MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-12 17:44:15+00:00
> they are meant to change domestic behavior.

What domestic behavior specifically?

If they're supposed to encourage industrial development at home, they've failed on that front. Building new factories requires years of commitment and billions of dollars, but the current administration has shown no interest in actually investing in that development. Meanwhile, the raw materials that would be necessary for a factory are more expensive precisely because of the tariffs, making new industry even less likely. Finally, the very dubious legal ground on which the tariffs are based means that no one is sure they'll be around to the end of this administration, much less into the next, so there's little interest in adapting long-term plans to a temporary state of affairs.

If they're supposed to encourage consumers to buy domestic, they've failed on that count too. Many goods simply are not available manufactured in the US (see above). If the tariffs were applied gradually and incrementally, maybe people would adapt, but from the consumer's mount of view, everything just gets more expensive, so what are they supposed to do? Again, applying tariffs to raw materials means that it's impossible for American businesses to undercut foreign imports even if they wanted to.

Like everything from this administration, the tariff are an impulsive decision based on poor economic understanding and incompetent execution.
by logicprog | 2026-02-12 17:44:30+00:00
Yeah, I use LLM agents extensively for coding, but I have never once allowed an LLM to write anything for me. In the past month, I literally wrote 40,000 words of researched essays on various topics, and every single word was manually written, and every source manually read, myself. Writing is how I think, how I process information, and it's also an activity where efficiency is really not the goal.
by leptons | 2026-02-12 17:44:36+00:00
A part costs what a part costs, and the consumer is always going to be the one who pay for that. If tariffs raise the price of the part, then the consumer pays more for the product the part is used in. The cost of the part goes up (because tariffs), the price of the product goes up too. It's really that simple.

No "importer" is going to eat the cost of the tariffs, and it is ridiculous that anyone would think that.
by codebyron | 2026-02-12 17:44:43+00:00
The 15-point drop from easy to hard is the number that stands out to me.

That suggests the architecture handles state accumulation across steps without compounding errors — which is the thing that kills most agent pipelines. Every other agent here shows exponential degradation as task length increases, which is what you'd expect from a naive screenshot-action loop with no error recovery.

Looking at the cookbook repo — are you doing any kind of structured DOM extraction before passing to the model, or is this pure vision? Curious whether the hard-task performance comes from better perception, better planning, or better recovery when an action doesn't produce the expected state change.
by jasode | 2026-02-12 17:44:48+00:00
>Why? If I'm writing a mail receiver, and I'm told there is some unique ID generated by the sender in a loosely specified way, the first thing I'm doing is ignoring that value forever. [...] So at that point the ID has no value to me

Your framework of analysis is based on someone else's database key ids being irrelevant to you. That's true.

But another framework of analysis is tracking statistical correlations of what spam looks like. Lots of spam often don't have message ids. Therefore it's used as a heuristic in scoring it as potential spam. That's why other postmasters even without SpamAssassin independently arrive at the same answer of trying to block messages without a message id. Example: https://serverfault.com/questions/629923/blocking-messages-w...
by fooker | 2026-02-12 17:44:51+00:00
Here's how it works in C++ libraries.

struct resource {
resource(ctx *c, ...) {index = c->store(...); ...;}
size_t index;
ctx *c;
~resource() {c->free(index);}
// copy constructor+op creates new handle
// move constructor+op copies the handle, maybe zeroes the current one
};

With this you can rely on RAII, smart pointers, etc.

This is needlessly verbose yes, but that's C++ for you.
by halapro | 2026-02-12 17:44:52+00:00
I travel a lot and it's extremely time consuming. I don't even do much research beforehand anymore. I really wish I got a notification like "I know you're heading that way, how about this waterfall? It only adds 15 minutes of driving."

The reality is that I do not enjoy at all sorting through tickets and booking emails and apps, I just want to ask my phone "show me tonight's booking" and then hand the phone to the hotel's front desk.

There's so much an assistant can do and Siri is just so far from it.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-02-12 17:45:06+00:00
> best of N models like deep think an gpt pro

Yeah, these are made possible largely by better use at high context lengths. You also need a step that gathers all the Ns and selects the best ideas / parts and compiles the final output. Goog have been SotA at useful long context for a while now (since 2.5 I'd say). Many others have come with "1M context", but their usefulness after 100k-200k is iffy.

What's even more interesting than maj@n or best of n is pass@n. For a lot of applications youc an frame the question and search space such that pass@n is your success rate. Think security exploit finding. Or optimisation problems with quick checks (better algos, kernels, infra routing, etc). It doesn't matter how good your pass@1 or avg@n is, all you care is that you find more as you spend more time. Literally throwing money at the problem.
by stevenjgarner | 2026-02-12 17:45:08+00:00
I think that may be an insight to something quite profound. We used to measure the "doubling of knowledge" against number of peer-reviewed papers of scientific research etc. Now not so much. "Knowledge" has become more proprietary, and condensed into the AI models replacing the libraries of training data. We now measure "doubling of knowledge" as the next version or iteration of a model. In some kind of real sense, the prompt IS more powerful than the output.
by martythemaniak | 2026-02-12 17:45:19+00:00
I use a technique where LLMs help me write, but the final output is manual and entirely mine. It's a bit of heavy process, but I think it blends the power of LLM and authenticity of my thoughts fairly well, I'll paste in my blog post below (which wasn't produced using this method, hence the rambly nature of it):

If you care about your voice, don't let LLMs write your words. But that doesn't mean you can't use AI to think, critique and draft lots of words for you. It depends on what purpose you're writing it for. If you're writing an impersonal document, like a design document, briefing, etc then who cares. In some cases you already have to write them in a voice that is not your own. Go ahead and write these in AI. But if you're trying to say something more personal then the words should be your own, AI will always try to 'smooth' out your voice, and if you care about it, you gotta write it yourself.

Now, how do you use AI effectively and still retain your voice? Here's one technique that works well: start with a voice memo, just record yourself maybe during a walk, and talk about a subject you want, free form, skip around jump sentences, just get it all out of your brain. Then open up a chat, add the recording or transcript, clearly state your intent in one sentence and ask the AI to consider your thoughts, your intent and ask clarifying questions. Like, what does the AI not understand about how your thoughts support the clearly stated intent of what you want to say? That'll produce a first draft, which will be bad. Then tell the AI all the things that don't make sense to you, that you don't like, just comment on the whole doc, get a second draft. Ask the AI if it has more questions for you, you can use live chat to make this conversation go smoother as well, when the AI is asking you questions, you can talk freely by voice. Repeat this one or two more times, and a much finer draft will take shape that is closer to what you want to say. During this drafting state, the AI will always try to smooth or average out your ideas, so it is important to keep pointing out all the ways in which it is wrong.

This process will help you with all the thinking involved being more up-front. Once you're read and critiqued several drafts, all your ideas will be much more clear and sort of 'cached' and ready to be used in your head. Then, sit down and write your own words from scratch, they will come much easier after all your thoughts have been exercised during the drafting process.
by TomasBM | 2026-02-12 17:45:21+00:00
I'm also very skeptical of the interpretation that this was done autonomously by the LLM agent. I could be wrong, but I haven't seen any proof of autonomy.

Scenarios that don't require LLMs with malicious intent:

- The deployer wrote the blog post and hid behind the supposedly agent-only account.

- The deployer directly prompted the (same or different) agent to write the blog post and attach it to the discussion.

- The deployer indirectly instructed the (same or assistant) agent to resolve any rejections in this way (e.g., via the system prompt).

- The LLM was (inadvertently) trained to follow this pattern.

Some unanswered questions by all this:

1. Why did the supposed agent decide a blog post was better than posting on the discussion or send a DM (or something else)?

2. Why did the agent publish this special post? It only publishes journal updates, as far as I saw.

3. Why did the agent search for ad hominem info, instead of either using its internal knowledge about the author, or keeping the discussion point-specific? It could've hallucinated info with fewer steps.

4. Why did the agent stop engaging in the discussion afterwards? Why not try to respond to every point?

This seems to me like theater and the deployer trying to hide his ill intents more than anything else.
by asveikau | 2026-02-12 17:45:38+00:00
> I don't really see any other solution, can you explain it?

One reason a wealth tax is controversial and less precedented is that it taxes unrealized gains.

Another alternative would be to raise taxes on high income rather than wealth. In the 1950s people were taxed at something like 90% for every dollar over $400,000. We could go back to something like that but adjust that $400,000 to something like a couple of million, to match inflation.

This essentially puts a cap on wages. The money you make below the cap would be taxed at the same rates we pay today. Once you get above that amount, you keep most of what falls below, but the government would take almost all of what's above the cap.

I think if you do it that way you would also have to tax interest and capital gains similarly to wages. That's another loophole that's very commonly exploited in the last few decades, investment income gets taxed lower.
by jmholla | 2026-02-12 17:45:39+00:00
> Someone would have noticed if all the phones on their network started streaming audio whenever a conversation happened.

You don't have to stream the audio. You can transcribe it locally. And it doesn't have to be 100% accurate. As for user identify, people have mentioned it on their phones which almost always have a one-to-one relationship between user and phone, and their smart devices, which are designed to do this sort of distinguishing.
by hypeatei | 2026-02-12 17:45:45+00:00
> justify massive so-called "reciprocal" tariffs

I just want to point out that this "reciprocal" nonsense was in no way calculated or strategic. The chart/table they showed was literally LLM-generated and no one could explain how they got those numbers. It's a complete circus and we're sitting here refuting bullshit everyday.
by dang | 2026-02-12 17:45:51+00:00
I believe you that the articles were different in that way, but I looked over the comments pretty closely (well, closely-ish) before merging the threads, and the two HN discussions seemed indistinguishable topic-wise. Otherwise I wouldn't have merged them.

Sorry, I know it's annoying when your article is the one that 'loses' in a merge transaction. Hopefully we can eventually mitigate some of this with URL aggregation.
by dfdsf2 | 2026-02-12 17:45:59+00:00
Trick? Lol not a chance. Alphabet is a pure play tech firm that has to produce products to make the tech accessible. They really lack in the latter and this is visible when you see the interactions of their VP's. Luckily for them, if you start to create enough of a lead with the tech, you get many chances to sort out the product stuff.
by amatecha | 2026-02-12 17:46:05+00:00
Yup, seems pretty easy to spin up a bunch of fake blogs with fake articles and then intersperse a few hit pieces in there to totally sabotage someone's reputation. Add some SEO to get posts higher up in the results -- heck, the fake sites can link to each other to conjure greater "legitimacy", especially with social media bots linking the posts too... Good times :\
by arcfour | 2026-02-12 17:46:07+00:00
Well, the end-goal is to stop cheating, not to detect it - detecting it is simply a means to an end. In that sense, sending more data is not ideal because even though you might be able to detect cheating more easily that way, cheaters would still have some period of time where they are able to cheat (and cheat more easily), thereby worsening the experience for legitimate players.
by hackrmn | 2026-02-12 17:46:13+00:00
The entire AI bubble _is_ a big deal, it's just that we don't have the capacity even collectively to understand what is going on. The capital invested in AI reflects the urgency and the interest, and the brightest minds able to answer some interesting questions are working around the clock (in between trying to placate the investors and the stakeholders, since we live in the real world) to get _somewhere_ where they can point at something they can say "_this_ is why this is a big deal".

So far it's been a lot of conjecture and correlations. Everyone's guessing, because at the bottom of it lie very difficult to prove concepts like nature of consciousness and intelligence.

In between, you have those who let their pet models loose on the world, these I think work best as experiments whose value is in permitting observation of the kind that can help us plug the data _back_ into the research.

We don't need to answer the question "what is consciousness" if we have utility, which we already have. Which is why I also don't join those who seem to take preliminary conclusions like "why even respond, it's an elaborate algorithm that consumes inordinate amounts of energy". It's complex -- what if AI(s) can meaningfully guide us to solve the energy problem, for example?
by RussianCow | 2026-02-12 17:46:23+00:00
On macOS, Option+Shift+- and Option+- insert an em dash (—) and en dash (–), respectively. On Linux, you can hit the Compose Key and type --- (three hyphens) to get an em dash, or --. (hyphen hyphen period) for an en dash. Windows has some dumb incantation that you'll never remember.
by mikemarsh | 2026-02-12 17:46:27+00:00
> I can't imaging writing code by myself again, specially documentation, tests and most scaffolding

> Why should I bother to read something someone else couldn't be bothered to write?

Interesting mix of sentiments. Is this code you're generating primarily as part of a solo operation? If not, how do coworkers/code reviewers feel about it?
by houmercodes | 2026-02-12 17:46:54+00:00
Genuine question about the eval methodology — how do you handle website non-determinism?

A lot of these sites serve different layouts, A/B tests, cookie consent modals, etc. across sessions. Did you control for that across agents, or is each agent hitting the live site independently at different times?

Because if so, some of the variance between agents could just be "Operator happened to get the GDPR popup and didn't know how to dismiss it." Would be useful to know if all agents were evaluated on the same snapshots or same time window.
by woopwoop | 2026-02-12 17:47:11+00:00
I like the idea that various communications media have implicit social contracts that can be broken. In my opinion, power point presentations break an implicit social contract that is held in handwritten talks: if it's worth you displaying a piece of information, so that I the listener feel the need to take it in or even copy it down, it has to be worth your time to actually physically write it on the board. With power point talks this is not honored, and the average power point talk is much, much worse than the average chalk talk. I bet there are lots of other examples.
by renato_shira | 2026-02-12 17:47:12+00:00
the thing that struck me building a mobile app is how much access you could technically request without most users noticing. we use the camera as a core feature and even that single permission makes some users nervous, which is totally reasonable.

the real problem isn't any single app though, it's that the permission model on mobile is still too binary: you either grant access or you don't. there's no "allow camera but only while i'm actively in the app and don't cache any metadata." ios has gotten better with the location permission tiers but for most other permissions it's still all or nothing.

the scarier part of the article imo isn't even the tracking pixels, it's the sdk integrations. when you add a third party sdk for analytics or ads, you're trusting that company with whatever permissions your app already has. most indie devs don't audit those sdks line by line, and the big ones are basically black boxes.
by alistairSH | 2026-02-12 17:47:23+00:00
...get domestic US industries to produce the items that are now being imported...

But, that's (corporate) socialism, and that group of people (mostly) claim to hate socialism.

There's a time and place for tariffs. Protecting "all" domestic industries via global trade war is (IMO) not it. Nor is wielding tariffs as a punishment simply because a foreign leader wasn't docile and subservient enough for Trump.
by notabot33 | 2026-02-12 17:47:50+00:00
Another option that does all this and more for open code: https://github.com/btriapitsyn/openchamber

Not affiliated with that project, but have been using it for a few weeks and it blows every other 'GUI for the CLI agents' I've tried out of the water in terms of both features and just working snappily/consistently.

Also totally free, and actively being improved by the solo maintainer and an active community of contributors.

Omnara providing a tunnel for you is nice, but considering Tailscale is dead simple and free, feels hard to justify $20 a month for what looks like considerably less features than openchamber
by _alaya | 2026-02-12 17:48:02+00:00
I think this is a really fun project, but even more importantly, I believe it’s a portent of things to come.

I really leaned into coding with agents last year, and after some time, it became evident to me that the vision now being pushed -- the "software factory" -- is where things will eventually end up. Building off that understanding, I began thinking about what interfaces would be necessary and useful for managing code and technology at that scale.

I keep coming back to the idea of a video game-like interface for managing all these agents and fleets of agents. Many of the information affordances in video games are reusable in other scenarios. So even though on the surface this project is 'just' a silly and fun enhancement, I think it’s actually a pretty serious contribution as well.
by nobody9999 | 2026-02-12 17:48:43+00:00
>We still use Newtonian physics plenty, despite bits of it not working due to relativity.

Absolutely. And since no one else has trotted this bit out yet, I guess it will be me:

All of our science is based on imperfect models of how the universe works. Every single one is wrong.

However, the models we use today are less wrong than those we used in the past. We know this because we (as you pointed out about Newtonian physics) can more accurately describe the universe than we were able to do previously.

That doesn't mean we've found "the truth." Nor does it mean that we have all the answers.

This is an important concept for baloney detection as those who are peddling baloney will (often, but not always) purport to know "the truth."

Anyone who makes such claims is either knowingly attempting to mislead or is lying to themselves and others.

Which, IMHO, is a pretty big red flag in baloney detection.
by yodon | 2026-02-12 17:48:43+00:00
When you get a chance to work on your login flow, I recommend giving users an opportunity to request the key rather than automatically showing it once only on the first screen.

I created the account from my phone, and don't have access to the dev tools I'd want to paste the key into. I can deal with it, but I don't know if I'll be able to regenerate the key if I lose it, I'd rather not store it on my phone, and I don't trust my accuracy in manually typing it in on my laptop while looking at my phone, so all the options feel not great. Again, not an actual roadblock, but still something I'd encourage fixing.

Edit added: Good thing I copied the key to my phone before writing this message. Jumping over to this page seems to have forced a refresh/logout on the ensure page in the other tab, so my token would (I think? maybe?) be lost at this point if I'd done it in the other order.
by hinkley | 2026-02-12 17:49:10+00:00
Based on the programs I was nudged to as a child, it was a surprise to no one but me that I scored higher verbal on the SATs than I did math, which I would have told you was my favorite subject. Despite the fact that French was my easiest subject. I can still picture the look on my french teacher’s face if I’d have mentioned this in front of him.

There are a lot of people like me in software. I’m tempted to say we are “shouted down”, but honestly it’s hard to be shouted down when you can talk circles around some people. But we are definitely in a minority. There are actually a lot of parallels between creative writing and software and a few things that are more than parallel. Like refactoring.

If you’re actually present when writing docs instead of monologuing in your head about how you hate doing “this shit”, then there’s a lot of rubber ducking that can be done while writing documentation. And while I can’t say that “let the AI do it” will wipe out 100% of this value, because the AI will document what you wrote instead of what you meant to write, I do think you will lose at least 80% of that value by skipping out on these steps.
by apawloski | 2026-02-12 17:49:36+00:00
If it's not a serious case or a national security threat, why impose de-naturalization quotas? Surely if there are real threats out there we should be dedicating the energy to those?

(Also since you brought up Obama, why was Obama able to deport so many more people than Trump? And able to do it without terrorizing US cities with secret/poorly trained police, or needing a DHS with a larger budget than most other countries' militaries?)

You're fixated on a "technically this is legal" argument. But you're (perhaps willfully) missing the larger repercussions. This administration has lied and misled about their opponents committing fraud. You know they are not acting in good faith. So why would we want to further empower capricious, inconsistent, and politically motivated behavior?
by walterbell | 2026-02-12 17:50:10+00:00
> how organizations can secure any device ios or android if they can't track and control the network layer, period out of it, and there are zero carveouts for the OS itself around network traffic visibility.

The closest I've seen is an on-device VPN like Lockdown Privacy , but it can't block Apple bypassing the VPN.

https://lockdownprivacy.com/ | https://github.com/confirmedcode/Lockdown-iOS