MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mmasu | 2026-02-17 17:14:53+00:00
I will give you an example I heard from an acquaintance yesterday - this person is very smart but not strictly “technical”.

He is building a trading automation for personal use. In his design he gets a message on whatsapp/signal/telegram and approves/rejects the trade suggestion.

To define specifications for this, he defined multiple agents (a quant, a data scientist, a principal engineer, and trading experts - “warren buffett”, “ray dalio”) and let the agents run until they reached a consensus on what the design should be. He said this ran for a couple of hours (so not strictly overnight) after he went to sleep; in the morning he read and amended the output (10s of pages equivalent) and let it build.

This is not a strictly-defined coding task, but there are now many examples of emerging patterns where you have multiple agents supporting each other, running tasks in parallel, correcting/criticising/challenging each other, until some definition of “done” has been satisfied.

That said, personally my usage is much like yours - I run agents one at a time and closely monitor output before proceeding, to avoid finding a clusterfuck of bad choices built on top of each other. So you are not alone my friend :-)
by hluska | 2026-02-17 17:15:37+00:00
I’m not really sure what kind of feedback to give here. I’m not the biggest fan of anything that’s not explicitly opt in so that annoyed me off the start. It doesn’t really provide a lot of data so it’s not a bad case of no opt in, but it doesn’t really provide a lot of data so I’m not sure what the purpose is.

Pretend that I just learned what GitHub is and I’ve never heard of your site either. What is the your site for and why would I use it over a GitHub url or a static site?
by thatcat | 2026-02-17 17:16:10+00:00
The money can't be spent on a house or any useful asset that could be resold. They wouldn't give you a loan for that at 18 because it'd be irresponsible since they know you don't know anything about finance or economics as you likely don't have an education yet. They'll give you a high interest credit card with a 500 dollar limit to buy what you want though.
by Jordan-117 | 2026-02-17 17:16:28+00:00
You can call your local affiliate to complain:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cbs-tv-stations-affiliates/

Better yet, call their advertisers:

https://stopmediabiasnow.com/cbs-advertisers/

Watch/like/comment/share the YouTube upload:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiTJ7Pz_59A

More indirectly, you can support the Talarico campaign (fueling a financial Streisand effect could help discourage similar moves in the future):

https://secure.actblue.com/donate/jt-tx-web
by mmooss | 2026-02-17 17:16:48+00:00
It is interesting that, as a guess, we waste an average of ~5% of storage capacity for text (12.5% of Unicode's first byte, but many languages regularly use higher bytes of course).

I don't fault the creators of ASCII - those control characters were probably needed at the time. The fault is ours for not moving on from the legacy technology. I think some non-ASCII/Unicode encodings did reuse the control character bytes. Why didn't Unicode implement that? I assume they were trying to be be compatible with some existing encodings, but couldn't they have chosen the encodings that made use of the control character code points?

If Unicode were to change it now (probably not happening, but imagine ...), what would they do with those 32 code points? We couldn't move other common characters over to them - those already have well-known, heavily used code points in Unicode and also iirc Unicode promises backward compability with prior versions.

There still are scripts and glyphs not in Unicode, but those are mostly quite rare and effectively would continue to waste the space. Is there some set of characters that would be used and be a good fit? Duplicate the most commonly used codepoints above 8 bits, as a form of compression? Duplicate combining characters? Have a contest? Make it a private area - I imagine we could do that anyway, because I doubt most systems interpret those bytes now.

Also, how much old data, which legitimately uses the ASCII control characters, would become unreadable?
by 1970-01-01 | 2026-02-17 17:16:50+00:00
"Didn't air" doesn't mean what you think it means. It means the interview didn't go over the airwaves via broadcast towers. The full interview is online, which thanks to the Streisand effect already has millions of views and therfore helped CBS in terms of funding. This can be seen as a 4D chess move by CBS. They'll certainly do this again if they're hitting millions of views.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiTJ7Pz_59A
by stephenr | 2026-02-17 17:16:55+00:00
> So I assume that even though QR codes are available where you live, you use your debit card with an NFC chip because it is quicker than using QR codes...

Yes, I generally use my card rather than than QR unless the shop doesn't take cards, doesn't have a paywave/etc-enabled card reader, the card reader is broken, the sales person doesn't know how to use it, or the sales person insists I give them my card and PIN to pay (none of those are hypotheticals, I've experienced all of those first hand, some of them quite repeatedly).

> Now I wonder why a QR code couldn't work without an internet connection just the same.

Because a QR code is just a short piece of information to tell your banking app who to send funds to - it's like putting a mailto: link on a website rather than asking people to re-type your email address to contact you.
by cj | 2026-02-17 17:16:58+00:00
Imagine a world where lenders charged different interest rates depending on the risk profile of each school.

Lower interest rates for schools where graduates repay their debt, higher interest for schools where many people default.

Assuming it wouldn’t disproportionately affect disadvantaged populations, that could be an interesting way to incentivize schools to get their shit together and prepare students for starting their career
by aresant | 2026-02-17 17:17:00+00:00
Really good comment and fair point

But mortality credits (pooling) don't solve the math of the discount rate - they add 100 - 150 basis points of reduction so retarget to 5.5% vs 4% if generous

So they are still structurally designed where they HAVE to allocate towards risk to meet their targets which is at core of issue
by manishfp | 2026-02-17 17:17:22+00:00
When Clawdbot rebranded to OpenClaw, it almost felt symbolic. Add “Open” to the name long enough and eventually OpenAI calls.

The founder of OpenClaw ( Peter Steinberger) joining OpenAI is more than a hiring update. It reflects a structural pattern in AI.

Open-Source has quietly become the ecosystem’s proving ground. Builders experiment in public, take risks without institutional constraints, and earn credibility at the edge. When their work reaches a certain threshold, the largest labs absorb the talent.

It is efficient and strategic. It is also centralizing.

Every time a strong open-source founder moves to a frontier lab, the center grows stronger. The edge becomes slightly thinner. This does not make the decision wrong. Ambitious engineers will always gravitate toward ambitious problems. In many ways, it validates that building in the open still produces serious technical depth.

But we should be clear about the dynamic.

Open-Source in AI is increasingly becoming a pipeline. Build publicly, prove capability, and get pulled into one of a few centralized institutions. The gravity is strong, and it keeps reinforcing itself.

The real question is not whether talent emerges in the open. It clearly does. The question is whether it stays. Because the future of AI will not just be shaped by model performance. It will be shaped by where power consolidates.

And moves like this make that direction harder to ignore!
by shermantanktop | 2026-02-17 17:17:24+00:00
We could also speculate that the poster throwing out speculations is itself an account controlled by a foreign state actor (or a domestic one) trying to muddy the waters of discussion.

We shouldn't do that, but we could.

A strong piece of evidence against the FSA theory is that the posts are pretty ham-handed and unsubtle. But maybe that's part of the plan.
by poszlem | 2026-02-17 17:17:39+00:00
When my wife was diagnosed with cancer and eventually went into remission, I didn’t really process what was happening at first. I was completely focused on getting her through it. The grief hit me later.

What helped me more than anything was going out into the garden and digging. I made sure to do it safely, since I know it can be risky, so I dug wide and with wooden supports, but there was something about just digging and digging down that let me work through all the darkness that had built up in my head. It gave those feelings somewhere to go.

This is unrelated, but I wonder if I did actually hit on something primal in myself.
by swynx | 2026-02-17 17:17:46+00:00
Agree that test coverage is the ultimate safety net for false positives, but I'd push back on relying on it as the primary strategy. "Delete it and see if tests break" works at small scale, but the feedback cycle gets painful fast - you're burning CI minutes on speculative deletions, and the FPs erode trust in the tool. After a few rounds of "oh that wasn't actually dead," people stop bothering.

The better approach is reducing false positives at the analysis level so the list you hand to a developer is actionable without requiring a test run for each item.

We built a dead code scanner (Swynx - https://swynx.io) and validated it against 1,100+ open source repos. A few things that moved the needle on Python specifically:

File-level reachability first, then export-level. Instead of parsing the AST for individual call sites (where dynamic dispatch kills you), we do a BFS from every entry point (__main__.py, framework convention files, package.json main/bin, etc.) and follow the import graph. If no path from any entry point reaches a module, it's dead with very high confidence. This sidesteps a huge class of FPs because you're not trying to resolve getattr(module, f"handle_{action}") — you're just asking "does anything import this module at all?"

__getattr__ is a sleeper problem in Python. When a module defines __getattr__, any sibling module becomes dynamically reachable via attribute access. We had to add a rule: if __init__.py defines __getattr__, treat all sibling.py files and sub-packages as live. Same idea with importlib.import_module() - if we see it in the BFS with a resolvable dotted path, we follow it.

Scale reveals your bugs. When you scan 1,000 repos, any repo showing >10% dead is almost certainly a scanner bug, not actually 10% dead. That feedback loop drove our false positive rate down to ~1.7% across hundreds of repos - way below the threshold where people stop trusting the output.

Re: Vulture - I actually just ran Skylos (the OP's tool) against its own codebase. It found some real stuff: constants like FRAMEWORK_FUNCTIONS and ENTRY_POINT_DECORATORS defined in framework_aware.py but never referenced anywhere. Genuinely dead code in a dead code detection tool. But it also flagged its own pytest plugin hooks (pytest_collection_finish, pytest_fixture_setup) as unused at confidence=60 - exactly the framework convention problem the OP described. The confidence scoring approach is right, but the framework awareness has to be deep enough to catch your own patterns.

To the OP's original question: you shouldn't accept false positives, and you shouldn't ignore dead code detection. The answer is two passes - file-level reachability (high confidence, low noise) followed by export-level analysis for files that are reachable but partially dead.
by slibhb | 2026-02-17 17:17:55+00:00
> I was so naïve that I thought progress could only go one direction, because that’s all I’d ever known.

What is he talking about? AI?

I can't relate. Maybe it's because his identity vaguely repulses me. Although in some ways I'm part of it, I never liked the programmer subculture that he's mourning.

I find AI exciting because I don't know where it's headed. If it can do my job better than me, that's even more exciting. Maybe I'll have to find a new job or just learn to use new, diffeent tools but either way, change is interesting.
by gruez | 2026-02-17 17:18:04+00:00
>you make a good point, if there's no risk there should be no interest.

Even loans to the US government pays interest. If you meant "no premium beyond the risk-free rate", why would anyone want to lend to students, when they have to deal with the hassle of dealing with lenders and the political risk of it getting discharged, when they can just led to the federal government instead?
Show HN: StewReads – Turn Claude chats into Kindle ebooks
by rajma | 2026-02-17 17:18:37+00:00
Blog: https://ankitgupta.dev/blog/building-stewreads

Over past year, I have realized (and accepted) two things:
- I do actually learn from AI chatbots.
- Chat interface is very hard to focus, I cannot go back to a useful chat from the past and reread it to revise the topic I learnt from it.

To solve this, I created StewReads MCP server which instructs Claude to generate a nicely formatted ebook based on the chat. Now, when I feel I have learned something from a chat, I simply invoke the `stew` prompt and have the ebook on my Kindle device and app in minutes. Works well with claude.ai, Claude Desktop app and Cowork. You can also try it by sending ebook to your email if you dont want to setup Kindle yet.

Looking forward to your comments and suggestions. Happy Stewing!

Note: it uses your Claude tokens, so be mindful. Ebook size is capped at 2000 words as a guardrail. I use sonnet for brainstorming and learning, and can comfortably generate an ebook a day on the Pro plan.
by dsf2d | 2026-02-17 17:18:54+00:00
To me LLMs are an experiment toward replication of what humans can do. However, they fall short on many dimensions that its just not going to pan out from what I see.

The real danger is the future investment needed to explore other architectures beyond LLMs. Will private firms be able to get the investment? Will public firms be granted the permission to do another round of large capex by investors? As time goes on, Apple's conservative approach means they will be the only firm trusted with its cash balance. They are very nicely seated despite all the furore they've had to endure.
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-17 17:19:09+00:00
> Greedy for trying to stay in business.

If CBS were headed by someone with gumption and less willingness to kowtow to the government, they could resist this pressure and still be fine. Worst case scenario, a merger would get rejected and they would be targeted by some spurious lawsuits. Going out of business is not a realistic risk.

What is a risk, however, is non-optimal shareholder value. We live in a world where the stock price is more important than anything else, including doing the right thing.
by hypersoar | 2026-02-17 17:19:20+00:00
Using overall life expectancy here is misleading, as it includes the risk of childhood mortality. You have to look at life expectancy at a given age. According to the SSA's life tables[0], life expectancy for men at 65 in 1930 and 1940 was about 12 years. In 2020, it was about 17. A significant increase, but not nearly as extreme as you're saying.

[0] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/NOTES/pdf_studies/study120.pdf
by advisedwang | 2026-02-17 17:19:23+00:00
If it's a truly random sample [1] it's perfectly valid; there would be no reason to think that the other images have less frequency of CSAM.

[1] The methodology just says "To collect the sample, researchers used a licensed third-party tool to select 20,000 posts at random out of all Grok posts that contained an image"
by TimorousBestie | 2026-02-17 17:19:23+00:00
> I don't really think we need to forgive student loans.

Neither do I. I was happy with the status quo ante Trump where many classes of public servant could get their student debts forgiven after on the order of ten years of service. (An imperfect program with too many disqualifying loopholes, but it was better than nothing. Now, almost no one qualifies.) The Overton window has foreclosed on that kind of solution to the problem, however. Even military personnel have been disqualified from attending certain schools as part of their meager education benefit.

> Bankruptcy isn't a "get out of jail free" card

Indeed. One’s mid-twenties are arguably the worst period of one’s life to live with damaged credit.

> I think it's absolutely abusive that student debt can't be discharged, and is pretty heinous as policy.

Absolutely, it needs to go.
by birdsongs | 2026-02-17 17:19:35+00:00
I use microsoft authenticator, in its own work profile for work. I also use fingerprint login for Nordea, the Proton Suite, my personal 2fa program. Biometric works great on the Pixel 9A, at least, and it was fine on the 8 Pro when I had it.

The BankID thing is a SW quirk on their end, but generic fingerprint seems works great across the ecosystem.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-17 17:19:46+00:00
> depositing funds in a bank is considered risky behaviour?

of course it is, that's why the bank pays you interest on your deposit. They loan out what you deposit at a higher rate and collect the difference as profit. If that loan defaults then your money is gone because the bank was never able to collect it back. FDIC was invented to insure your deposit up to 250k so you're protected (up to 250k) in case that happens.
by DrewADesign | 2026-02-17 17:19:52+00:00
” The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.”

— Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

Some day I’m going to get a crystal ball for statistics. Getting bored with a project was always a thing— after the first push, I don’t encounter like 80% of my coding side projects until I’m cleaning— but I’ll bet the abandonment rate for side projects has skyrocketed. I think a lot of what we’re seeing are projects that were easy enough to reach MVP before encountering the final 90% of coding time, which AI is a lot less useful for.
by foxmoss | 2026-02-17 17:20:09+00:00
As someone who posts blogs and projects out of my own enjoyment, no AI for code generation, handed edited blog, I still have no idea how to signal to people that I actually know what I’m talking about. Every step of the process could’ve been done by an LLM, albeit worse, so I don’t have a way of signifying my projects as something different. Considering putting a “No LLMs used in this project” tag at the start but that feels a little tacky.
by scottyah | 2026-02-17 17:20:19+00:00
Same reason you can sign up for war, or ride a bike without a helmet (in some places). The world is a dangerous place and the less legislation we have blocking people from making decisions, the more likely they are to be capable of making their own. In 2009 when I graduated, it was common knowledge that any private colleges or abnormal degrees were an oddity only for rich people to buy a piece of paper for their more disappointing kids. I don't know what changed (or if it was just localized), but whoever convinced you to go for the scam is at fault here in your circumstance- not the "system" for allowing other people to benefit.

It's a bunch of able-bodied people who took the elevator instead of stairs thinking it was a shortcut, but the effort put in was the whole point. Anyone who told you otherwise is to blame. Punishing people who took the stairs sends a clear message to everyone else deciding which way to go.
by grayne | 2026-02-17 17:20:21+00:00
Thanks for the question.

audio-to-motion is fairly robust to noisy TTS and differing languages / accents. It doesn't use the raw audio as input, we first embed the audio using a pretrained wav2vec-style embedder, trained on millions of audio samples.

Saying this, we haven't properly evaluated in multiple languages, and we have heard from customers that lip-sync isn't always as good in non-english. For Cara 4 we're training on more diverse data, which will hopefully close this gap.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-02-17 17:20:24+00:00
Liberal Currents is great. Bulwark is too, but I want to remind people that they are a center-right publication. Yes they hate the hell out of the infernal despicable corrupt sodden actions now, and are quite eloquent & good calling for some moral character & values.

But they're still on the right, and crucially in writing in because sometimes people don't actually know that. Do read/listen! But please be aware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bulwark_(website)

(In case it's not obvious Liberal Currents is quite left.)
by tartoran | 2026-02-17 17:20:45+00:00
> Because you took the money promising to pay it back, spent it on something you wanted, and now it's gone and someone has to pay the money you spent.

How are they supposed to pay it back with a crashed economy? Look, I get it with personal responsibility and all that but these people were following the rules, did their part and now are burdened to their death while Big Co gets bailed out over and over and never learns responsibility. Why the double standard?
by gruez | 2026-02-17 17:20:57+00:00
>combined with a school system designed to educate - in direct opposition to current goal of producing labour units for corporate; would massively improve pretty much ever aspect of American life.

"producing labour units for corporate" at least pays the bills. What's the alternative? Education is for "finding yourself" or whatever? That's a nice platitude, but "finding yourself" with a film studies course doesn't pay the bills, and is arguably the reason why there's a student loan crisis in the first place.
by Aachen | 2026-02-17 17:20:58+00:00
Debian surely doesn't depend on Lenovo or Asus to release OS updates for my laptop. Apparently it's not "everyone else" that needs this but it's some sort of dependency for mobile (qualcomm?) devices

I have trouble understanding why this is different on mobile devices. People keep speaking of blobs but that doesn't seem to be a thing in laptop/desktop hardware, unless they mean something like the firmware running on your wifi card and uefi chip? But those can be interfaced with from any kernel version, afaik, so I don't get it
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-02-17 17:21:08+00:00
No one did what the paper actually proposed. It was a nothing burger in the industry. Yet it was insanely popular on social media.

Same with the "llms don't reason" from "Apple" (two interns working at Apple, but anyway). The media went nuts over it, even though it was littered with implementation mistakes and not worth the paper it was(n't) printed on.
by gwbas1c | 2026-02-17 17:21:13+00:00
> If the problem is that we’ve painted our development environments into a corner that requires tons of boilerplate, then that is the problem. We should have been chopping the cruft away and replacing it with deterministic abstractions like we’ve always done. That’s what that Larry Wall quote about good programmers being lazy was about. It did not mean that we would be okay with pulling a damn slot machine lever a couple times to generate the boilerplate.

Curious: Now that AI programming is getting good, is anyone using AI to chop away at boilerplate and/or simplify it? For example, is anyone skipping the ORM and just having AI write SQL and build objects from a datareader?
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-17 17:21:19+00:00
> This can be seen as a 4D chess move by CBS.

It isn't. CBS is owned by the Ellisons, who are big Trump supporters. They are absolutely complicit in attempts to quash dissenting voices.

You're right that the Streisand effect is in play here, but it's not 4D chess. It's garden-variety incompetence, because the policy makers in the government are too old to see anything other than broadcast TV as the most valuable medium.