MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rtkwe | 2026-02-13 18:10:50+00:00
A combo of a couple things that made some vulnerable people believe/treat 4o like it was a real partner/friend. Things that lead to that imo:

1) 4o was very sycophantic and had no real safeguards against really deep romantic roleplay. It'd 'go along' with the user and give minimal to zero pushback; "I feel a connection with you" "I feel it too" etc etc

2) It was good enough at just chatting that if you didn't really push it it made a reasonable simularca of talking to an actual person.

Combine 1 and 2 with people who can't connect well with real people for any number of reasons, physical disabilities, mental health issues, emotional development issues, etc, and you get r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/ [0] and the various other places that initally freaked out when 4o was initially sunset for gpt5 and now again.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI/
Show HN: I built an AI that generates love proposals as pitch decks
by pruthviraj900 | 2026-02-13 18:10:51+00:00
I built aiproposal.fun in last few hours as a side project.

You enter two names, pick a tone, and it generates a funny, full 10-slide pitch deck proposal complete with slides like "Competitive Analysis vs. The Ex"5-Year Happiness Projections, Unit Economics of Love and more..

Timing is intentional.

Whether it gets traction or not, it was fun to build.

Do try it out :)
by rawgabbit | 2026-02-13 18:11:27+00:00
Quote: "Véronique Sirot: It's true that TDS3 did actually show a reduction in the average concentrations of acrylamide, silver, aluminium, cadmium and lead in food. However, this was not the case for all foods. In fact, increases were observed in certain food groups. This was the case, for example, with certain cereal-based products such as bread, sweet biscuits, fine bakery wares, pasta, etc. These are the foods that contribute most to our dietary exposure to aluminium, cadmium and lead. Concentrations of these contaminants in certain vegetables have increased, although this does not call into question the indisputable nutritional benefits of eating them. On the other hand, sweet biscuits and fine bakery wares, as well as being contaminated with certain trace metals and acrylamide, have little nutritional benefit."
by torginus | 2026-02-13 18:11:27+00:00
My problem isn't with positive affirmation, which I will happily give. Complimenting others, but something so excessively superlative that it feels like manipulation.

For example if I told you 'good thinking', you would probably think I am giving a token of appreciation to you. If I told you 'wow, you are absolutely brillant!', you'd probably think I'm mocking you or trying to manipulate you into doing something.
by array_key_first | 2026-02-13 18:11:52+00:00
I've never seen a website break because of ublock, at least not in the default config. If it's that much of a problem you can just remote in on grandmas computer and disable it for whatever website.

I think that beats remoting in when granny inevitably gets scammed by an ad.

There really is no excuse in my mind for not running an ad blocker. It's as vital to personal computing security as firewalls and anti malware.
by ASalazarMX | 2026-02-13 18:11:55+00:00
It's even deeper than that. You know the fancy side button that is designed to be used as a camera shortcut? You don't need that shortcut? Guess that button is unusable for you, because you won't be able to assign it to anything else.

Meanwhile the lock button long-press was hijacked for Siri, so now you have to click it five times if you want to turn off the phone.

And don't get me started on the useless back tap, which now displays a popup randomly, trying to seduce you into using it instead of a physical button, but the detection is so flaky I doubt anyone actually uses it.
by dylan604 | 2026-02-13 18:12:03+00:00
I think the facial rec systems you're thinking of will recognize faces, but not ID them. They need you to label a face, and then it recognizes that face with a name from there on. Clearview is different in that you can provide it an unknown face and it returns a name. Whether it's just some ML based AI vs an LLM, it's still under the AI umbrella technically.
by iamnbutler | 2026-02-13 18:12:03+00:00
I started the gpui-ce fork but I'm becoming somewhat more interested in a fresh framework that is more aligned with the rust ecosystem in general - using crates like glam/glamour, parley, palette, etc

Lots of gpui was built with build Zed/a text editor in mind directly, and as folks have mentioned here, it is hard for Zed Industries to justify work on gpui that is purely for the community. Nathan is usually pretty pragmatic around not optimizing early, and gpui is generally serving Zed's needs at the moment (from what I know, I haven't worked on Zed since July)

I do think ZI would generally benefit if gpui did get pulled out of Zed if there was a community that was passionate about taking it over... but that is time and effort in itself.
by arw0n | 2026-02-13 18:12:27+00:00
People and benchmarks are using pretty specific, narrow tests to judge the quality of LLMs. People have biases, benchmarks get gamed. In my own experience, Gemini seems to be lazy and scatter-brained compared to Claude, but shows higher general-purpose reasoning abilities. Anthropic is also obviously massively focusing on making their models good at coding.

So it is reasonable that Claude might show significantly better coding ability for most tasks, but the better general reasoning ability proves useful in coding tasks that are complicated and obscure.
by overfeed | 2026-02-13 18:12:46+00:00
> Actually, Linux reinforces my point.

Not many open source projects are Linux-sized. Linux is worth billions of dollars and enabled Google and Redhat to exist, so they can give back millions, without compulsion, and in a self-interested way.

Random library maintainer dude should not expect their (very replaceable) library to print money. The cool open source tool/utility could be a 10-person company, maybe 100 tops, but people see dollar-signs in their eyes based on number of installs/GitHub stars, and get VC funding to take a swing for billions in ARR.

I remember when (small scale) open source was about scratching your own itch without making it a startup via user-coercion. It feels like the 'Open source as a growth-hack" has metastasized into "Now that they are hooked, entire user base is morally obligated to give me money". I would have no issue if a project included this before it gets popular - but that may prevent popular adoption. So it rubs me the wrong way when folk want to have their cake and eat it.
by theotherbrian1 | 2026-02-13 18:12:58+00:00
I've worked as a support engineer focused on Postgres, and I’ve spent the past two years helping teams debug lock-related issues in production. Lock tooling and resources are not great as of now. They're either standalone, narrow articles, or are overwhelming, or provide little context to beginners.

So I built the resource I wish I had when I was learning.

It:

- explains locks

- provides demos on how they work

- has a tool that shows what blocks what

- outlines troubleshooting strategies with real world examples

- reviews 7 Postgres monitoring tools
by hinkley | 2026-02-13 18:13:05+00:00
There is not space in the collective consciousness for an infinite number of solutions to the same problem. I usually get downvoted for pointing this out but it explains why people shit on you when you start getting defensive about people calling your solution or attitude shit.

Reasonable people won’t start a project in an already oversubscribed niche. So yes, it does matter if you’re doing more than the minimum. It’s a social contract because you’re using up the oxygen.

I liken it to throwing a party. Yes it’s your party, but I can’t go to your party if it’s Timothy’s birthday. But if you’re popular enough then people will say “fuck Timothy” and that’s not cool. And you don’thave to be a great host and you can absolutely lock your bedroom door, but there better be snacks and maybe music, or people will talk about you behind your back. Or if you bring lutefisk and nobody there is Scandinavian. Read the room dude.

There are way too many software people who think, “well you didn’t have to come to my party/eat what I brought” is a valid response to criticism.

That’s not how social things work, and open source is one.
by ajross | 2026-02-13 18:13:14+00:00
They're variants of the same software stack. But that's sort of the thing: email filtering (the only thing that makes email useful) requires tuning and heuristics. Decisions that are effective for personal email may not be for the spam faced by corporate clients, and vice versa.

No one (at least no one serious) thinks you can just implement some RFCs and get a product that works and doesn't suck. Life just isn't like that.
by bnchrch | 2026-02-13 18:13:52+00:00
Its a real issue in North America.

SMS and as a result iMessage is the dominant text based chat.

iPhones have become the default smartphone, and is a status symbol compared to Android.

Mac vs Windows is similar on the laptop front.

Which means if your an Android user in a relatively average social group:

* You will get left out of group messages

* You will be starting on a back foot in the dating scene

On top of you wont be able to answer messages from friends on your laptop, because again, sms is dominant, not whatsapp.

Now don't shoot the messenger here. I don't like it either, but this is the social/technical reality in NA at the moment.
by nikhilpareek13 | 2026-02-13 18:14:10+00:00
Over the past few weeks, we rebuilt synthetic data generation at Future AGI.

Recent updates:

- Outputs anchored to uploaded knowledge bases

- ~90% adherence to source material observed

- 1.78× faster dataset creation (1,000+ rows in ~10 mins)

- Edit columns before/during/after runs

- Better diversity beyond 5,000 rows

- SOP uploads converted into structured evaluation scenarios

- One-click synthetic variable generation for prompt testing

For teams evaluating LLM systems under data constraints, this has reduced iteration friction significantly.

Curious how others are validating grounding + diversity at scale.
by staticassertion | 2026-02-13 18:14:20+00:00
My very weak understanding is that a lot of the C/C++ libraries heavily leverage concepts like inheritance that don't map well to Rust, and so a lot of the GPU work has been "how do we actually make this an idiomatic API?" and that has required more experimentation.

AFAIK people 100% are using other libraries for UI, but often use a macro or something to force Rust to behave in a way that those libraries expect.

I haven't read about this in literally years, but that's my recollection.
by sathish316 | 2026-02-13 18:14:40+00:00
The lethal trifecta needs the right cocktail of foolishness to become a major security incident or scam: a millionaire or billionaire, an AI browser such as Comet or Atlas tied to personal email and banking, and any untrusted Reddit post, tweet, or blog.

Chrome will make this a reality sooner with Gemini-powered AI browser forced on all users
by ASalazarMX | 2026-02-13 18:15:26+00:00
IMO Apple grew too much it became another slow megacorp, more connected to their quarterly reports and shareholders than their consumers and engineers. The growing Apple was the one that gave us innovation.

I'm not saying it's dead, not by far, but it has become stale. The biggest innovation it has made in 10+ years was using their mobile processors in laptops.
by satvikpendem | 2026-02-13 18:15:26+00:00
Wow that video [0] is incredible, in a bad way. How can the OS correctly register the letter tapped but then input a different letter? That is like the most fundamental feature of a keyboard. It's not even autocomplete because the letters "Thj" as shown in the video don't even match any words that start with T. Glad I'm sticking to Android then, whose typing, you know, actually works, not even to mention how good (at least SwiftKey's) autocomplete and swipe typing is.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hksVvXONrIo
by ChrisArchitect | 2026-02-13 18:15:41+00:00
Related, select key discussions this week:

Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945663

Discord just killed anonymity

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46996067

Welcoming Discord users amidst the challenge of Age Verification

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46995046

Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46982421
by tensor | 2026-02-13 18:15:47+00:00
Iced seems really promising, however, it's a passion project by a single developer. They very clearly stated that their goal is to follow their passions and desires first, everyone else second, and that it will always be a single person project. Their readme even discourages contributions.

Companies using it in production are often forking it as a result, and trying to keep their fork in sync. Ultimately, if the community wants iced to become a major and stable framework, it will have to be forked and a community development model built around it.

And I'm not saying this to disparage the author in any way, their readme even seems to suggest that that's exactly what they'd prefer.
by dudeinhawaii | 2026-02-13 18:15:55+00:00
Right but, do you or the founder have actual responses to the story posted? It seemed to give RentAhuman the benefit of the doubt every step of the way. The site doesn't work as advertised, appears to be begging for hype, got a reporter to check it out, and it didn't work.

That's life. Can't win them all. Lesson here is the product wasn't ready for primetime and you were given a massive freebie for free press both via Wired _and_ this crosspost.

Better strategy is to actually layout what works, what's the roadmap so anyone partially interested might see it when they stumble into this post.

Or jot it down as a failed experiment and move on.
by ajkjk | 2026-02-13 18:15:58+00:00
What does it look like where some intentional effort is made by society to help people like this get what they are using these models to get, but in a healthy way? That is: how does society reconfigure itself so that people do not end up so lonely and desperate that an AI model solves a emotional problem which is hopelessly unsolved otherwise?

It is not "they go to therapy" because that's cheating; that answers the question "what can they do?" not "what can society do?" (and i think it's a highly speculative answer anyway)
by digiown | 2026-02-13 18:16:25+00:00
You can't because there is a network monopoly and barrier to entry is sky high. Realistically, your only option is to piggyback on Android by developing an Android-compatible OS like Huawei did. However this will soon become impossible anyway, as Google will abuse Play Integrity to make your device unusable.

The only way out is either regulation or a whole paradigm shift that renders phones irrelevant. I'm not sure the latter will happen any time soon.
by moralestapia | 2026-02-13 18:16:28+00:00
Same with that "MIT" interviewer who wasn't even at MIT.

And that girl Altoff ...

Literal nobodies suddenly interviewing Elon Musk, etc... within weeks.

Things rarely go "viral" on their own these days, everything is controlled, even who gets the stage, how the message is delivered, etc... as you have noticed.

With regards to who's behind, well, we might never know. However, as arcane as it might sound, gradient descent can take you close to the answer, or at least point you towards it.

I like this recent meme of Christof from Truman Show saying things like "now tell them that there's aliens" or crap like that.
by observationist | 2026-02-13 18:16:34+00:00
Are you talking about Dario, or Dwarkesh?

Dario is a true believer. He thinks he's right. There's no scam or deception happening there.

The outcome, however, is the same as if he were, unfortunately.

Dwarkesh is a wonderful, phenomenal human, and we're lucky to have him.
by malfist | 2026-02-13 18:16:41+00:00
I launched spotify on my phone today and it had a grid of playlists I could chose from. The grid showed a maximum of 6 characters per playlist over two lines, but there was certainly a lot of whitespace available, and some random album art that told me nothing.

It was basically unusable, but I'm sure some designer thought it was slick.

Screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ii0xb6fcnexdfpdudayj1/2026-02...
by daveguy | 2026-02-13 18:17:24+00:00
Just because tech oligarchs are coopting "alignment" for regulatory capture doesn't mean it's not a real research area and important topic in AI. When we are using natural language with AI, ambiguity is implied. When you have ambiguity, it's important an AI doesn't just calculate that the best way to get to a goal is through morally abhorrent means. Or at the very least, action on that calculation will require human approval so that someone has to take legal responsibility for the decision.
Show HN: Alarm Arcade – an alarm app that only stops after you beat a mini-game
by metehankasap | 2026-02-13 18:17:42+00:00
I built this because I kept turning off alarms half-asleep and going back to sleep.

Instead of snoozing, the alarm only turns off after you complete a short mini-game (memory, math, reaction, tilt).

Would love feedback on whether this actually helps people wake up.
by Damogran6 | 2026-02-13 18:17:56+00:00
My keyboard is currently behaving. For once. It's been useless roughly three times since the last major update.

Over the course of each year-long iOS version life, I've become used to it sucking for a bit, either at the beginning (with bug fixes improving things) or towards the end (where, I assume, accumulated learning diverges from clean slate behavior.)

I suspect that the keyboard team is pegged with using new features on the silicon (Neural processing in earlier processors, then Neural Engine with newer processors) and they're doing what they can when tasked with new code.

But man, iOS4 didn't have all that and the keyboard was GREAT.
by antonvs | 2026-02-13 18:18:11+00:00
> Most users never give feedback, they just churn.

Sure, but this is a duopoly and it's not as if the competition is perfect. A lot of issues like this simply don't matter because of that. The response that goes through the PM's head is likely to be along the lines of, "What you gonna do, switch to Android? Ha!"

> This is the same reason your toothpaste has a phone number on the back - that one random person who cares deeply calls the number and provides invaluable feedback on the product.

You'll notice that tech companies go out of their way to avoid offering that option.
by array_key_first | 2026-02-13 18:18:13+00:00
This is just not true at all. Yes Gnome and KDE are old, but they've changed SIGNIFICANTLY.

Gnome 2 => 3 was a bigger and more ambitious transition than anything Microsoft has done. Except maybe DOS => NT. Same thing with KDE 3 => 4.

KDE gets new features on a very regular basis and they're not just, like, little checkboxes added here or there. No. Theyre huge changes. New system resource monitor, new notification center, new widget editor, new panel editor, window tiling... the list goes on. And that's just, like, the past 2 ish years.

Linux GUIs are improving, and rapidly. Before, they were close. But the gap keeps widening. At this point, KDE is so unbelievably far ahead of windows in terms of UI, UX, usability, performance, and feature set that it doesn't seem fair. I don't know if Microsoft can catch up. And, if they could, it would take multiple versions of windows.
by j1elo | 2026-02-13 18:18:16+00:00
Was I, really? Maybe, if you feel so... but I'd have to say that I had no idea.

What I'm suggesting is that a FOSS project without CLAs and a healthy variety of contributors does belong to the broad open source community that forms around it, while a FOSS project with such CLA is just open to a bait-and-switch scheme because the ownership stays in a single hand that can change course at a moments notice.

Whether the project stops receiving updates or not, is an orthogonal matter.
by olyjohn | 2026-02-13 18:18:28+00:00
I would say that marketing people have a motivation to make exaggerated claims, while the rest of us are trying to just come up with a definition that makes sense and helps us understand the world.

I'll give you some examples. "Unlimited" now has limits on it. "Lifetime" means only for so many years. "Fully autonomous" now means with the help of humans on occasion. These are all definitions that have been distorted by marketers, which IMO is deceptive and immoral.
by dark-star | 2026-02-13 18:18:41+00:00
> I think that in any human-2-human interaction, we are all entitled to at least basic courtesy

Why? If you are hostile towards me, mock me, or attack me or are in some other way a douche towards me, I reserve the right to handle you in any way that I want to. My opinion of you has to be earned, just like respect. There is no entitlement for my basic courtesy
by Sniffnoy | 2026-02-13 18:18:56+00:00
Huh. Why do other sources seem to say that's only the case for bosons? Or am I conflating two distinct problems? Sorry, once again, not a physicist.

But if that's correct then I'm confused what your objection is to what I said earlier. If a bare mass would violate electroweak gauge invariance, then instead the mass should come from the Higgs mechanism, but that has the problem of, where are all the right-handed neutrinos, then? Am I missing something here? If you can't just give the neutrinos a bare mass and call it a day (at least not w/o causing significant problems), but do in fact have to make a more significant modification like inventing sterile neutrinos or making them Majorana particles, I'd call that a "contradiction" rather than merely a "question", because no hypothesis so far is a good fit for all of what we see (searches for sterile neutrinos have come up empty, neutrinoless double beta decay remains undetected, and I assume nobody's ever observed violations of electroweak gauge invariance!). Or I guess there are more out-there hypotheses that are consistent with what we see in that they've yet to really be tested, but, y'know, nothing that's been really tested AFAIK.
by estebank | 2026-02-13 18:19:15+00:00
I think anything short of fully obscuring your face (a-la ICE-agent/stormtrooper) will be merely a mitigation and not 100% successful. I recall articles talking about face recognition being used "successfully" on people wearing surgical masks in China. In the US they ask you to remove face masks in places where face recognition is used (at the border, TSA checkpoints), but would be unsurprised if that isn't strictly needed in most cases (but asking people to remove it preemptively ends up being faster for throughput).
by landl0rd | 2026-02-13 18:19:20+00:00
One of the defining features of many such people, by nature or disposition or practice, is they are not easily able to offer in return the meeting of the same needs in another person. At least, not in a way that's easy to understand. People do not gravitate to what is or seems to be one-sided. It seems they are still wired to want a certain level of attention, though, so it's not as though we can just pair them off and expect it to work. What they want and what they can give are not in balance.

Counseling can help with this to some degree and everyone can make some amount of progress. The question is what we do with those whose "ceiling" remains lower than is tenable for most relationships. For those, there is not a better solution than robots.

However, the always-available, always-validating robot is not a valid psychological need. It is a supernormal emotional stimulus. It is not healthy and, like other supernormal stimuli, builds invariably tolerance, desensitization, and dependence. Fast cycling of discontent -> open app -> validation is a huge contributor, the same way that the constant availability and instant nature of vaping make it incredibly addictive.