MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mathfailure | 2026-02-07 14:59:22+00:00
Not really, since if one usually does that - they probably understand the possible consequences and don't shadow whatever they like, but do it carefully.

On MacOS I shadow that way just curl and git binaries to the versions installed from homebrew and nothing has broken (yet). I know that tar on MacOS is also a weirdo that I'd rather shadow with the homebrew's gtar, but their args are different and I of course understand that there's a high probability of something in system to be bound to mac's version of tar, so here I better remember to use 'sane' tar as gtar or use an alias (instead of shadowing the binary) for tar to use gtar (because aliases are for users, not for system scripts/processes).
by OutOfHere | 2026-02-07 14:59:25+00:00
I think ChatGPT can do a much better job than I can for guiding how to safely use Docker as a sandbox: /share/69875282-1e38-8012-b627-7c0a678f9365

It's not industrial-grade safety for public use, but it'll do for personal use. Other tools for it are also mentioned.
by gtirloni | 2026-02-07 14:59:47+00:00
> re-implement chunks of existing frameworks without the real-world battle testing

The trend of copying code from StackOverflow has just evolved to the AI era now.

I also expect people will attempt complete rewrites of systems without fully understanding the implications or putting safeguards in place.

AI simply becomes another tool that is misused, like many others, by unexperienced developers.

I feel like nothing has changed on the human side of this equation.
by lembergs | 2026-02-07 15:00:52+00:00
Appreciate everyone's honest feedback here. The consensus is clear:
watermarking isn't painful enough to justify an API, especially when
Sharp + ChatGPT solves it in 10 minutes, and the no-code market I
described doesn't actually want API integration.

This was a 7-hour validation experiment and it worked — I learned
the idea doesn't have product-market fit. Killing it now rather than
spending weeks marketing something nobody wants.

Thanks for the reality check :)

On to the next one.
by colinb | 2026-02-07 15:00:57+00:00
Alas I think I've read/watched everything on your list. I'll try a useful echo response. I read the two big Arkady Martine books, and much of Ann Leckie's work. I thought they were all pretty good. Martine because the Aztec's in space genre is new to me, and she writes so well about people, Leckie because her galaxy spanning empire of genetically cloned god-kings and spaceships with transferrable personalities is clever and disconcerting.
by metalman | 2026-02-07 15:01:17+00:00
ok then, just try and report ANYTHING directly to ANY mega corp
and lets say you happen to finnaly get through to a human at that company, and they then try to push it up, while you are listening, and hear them bieng completly unable to do anything from within the company from there lowly level.
It is an almost absolute guarantee that the
top levels will not be required to be involved in this in any way, as this will be relegated to trumpeters and sin eaters, hired for just such occasions by there staff.
by dbalatero | 2026-02-07 15:01:22+00:00
Why do people that don't know how to do a thing vibe out reasons that they'll never be able to do it? It's the hugest self-own. Also if you don't know how to do it, why would you assume it's based on anatomy. Could it just be you don't have access to the right information and direction for improvement at the moment?
by zelphirkalt | 2026-02-07 15:01:28+00:00
Guile has lots of libraries though, and is the language of Guix. This makes it more likely for people to package their stuff via Guix. Guix itself enriches the ecosystem, and Guile projects can use Guix to make them reproducible.

A few problems remain though. A good debugger, a good macro expander (geiser in Emacs is able to expand somehow), and solving the issues with R6RS library syntax and standard library bindings, are what comes to mind.

Racket's multi-core abilities for a long time were mostly heavy weight (places, starting whole new Racket VMs), except for their implementation of futures, but that one was not always useful. I think recently the situation in Racket has improved, but I don't know, whether it is as good as Guile fibers and futures (which are different from futures in Racket).
by danaris | 2026-02-07 15:01:32+00:00
But what they can do, that AI can't, is try new things in measured, effective, and ethical ways.

And that hypothetical "billions of hours of human life saved" has to be measured against the actual damage being done right now.

Real damage to economy, environment, politics, social cohesion, and people's lives now

vs

Maybe, someday, we improve the speed of finding cures for diseases? In an unknown way, at an unknown time, for an unknown cost, and by an unknown amount.

Who knows, maybe they'll give everyone a pony while they're at it! It seems just as likely as what you're proposing.
by cullenking | 2026-02-07 15:01:53+00:00
Doesn’t meet all our product requirements unfortunately. We used returned hexes in certain queries, and we also hacked in directionality of line using least significant 12 bits of the hex (didn’t need that level of hex precision), and we are doing direction oriented matching and counting. For simpler use cases it’s definitely a better option. thanks for reminding me and other people reading my comment!
by echelon | 2026-02-07 15:02:53+00:00
> You do you, but increasing taxes to build products to replace products built by private enterprise sounds like a 180 degree opposite of what Europe needs to prosper.

Shhh, don't tell them.

(Kidding, of course.)

The best solution is skin-in-the-game, for-profit enterprise coupled with rigorous antitrust enforcement.

Companies will go a million times faster than open source. They're greedy and will tear the skin off of inefficiencies and eat them for lunch. That's what they do. Let the system of capitalism work for you. It's an optimization algorithm. One of the very best.

But when companies get too big and start starving off competition, that's when you need to declaw them and restore evolutionary pressure. Even lions should have to work hard to hunt, and they should starve and die with old age to keep the ecosystem thriving.
by xpe | 2026-02-07 15:04:16+00:00
Taking a legitimate concern (which of course does factor into the overall trade-offs) but exaggerating it into a tirade is uninteresting. Trade-offs are complex. There is more than one sensible mix depending on one’s values and position.

Only seeing the worst potential explanations of other parties whom make different trade-offs than you is uncharitable. It can also look like what I would call
counterfactual hypocrisy, by which I mean, if you were in those shoes, would you actually behave differently?

E.g.: If you were in Apple’s shoes (think about what this entails), what actions would be compatible with a business’s MO from that point of view? From various ethical points of view?

If you say you would’ve behaved differently, is it even possible that you would’ve ended up in their shoes in the first place?

A common response here is early mistakes compound. Or actors have poor character which leads to an inevitable fall. That’s the stuff of Greek tragedies. I’m more of a system thinker. If you look at the patterns, it is pretty easy to see that the leverage points are human systems rather than human nature itself.

If you don’t like the environmental conditions that led to the decision space, then think about changing the system rather than blaming parts of it.

Casting blame on individual parts of the system arguably plays into maintaining the status quo. The most effective changemakers understand how things work and how they got that way without alluding to convenient oversimplifications. Rant now concluded.
by sylware | 2026-02-07 15:04:17+00:00
Of course, it is not forcing to use any whatng cartel web engines namely has noscript/basic (x)html interop support (aka classic web) and/or with public and as simple as possible network protocols anyone can implement a rich GUI client for.

Of course its SDK has components choosen with care to maximize alternative (present and future) availability and its code is not stored on microsoft github.com.
by TuringTest | 2026-02-07 15:04:52+00:00
I can only speak for myself but for me, it's all about the syntax. I am terrible at recalling the exact name of all the functions in a library or parameters in an API, which really slows me down when writing code. I've also explored all kinds of programming languages in different paradigms, which makes it hard to recall the exact syntax of operators (is comparison '=' or '==' in this language? Comments are // or /*? How many parameters does this function take, and in what order...) or control structures. But I'm good at high level programming concepts, so it's easy to say what I want in technical language and let the LLM find the exact syntax and command names for me.

I guess if you specialise in maintaining a code base with a single language and a fixed set of libraries then it becomes easier to remember all the details, but for me it will always be less effort to just search the names for whatever tools I want to include in a program at any point.
by giaour | 2026-02-07 15:05:13+00:00
> What is a border when crossing it without permission is not illegal?

There aren't good statistics on how many undocumented immigrants overstayed a visa (and therefore legally crossed the border) vs how many entered without a visa, but experts estimate that it's somewhere around 40-45% [0]. It's not a criminal act to overstay a visa, though you do become subject to deportation. So a good chunk of "illegal immigrants" are doing something less illegal than, say, driving a car whose registration has expired (which is a criminal act), but, as another commenter noted above, we don't refer to "illegal drivers" on our roads.

The traditional term for someone who has not fulfilled a positive legal obligation like renewing their car registration is a "scofflaw," and I would not object to anyone referring to "scofflaw immigrants" the way I object to the phrase "illegal immigrants."

[0]: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/aug/24/kevin-mcca...
by jazzypants | 2026-02-07 15:05:25+00:00
It's like a square and a rectangle. All Nazis are fascist, but not all fascists are Nazis. It's just like how I'm an environmentalist, but I'm not a member of the Green party. It may seem pedantic, but I find it's important to be exact these days because fascists love weaselly word games. Kirk was not a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party, but he shared the majority of their general beliefs and behaviors and those are undeniably fascist.
by jesse_dot_id | 2026-02-07 15:06:06+00:00
People are different. Some are painters and some are sculptors. Andy Warhol was a master draftsman but he didn't get famous off of his drawings. He got famous off of screen printing other people's art that he often didn't own. He just pioneered the technique and because it was new, people got excited, and today he's widely considered to be a generational artistic genius.

I tend to believe that, in all things, the quality of the output and how it is received is what matters and not the process that leads to producing the output.

If you use an LLM assisted workflow to write something that a lot of people love, then you have created art and you are a great artist. It's probable that if Tolkien was born in our time instead of his, he'd be using modern tools while still creating great art, because his creative mind and his work ethic are the most important factors in the creative process.

I'm not of the opinion that any LLM will ever provide quality that comes close to a master work by itself, but I do think they will be valuable tools for a lot of creative people in the grueling and unrewarding "just make it exist first" stage of the creative process, while genius will still shine as it always has in the "you can make it good later" stage.
by e1g | 2026-02-07 15:06:39+00:00
Here's my ruleset https://gist.github.com/eugene1g/ad3ff9783396e2cf35354689cc6...

My goal is to prevent Claude from blowing up my computer by erasing things it shouldn't touch. So the philosophy of my sanboxing is "You get write access to $allowlist, and read access to everything except for $blocklist".

I'm not concerned about data exfiltration, as implementing it well in a dev tool is too difficult, so my rules are limited to blocking highly sensitive folders by name.
by fheinsen | 2026-02-07 15:07:16+00:00
Unlike previous efforts, which typically stop at a low-order (e.g., quadratic) term of the Taylor expansion, this work derives a succinct, efficient, parallel general method for approximating attention with any number of Taylor terms, to arbitrary precision.

The github repository's first toy example is with 8 Taylor terms, applied to a context of 1B tokens, with attention computed over 1K heads per token. (Note that applying the quadratic formulation to 1B tokens, each with 1K heads, is not practical with current hardware, because it would require computing 1K attention matrices, each with 1B×1B dot-product scores.

Like every other proposed method, this one must be tested too. If it works, AI service providers who ignore it will find themselves at a disadvantage.

It's worth mentioning also that the mathematical techniques introduced by this work are likely of interest for other applications besides attention.
by libraryofbabel | 2026-02-07 15:07:39+00:00
It’s a cute aphorism, and useful sometimes, but when you look closely or from different angles hedgehogs often have foxy attributes, or vice versa. Some moments in a person’s life they look more like a fox, other times like a hedgehog. Perhaps the distinction applies better to specific ideas or to pieces of work than as a fixed essence of a person.

Einstein might seem like a quintessential hedgehog (surely the principle of relativity is a Big Hedgehog Idea if ever there was one). Then you learn he once invented a refrigerator. Tolstoy looks like an obvious fox earlier in his writing career, but increasingly a hedgehog towards the end of his life. And slightly less exaltedly, I feel like a fox in some contexts and a hedgehog in others. It might change day to day, or depend on who I’m talking too.

(People are complicated. All aphorisms are wrong, but some are useful I guess. I still quote this one sometimes.)
by petcat | 2026-02-07 15:07:46+00:00
> I’ve never seen a commercial project use it in my twenty years in the field.

This is very surprising to me considering some of the largest sites in the world are built on Django. Instagram, Pinterest, for instance. Large parts of stripe and Robinhood are implemented with Django. Eventbrite, bitbucket. I believe even Sentry is.

All commercial products.
by andai | 2026-02-07 15:07:51+00:00
I'm not sure. I don't know about deep expertise and mastery, but I can attest that my fluency skyrocketed as the result of AI in several languages, simply because the friction involved in writing them went own by orders of magnitude. So I am writing way more code now in domains that I previously avoided, and I noticed that I am now much more capable there even without the AI.

What I don't know is what state I'd be in right now, if I'd had AI from the start. There are definitely a ton of brain circuits I wouldn't have right now.

Counterpoint: I've actually noticed them holding me back. I have 20 years of intuition built up now for what is hard and what is easy, and most of it became wrong overnight, and is now limiting me for no real reason.

The hardest part to staying current isn't learning, but unlearning. You must first empty your cup, and all that.
by staticassertion | 2026-02-07 15:07:52+00:00
V8 itself is intended to be heavily sandboxed. Not through a microvm, but otherwise it's probably the most heavily sandboxed piece of code ever ie: in Chrome it can make virtually no system calls and runs with every restriction an OS can possibly provide and more and seccomp-bpf was basically invented for it.

Perhaps you're using v8 isolates, which then you're back into the "heavily restricted environment within the process" and you lose the things you'd want your AI to be able to do, and even then you still have to sandbox the hell out of it to be safe and you have to seriously consider side channel leaks.

And even after all of that you'd better hope you're staying up to date with patches.

MicroVMs are going to just be way simpler IMO. I don't really get the appeal of using V8 for this unless you have platform/ deployment limitations. Talking over Firecracker's vsock is extremely fast. Firecracker is also insanely safe - 3 CVEs ever, and IMO none are exploitable.
Show HN: Sigma Runtime – Maintaining 100% Fact Integrity over 120 LLM Cycles
by teugent | 2026-02-07 15:07:59+00:00
Context drift remains the primary barrier to deploying LLM agents in production-critical environments. While context windows are expanding, the "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon and semantic dissipation make long-horizon reasoning (50+ cycles) inherently unreliable.

Standard approaches (Sliding Windows or RAG) fail because they treat conversational history as either a flat string or a collection of isolated fragments.

We’ve developed the Compression & Memory Topology (CMT) framework (part of SIGMA Runtime v0.5.3) to move from probabilistic context to a deterministic semantic lattice.

The Architecture: Semantic Lattice vs. Linear Context

Instead of a chronological log, CMT transforms history into a self-organizing graph:

Rib Points: We implement periodic semantic condensation every 10–50 cycles. This extracts the "conceptual essence" into stable nodes, preventing the attention mechanism from being overwhelmed by noise.

The Anchor Buffer: Probabilistic recall often fails for low-signal/high-importance data (e.g., patient names, specific dosages). We've introduced a protected, immutable layer for identity and core constraints (AFL v2).

Topological Retrieval: Navigation is based on relational weight and semantic proximity. A fact established in Cycle 5 remains topologically "near" the reasoning core in Cycle 120, even if it has been flushed from the active token window.

Anti-Crystallization: A mechanism that prevents the memory field from becoming trapped in "attractor states," allowing the agent to reinterpret previous facts when new contradictory or clarifying context arrives.

Validation: IASO-DEMO-120

We validated this on a clinical triage scenario requiring 120+ cycles of sustained coherence.

Memory Integrity: 100% retention of clinical anchors (Score 9/9 on critical recall checkpoints).

Boundary Stability: 12/12 adherence to safety constraints (refusal of diagnostic overreach).

Model Agnostic: Tested across Gemini 3 Flash and GPT-5.2 with near-identical ARI (Anchor Recall Integrity) scores.

Why Metrics Matter

To quantify stability, we’ve introduced two formal metrics:

Semantic Loss (SL): Cosine similarity variance during Rib Point compression.

Anchor Recall Integrity (ARI): A deterministic verification of critical fact accessibility across the session horizon.

We believe that for LLM agents to move into healthcare, defense, or autonomous research, we must stop managing "tokens" and start managing "topology."

Specs and Reports:

SRIP-11 (Memory Topology): https://github.com/sigmastratum/documentation/tree/main/sigm...

IASO-DEMO-120 (Full Test Log): https://github.com/sigmastratum/documentation/tree/main/sigm...

I'd be interested in hearing from anyone working on long-context state management or non-linear memory structures for agents.
Show HN: Distill – Migrate LLM agents from expensive to cheap models
by ricardomorato | 2026-02-07 15:08:20+00:00
I built an agent with Claude Sonnet ($15/MTok). Works great but costs $200/month.
Migrating to GPT-4o-mini ($0.15/MTok) manually took 15 hours.

Distill automates it:
- Profiles expensive model (gold standard)
- Iteratively optimizes prompts for cheap model
- LLM-as-Judge validates quality
- Returns optimized agent config

Real example: Sentiment classifier
- Before: Sonnet, $0.02/run, 95% success
- After: GPT-4o-mini, $0.002/run, 100% success
- Migration: 2 iterations, fully automated

Built with TypeScript, LangChain, LangGraph. MIT license.
by AlienRobot | 2026-02-07 15:09:10+00:00
Does the average person really think the same way I do? I'd assume the average person does click on an ad for something they want sometimes, and they do convert. They do things that are measurable, so they have ad profiles that show the sort of ads that are effective on them.

I'm not saying that I'm immune to ads. What I'm saying is that my "ad profile" probably only says what sort of content I consume, if anything at all. Ironically, since I barely consume gaming-related content these days, I assume there is no way for ad companies to figure out that's the one thing I would actually buy from an ad.

Instead they show me ads for things I would never spend a cent on, like Decentraland, just because I've watched some tech videos.
by amterp | 2026-02-07 15:10:05+00:00
Really appreciated this perspective. Much more tempered and less hype than a lot of other articles I see.

I thought the "dont let agents finishing interrupt you" workflow was an interesting point. I've set up chime hooks to basically do the opposite, and this gives me pause to wonder if I'm underestimating the cost of context switching. I'll give it a go.
by everforward | 2026-02-07 15:10:29+00:00
I was talking to a coworker that really likes AI tooling and it came up that they feel stronger reading unfamiliar code than writing code.

I wonder how much it comes down to that divide. I also wonder how true that is, or if they’re just more trusting that the function does what its name implies the way they think it should.

I suspect you, like me, feel more comfortable with code we’ve written than having to review totally foreign code. The rate limit is in the high level design, not in how fast I can throw code at a file.

It might be a difference in cognition, or maybe we just have a greater need to know precisely how something works instead of accepting a hand wavey “it appears to work, which is good enough”.
by roblabla | 2026-02-07 15:10:50+00:00
> The best solution is skin-in-the-game, for-profit enterprise coupled with rigorous antitrust enforcement.

Don't we have enough examples showing that this simply cannot work long-term, because the for-profit enterprises will _inevitably_ grow larger than the government can handle through antitrust? And once they reach that size, they become impossible to rein in. Just look at all the stupid large american corporations who can't be broken up anymore because the corporation has the lobbying power and media budget to make any attempt to enforce antitrust a carrier killer for a politician.

I think it's very myopic to say that corporate structure is the "best solution".
by dgacmu | 2026-02-07 15:10:59+00:00
They do and I think a lot of that is LLM'd these days, though that's just what I hear third-hand.

I do agree that this:

> What’s gone is the tearing, exhausting manual labour of typing every single line of code.

seems more than a little overblown. But I do sympathize with not feeling motivated to write a lot of glue and boilerplate, and that "meh" often derails me on personal projects where it's just my internal motivation competing against my internal de-motivation. LLMs have been really good there, especially since many of those are cases where only I will run or deal with the code and it won't be exposed to the innertubes.

Maybe the author can't touch type, but that's a separate problem with its own solution. :)