:16+00:00
I could accept that definition, but really that seems less like vibe coding and more like just not coding. Vibe coding for me is more like: yeah this doesn’t look insane and you got the interface from the right git repo. Like I wouldn’t put my name on it at work and defend it in a code review but I also didn’t just push the button and hope.
by deaux | 2026-02-12 01:36:50+00:00
It's not a dumb question per se but it does fail to understand the issue. It's that there's 20 coding agents yet only 1 of them needs this solving. Imagine if all of them needed this. It's like IE6, or Lightning connectors. At least for that last one there's an argument that they performed better than USB-C. For the Anthropic people reading this - take note that both IE and Lightning are now dead and their competitors that followed the standards are thriving.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-02-12 01:37:07+00:00
> It's easier to blame users instead.

Yes, because the users are in fact the problem. The options are either to trust the user to make decisions (and technically illiterate users will screw things up for themselves), or lock down the system so that the user isn't allowed to do anything the corporate overlord doesn't let them. There is no middle ground.