MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2026-02-14 20:04:51+00:00
Regarding "AI systems will be better than any human at any cognitive task", while I believe that this may become possible in a distant future, with systems having a quite different structure, I do not see any evidence of such a thing becoming possible during the next decade or two.

Nothing that I have seen described here on HN or elsewhere, by the most enthusiast users of AI, who claim that their own productivity has been multiplied, does not demonstrate performance in cognitive tasks even remotely comparable with that of a competent human, much less better performance.

All that I see is that the AI systems outperform humans for various tasks only because they had access in their training data to much more information than most humans are allowed to access, because they do not have enough money to obtain such access, both because the various copyright paywalls and also because of the actual cost of storage and retrieval systems.

Using an AI agent may be faster than if you were given access to the training data and you would use conventional search tools on it, but the speed may be illusory, because when I search something and I have access to the original sources I can validate the search results faster and with much more certainty than when I try to ponder about the correctness of what AI has provided, e.g. whether a program produced by it really does what I have requested and it is bug free (in comparison with having access to its training programs and being able to choose myself what to copy and paste).

I hope that paid access to AI tools gives better results, but the AI replies that popular search engines, like Google and Bing, force upon their users have made Internet searches much worse not better, as their answers always contain something else than I want, and this is in the best case, when the answers are not plainly wrong.
Show HN: An automaton's code review of Gas Town with sycophancy-mode disabled
by burnerToBetOut | 2026-02-14 20:05:56+00:00
Today I got some insight into the code quality of Steve Yegge's Gas Town by running it through Sonar Cloud [1]

I followed that up with — appropriately — a vibe code review [2]…

_______

…

Brutal Verdict:

You’ve built a message bus out of duct tape and string. It’s "Booch-like" only in the sense that you’ve abstracted the concept of a channel, but the _implementation_ is pure "boot-camp-grad-on-their-third-Red-Bull."

You are using a high-performance versioned database (Dolt) to store... manually parsed colon-separated strings. _Why?_

…

_______

[1] https://g2ww.short.gy/CCWutUHalfDone

[2] https://g2ww.short.gy/ItsaGasGasGas
by 48terry | 2026-02-14 20:06:23+00:00
> Or can they stay on at Ars if for example, it was explained as an unintentional mistake while using an LLM to restructure his own words and it accidentally inserted the quotes and slipped through.

No. Don't giving people free passes because of LLMs. Be responsible for your work.

They submitted an article with absolute lies and now the company has a reputational problem on its hands. No one cares if that happened because they sought out to publish lies or if it was because they made a tee-hee whoopsie-doodle with an LLM. They screwed up and look at the consequences they've caused for the company.

> I think for some people this could be a redeemable mistake at their job. If someone turns in a status report with a hallucination, that’s not good clearly but the damage might be a one off / teaching moment.

Why would you keep someone around who:

1. Lies

2. Doesn't seem to care enough to do their work personally, and

3. Doesn't check their work for the above-mentioned lies?

They have proven, right then, right there, that you can't trust their output because they cut corners and don't verify it.
by anonymousiam | 2026-02-14 20:06:57+00:00
100% agree. I still have Ars Technica and Slashdot in my RSS feed list, but both are paused. Every now and then (maybe once a month) I'll take a peek, but it's rare that I'll find anything really worthwhile. About 10% of the content is slanted to push their desired narratives, so objectivity is gone.
by alexpotato | 2026-02-14 20:07:07+00:00
In Ted Turner's autobiography [0] (highly recommended) he describes how wealth individuals got around the very high income taxes in the 1960s-1970s:

- Person A is selling their company to Person B

- The total price is very high (let's say millions)

- I B pays A the millions, A will have to pay a large tax burden

- Instead, A "loans" the money to B so that B can "buy" the business

- This creates a stream of small payments (less tax), spread out over time

I mention this only b/c smart people will eventually figure out ways around these taxes.

For example, there are already "barter networks" in Scandinavia where Person 1 does plumbing for Person 2, Person 2 does legal work for Person 3 who in turn does accounting for Person 1. All so there is less income reported.

0 - https://amzn.to/40a8Z67
by vessenes | 2026-02-14 20:07:58+00:00
Simon notes this benchmark is win-win, since he loves pictures of pelicans riding bicycles — if they spend time benchmaxxing it’s like free pelicans for him.

He originally promised to generate a bunch more animals when we got a “good” pelican. This is not a good pelican. This is an OUTSTANDING pelican, a great bicycle, and it even has a little sun ray over the ocean marked out. I’d like to see more animals please Simon!
by themafia | 2026-02-14 20:08:13+00:00
> sucked the oxygen out of journalism.

They helped monopolize the industry. Willingly destroying the utility of RSS for end users is a prime example.

> Google/Twitter/Facebook need a constant stream of new links

Yet people can't understand that "AI" is just a tool to rip off copyright. For almost _precisely_ this reason here.

> we see societally stem back to people not paying for media

The problem is there is not infinite bandwidth for media. If a free option exists people will gravitate towards it. The real problem is that media sales people and media editors are allowed to be in the same room. We used to understand the value of a "firewall" in this context.

It has nothing to do with the people. It has everything to do with those holding the profit motive. They'll willingly destroy useful things in order to tilt the field in their direction. Social problems rarely have a distributed social cause.
by robimbeault | 2026-02-14 20:08:13+00:00
This version is approximately 2,900 characters—well under your 4,000-character limit—while retaining all the technical authority and key quotes from the original.

Backboard.io Sets New State-of-the-Art Benchmarks for AI Memory
Backboard.io today announced record-breaking results across two leading AI memory benchmarks, LoCoMo and LongMemEval, solidifying its position as the foundational infrastructure for production-grade agentic systems.

Breakthrough Performance
An independent evaluation by NewMathData (AWS Small Partner of the Year) measured Backboard on the LongMemEval benchmark. Backboard achieved 93.4% overall accuracy, the highest publicly reported result to date.

During review, evaluators noted that Backboard’s score is likely a "conservative lower bound." In several instances, Backboard provided more precise, semantically accurate answers than the benchmark’s "gold" standard by incorporating factual context from the broader interaction.

These results follow Backboard’s 90.1% accuracy on the LoCoMo benchmark. While most systems sacrifice long-horizon persistence for short-term precision, Backboard excels at both.

Redefining "Memory" in AI
In an analysis for the Ottawa Business Journal, Adyasha Maharana, creator of LoCoMo and research scientist at Databricks, noted that breaking the 90% threshold requires "superhuman consistency."

"Strictly speaking, [feeding a full conversation as a prompt] is not memory," Maharana explained. "The system built by Backboard.io is a far better attempt at simulating memory as it manifests in humans. It is practical, cheaper, scalable, and doesn’t rely solely on brute-force LLM processing."

A Unified AI Stack
Backboard.io is not a plugin or a wrapper; it is a unified infrastructure stack. By treating memory as first-class infrastructure, Backboard eliminates the need for enterprises to stitch together fragile open-source components.

The platform provides a single API for:

Persistent long-term and shared agent memory

Native embeddings, vectorization, and RAG

Access to 17,000+ LLMs (including BYO-key options)

This architecture allows models to be swapped and agents to coordinate without losing continuity or rewriting retrieval strategies.

Making Agentic AI Practical
"Agentic AI becomes meaningful when agents can remember, coordinate, and operate over time," says Rob Imbeault, founder of Backboard.io. "Solving memory is the prerequisite."

Backboard’s Active Temporal Resonance framework preserves meaning as interactions unfold, ensuring systems remain consistent and auditable at scale. This focus on durability stems from Imbeault’s experience founding Assent, a platform trusted by Fortune 100 companies for complex compliance.

What’s Next: Introducing Switchboard
With its memory foundation validated, Backboard will soon launch Switchboard—a new capability helping developers evaluate how different AI configurations behave under real-world constraints.

"We didn’t build Backboard to chase benchmarks," said Imbeault. "We built it to solve real problems... the benchmarks just happened to confirm what we were already seeing in practice."
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-14 20:08:26+00:00
Using ublock and umatrix both on firefox with full tracking protection enabled. Don't recall ever having any issues with youtube. Sometimes an alert will pop up "see why you're experiencing playback interruptions" and it clicks through to a page about how this is due to my adblocking extension but the joke is on them because I don't recall it ever actually being interrupted. It's just this erroneous alert that occasionally pops up.
by pron | 2026-02-14 20:08:52+00:00
Downplaying compared to what? This kind of adoption is certainly something Haskell never gained. But all those companies (or analogous ones) adopted C++ much faster. In fact, they've adopted faster virtually every language they're using seriously. So it's a great achievement compared to every language they've never adopted at all, but not such a great achievement compared to every other language they have adopted.

> that when the time gets to be rewritten it won't surely be C++.

It looks like it won't be Rust, either. I mean, some may be written in Rust, but not the majority. My point is just that as much as some erstwhile Haskell fans have taken to Rust, comparing Rust's adoption to Haskell's - a language whose joke motto was "avoid success at all costs" - is not the right metric. Given that Rust's goal was to replace C++, its success should be compared to C++ and other languages that ended up achieving similar success. I'm saying that compared to them Rust's success has been mediocre, if that, and it's not a young language anymore by any stretch of the imagination.
by cryptonector | 2026-02-14 20:09:10+00:00
> The tradeoff for the compression 'vanishing' is longer times pressing your breaks, travelling slower overall, and leaving your engine running for more of the time.

What? Your travel time does not get longer, and if the traffic is merely slow then this "leaving your engine running for more of the time" is nonsense. Even if it's stop and go and you have a car that kills the engine every time you come to a dead stop, that will use more gas because you're making inefficient use of the electrical system (charging and discharging the battery more than you should have to).

> Also you then just leave a bigger gap in front of you for somebody to jump into,

Sure, so as earlier you have to pay attention and not allow that.

> In heavy traffic I much prefer to quickly catch the car in front up and then sit stationary with my engine off. Much more efficient

Doubt.

And besides doubting your claim about efficiency, you're doing exactly that which most helps the pressure wave endure, and thus you're causing more delays for more people, and more people to have to brake hard, and more engine stop/start cycles, all of which means more pollution overall not less, etc.

You really have to think systemically.
by pwg | 2026-02-14 20:09:48+00:00
If you are willing to sacrifice some storage space on the disk, then dvdisaster (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvdisaster) can add extra ECC data to the disk that will allow recovery even if some percentage of the disk errors out upon read later.

Granted, if one no longer has the mechanical drive, or if the disk errors out beyond the threshold where the extra ECC can correct the errors, the data's still lost. But it (dvdisaster) does provide some protection from the "bit-rot" case where the disk slowly degrades.
by ninjagoo | 2026-02-14 20:09:59+00:00
> Either way I'm fairly certain that blocking AI agent access isn't a viable long term solution.

Great point. If my personal AI assistant cannot find your product/website/content, it effectively may no longer exist! For me. Ain't nobody got the time to go searching that stuff up and sifting through the AI slop. The pendulum may even swing the other way and the publishers may need to start paying me (or whoever my gatekeeper is) for access to my space...
by Mankirat47 | 2026-02-14 20:09:59+00:00
I built Dao Heart 3.11 : a four layer alignment architecture whose core idea is values can evolve without losing identity

The Architecture:

Layer 0: Narrative Grounding

Layer 1: External Oversight

Layer 2: Hard Constraints

Layer 3: Internal Value Dynamics

The Eight Components:

Constraint Satisfaction Value Networks (CSVN)

Constitutive Reflection Engine (CRE)

Meta Cognitive Stability Observer (MSCO)

MDL Optimized Adversarial Ensemble

Asymmetric graceful degradation (hysteresis)

Dual Mode Goldfish Protocol

Upstream Commitment Nodes

Warmth Preservation Constraint

Code, Papers available at Github:
by eterm | 2026-02-14 20:10:10+00:00
It is the failure mode of incorrect trust that has changed.

Previously you might get burned with some bad information or incorrect data or get taken in by a clever hoax once in a while.

Now you get overwhelmed by regurgitation, which itself gets fed back into the machine.

The ratio of people to bots reading is crashed to near zero.

We have burned the web.
by allthetime | 2026-02-14 20:10:17+00:00
Every once in a while I build a game engine with a tcp & udp multiplayer server to learn a new language. I started doing this with zig a couple months ago.

It might be because I've done it a few times now, and/or because of the existence of LLMs, but this is the most fun I've had doing, and the most productive I've been, and the engine absolutely rips performance wise.

Zig makes it very easy to do this kind of lowish-level data-oriented programming, and tbh, I'm hooked. I was using rust for my performance critical services but dancing around the strictness and verbosity of memory management in rust gives me nothing in comparison and just gets in my way. This is partially a skill issue, but life is short and I just want to make fast, well organized software that works.
by philgyford | 2026-02-14 20:10:48+00:00
I'd argue there is a difference between a blog and a newsletter, but that would take longer to discuss than I have right now. But you're right that the boundary between the two is extremely blurry.

However, I'm guessing you tried to submit a Substack URL and was told newsletters aren't accepted? Even if I allowed newsletters, I wouldn't add any Substack newsletters because of the platform's fascist-supporting tendencies.
Show HN: PolyMCP – A framework for building and orchestrating MCP agents
by justvugg | 2026-02-14 20:11:10+00:00
Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on PolyMCP, an open-source framework for building and orchestrating agents using the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

Most of the tooling around MCP focuses on exposing tools. With PolyMCP, the focus this time is on agents: how to structure them, connect them to multiple MCP servers, and make them reliable in real workflows.

PolyMCP provides:
• A clean way to define MCP-compatible tool servers in Python or TypeScript
• An agent abstraction that can connect to multiple MCP endpoints (stdio, HTTP, etc.)
• Built-in orchestration primitives for multi-step tasks
• A CLI to scaffold projects and run an inspector UI to debug tools and agent interactions
• A modular structure that makes it easier to compose skills and reuse components across projects

The main goal is to make agent systems less ad-hoc. Instead of writing glue code around each model + tool combination, PolyMCP gives you a structured way to:
• Register tools as MCP servers
• Connect them to one or more agents
• Control execution flow and state
• Inspect and debug interactions

It’s MIT licensed and intended for developers building real-world automation, internal copilots, or multi-tool assistants.

I’d love feedback on:
• The agent abstraction: is it too opinionated or not opinionated enough?
• Orchestration patterns for multi-agent setups
• Developer experience (CLI, inspector, project layout)

Happy to answer questions.
by staticassertion | 2026-02-14 20:11:11+00:00
> I've seen companies fail compliance reviews because a third-party vendor's published security policy that they referenced in their own controls no longer exists at the URL they cited.

Seriously? What kind of auditor would "fail" you over this? That doesn't sound right. That would typically be a finding and you would scramble to go appease your auditor through one process or another, or reach out to the vendor, etc, but "fail"? Definitely doesn't sound like a SOC2 audit, at least.

Also, this has never particularly hard to solve for me (obviously biased experience, so I wonder if this is just a bubble thing). Just ask companies for actual docs, don't reference urls. That's what I've typically seen, you get a copy of their SOC2, pentest report, and controls, and you archive them yourself. Why would you point at a URL? I've actually never seen that tbh and if a company does that it's not surprising that they're "failing" their compliance reviews. I mean, even if the web were more archivable, how would reliance on a URL be valid? You'd obviously still need to archive that content anyway?

Maybe if you use a tool that you don't have a contract with or something? I feel like I'm missing something, or this is something that happens in fields like medical that I have no insight into.

This doesn't seem like it would impact compliance at all tbh. Or if it does, it's impacting people who could have easily been impacted by a million other issues.
by doodlebugging | 2026-02-14 20:11:24+00:00
I'm lucky enough to be in a semi-rural area with only one neighbor within 200m. The deer come from a large area that is currently under development for an encroaching subdivision. That subdivision is about about 350m at the closest point today though it will eventually extend to my back fence. That sucks but the newest construction has taken more than 20 years to reach that point.

I have a bow and have considered that option but I think the lethality could be a problem or the possibility of injuring a fawn. I just want to keep them on the other side of the fence. I would employ a drone to chase them since that would be fun but my place is in a no-fly radius near a small airport so that isn't an option without assuming some risk.

There is too much ground to cover for sprinklers to be effective even though the paths are well-established. I have tried path modification but that just shifts the crossings back and forth along the fence line. I have nice native grasses and plants and some really tasty fruit trees so my place is attractive.

The slingshot does the trick for the times when they are less than 35m away. Farther than that it gets dicey and they will just stand still until one is hit before they amble off into the trees.

This sling has better range though there is a learning curve. That will be the fun part.
by charles_azam | 2026-02-14 20:11:24+00:00
TL;DR: GLM-5 tops coding benchmarks. I tested it on an unpublished NP-hard optimization problem (KIRO) and 89-task Terminal-Bench. Best case: competitive. Typical case: 30% invalid output, every trial timed out, and two identical runs could produce a valid solution or complete garbage. Zhipu AI reports 56% on Terminal-Bench; I got 40%.
by protimewaster | 2026-02-14 20:12:07+00:00
You don't necessarily need a lib, though. Especially if you're interested in a use case where you can store data in a go bag, safe deposit box, etc., it seems like having individual tapes would be preferable.

Individual used drives aren't too expensive (or at least didn't used to be). Libraries, in contrast, do tend to be more expensive (and also a lot more trouble to ship).
by tim-tday | 2026-02-14 20:12:47+00:00
I can count though.
I’m largely hallucination free.
I rarely fall into logic loops.
It’s difficult to prompt inject me.
I can remember things, people, situations and facts.
I can think slowly and carefully.
My brain doesn’t require an insane amount of power to run and train.
I have a world model.
I have body knowledge.
I have common sense.

I assume he’s talking about LLMs but I won’t dignify him with a click.
by PessimalDecimal | 2026-02-14 20:12:52+00:00
My guess is there's more to that story than just "protobufs don't forward unknown fields" because that's not how they work be default. Take a look at https://protobuf.dev/programming-guides/proto3/#unknowns.

https://kmcd.dev/posts/protobuf-unknown-fields/ discusses the scenario you're hinting at.

It's possible in the story you mention that each of those ~20 internal protos were different messages, and each hop between backends was translating data between nearly identical schemas. In that case, they'd all need to be updated to transport that data. But that's different and the result of those engineers' choice for how to structure their service definitions.
by remisharoon | 2026-02-14 20:12:55+00:00
Hi HN,
I’ve been working on dbt-Workbench, an open-source UI for working with dbt projects.

It’s early, opinionated, and definitely not perfect. I’d really appreciate feedback from people using dbt at scale.

Repo: https://github.com/rezer-bleede/dbt-Workbench
It Isn't the Tool, but the Hands – A Response to "Something Big Is Happening"
by markferraz | 2026-02-14 20:12:58+00:00
Matt Shumer's piece argues 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs disappear in 1-5 years. While the pace of change for software engineers is real, the "just prompt it" narrative is misleading. If the prompt is what matters, then knowing what to build and deeply understanding the problem matters more, not less. Building simple software may become commoditized, but building complex systems and understanding how they work becomes more valuable. We also need to stop conflating building software with building AI systems — the latter isn't getting commoditized. Finally, if agents can move fast and independently, the fulcrum of value becomes how effectively the operator manages them. We're nowhere near assigning broad goals and letting systems pursue them autonomously for months. As long as the end user is human, taste, judgment, and oversight remain crucial.

Like everything before AI: it isn't the tool, but the hands.

Original article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/something-big-happening-matt-shumer-so5he
by quantum_mcts | 2026-02-14 20:13:01+00:00
Around 2018 I got obsessed with slings - I've made a couple from paracord and was practicing almost every day. After about a year I only managed to consistently launch stones in the rough desired direction. Another (COVID) year and got to the level where my spread was about 5 degrees. Systematically hitting a reasonably sized target was still beyond my ability. Plus early symptoms of tennis elbow...

Slinging is hard, requires a lot of dedication and systematic practice. Stil, the feeling when the rock hits a target and "explodes" is worth it.