MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kazinator | 2026-02-17 07:07:56+00:00
This is by design, so that case conversion and folding is just a bit operation.

The idea that SOH/1 is "Ctrl-A" or ESC/27 is "Ctrl-[" is not part of ASCII; that idea comes from they way terminals provided access to the control characters, by a Ctrl key that just masked out a few bits.
by aadarshkumaredu | 2026-02-17 07:08:41+00:00
Calling it “hiding” assumes the default should be full exposure of internal reasoning. That’s not obviously true.

There are three separate layers here:

What the model internally computes

What the product exposes to the user

What developers need for debugging and control

Most outrage conflates all three.

Exposing raw reasoning tokens sounds transparent, but in practice it often leaks messy intermediate steps, half-formed logic, or artifacts that were never meant to be user-facing. That doesn’t automatically make a product more trustworthy. Sometimes it just creates noise.

The real issue is not whether internal thoughts are hidden. It’s whether developers can:

• Inspect tool calls
• See execution traces
• Debug failure modes
• Reproduce behavior deterministically

If those are restricted, that’s a serious product problem. If what’s being “hidden” is just chain-of-thought verbosity, that’s a UI decision, not deception.

There’s also a business angle people don’t want to acknowledge. As models become productized infrastructure, vendors will protect internal mechanics the same way cloud providers abstract away hardware-level details. Full introspection is rarely a permanent feature in mature platforms.

Developers don’t actually want full transparency. They want reliability and control. If the system behaves predictably and exposes the right operational hooks, most people won’t care about hidden internal tokens.

The real question is: where should the abstraction boundary sit for a developer tool?
by dfabulich | 2026-02-17 07:09:44+00:00
> For security, other than what the MCP protocol itself provides, what should be defined?

The MCP protocol itself provides no security at all.

The MCP specification includes no specified method of authorization, and no specified security rules. It lists a handful of "principles," and then the specification simply gives up on discussing the problem further.

https://modelcontextprotocol.io/specification/2025-11-25#sec...

3.2 Implementation Guidelines

While MCP itself cannot enforce these security principles at the protocol
level, implementors **SHOULD**:

1. Build robust consent and authorization flows into their applications
2. Provide clear documentation of security implications
3. Implement appropriate access controls and data protections
4. Follow security best practices in their integrations
5. Consider privacy implications in their feature designs
by avhception | 2026-02-17 07:09:52+00:00
When an agent just plows ahead with a wrong interpretation or understanding of something, I like to ask them why they didn't stop to ask for clarification.
Just a few days ago, while refactoring minor stuff, I had an agent replace all sqlite-related code in that codebase with MariaDB-based code.
Asked why that happened, the answer was that there was a confusion about MariaDB vs. sqlite because the code in question is dealing with, among other things, MariaDB Docker containers. So the word MariaDB pops up a few times in code and comments.

I then asked if there is anything I could do to prevent misinterpretations from producing wild results like this.
So I got the advice to put an instruction in AGENTS.md that would urge agents to ask for clarification before proceeding.
But I didn't add it. Out of the 25 lines of my AGENTS.md, many are already variations of that.
The first three:

- Do not try to fill gaps in your knowledge with overzealous assumptions.

- When in doubt: Slow down, double-check context, and only touch what was explicitly asked for.

- If a task seems to require extra changes, pause and ask before proceeding.

If these are not enough to prevent stuff like that, I don't know what could.
by bob1029 | 2026-02-17 07:10:28+00:00
The brain relies on discrete, sparse events in space and time to handle computation.

Most of the computation and learning that occurs is attributable to the relative timing of spiking events. A lot of information can be encoded in the delay between 2 spikes. The advantage of biology is that there is no explicit quantization of the time domain that must occur. Biology gets to do a lot of things "for free". Simulating causality in a computer in a similar way requires a priority queue and runs like ass by comparison.
by dogline | 2026-02-17 07:11:00+00:00
Beej! Thank you very much! Your networking guides have long been a great contribution to everybody, and collectively improves what we know.

These diary pages come largely from Stirling City, just north of Chico, and later from the Hat Creek district, on Hwy 89 north of Mt. Lassen. Nearby, many historical records were lost in the Paradise Camp Fire, and digitizing some of the records in some of the local museums is something this is a test run for.

—Lance (CSU Chico ‘93 Computer Engineering)
by elevation | 2026-02-17 07:11:33+00:00
> never understood why his stuff is well-regarded here.

He appealed to proponents of basic income.

Years ago, forward thinking identified the trend of decreasing ipv4 availability. Pundits built html clocks to countdown to the depletion of ARINs IPV4 pool, prominently warning of an epoch after which no business could function without fully implementing ipv6. The countdown clocks looked scary and the situation sounded believable, inevitable even, we all wanted to hear, but something would finally force the boss to upgrade.

But hubris blinded these pundits to the possibility that a few large businesses implementing IPv6 and reselling their v4 allotments would indefinitely sustain ipv4 as the internet’s source of truth. With a simple workaround, the old model held.

Like the IPv6 pundits of old, Andrew Wang has correctly identified a trend in AI, but he projects it will erase all jobs and require redefinition of social contract. This is a wild claim, yet proponents of “basic income” are excited to hear anything that bolsters the ideas they prefer to believe.

But I suspect in this case too that the old model will adapt, just as it did with every other increase in human office productivity.
by wolvesechoes | 2026-02-17 07:11:50+00:00
> availability and maturity of toolchains

Pretty bad situation for Rust.

> the rate of release of projects written in that language

I guess back in 90s they didn't do grep clones every weekend, so Rust wins here definitely.

> the rate of release of books and learning materials

And what this data tells us?

> the rate at which universities begin teaching the language

Pretty bad situation for Rust.

> the volume of discourse devoted to that language in magazines and the online venues which did exist (e.g. Usenet)

But you need to normalize this volume against total volume of content out there produced every second, and then situation becomes complicated.

> crucially the declining metrics of all of the above for the direct competitors of that language

Why ignore job offerings?
by anal_reactor | 2026-02-17 07:12:15+00:00
Between 1950 and 2008 it briefly spiked above 20 six times total. Since 2008, the number never meaningfully fell below 20, staying in the 30-40 zone between 2008 and 2015, and then hovering between 20 and 25 since then. Yes, it's obvious that the status quo has changed.

IMO the reason is that there's simply more paper trail behind you. If you fall behind once, it's not like you can get your things, change name, and start a new life in another state.

> if your parents name you Tequila, get a name change.

I want to be named Charizard but my country doesn't allow name change.
by sdfhbdf | 2026-02-17 07:12:43+00:00
The product that this article is advertising seems to be pretty inaccurate and their marketing seems to be burying that information.

The big copy on the front page says:

> Your Apple Watch *tracks* VO2 Max—one...

While you have to read through FAQ where you see:

> The watch *estimates* your cardio fitness during outdoor activities and stores it in Apple Health, which our app reads automatically.

All emphasis are mine.

I think it's a little disingenuous to sell this as "Your VO2 Max, finally visible" when it's actually just an estimate from a watch, based on biomarkers. When the real VO2 is measured in a lab with a more involved equipment.

A 2025 validation study involving 30 participants found that Apple Watch underestimated VO2 max by a mean of 6.07 mL/kg/min (95% CI 3.77–8.38) when compared to indirect calorimetry, the gold standard method. The mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) was 13.31%, and the limits of agreement showed considerable variability ranging from -6.11 to 18.26 mL/kg/min [1]. Another 2024 study found similar results, with the Apple Watch Series 7 showing a MAPE of 15.79% and poor reliability (ICC = 0.47) [2].

[1]: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn...

[2]: https://biomedeng.jmir.org/2024/1/e59459
by alex43578 | 2026-02-17 07:13:57+00:00
Two things that narrow the “unthinkably vast input data”:
1) You’re already in the latent space for “AI representing itself to humans”, which has a far smaller and more self-similar dataset than the entire training corpus.

2) We’re then filtering and guiding the responses through stuff like the system prompt and RLHF to get a desirable output.

An LLM wouldn’t be useful (but might be funny) if it portrayed itself as a high school dropout or snippy Portal AI.

Instead, we say “You’re GPT/Gemini/Claude, a helpful, friendly AI assistant”, and so we end up nudging it near to these concepts of comprehensive knowledge, non-aggressiveness, etc.

It’s like an amplified, AI version of that bouba/kiki effect in psychology.
by kace91 | 2026-02-17 07:14:58+00:00
Sorry if I’m missing something as this isn’t my field, but shouldn’t the two meanings be roughly equivalent to the user?

As in, everything down from UB is only working by an accident of implementation that does not need to hold, and you should explicitly not rely on that. Whether the compiler happens to explicitly make it not ever work or just leaves it to fate should not be relevant.
by 21asdffdsa12 | 2026-02-17 07:15:23+00:00
Shouldn't the chemistry hide the usage of calories by the brain? It gets basically a supply run at night - when its washed with lymph, sugar supplied and then subsists on that for new memory formation and computation with small scale supplies delivered during the day via the blood stream? So a hard thinking experience should show up downstream as calorie usage during the following sleep?
by BlackjackCF | 2026-02-17 07:16:34+00:00
I wonder if everyone who said it was a lot easier for them to learn when they were younger aren’t factoring in their increased responsibilities as an adult.

I know when I’m actually able to sit quietly to study something, I’m able to pick it up fairly quickly. (One thing going for me is I’m much better able to sit still as an adult than a kid, ha.) But yeah, having to juggle work responsibilities for 8-9 hours a day and then having to also manage a bunch of things I didn’t have to think as hard about when I was younger (bills, cleaning, pets), I definitely just don’t have as much time to dedicate towards focused studying like that.
by thesz | 2026-02-17 07:16:40+00:00
I had no expectations at all, I just asked questions, expecting answers. At the very beginning the tone of your comment, as I read it, was "agentic coding is nothing but simple, look they vote." Now answers to simple but important questions are "confidential IP."

Okay then, agentic coding is nothing but complex task requiring knowledge of unbiased voting (what is this thing really?) and, apparently, use of necessarily heavy test suite and/or theorem provers.
by userbinator | 2026-02-17 07:17:26+00:00
Given what most C compilers are written in, are C programmers also C implementers?

I suspect it also depends on who exactly the compiler writers are; the GCC and LLVM guys seem to have more theoretics/academics and thus think of the language more abstractly, leading to UB being truly inexplicable and free of thought, while MSVC and ICC are more on the practical side and their interpretation of it is, as the standard says, "in a documented manner characteristic of the environment". IMHO the "spirit of C" and the more commonsense approach is definitely the latter, and K&R themselves have always leaned in that direction. This is very much a "letter of the law vs. spirit of the law" argument. The fact that these two different sides have produced compilers with nearly the same performance characteristics shows IMHO that the argument of needing to exploit UB is mandatory for performance is a debunked myth.
by 2001zhaozhao | 2026-02-17 07:19:08+00:00
Somewhat of an aside but I had the thought reading this that arcades would be a great format for games heavily involving GenAI. The pay-per-play model is probably the only model where you can either affordably use a lot of LLM tokens per game. Alternatively, having large commercial arcade machines is the only way to guarantee the very high hardware specs needed to run capable models locally.

Perhaps as a result, we might see LLM and video model-powered games become mainstream in arcades before any home consumer platforms.
by bandrami | 2026-02-17 07:19:17+00:00
Isn't that question a category error? The "why" the agent did that is that it was the token that best matched the probability distribution of the context and the most recent output (modulo a bit of randomness). The response to that question will, again, be the tokens that best match the probability distribution of the context (now including the "why?" question and the previous failed attempt).
by Pay08 | 2026-02-17 07:20:28+00:00
This is frankly, completely ahistorical. The British famously backed the Palestinians in the 1948 war (only barely, they mostly didn't care, but still did back them) and didn't like the idea of Israel so much so that they withdrew from the UN committee over it. Palestinians famously collaborated with Hitler as well. The USA only started being allied with Israel in the late 60s.

> And no, it was not a UN partition plan because most of the world was still colonized at the time.

And I can't even begin to fathom what this means.

As you noted in an another comment, Plan Dalet was corroborated by Israeli historians. Which is false. It was corroborated by one Israeli historian, who retracted his findings after finding out his source for the writings of Ben-Gurion were edited posthumously.

And "war starts" is a very nice and PG way to phrase "attempted to genocide Jews".
by baxtr | 2026-02-17 07:20:44+00:00
It’s good to have a definition in place before a discussion.

People with addiction use substances or engage in behaviors that become compulsive and often continue despite harmful consequences.

This is from the American Society of Addiction Medicine.

You can do your own test if this matches watching short videos extensively.

https://www.asam.org/quality-care/definition-of-addiction
by bartdarebel | 2026-02-17 07:21:36+00:00
Revlo is a command-line tool that catches electrical engineering mistakes in KiCad schematics before they become expensive PCB respins. Point it at a .kicad_sch file and get back actionable findings -- missing decoupling caps, wrong pull-up values, unterminated pins, power rail issues -- all verified against real datasheet specifications pulled automatically from the internet.
by fix4fun | 2026-02-17 07:21:45+00:00
For me was interesting that all digits in ASCII starts with 0x3, eg. 0x30 - 0, 0x31 - 1, ..., 0x39 - 9. I thought it was accidental, but in real it was intended. This was giving possibility to build simple counting/accounting machines with minimal circuit logic with BCD (Binary Coded Decimals). That was wow for me ;)
by kazinator | 2026-02-17 07:22:21+00:00
You're no longer talking about ASCII. ASCII has only a double quote, apostrophe (which doubles as a single quote) and backtick/backquote.

Note on your Mac that the Option-{ and Option-}, with and without Shift, produce quotes which are all distinct from the characters produced by your '/" key! They are Unicode characters not in ASCII.

In the ASCII standard (1977 version here: https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/FIPS/fipspub1-2-197...) the example table shows a glyph for the double quote which is vertical: it is neither an opening nor closing quote.

The apostrophe is shown as a closing quote, by slanting to the right; approximately a mirror image of the backtick. So it looks as though those two are intended to form an opening and closing pair. Except, in many terminal fonts, the apostrophe is a just vertical tick, like half of a double quote.

The ' being veritcal helps programming language '...' literals not look weird.
by hurios | 2026-02-17 07:22:22+00:00
When asked about your salary expectations, it's often best to redirect the conversation back to the value you can bring to the company. You can say something like, "I'm more interested in understanding the role and the team to ensure a good fit. Could you share the range you have in mind for this position?" This approach shows you're flexible and focused on the job itself. If they insist, you can provide a range based on your research of industry standards. Websites like Glassdoor or Payscale can offer useful insights into typical salaries for your position and location.
by p0w3n3d | 2026-02-17 07:23:35+00:00
TBH I am scared for the young developers which are being tempted to not learn but use the AI. TBH I'd never learn to... Learn if I had this access to ominous entity, which does not guide me step by step, but rather tend to throw me the ready-made solution. I mean - people say "don't give a fish, give a fishing rod" but AI tend to slap me with fishes all the time. And while being a full grown developer I know what's there more or less, those younglings will not learn anything
by keepamovin | 2026-02-17 07:25:15+00:00
OP here. I’m reposting this with a focus on the tech stack because I think the "retro" look buried the lede last time.

The Problem with Web Desktops:

We've all seen cool Windows 95/98 JS recreations (like 98.js.org), but they all hit the same wall: the browser inside them is fake. You can't load modern sites (Google, YouTube, HN) inside an iframe due to X-Frame-Options, CORS, and mixed content security policies.

The Solution (BrowserBox):

This project is a frontend for a tool I'm building called BrowserBox.

Remote Isolation: When you open IE in this demo, you aren't opening an iframe. You are spinning up a remote browser session in a Docker container on my server.

Streaming: The view is streamed back to the client (using standard web technologies), and your clicks/keystrokes are sent to the server.

Result: You get a "real" internet connection inside the simulation that bypasses all client-side restriction. You can watch YouTube or browse HN from inside the virtual desktop.

The Stack:

Backend: Node.js / Puppeteer-ish control (raw CDP, custom bookkeeping)

Frontend: Vanilla JS / Custom retro UI framework

Infrastructure: Dockerized browser instances

I built this because I missed the "Wild West" feel of the 90s web, but I also wanted to show that remote browser isolation doesn't have to be clunky enterprise-ware.

Give the browser a try (sound on for full immersion) and let me know if the latency holds up for you.
by al_borland | 2026-02-17 07:25:30+00:00
I have no proof of this, but it feels like it’s pay-to-play. I assume it’s a way to attract talent and make customers feel good. Current employees shouldn’t need an external poll to tell them if people are happy or not.

Where I work is almost always on these lists. In my experience it is highly dependent on department. I didn’t realize this until transferring to an office that had very few IT workers. Everyone in IT seemed miserable, while everyone outside of IT seemed extremely happy. I once made a rather sarcastic and cynical joke in the elevator to someone in a customer support role and it went over like a led ballon… but that was the language of everyone I worked with in IT. It was wild to me how two departments sitting 50 feet from each other could have such drastically different cultures. On town halls, everyone in the chat is brimming with company pride, meanwhile the side chats from people in the IT org are full of cynicism and sarcasm, with everyone trying to understand if these people are real or just bots… but I think they’re real.
by hurios | 2026-02-17 07:25:35+00:00
Testing race conditions in Postgres can be tricky, but synchronization barriers can help. You might want to use advisory locks to simulate barriers. For instance, you can use `pg_advisory_lock` and `pg_advisory_unlock` to control transaction execution order. Here's a quick example:

```sql
BEGIN;
SELECT pg_advisory_lock(1234);
-- Perform your critical operation here
SELECT pg_advisory_unlock(1234);
COMMIT;
```

This way, you can ensure that certain operations wait for others to complete. For more in-depth info, check out the [Postgres documentation on locks](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/explicit-locking.htm...).
by Nevermark | 2026-02-17 07:27:56+00:00
If those prompt limits were reliable borders it would be very cool.

But that would mean the alignment problem was solved. When survival depends on watering down ethics, and there is a long slippery slope of ethical wells available to plum, depending on prompts for safety sounds risky.

Is that malicious? I don't think that would be considered malicious. We don't consider it immoral for starving people to steal food.

But, I am fascinated by the idea too! I just think it is a terrible idea (despite being almost certain to happen).
by danaris | 2026-02-17 07:28:19+00:00
> There is no world where you get all that for the same percentage of income.

This is only true because real income has barely budged since the 1970s.

If real income had tracked productivity during that time, we would have plenty. But it didn't. All the increases have been siphoned off to feed the ultra-wealthy, in a variety of ways.
by hurios | 2026-02-17 07:28:50+00:00
Hey there! If you're looking to propose or develop something with WebMCP, it's essential to understand its architecture and how it handles web requests. The official documentation is a great place to start for getting a grasp on its core components and workflow. If you're diving into development, make sure to check out the section on request handling and session management. Also, consider setting up a local environment to experiment with some basic features. If you have specific questions as you go, feel free to ask!
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-17 07:29:08+00:00
The mobile apps will be fine. The shutdown will affect the PWA/web access and also the "desktop app" such as Windows or macOS.

If you have a FB account, then that URL they give will work in your web browser. If you don't have an FB account or you deactivated it, and you only use Messenger, the mobile apps will be the only way forward.
by yashas471 | 2026-02-17 07:29:27+00:00
Location: SF/La(remote)
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes But I'm in college so I'd be willing to relocate only for the summer
Technologies:Machine Learning, JS, Python, Circuits, Pytorch, Tensorflow, OpenCV
Résumé/CV:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oB9dVRgJ0XdTWMoBujPQSfiLUp-...
Email: yashasr471@gmail.com

I’m an aspiring computational biologist at UC Irvine focused on using machine learning and AI to drive innovation in precision medicine. My work includes developing predictive models for brain tumor detection from MRI data and applying data science techniques to biomedical datasets.

I’m deeply interested in bioinformatics, genomics, and medical imaging systems, and I aim to contribute to next-generation biotech and health tech solutions. I combine technical rigor in Python and algorithm development with a strong interest in translating biological data into meaningful clinical impact.

I’m actively seeking internships and research roles in biotech, biomedical AI, and computational biology.