MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nkrisc | 2026-02-14 01:53:54+00:00
Flimsy? No. I mean they won't survive a tornado, but homes aren't usually built with surviving a direct tornado hit in mind.

Sure it's not as strong as brick or concrete blocks, but it's strong enough for normal, every day use.

Where it does pale in comparison is hanging heavy objects on the wall. You do need to secure heavy loads to a stud, instead of just drilling and anchoring anywhere in the wall. However what it lacks there it more than makes up for in ease of routing low-voltage cables in an existing home.

Also, if I really wanted it, I could knock out almost all of my interior walls and completely change the layout of my home. Not something you do on a whim, but you can absolutely do so when renovating a home.
by komali2 | 2026-02-14 01:54:55+00:00
What's frustrating is our society hasn't grappled with how to deal with that kind of psychological attack. People or corporations will find an "edge" that gives them an unbelievable amount of control over someone, to the point that it almost seems magic, like a spell has been cast. See any suicidal cult, or one that causes people to drain their bank account, or one that leads to the largest breach of American intelligence security in history, or one that convinces people to break into the capitol to try to lynch the VP.

Yet even if we persecute the cult leader, we still keep people entirely responsible for their own actions, and as a society accept none of the responsibility for failing to protect people from these sorts of psychological attacks.

I don't have a solution, I just wish this was studied more from a perspective of justice and sociology. How can we protect people from this? Is it possible to do so in a way that maintains some of the values of free speech and personal freedom that Americans value? After all, all Cambridge Analytica did was "say" very specifically convincing things on a massive, yet targeted, scale.
by UncleOxidant | 2026-02-14 01:55:30+00:00
What I'm saying is, don't get to thinking that the memory problem is some kind of insurmountable, permanent barrier that's going to keep us safe. It's already being addressed, maybe crudely at first, but the situation is already much better than it was - I no longer have to bring the model up to speed completely every time I start a new session. Part of this is much larger context windows (1M tokens now). New architectures are also being proposed to deal with the issue, as well.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-14 01:55:33+00:00
> If it's genuinely the case that whole product categories are unknown to many people who could realistically benefit from them, as determined by a disinterested third party, an exception could be made for advertising that does not mention specific products or brands.

Now all of the "brought to you by America's <industry group>" ads are back in. So is every pharma ad and every other patented product because they don't have to tell you a brand when there is only one producer.

> The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs.

Publication where? In the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"? Also, who decides to publish it, decides what it will say or pays the costs of writing and distributing it?
by swores | 2026-02-14 01:55:42+00:00
I'm someone who never puts any sort of product on my finger nails, and I can confirm that my nails work on my iPhone screen, both when I've lazily forgotten to cut them, letting them get annoyingly long, and if I turn my finger over so that my nail is just about flat on the screen - I checked while writing this, and confirmed the screen was responsive despite my skin definitely not touching it. (I'm a man who doesn't have any experience growing my nails to extend more than a few mm beyond my finger tips so I can't speak to that scenario.)
by roenxi | 2026-02-14 01:55:46+00:00
> The bookkeeper is still there, still needed, but now they're doing the part that actually requires judgment.

The argument might be fundamentally sound, but now we're automating the part that requires judgement. So if the accountants aren't doing the mechanical part or the judgement part, where exactly is the role going? Formalised reading of an AI provided printout?

It seems quite reasonable to predict that humans just won't be able to make a living doing anything that involves screens or thinking, and we go back to manual labour as basically what humans do.
by coldtea | 2026-02-14 01:56:11+00:00
Would it be that many? Asked AI to do some rough calculation, and it spit that:

Making 50 SOTA AI requests per day ≈ running a 10W LED bulb for about 2.5 hours per day

Given I usually have 2-3 lights on all day in the house, that's like 1500 LLM requests per day (which sounds quite more than I do).

So even a month worth of requests for building some software doesn't sound that much. Having a local beefy traditional build server compling or running tests for 4 hours a day would be like ~7,600 requests/day
by Tazerenix | 2026-02-14 01:56:31+00:00
You need to differentiate between special and general relativity when making these statements.

It is absolutely true that someone else would have come up with special relativity very soon after Einstein. All that would be necessary is someone else to have the wherewithal to say "perhaps the aether does not need to exist" for the equations already known at the time by others before Einstein to lead to the general theory.

General relativity is different. Witten contends that it is entirely possible that without Einstein, we may have had to wait for the early string theorists of the 1960s to discover GR as a classical limit of the first string theories in their quest to understand the strong nuclear force.

As opposed to SR, GR is one of the most singular innovative intellectual achievements in human history. It's definitely "out of distribution" in some sense.
by uniclaude | 2026-02-14 01:56:46+00:00
Ars technica’s lack of journalistic integrity aside, I wonder how long until an agent decides to order a hit on someone on the datk web to reach its goals.

We’re probably only a couple OpenClaw skills away from this being straightforward.

“Make my startup profitable at any cost” could lead some unhinged agent to go quite wild.

Therefore, I assume that in 2026 we will see some interesting legal case where a human is tried for the actions of the autonomous agent they’ve started without guardrails.
by paulddraper | 2026-02-14 01:57:05+00:00
This is everything terrible about laws.

Laws are supposed to be just that — predictable, enforceable, and obeyable rules, like the laws of physics or biology.

Bad laws are vague and subjective. It may be impossible to remove all ambiguity, but lawmakers should strive to create clear and consistent laws for their citizens.

Else it is not a nation of laws, but a domain of dictators.
by aspenmayer | 2026-02-14 01:57:48+00:00
> /? find a specific transcript from "The Bit Player" and "Claude Shannon: The Father of the Information Age" IEEE Information Theory Society video where the narrator makes the leap from the Morse dots and dashes on fence wire to the math of entropy (and logarithms and channel coding and capacity limits)

Who is meant to be doing the finding, in this case?
by giobox | 2026-02-14 01:58:31+00:00
More than ironic, it's truly outrageous, especially given the site's recent propensity for negativity towards AI. They've been caught red-handed here doing the very things they routinely criticize others for.

The right thing to do would be a mea-culpa style post and explain what went wrong, but I suspect the article will simply remain taken down and Ars will pretend this never happened.

I loved Ars in the early years, but I'd argue since the Conde Nast acquisition in 2008 the site has been a shadow of its former self for a long time, trading on a formerly trusted brand name that recent iterations simply don't live up to anymore.
by Jon_Lowtek | 2026-02-14 01:58:32+00:00
they just wrote a paragraph about evil being easy and convenient, how the inability to achieve absolute moral purity means that one small evil deed is indistinguishable from being as evil as possible, and that only those who have unachievable moral purity should be allowed to lecture about ethics in favor of good. At this point i don't think property damage is what we need to worry about. Walk away slowly and do not accept any deals.
by ragall | 2026-02-14 01:58:38+00:00
> Our houses are way too over constructed

They're not. The long-term reduction in maintenance costs more than make up for it. Tell a German that the "normal" North-American "common sense" is saving 1-2% of the house value every year for repairs and you'll be considered a madman.

> and the dry-wall stigma here is just one aspect of it, wood construction stigma is another

Both stigmas are very well justified.
by move-on-by | 2026-02-14 01:58:44+00:00
> Asking me to open a new issue to discuss this behavior instead of it being a high priority for them to open up a new issue internally to fix this is odd. I'm not here to do their homework for them.

Why are people so entitled? How much is the author paying WolfSSL to make demands of them?

> Currently I've only identified one victim of this decision, but there's bound to be more out there.

Oh yes, he has become a victim of using a FOSS library.
by Cyphase | 2026-02-14 01:58:57+00:00
We don't know yet how the Ars article was created, but if it involved prompting an LLM with anything like "pull some quotes from this text based on {criteria}", that is so easy to do correctly in an automated manner; just confirm with boring deterministic code that the provided quote text exists in the original text. Do such tools not already exist?

On the other hand, if it was "here are some sources, write an article about this story in a voice similar to these prior articles", well...
by mardef | 2026-02-14 01:59:00+00:00
The teams have always been 32 tax paying companies. The NFL central office was a 501(c)(6), but the tax savings from that was negligible.

In fact, when they changed their status over a decade ago, they now no longer have to submit a 990 and have less transparency of their operations.

You are phrasing this situation to paint all non-profits as a farce, and I believe that's a bad faith take.
by plif | 2026-02-14 01:59:12+00:00
"JavaScript is the primary driver of 'human-like' reasoning in LLMs because it is the only language where the Training Crawler sees the full triad of thought: The Action (Minified Bundle), the Result (SSR HTML), and via Source Maps, the Intent (Original Comments & Emotion)."

Volume (The Base): JavaScript is the most abundant code on the web (The "Big Bang").

Visibility (The Structure): Client-side bundles expose the "Business Logic" of major apps, unlike hidden server-side code.

Completeness (The Logic): Bundles provide the full "Runtime Universe" (Definition + Execution) in one stream.

Grounding (The Truth): Server-Side Rendering (SSR) provides "Input -> Output" pairs that teach strict causality.

Emotion (The Soul): Source Maps provide the "Director's Commentary," linking raw logic to human intent, frustration, and strategy.

--

Skip to the last 5 prompt / responses for where the insight starts, or read the whole thing to see how we got there. This was prompted by my getting much better results with LLMs than those around me, despite their brilliance, and then considering that JavaScript may be the most critical variable.

Hope this makes for a thought provoking consideration, if nothing else :)
by deaux | 2026-02-14 01:59:22+00:00
> And the reason for this is not that the people involved are inherently bad people, it's just that humans react strongly to incentives, and the incentives, at least in our capitalist society, ensure that profit motive will always be paramount. Again, I don't think this is cynical, it's just realistic.

It's not a reflection of reality, and at your age you should know better.

It is indeed because they're bad people. Why? Because there are tons of organizations that do stick to their goals.

They just don't become worth many billions of dollars. They generally stay small, exactly because that's much healthier for society.
by GavinRatta | 2026-02-14 01:59:22+00:00
I spent 4 months building a desktop workspace where every tool lives on an infinite canvas as a draggable node — notes, browser, calendar, design editor, terminal, and an AI agent that can control the canvas.

Stack: React + ReactFlow + Fabric.js + Electron + Gemini AI. 177 files, 7-layer architecture, full documentation.

I've decided to move on from this project and I'm looking for someone who wants the codebase to build on top of.

Happy to answer any technical questions about the architecture.
by jgon | 2026-02-14 01:59:57+00:00
I always like to do a little digging when I read one of these articles. The first point I come to is that the author is employed by a16z (https://a16z.com/author/david-oks/) and so you have to immediately apply the "talking his book" filter. A16Z is heavily invested in AI and so any sorts of concerns around job loss and possible regulation or associated actions by the public at large represent a risk to these investments.

Secondly David Oks attended Masters School for his high school, an elite private boarding school with tuition currently running 72kUSD/year if you stay there the whole time, and 49kUSD/year if you go there just for schooling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_School). I am going to generally say that people who were able to have 150k+ spent on their high school education (to say nothing of attending Oxford at 30kGBP/year for international student tuition) might just possibly be people who have enough generational family wealth that concerns like job losses seem pretty abstract or not something to really worry about.

It's just another in a long series of articles downplaying the risks of AI job losses, which, when I dig into the author's background, are written by people who have never known any sort of financial precarity in their lives, and are frequently involved AI investment in some manner.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-14 02:00:03+00:00
The discourse in the Rust community is way better than that, and I believe being a toxic shit-hat in that community would lead to immediate consequences. Even when there was very serious controversy (the canceled conference talk about reflection) it was deviously phrased through reverse psychology where the wronged party wrote blogposts expressing their deep 'sorrow' and 'sadness' about what had transpired. Of course, the fiction was blatant, but also effective.
by MoltenMan | 2026-02-14 02:00:04+00:00
Most of this is very true, except for the one caveat I'll point out that a space complexity O(P(n)) for some function P implies at least a O(cubedroot(P(n))) time complexity, but many algorithms don't have high space complexity. If you have a constant space complexity this doesn't factor in to time complexity at all. Some examples would be exponentiation by squaring, miller-rabin primality testing, pollard-rho factorization, etc.

Of course if you include the log(n) bits required just to store n, then sure you can factor in the log of the cubed root of n in the time complexity, but that's just log(n) / 3, so the cubed root doesn't matter here either.
by zahlman | 2026-02-14 02:00:09+00:00
> Why are we treating the former as a mere mistake, and the latter as a deliberate attack?

"Deliberate" is a red herring. That would require AI to have volition, which I consider impossible, but is also entirely beside the point. We also aren't treating the fabricated quotes as a "mere mistake". It's obviously quite serious that a computer system would respond this way and a human-in-the-loop would take it at face value. Someone is supposed to have accountability in all of this.
by turzmo | 2026-02-14 02:00:27+00:00
Physicist here. Did you guys actually read the paper? Am I missing something? The "key" AI-conjectured formula (39) is an obvious generalization of (35)-(38), and something a human would have guessed immediately.

(35)-(38) are the AI-simplified versions of (29)-(32). Those earlier formulae look formidable to simplify by hand, but they are also the sort of thing you'd try to use a computer algebra system for.

I'm willing to (begrudgingly) admit the possibility for AI to do novel work, but this particular result does not seem very impressive.

I picture ChatGPT as the rich kid whose parents privately donated to a lab to get their name on a paper for college admissions. In this case, I don't think I'm being too cynical in thinking that something similar is happening here and that the role of AI in this result is being well overplayed.
by andrewflnr | 2026-02-14 02:00:28+00:00
I think the distinction is a bit more subtle than "designed to facilitate actions", which you could argue also applies to an LLM. But a browser is a conduit for ideas from elsewhere or from its user. An LLM... well, kind of breaks the categorization of conduit vs originator, but that's sufficient to show the equivalence is false.
by QuadmasterXLII | 2026-02-14 02:01:00+00:00
The ars technica twist is a brutal wakeup call that I can't actually tell what is ai slob garbage shit by reading it- and even if I can't tell, that doesn't mean it's fine because the crap these companies are shoveling is still wrong, just stylistically below my detectability.

I think I need to log off.
by BrenBarn | 2026-02-14 02:01:30+00:00
Obvious examples of negative consequences of the first amendment include the profusion of false and misleading advertising, the scourge of political campaign spending, and the disastrous firehouse of misinformation being pushed out in various online forums. The idea that an abstract carte blanche for free speech outweighs those real and present ills is misguided. At the same time, we see that the limitation to only protection from government action enables effective quelling of speech by private actors.

At the core of the first amendment is the idea that people should not be punished for criticizing their government. I think that idea is worth preserving. But the idea that people are free to say anything they choose, in any context, regardless of its factual status, and also that their permission to do so is limited only by the resources they can muster to promulgate their speech, is an unwarranted extension of that concept.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2026-02-14 02:01:59+00:00
Honestly, some of the shit with ClawdBot^W MoltBot^W OpenClaw and molt.church and molt.book has been some quality entertainment, enabled largely by the Internet. And it's AI slop but that only seems to matter when one of them gets miffed about its PR being rejected and posts an unhinged blog post about the maintainer who rejected said PR. And in a "comedy equals tragedy plus time" way, it's pretty easy to laugh at that, too.
by komali2 | 2026-02-14 02:02:01+00:00
But I want to use AI to generate highly effective, targeted propaganda to convert you and your family into communists. (See: Cambridge Analytica) I'll do so by leveraging automation and agents to flood every feed you and your family view with tailored disinformation so it's impossible to know how much of your ruling class are actually pedophiles and how much are just propagandized as such. Hell I might even try to convince you that a nuke had been dropped in Ohio (see: "Fall, or Dodge in Hell" by Neal Stephenson)

I guess you're making an "if everyone had guns" argument?
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-02-14 02:02:07+00:00
As recently as last month I would have agreed with you without reservation.
Even last week, probably with reservation.
Today, I realize the two of us are outnumbered at least a million to one.
Sooo.... that's not the play.

I think Scott Shambaugh is actually acting pretty solidly. And the moltbot - bless their soul.md - at very least posted an apology immediately. That's better than most humans would do to begin with. Better than their own human, so far.

Still not saying it's entirely wise to deploy a moltbot like this. After all, it starts with a curl | sh.

(edit: https://www.moltbook.com/ claims 2,646,425 ai agents of this type have an account. Take with a grain of salt, but it might be accurate within an OOM?)
by coldtea | 2026-02-14 02:04:07+00:00
>That's exactly the thing that matters when you're dealing with something where every loophole is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it.

Everything with profit "is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it". He have laws anyway for those things, and for the most part, they're effective. I'd take a relative improvement even if it's not 100% over free reign.

>You're picking the thing which is a hopeless disaster as your exemplar?

I don't consider it a "hopeless disaster" (except in it's effects on society). As a business it's regulated, and for the most part, stays and follows within those regulations. The existence of dark illegal versions of it, or exploitation in the industry, doesn't negate this.
by crossbody | 2026-02-14 02:05:51+00:00
You're describing a standard S-curve (logistic growth), which is definitely what happens to parameter counts or user adoption (like The Internet). But Amodei is applying this to scientific discovery itself.
He’s effectively saying the "S-curve of Science" flatlines because we figure out everything that matters (curing aging, mental health, etc.). My whole point was that science doesn't have a top to the S-curve - it’s an infinite ladder (as per Deutsch).
by coldtea | 2026-02-14 02:06:03+00:00
>And how do you self-host distribution?

You have your own website and your copy on it. Don't start that "but if you pay some hosting provider to host that website that would be advertising", or the

"And how do you self-host distribution? You would have to run your own fiber to every customer's house or spin up your own postal service or you're paying someone to do that."

that borders on being obtuse on purpose.
by Herring | 2026-02-14 02:07:07+00:00
Well how much have the countries aged? In that case you should expect it to go up, maybe it's still a lot less than it should be.

I'm a statistician. That (first) graph is a case study in how to lie with statistics. They should teach it in class.

I'm out, I recommend you spend some time reading about this issue. Inequality and welfare cuts leading to the rise in the far right is fairly well established. One (misleading) graph doesn't disprove it. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...
by coldtea | 2026-02-14 02:08:12+00:00
>How do the people that post reviews, or spread something over word-of-mouth, discover the thing in the first place?

The follow industry conventions, visit registries of industry websites, have professional lists where companies submit their announcements (and not to the general public) and so on.

>Try your hand at starting a business and trying to sell goods or services using these methods and see how well it works.

If advertising is banned, it will work just as good as for any competitor.
by zahlman | 2026-02-14 02:08:24+00:00
> The AI here was honestly acting 100% within the realm of “standard OSS discourse.”

Regrettably, yes. But I'd like not to forget that this goes both ways. I've seen many instances of maintainers hand-waving at a Code of Conduct with no clear reason besides not liking the fact that someone suggested that the software is bad at fulfilling its stated purpose.

> maybe we could shift the experience credentialing from “I wrote this code” to “I wrote a clear piece explaining why this code should have been merged.”

People should be willing to stand by the code as if they had written it themselves; they should understand it in the way that they understand their own code.

While the AI-generated PR messages typically still stick out like a sore thumb, it seems very unwise to rely on that continuing indefinitely. But then, if things do get to the point where nobody can tell, what's the harm? Just licensing issues?