MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ssl-3 | 2026-02-16 21:46:54+00:00
ISDN was awesome. I had that going on for a bit, too. It was great to experience parts of what some folks (mostly the French, IIRC) had commonly used for such a long time.

Nearly-instant dialup. And not just for the local ISP, but to other ISPs as well: The service and the Internet service were different entities.

Switch to a different ISP? No problem -- no appointments or installers making new holes in the house required. Just plug in a different phone number, username, password, and done.

And since each B channel was independent, one could do voice calls while the other did data -- dynamically, as-needed. Performance was resolute: Calls were perfect in their consistency, and data rates were precisely 64 kilobytes per second, per channel, symmetric, and not one bit more nor less -- and with constant latency (what jitter?).

And to not leave it to implication for those who don't know: An ISP wasn't required at all. Two people with ISDN could move data between their computers without involving the Internet. The circuits were switched in an any-to-any to fashion.

Want to play a two-player computer game a buddy, with voice chat, over ISDN in 1999? No problem: Use one B channel for data, the other for voice, and get gaming. The circuits are dedicated to these tasks for the duration of the game, and latency is a fixed constant (no Internet used at all, and no lag spikes either).

We've really lost something with the death of this point-to-point, circuit-switched technology. We're probably better off with the best-effort packet switched IP business we wound up using instead, but we've lost something nonetheless. It offered some neat opportunities and was a fun system to explore.
by pixl97 | 2026-02-16 21:46:57+00:00
So the problem here is this isn't an article about AI.

When the Luddities broke machines and burned the buildings that held them it wasn't because they hated machines (well at least initially). It's because they hated starving in the streets.

This is just a continuing part of the class war that has been going on since humanity started writing. Now, the only thing that might make this different is class/capital may have finally gotten the power to win it.

Every time you vote against a social safety net, you are ensuring that our AI future is a dark one. History has repeated this over and over.
by abcde666777 | 2026-02-16 21:47:13+00:00
Many of the potential technologies we might unlock in the future come with great danger. We saw this clearly perhaps for the first time with atomic weapons - the kind of technology with which we could truly destroy ourselves.

Many other advancements might also carry that kind of existential danger. Genetic engineering, human machine interfacing, actual AGI.

I see the technological climb as a bit like climbing Mt Everest - it's possible that we might reach the peak and one day live on some kind of Star Trekian society, but the climb becomes increasingly treacherous along with the risk that we perish.

The trouble of course is that there's nothing else for us to do: it's in our nature to explore new frontiers. It's just not clear whether we'll be able to handle the responsibility that comes with the power.
by RobMurray | 2026-02-16 21:47:16+00:00
strawberry isn't a trick question. llms jus don't sea letters like that. I just asked chatgpt how many Rs are in "Air Fryer" and it said two, one in air and one in fryer.

I do think it can be useful though that these errors still exist. They can break the spell for some who believe models are conscious or actually possess human intelligence.

Of course there will always be people who become defensive on behalf of the models as if they are intelligent but on the spectrum and that we are just asking the wrong questions.
by small_model | 2026-02-16 21:47:19+00:00
It seems like the author hasn't really used the latest models, I wrote my last line of code about a month ago after 20+ years coding. Claude Code can do it for me, better faster and never gets tired etc. Yes I have to keep it on leash but humans coding is over, unless its to learn or for fun.

Actually it's the lower classes that will escape the longest from AI replacing their jobs, unskilled physical work will remain human for a while yet. Whereas any job that can be done remotely is likely to replaced by one or more agents.
by syketdas | 2026-02-16 21:47:27+00:00
I run a small agency and hit a breaking point with our tool stack. Project management in one app, invoicing in another, time tracking somewhere else, team chat, file sharing, a client portal - none of it connected. We were spending $30-50/user/month across everything, and half our time went into keeping things in sync.

So I built 7desk.io. One platform that handles projects, tasks, invoicing, time tracking, team chat, file management, client portal, and role-based access control. One login, one subscription.

This isn't trying to be Notion or another "everything app." It's specifically for agencies and freelancers who bill clients and need to give them visibility without bolting on another tool.

We're in pre-launch right now. Professional plan is $9.99/mo (50% launch discount) and the first 1,000 users get an additional 10% off for life.

If you run an agency or freelance - what tools are you currently stitching together? What would actually make you switch?

7desk.io
by decidu0us9034 | 2026-02-16 21:47:39+00:00
"Claude struggles with large functions and more or less gives up immediately on those exceeding 1,000 instructions." Well, yeah, that's the thing, an n64 game, that's C targetting an architecture where compiler optimizations are typically lacking, the idomatic style is lots of small tightly-scoped functions and the system architecture itself is a lot simpler than say a modern amd64 pc... These days I often just feel like, why is this person telling me how easy my job is now when they seemingly don't know much about it. I just find it arrogant and insulting... Perpetually demo season.
Show HN: ZIT: Zooplankton Image Tool for 2d rendering of biological locomotion
by juleshenry | 2026-02-16 21:47:49+00:00
ZIT is a tiny micro-library that takes zooplankton locomotion videos and renders them into 2D flattened static images, encoding motion over time into a single frame for compact analysis. Installable via pip install zooplankton-image-tool.
by mikkupikku | 2026-02-16 21:47:52+00:00
Basically true tbqh. Poker is maybe the one exception, but you're almost always better off gambling "in the wild" e.g. poker night with your buds instead of playing slots or anything else where "the house" is always winning in the long run. Are your losses still circulating in your local community, or have they been siphoned off by shareholders on the other side of the world? Gambling with friends is just swapping money back and forth, but going to a casino might as well be lighting the money on fire.
by Wilder7977 | 2026-02-16 21:47:59+00:00
This assumes every decision-maker is a rational actor. Just today an executive was rambling about "quantum-empowered AI". These are the people who take decisions about firing workers. It is entirely possible that AI will replace many jobs while being useless (at achieving what those workers do). At least in the short-medium period.

We would live in a post-scarcity utopia if big economic decisions were taken based on long-term optimal effects.
by figassis | 2026-02-16 21:48:18+00:00
You don't get hired for any of that. OpenAI did not hire him because he went viral. Virality brought something interesting to OpenAI's attention. And they thought they could use this product idea/vision/execution, GTM strategy, whatever, and because it didn't seem like OAI had anyone on their team capable of this, they hired him.

Simple as that. Don't feel jealous, trying to replicate won't work, he did not know he'd be hired, he built something that he found interesting, and then realized it would be interesting to a lot more people.

The way to reach success is to either be strategically consistent in a way that maximizes luck surface area but does not depend on it, or to be unexpectedly lucky. The latter is gambling, People win the lottery regularly, does not mean you should make that your mission.

Be comfortable with not being the one to hit gold. And yes, it's ok to be jealous. Take a moment and then go back and enjoy the rest of your life.

Finally, there are a lot of companies that would likely hire you, hoping to hit gold. But you are likely filtering them out because they're not tech/large/startupy enough for you.
These companies are wondering what they need to attract talent like you.
by onyx228 | 2026-02-16 21:48:18+00:00
The thing I would appreciate much more than performance in "embarrassing LLM questions" is a method of finding these, and figuring out by some form of statistical sampling, what the cardinality is of those for each LLM.

It's difficult to do because LLMs immediately consume all available corpus, so there is no telling if the algorithm improved, or if it just wrote one more post-it note and stuck it on its monitor. This is an agency vs replay problem.

Preventing replay attacks in data processing is simple: encrypt, use a one time pad, similarly to TLS. How can one make problems which are at the same time natural-language, but where at the same time the contents, still explained in plain English, are "encrypted" such that every time an LLM reads them, they are novel to the LLM?

Perhaps a generative language model could help. Not a large language model, but something that understands grammar enough to create problems that LLMs will be able to solve - and where the actual encoding of the puzzle is generative, kind of like a random string of balanced left and right parentheses can be used to encode a computer program.

Maybe it would make sense to use a program generator that generates a random program in a simple, sandboxed language - say, I don't know, LUA - and then translates that to plain English for the LLM, and asks it what the outcome should be, and then compares it with the LUA program, which can be quickly executed for comparison.

Either way we are dealing with an "information war" scenario, which reminds me of the relevant passages in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age about faking statistical distributions by moving units to weird locations in Africa. Maybe there's something there.

I'm sure I'm missing something here, so please let me know if so.
by quotemstr | 2026-02-16 21:48:25+00:00
And that's why my whole schtick when it comes to agent design is that agents need to learn online, continuously, and in adapter space via some PEFT mechanism (I like soft prompts and prefix tuning), because it's really hard to ascend gradients in discrete domains like tokens.

The model knows damn well when it's written ugly code. You can just ask it. The problem is what the Greeks called "akrasia", a wonderfully precise word that refers to knowing that you should do X yet not doing X.

But I've been beating this drum for years and we keep playing around with trying to fine-tune via fine prose. At the very least, we should be making these skills/prompts/whatever using a principled approach like https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.07978, not... whatever people are vibing.
by surgical_fire | 2026-02-16 21:48:46+00:00
This is such a weird framing.

My comment was that I think AI is useful. I use it on a daily basis, and have been for quite a while. I actually pay for a Chat GPT account, and I also have access to Claude and Gemini at work.

That you frame my comment as "people who hate AI" and calls ir "a religious war" honestly says more about you than me.

It seems that if you don't think that AI is the second coming of Christ, you hate it.
by carefree-bob | 2026-02-16 21:48:58+00:00
If you have not learned to totally ignore CEO predictions and promises, then you just haven't been paying attention. CEOs are famously myopic while simultaneously being prone to fabulism. They confuse this fabulism for "vision".

* Anthropic CEO "In three to six months, AI will be writing 90% of the code"

* NVIDIA in 2024 "Stop learning to code"

* Bill Gates, 2004 "Spam will be solved in 2 years"

* Twitter (Jack Dorsey in 2021) "Everything will move to blockchain by the mid 2020s"

* Michael Dell on future of Apple (1997) "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders"

The thing is, what makes a CEO a good CEO is managing people well, spotting talent, being upbeat and optimistic, and remaining focused on a goal that others miss. It has absolutely nothing to do with "being grounded in reality". In fact, pessimistic and depressed people are much more realistic in their assessments of things. So never look to a CEO as a predictor of the future, especially with respect to their own company, because they will always give you a rose-colored song and dance about unicorns and world-changing tech.
by tgtweak | 2026-02-16 21:49:26+00:00
I remember cutting an IKEA desk top down one side and discovering the inside was just corrugated cardboard under a few layers of laminate. it was trivial to break by shearing it but in a typical construction where the weight is mostly up/down it was obviously sufficient - until you cut the rigid sides off that is...

While this probably does have incredible Z-axis strength, I can't imagine it being very strong with any kind of lateral loads.
by arjunchint | 2026-02-16 21:50:17+00:00
Thanks for taking a look!

So our core technical moat is building up an agentic harness that can represent and take actions on any webpage without any screenshots. With this approach we even beat custom trained models like OpenAI Operator and Anthropic CUA:
https://www.rtrvr.ai/blog/web-bench-results

Everyone else in the space just takes a screenshot and asks a model what coordinates to click, our core thesis is that LLMs understand semantic representations fundamentally better than vision. But with this DOM approach there is a long tail of HTML/DOM edge cases to cover that we have built out for with the 20k+ users bringing these edge cases.

Soon you will be able to record demonstration tasks via our partner Chrome Extension as well as setup knowledge bases scraped by our Cloud browsers to provide additional context to the agent. So there is a platform moat as well.

The audience is website owners who want to increase visitor engagement and conversion via a conversational interface for users.

This is more for our cloud browser platform where we launch cloud browsers for vibe scraping controlled via a custom extension instead of CDP. You can try it out at rtrvr.ai/cloud, where we can get back some strong antibot detection sites like google.com
by sigmoid10 | 2026-02-16 21:50:23+00:00
Can you really say that unless you switched fields multiple times? Of course you'll pick up on math and physics faster in high school than in college or postgrad, but that's because the problems get way, way harder as you progress. I've found that even in my late 30s I can still easily pick up new skills outside my field of expertise as long as I start with the basics that could also be picked up by a high-schooler. I started learning a new language last year and thanks to modern study apps, I actually find it easier today. Of course it will still take a long time to become an expert, but I'm not sure it would need more total hours than if I had started 20 years ago. It just gets more difficult to allocate the necessary hours for learning.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-16 21:50:27+00:00
Local retail and specialty print media are alive and well. Mass-market newspapers may be in trouble, but that's because it turns out most people were buying those for the classifieds, not really for the news. Even cyberbullying is mostly a matter of salience: it takes something that's always existed in the physical realm (bullying behavior) and moves it to the cyber environment where the mass public becomes aware of it.
by aprilthird2021 | 2026-02-16 21:50:49+00:00
Everyone says this as if the previous cycles of labor displacement could not compound and this be the last straw. Same with how phones cause shorter attention span and less thought and more social isolation. People will say "oh they said the same thing about books and TV and video games"

We could be at the end of the rope with how much we can displace unevenly and how much people will put up with another cycle of wealth concentration. Just like we might be at the end of the rope with how much our minds can be stunted and distracted before serious negative consequences occur
by rrvsh | 2026-02-16 21:51:03+00:00
Despite skills being just a new form of memory and context engineering for an agent, I think the framework is still great for agents to self-develop, given a good prompt to regularly review their own sessions and pick learning points to save as skills. In fact, I think the "craft" of prompt engineering has been lost somewhat - I still enjoy puzzling out and iterating over the best possible starting prompt for a conversation to get the best result I can for a one-shot

FWIW I didn't read the paper and am judging it based on its title, which I think is fair because "self-generated agent skills" is a pretty loose definition.
by gf000 | 2026-02-16 21:51:15+00:00
I agree with you here, especially regarding the reductionist view point.

My only gripe was that single sentence, and we might just mean something slightly different there.

Also, I'm out of my depth here, but I believe these sort of issues are solved in a post-training step, which may look more like applying a band-aid. I'm not convinced these issues can actually be fully fixed (due to the way these work) - but of course this tradeoff doesn't make LLMs useless, and it can be limited/eliminated via clever applications.
by avadodin | 2026-02-16 21:51:38+00:00
Being able to hold 10x the weight of paper doesn't sound so impressive that it would require an astrophysicist to invent it.

I was more ready to accept the headline if it had been invented by the kid.

Are you telling me you can't roll up 10 origami papers and stand them on a reasonably stable origami pattern?
by quacked | 2026-02-16 21:51:45+00:00
Well, of course, I agree with you. That's why I said I don't think it would happen.

I personally wouldn't mind a world where consumer goods were much, much more expensive and difficult to acquire, even though it would mean that my life would feel harder and less wealthy than it does now.

What I don't understand is whether or not there's any path to take besides watching the country gently sail along the sunset path into oblivion. Is that it? We gave away the keys to the country's wealth generation mechanism, and now we're at the mercy of the global economy to do whatever it wants? I don't want to compete with foreign firms who can hire foreign labor to compete with me and sell on my territory, but do I simply have no choice?
by dcre | 2026-02-16 21:51:52+00:00
"Self-Generated Skills: No Skills provided, but the agent is prompted to generate relevant procedural knowledge before solving the task. This isolates the impact of LLMs’ latent domain knowledge"

This is a useful result, but it is important to note that this is not necessarily what people have in mind when they think of "LLMs generating skills." Having the LLM write down a skill representing the lessons from the struggle you just had to get something done is more typical (I hope) and quite different from what they're referring to.

I'm sure news outlets and popular social media accounts will use appropriate caution in reporting this, and nobody will misunderstand it.
by random3 | 2026-02-16 21:51:53+00:00
arguably the history of humanity was about automating humanity.

- teeth and nails with knives (in various shapes from bones to steel)

- feet with carriages and bicycles and cars

- hands with mills and factories on steam engines to industrial robots

Literaly every automation was meant to help humans somehow so, this naturally entailed an automation of some human function.

This automation is an automation of the human brain.

While the "definition" of what's human doesn't end here (feelings, etc.) , the utility does.

With loss of utility comes loss of benefits.

Mainly your ability to differentiate as a function of effort (physical or intellectual) gets diminished to 0. This poses some concerns wrt to ability to achieve goals and apsirations - like buying that house at some point or ensuring your childrens future, potentially vanish for large swaths of the population — the "unfortunates" - which are these it's hard to tell, but arguably the level of current resources (assets) becomes a better indicator of the future for generations to come, with work becoming less to none.

By freezing utility based on own effort you arguably freeze the structure of society in time. So yes, every instance sucked for the displaced party, but this one seems to be particularly broader (i.e. wider splash damage)
by _wire_ | 2026-02-16 21:51:56+00:00
I requested of Google search "generic word for tools like openclaw" and it presented a Gemini result at top of page (per usual) that reads "...AI agents..." which result pane then disappeared after about 3 seconds replaced with the Gemini logo and the message "Can't generate AI overview right now. Try again later"

Unfortunately cute, because as "AI agents" are being virtually lashed together with scripts and baling wire (the industry seems to have bet the farm on an AGI to rule them all, and now is scrambling for yet-another-framework to make AI units computationally useful) how are engineers supposed to think about program correctness when the units of computation they employ may produce effectively random results to any input, and different results whenever the agent is updated?

As constantly changing agents are promoted as a great boon in the AI industry, Does the discipline of software "engineering" effectively lose all meaning when the computational unit being marshaled are fundamentally unpredictable with respect to their inputs? "Debugging" as a term returns to its original meaning of insects inside a machine causing short-circuits.

Who can honestly endorse the deployment of life-sustaining infrastructure built from such mechanisms?
by zephen | 2026-02-16 21:52:26+00:00
> Bad Grammar is a courtesy.

I agree. Or at least to the extent that the complaint is that bad grammar signifies dispensing with formality, dispensing with formality is often a courtesy.

Too many people have it drilled into them that "If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well" when in reality if a job is worth doing, it is often worth doing very badly indeed, because it really, really just needs to be done.

It takes a large amount of very unproductive navel-gazing to assume that a message that unequivocally gives you the information you need, yet that doesn't measure up to your own perceptions of how much effort should have gone into the crafting of the email, is an insult directed at you, rather than a focus on the message rather than the medium.

Even if Marshall McLuhan's dictum is correctly applied to this scenario, the message conveyed by the medium could well be "Stop wasting so much time agonizing over phrasing! Just spit it out!" rather than "I'm better than you so I can get away with sloppy shit that I would excoriate you for."
by godelski | 2026-02-16 21:52:42+00:00
People like to make the comparison between zip file compressions, where you can degrade something by continually compressing. Same with using jpeg or mp3. But I like to use the analogy of the game "Telephone" (also called "Chinese Whispers"). I think it also highlights how fraught natural language is and just how quickly it can degrade. I think a lot of people are insufficiently impressed with how good we are at communicating at all.