MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nz | 2026-02-23 19:32:02+00:00
How does he solve the Fruit of the Poison Tree problem? For all he know, his LLMs included a bunch copyrighted or patented code throughout the codebase. How is he going to convince serious people that this port is not just a transformation of an _asset_ into a _liability_?

And you might say that this is a hypothetical problem, one that is not practically occurring. Well, we had a similar problem like this in the recent past, that LLMs are close to _making actual_. When it comes to software patents, they were considered a _hypothetical_ problem (i.e. nobody is going to bother suing you unless you were so big that violating a patent was a near certainty). We were instructed (at pretty much all jobs), to never read patents, so that we cannot incriminate ourselves in the discovery process.

That is going to change soon (within a year). I have friend, whom I won't name, who is working on a project, using LLMs, to discover whether software (open source and proprietary) is likely to be violating a software patent from a patent database. And it is designed to be used, not by programmers, but by law firms, patent attorneys, etc. Even though it is not marketed this way, it is essentially a target acquisition system for use by patent trolls. It is hard for me to tell if this means that we will have to keep ignoring patents for that plausible deniability, or if this means that we will have to become hyper informed about all patents. I suppose, we can just subscribe to the patent-agent, and hope that it guides the other coding agents into avoiding the insertion of potentially infringing code.

(I also have a friend who built a system in 2020 that could translate between C++ and Python, and guarantee equivalent results, and code that looks human-written. This was a very impressive achievement, especially because of how it guarantees the equivalence (it did not require machine-learning nor GPUs, just CPUs and some classic algorithms from the 80s). The friend informs me that they are very disheartened to see that now any toddler with a credit card can mindlessly do something similar, invalidating around a decade of unpublished research. They tell me that it will remain unpublished, and if they could go back in time, they would spend that decade extracting as much surplus from society as possible, by hook or by crook (apparently they had the means and the opportunity, but lacked the motive); we should all learn from my friend's mistake. The only people who succeed are, sadly, perversely, those who brazenly and shamelessly steal -- and make no mistake, the AI companies are built on theft. When millionaires do it, they become billionaires -- when Aaron Swartz does it, he is sentenced to federal prison. I'm not quite a pessimist yet, but it really is saddening to watch my friend go from a passionate optimist to a cold nihilist.).
by falcor84 | 2026-02-23 19:32:13+00:00
But that only gets you to a philosophical argument about what "value" is. Many would argue that being able to get your thing into a Super Bowl commercial is extremely valuable. I definitely have never built anything that did.

It's very much imperfect, but the only consistently agreed upon and useful definition of "value" we have in the West is monetary value, and in that sense, we have at least a few major examples of AI generating value rapidly.
by throwaway27448 | 2026-02-23 19:32:18+00:00
> and the Rust standard library does that all the time.

I don't doubt this is true, but do you have an example? I think I haven't run into a build breaking like this in std in like maybe seven/eight years. In my experience breaking changes/experimental apis are typically ensconced in features or gated by editions.

Granted, it'd be nice to be able to enforce abi stability at the crate level, but managing that is its own can of worms.

I did find that the breakage rfc allows for breaking inference, which tbh seems quite reasonable... inference is opt-in.
by epistasis | 2026-02-23 19:32:22+00:00
Oh yeah, I am sure about that. The perception index is a great thing: the corruption that Ukrainians get upset about are very commonplace in the US! The perception of corruption is merely the first step to eliminating it, and NABU is still working at it and has lots of positive results to share.

We can't look to, say, France because France hasn't made any progress because it started as high-trust and fairly low corruption, whereas NABU actually does have results to look at.

For the US to improve its corruption problem, it needs to look to where there are actual results, and Ukraine is far better than either France or Bosnia and Hezegovina.
by drdeca | 2026-02-23 19:32:25+00:00
I believe I answered the question? You asked whether these quantum fields have values at points. I believe there is a field-of-sorts, but that unless spacetime is discrete, the value of it at an individual point isn’t really a meaningful question, and even if spacetime is discrete, while the question becomes meaningful (as in, it is an observable), typically it will not have a determinate answer.

If there is no inside to a box, then knowing everything about how the box interacts with things outside the box, is pretty much everything there is to know about the box, yeah.

The study of physics concerns only that which we can observe/measure. Now, like I implied before, I’m not a scientific materialist, and I don’t claim that all-that-there-is is amenable to understanding through the lens of physics. So, like, I guess the answer is “No, I don’t expect physics to tell us everything I want to know about the nature of the universe, just all of it that is accessible to experiment.”.
by devonkelley | 2026-02-23 19:32:49+00:00
Maybe, but "really smart" is doing a lot of work there. Even if the model is 10x better, you still need something to manage tool failure, retries, rate limits, cost budgets, human approval gates, and state persistence across long-running tasks. Those aren't intelligence problems, they're infrastructure problems. The framework isn't going away, it's just going to get a lot thinner.
by ksymph | 2026-02-23 19:32:53+00:00
Nope. Edible mushrooms generally need similar conditions as mold/mildew/rot to grow, i.e. moisture, low light, and the right material -- though they tend to be pickier, and are less suited to human-adjacent conditions. So if you find mushrooms growing where they shouldn't, there's a much deeper moisture and mold issue.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-23 19:33:36+00:00
This is not 'running it on our own computers'.

But I like the option to give my data to a rando rather than one of the big 5 US companies that can get sued. At least the rando probably has no idea what to do with 10M of my customer's IP.

Actually... thank you for the links. Unironically.
by jackfranklyn | 2026-02-23 19:33:40+00:00
We've been exposing tools via MCP and the biggest lesson so far: the tool description is basically a meta tag. It's the only thing the model reads before deciding whether to call your tool.

Two things that surprised us: (1) being explicit about what the tool doesn't do matters as much as what it does - vague descriptions get hallucinated calls constantly, and (2) inline examples in the description beat external documentation every time. The agent won't browse to your docs page.

The schema side matters too - clean parameter names, sensible defaults, clear required vs optional. It's basically UX design for machines rather than humans. Different models do have different calling patterns (Claude is more conservative, will ask before guessing; others just fire and hope) so your descriptions need to work for both styles.
by Wobbles42 | 2026-02-23 19:34:33+00:00
I wonder if the term "published" as a binary distinction applied to a piece of writing is a term and concept that is reaching the end of its useful life.

"Peer reviewed" as a binary concept might be as well, given that incentives have aligned to greatly reduce its filtering power.

They might both be examples of metrics that became useless as a result of incentives getting attached to them.
by intellegix | 2026-02-23 19:34:33+00:00
This separation of planning and execution is exactly the pattern I ended up building into an open source toolkit for Claude Code. The key insight that made autonomous loops work was giving the loop driver awareness of the CLAUDE.md file as the "plan" layer — the human edits CLAUDE.md between runs to steer the project, and the loop driver handles execution (session continuity, budget enforcement, stagnation detection, model fallback from Opus to Sonnet on consecutive timeouts).

The other piece that helped was a multi-model council system — before committing to a major architectural decision, the toolkit queries GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini simultaneously through Perplexity, then synthesizes with Opus. Having three models surface their assumptions (as the top comment here describes) catches more blind spots than any single model.

194 pytest tests, MIT licensed: https://github.com/intellegix/intellegix-code-agent-toolkit
by cyberax | 2026-02-23 19:34:40+00:00
> Oooh! Do you have a recommendation for a translation of a Russian economics text? I’m particularly curious of Soviet-era texts that work on theory without prices.

I don't think they exist? The Soviet Union used prices internally as an accounting tool. It essentially had two separate currencies: the actual physical currency that regular people owned and the virtual "accounting" currency. The accounting currency could not be converted into the real one, except for salary payments that were tightly regulated.

Once the USSR allowed some inter-conversion channels in the early 80-s its economy predictably got blown up as a result.

> Sherman prohibits the “restraint of trade or commerce” [1]. The word “price” never appears in its text. In practice, predatory pricing is a tightly-regulated term that doesn’t generally prohibit selling goods below cost

The Sherman Act is a framing law that establishes the authority to regulate monopolies, and it's on purpose rather vague in its wording.

A more concrete law here is the Robinson-Patman Act, which prohibits illegal price discrimination, including pricing substantially similar goods differently for different purchasers.
by flatline | 2026-02-23 19:34:45+00:00
One person's waste is another's value. Do you have any idea how "wasteful" tik tok or any other streaming platform is? I'll grant that AI is driving unprecedented data center development but it's far from the root cause, or even a leading clause, of our climate issues. I always find it strange that this is the first response so many have to AI, when it poses other more imminent existential threats IMO.
by QAEinfra | 2026-02-23 19:34:47+00:00
I built QuantumAssetEngine to make market integrity review easier to verify and easier to forward.

Output is a court ready PDF forensic report plus SHA256 sealed hash verification and a chain of custody record. The goal is reproducible outputs for falsifiable integrity review.

Proof live demo
https://quantumassetengine.com/proof

Evaluation is read only and written only. No installs. No private keys. No access requests. No calls. No Telegram.

I would value critique from compliance and market integrity practitioners. What makes a forensic output package reviewable in your workflow.

No token. No presale. Not affiliated.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-23 19:34:49+00:00
> The MR60BHA2 is a 60GHz wave sensor that detects breathing and heartbeat patterns. Using its radar technology, it can monitor vital signs without direct contact, even through materials like clothing or bedding. You can use it for sleep monitoring, health assessments, and presence detection.

This is kind of crazy, I had no idea this was a thing. And here I have PIR sensors all over the place and hacks around those, that definitively sounds much better. Besides being more expensive and weaker range, any drawbacks for using it for motion sensing?
by ticulatedspline | 2026-02-23 19:34:52+00:00
Cool, going back over them I'm actually surprised at the strength of the substitution test, thus far I haven't really encountered one that strongly goes against the test if a suitable synonym is picked.

There are a few things for which English simply doesn't have anything to substitute and those are harder to assess. boiling is one but so would "blood" in "blood pressure", obviously replacing it with another liquid has basically the same meaning eg water pressure, oil pressure but as far as I can tell there's literally no synonym for blood.

I those cases I try to use a stand in from another language to see of the substitution works. for for example "sangre" in Spanish so "sangre pressure" which doesn't seem to affect it's meaning much so I'd argue it's exclusion.

Conversely "Red tape" cannot be "roja tape" and a "caliente dog" is one trapped in a car not a food.
by eggbrain | 2026-02-23 19:34:55+00:00
I'm curious -- are there any stories of projects that launched on Hacker News, Hacker News loved it, and it ended up _also_ being a big success?

E.g. we have stories like Dropbox where HN seemed to be dismissive only to be proven wrong, and there are numerous launches where HN was dismissive and they were proven right, but I'd be more curious when the HN crowd got it right in a positive way.
by boplicity | 2026-02-23 19:35:38+00:00
> So I guess the key takeaway is basically that the better Claude gets at producing polished output, the less users bother questioning it.

This is exactly what I worry about when I use AI tools to generate code. Even if I check it, and it seems to work, it's easy to think, "oh, I'm done." However, I'll (often) later find obvious logical errors that make all of the code suspect. I don't bother, most of the time though.

I'm starting to group code in my head by code I've thoroughly thought about, and "suspect" code that, while it seems to work, is inherently not trustworthy.
by roborovskis | 2026-02-23 19:36:20+00:00
What would you define as 'distillation' versus 'learning'? How do you know that what a LLM is doing is 'distillation' vs a process closer to a human reading a book?

From my perspective, pretraining is pretty clearly not 'distilling', as the goal is not to replicate the pretraining data but to generalize. But what these companies are doing is clearly 'distilling' in that they want their models to exactly emulate Claude's behavior.
by ceoloide | 2026-02-23 19:36:35+00:00
Since they are testers and not auditors, what prevents Donut Labs from changing the actual battery sent for testing, selecting whatever works best for that specific test? In aggregate each test would seemingly validate their claims, only nobody ever validated and audited the fact that the same exact battery was used in all the tests.

As many have said, so many red flags around something so exceptionally revolutionary that you'd need extremely strong and unquestionably real proof.
by intellegix | 2026-02-23 19:36:50+00:00
It actually can with the right wrapper. I built an open source loop driver that runs Claude Code CLI autonomously with --dangerously-skip-permissions. It handles session continuity (--resume), budget enforcement, stagnation detection (two-strike system if turns stay low), and auto model fallback (Opus -> Sonnet on consecutive timeouts).

The key is streaming NDJSON output to track cost per iteration and detect completion markers. The human stays in control by editing CLAUDE.md between runs to steer the project.

https://github.com/intellegix/intellegix-code-agent-toolkit
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2026-02-23 19:36:56+00:00
> People quickly remark that it is slop, without even reviewing the code.

I absolutely hate how "slop" has lost its meaning.

"AI slop" was supposed to mean poor-quality content that's obviously AI-generated. But the anti-AI crowd has co-opted it to mean any AI-generated content, regardless of quality. EDIT: Or even the quantity of AI. Expedition 33 had a ton of critical acclaim and ended up winning tons of awards, yet once it was discovered that AI was used to generate some placeholder art, of which NONE of it was actually used in the final product, some people started labeling the game as AI slop. It's utterly ridiculous.

So now, we can't have conversations about AI slop without starting off with making sure everyone is on the same page on what the term even means.

EDIT: "Vibe coding" is suffering a similar fate. If I use AI to write some code, and I examine the code to make sure it doesn't have any obvious bugs or security issues, is that still vibe coding?
by pipes | 2026-02-23 19:37:48+00:00
Did the people you notice becoming less intelligent ever recover? I'm genuinely interested. My biggest regret in life is early years drug use, smoked my first joint at 13. Mdma 18. Cocaine late tewnties. I personally think marijuana might be worse than mdma but not by much. And cocaine is really bad for cardio vascular system, probably physically worst of all of them that I tried.

I think both mdma and marijuana cause anxiety and they mess with short term memory.

There doesn't seem to be a good answer to protecting kids from drugs. Heavily regulated legalisation might help or it might normalise drug use.

As an aside I personally think alcohol in very moderate use isn't really as harmful as other drugs. And is probably a net benefit for many. Even moderate use of illegal drugs seems to have bad affects on people.

Edit: added my thoughts on alcohol and something on cocaine use.
by ttcbj | 2026-02-23 19:37:55+00:00
I can't read this article, but I live in a market that Waymo is just beginning to develop (St. Louis). I have seen two Waymos in our area in the last week. I am really, really looking forward to having it available, but I think it is several years away.

It will be useful for me and my wife, but it would have been transformative for my kids in the pre-driving teen years. We do so much ferrying them around, and to be able to put them in a safe car and get them where they are going would have made such a difference for us. I think it might be here in time to make a difference with my younger child.

For that use case, trust and safety are really, really important to me. That plan only works for me because I suspect the Waymo driver will be safer than I am. I think for companies developing self-driving cars, the safety reputation matters a lot. Right now Waymo is the only one I would consider, because their roll out has been so methodical and competent.
by klsdjfdlkfjsd | 2026-02-23 19:38:07+00:00
Here is a more extended quote from Jefferson on the same subject:

“To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, ‘by restraining it to true facts and sound principles only.’ Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers.

It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.

I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.

General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, etc., etc.; but no details can be relied on.

I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.”

- Thomas Jefferson
by intellegix | 2026-02-23 19:38:11+00:00
Interesting approach with the parallel planner/worker/judge architecture. I've been solving a similar problem but with a single-agent loop pattern instead of multi-agent.

My toolkit wraps Claude Code CLI with NDJSON streaming and handles the exact failure modes you describe: budget exceeded -> exit code 2, stagnation detected (low turns over a window) -> exit code 3, consecutive timeouts -> auto fallback from Opus to Sonnet. The human steers between runs by editing CLAUDE.md.

One thing I added that might interest you: a multi-model council system that queries GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini simultaneously through Perplexity before big architectural decisions. Catches blind spots that a single model misses.

https://github.com/intellegix/intellegix-code-agent-toolkit

Curious how openTiger handles the cost tracking problem. With single-agent loops I parse cost from NDJSON events, but with parallel agents the spend can compound fast.
by falcor84 | 2026-02-23 19:38:13+00:00
> to the point we saturate systems downstream

But that's point of TFA, no? Now that writing code is no longer the bottleneck, the upstream and downstream processes have become the new bottlenecks, and we need to figure out how to widen them.

As I see it, the end goal for all of this is generating software at the speed of thought, or at least at the speed of speech. I want the digital butler to whom I could just say - "I'm not happy with the way things happened to day, please change it so that from here on, it'll be like x" - and it'll just respond with "As you wish", and I'll have confidence that it knows me well enough and is capable enough to have actually implemented the best possible interpretation of what I asked for, and that the few miscommunications that do occur would be easy to fix.

We're obviously not close that yet, but why shouldn't we build towards it?
by malfist | 2026-02-23 19:38:25+00:00
No I said what I meant. Code is a liability, though to your point, code you don't understand is an even bigger liability.

Even if I understand all my code, when I go to make changes, if it's 100k lines of code vs 2k lines of code, it's going to take more time and be more error prone.

Even if I understand all my code, the intern I hired last week won't and I'll have to teach it to them.

Even if I understand all my code, I don't remember everything all the time and I can forget about an edge case handed in thousands of lines of code.

Even if I understand all my code, I don't understand my co-workers code, and they don't understand mine.

Even if I understand all my code, I might not want to work for this company the rest of my life.