MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ViscountPenguin | 2026-02-13 06:59:20+00:00
The earliest bits of the paper cover the case for significantly smaller life expectancy improvements. Given the portion of people in the third world who live incredibly short lives for primarily economic (and not biological) reasons it seems plausible that a similar calculus would hold even without massive life extension improvements.

I'm bullish on the ai aging case though, regenerative medicine has a massive manpower issue, so even sub-ASI robotic labwork should be able to appreciably move the needle.
by WiSaGaN | 2026-02-13 06:59:32+00:00
Great article. To me, this highlights a key question in the era of rapidly advancing machine intelligence: if we know machine intelligence is progressing, what is more valuable to build for? As humans, we still find many tools useful even when doing knowledge work. For instance, a calculator. Sure, a smart person can perform calculations in their head, but it’s much easier to teach everyone how to use a calculator, which is 100% reliable in its intended domain.

In this era, we should build these kinds of tools for problems we know are straightforward ones you can’t get smarter than, even as intelligence continues to advance. Using tools like "bash" or command-line interfaces originally designed for humans is a good initial approach, since we can essentially reuse much of what was built for human use. Later, we can optimize specifically for machines, either accounting for their different cognitive structures (e.g., the ability to memorize extremely long contexts compared to humans) or adapting to the stream-based input/output patterns of current autoregressive token generators.

Eventually, I believe machine intelligence will build their own tools based on these foundations, likely a similar kind of milestone to when humans first began using tools.
by globular-toast | 2026-02-13 06:59:55+00:00
People prefer how it looks and it's also more convenient to have a square room and no irregular protrusions stopping you pushing furniture up against the wall.

In the UK it used to be common for pipework to be exposed and painted. Electrical conduit is pretty common in "industrial" places like garages but the number of sockets people expect now would mean you'd barely have a flat wall anywhere.

The current preference is definitely for clean looking, square rooms. When pipes don't fit in the walls themselves, like soil pipes or around boilers, they are boxed in or hidden away in a cupboard.
by pmontra | 2026-02-13 06:59:56+00:00
I think that the only windows hotkey I know is Windows key to open the start menu. But I've been using Windows only 1994-2008, then Linux. I still connect to some Windows 10 / 11 machines of a customer to check processes and log files, but that doesn't matter.

And I hate windows snapping. I disable it in GNOME at every new OS install. UIs must fit people preferences and any single person is different.
by matheist | 2026-02-13 07:00:05+00:00
I remember being very taken with this story when I first read it, and it's striking how obsolete it reads now. At the time it was written, "simulated humans" seemed a fantastical suggestion for how a future society might do scaled intellectual labor, but not a ridiculous suggestion.

But now with modern LLMs it's just too impossible to take it seriously. It was a live possibility then; now, it's just a wrong turn down a garden path.

A high variance story! It could have been prescient, instead it's irrelevant.
Asimov (YC W26) Is Hiring
by lningthou | 2026-02-13 07:00:41+00:00
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by rkomorn | 2026-02-13 07:01:05+00:00
> I had to stop my Seinfeld rewatch

I'm glad I'm not the only one who doesn't buy the "separate the artist from the artwork" line.

I can't say I've ever watched Seinfeld, but there are plenty of other artists whose work I just won't consume anymore because they've done things I find despicable (and that I know of).

Why would I want to see or hear them or even think about them while trying to enjoy something?
by freakynit | 2026-02-13 07:01:24+00:00
I do believe this is gonna get commodatized like the internet has. Hardware obviously keeps getting better and cheaper as the time goes by. Sofware in this case is already free/open-weights.

The moats these companies might end up having in near future:

1. Government and enterprise contracts;

2. Even better private models not released to public and only accessible through long-term/exclusive contracts;

3. Gatekeeping the access to millions of their users, especially the non-technical ones, and charging premium for the same;

4. Becoming more and more as the full-stack OS'es to build on top of them.. By proving ready-made foundational layers like knowledge, memory, search/research, sandboxes, deployments, etc...

5. Data/network effects from large-scale usage and feedback loops.

...
by energy123 | 2026-02-13 07:01:38+00:00
> Yield will be much lower and prices higher.

That's an intentional trade-off in the name of latency. We're going to see a further bifurcation in inference use-cases in the next 12 months. I'm expecting this distinction to become prominent:

(A) Massively parallel (optimize for token/$)

(B) Serial low latency (optimize for token/s).

Users will switch between A and B depending on need.

Examples of (A):

- "Search this 1M line codebase for DRY violations subject to $spec."

An example of (B):

- "Diagnose this one specific bug."

- "Apply this diff".

(B) is used in funnels to unblock (A). (A) is optimized for cost and bandwidth, (B) is optimized for latency.
by asdff | 2026-02-13 07:02:50+00:00
> It’s impossible to mount even lightweight items such as picture frames onto the wall, because even the tiniest hole from nails or the like would crumble and erode into dust.

The trick for this is to just find the stud. Same thing you'd have to do in drywall. For light stuff like photos, you can get away with putting a nail right into the lathe without having to find a stud. If you miss the lathe (you can tell) just move the nail up a half inch.
by ChadNauseam | 2026-02-13 07:03:15+00:00
Sometimes people say that they don't understand something just to emphasize how much they disagree with it. I'm going to assume that that's not what you're doing here. I'll lay out the chain of reasoning. The step one is some beings are able to do "more things" than others. For example, if humans wanted bats to go extinct, we could probably make it happen. If any quantity of bats wanted humans to go extinct, they definitely could not make it happen. So humans are more powerful than bats.

The reason humans are more powerful isn't because we have lasers or anything, it's because we're smart. And we're smart in a somewhat general way. You know, we can build a rocket that lets us go to the moon, even though we didn't evolve to be good at building rockets.

Now imagine that there was an entity that was much smarter than humans. Stands to reason it might be more powerful than humans as well. Now imagine that it has a "want" to do something that does not require keeping humans alive, and that alive humans might get in its way. You might think that any of these are extremely unlikely to happen, but I think everyone should agree that if they were to happen, it would be a dangerous situation for humans.

In some ways, it seems like we're getting close to this. I can ask Claude to do something, and it kind of acts as if it wants to do it. For example, I can ask it to fix a bug, and it will take steps that could reasonably be expected to get it closer to solving the bug, like adding print statements and things of that nature. And then most of the time, it does actually find the bug by doing this. But sometimes it seems like what Claude wants to do is not exactly what I told it to do. And that is somewhat concerning to me.
by nullc | 2026-02-13 07:04:07+00:00
LLMs also appear to exacerbate or create mental illness.

I've seen similar conduct from humans recently who are being glazed by LLMs into thinking their farts smell like roses and that conspiracy theory nuttery must be why they aren't having the impact they expect based on their AI validated high self estimation.

And not just arbitrary humans, but people I have had a decade or more exposure to and have a pretty good idea of their prior range of conduct.

AI is providing the kind of yes-man reality distortion field the previously only the most wealthy could afford practically for free to vulnerable people who previously never would have commanded wealth or power sufficient to find themselves tempted by it.
by docdeek | 2026-02-13 07:05:49+00:00
This article is not about who was mentioned in the files or emails, but who was sending and receiving emails. Even then, it limits itself to only the top email senders and receipients. Trump might be mentioned often in the emails, but if he is not among the top couple of hundred senders/receivers of emails, then he’s not going to be mentioned in this article.
by cameldrv | 2026-02-13 07:05:56+00:00
Humans have driven innumerable species to extinction without even really trying, they were just in the way of something else we wanted. I can pretty easily think of a number of ways an AI with a lot of resources at its disposal could wipe out humanity with current technology. Honestly we require quite a bit of food and water daily, can't hibernate/go dormant, and are fairly large and easy to detect. Beyond that, very few living people still know truly how to live off the land. We generally require very long supply chains for survival.

I don't see why being able to do this would necessitate being able to cure all diseases or a comparable good outcome.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-13 07:06:01+00:00
Again, I never used the term "liable". You introduced that. I spoke of criminal negligence.

And I don't believe your claim of liability generalizes. If someone else set up the detonator and then I pushed the button without realizing what it was I don't believe I'd be liable.

The party that set it up might be, but it gets really complicated and messy because it depends on the specific circumstances of all involved parties.

If A sets it up in a manner believed to be safe, B moves something in good faith which unintentionally makes things unsafe, and then C comes along and triggers it without realizing, you might well end up with a situation where no one is considered liable.
by penteract | 2026-02-13 07:06:17+00:00
> I don't think it's possible to tile the sphere using more than 20 exactly identical pieces.

I was wrong about this (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhombic_triacontahedron). It still seems possible to me that there's a limit to the smallest tile that can tile a unit sphere on its own. (Smallest by diameter as a set of points in R^3).
by maxbond | 2026-02-13 07:06:22+00:00
I'm not saying I think either scenario is inevitable or likely or even worth considering, but it's a paperclip maximizer argument. (Most of these steps are massive leaps of logic that I personally am not willing to take on face value, I'm just presenting what I believe the argument to be.)

1. We build a superintelligence.

2. We encounter an inner alignment problem: The super intelligence was not only trained by an optimizer, but is itself an optimizer. Optimizers are pretty general problem solvers and our goal is to create a general problem solver, so this is more likely than it might seem at first blush.

3. Optimizers tend to take free variables to extremes.

4. The superintelligence "breaks containment" and is able to improve itself, mine and refine it's own raw materials, manufacture it's own hardware, produce it's own energy, generally becomes an economy unto itself.

5. The entire biosphere becomes a free variable (us included). We are no longer functionally necessary for the superintelligence to exist and so it can accomplish it's goals independent of what happens to us.

6. The welfare of the biosphere is taken to an extreme value - in any possible direction, and we can't know which one ahead of time. Eg, it might wipe out all life on earth, not out of malice, but out of disregard. It just wants to put a data center where you are living. Or it might make Earth a paradise for the same reason we like to spoil our pets. Who knows.

Personally I have a suspicion satisfiers are more general than optimizers because this property of taking free variables to extremes works great for solving specific goals one time but is counterproductive over the long term and in the face of shifting goals and a shifting environment, but I'm a layman.
by plastic-enjoyer | 2026-02-13 07:06:23+00:00
Bostrom is that what I call a 'douchebag nerd' and as such seeks validation from other douchebag nerds. The problem is that Bostrom is not an engineer, and therefore cannot gain this recognition through engineering feats. The only thing Bostrom can do is sell an ideology to other douchebag nerds so that they can better rationalise their already douchebagy behaviour.
by fsckboy | 2026-02-13 07:06:43+00:00
large businesses have large cash borrowing needs. if they borrow for free from their customers, it reduces the other borrowing they would need to do, so the rate to use is not what interest rate is available to you, but rather how much interest that Starbucks would need to pay for loans that size. Furthermore, whereas dividends are taxed twice (once as profit for the company and again as regular income to the shareholder), interest is a tax deduction to the company (which decreases their taxable profits) and for a percentage of debtholders that interest income is also taxed advantageously.

probably doesn't come up to 20% (unless Starbucks is in junk bond territory) but it's higher than the investment rate of 4% that you're quoting.
by awesome_dude | 2026-02-13 07:07:09+00:00
Sorry, can they (customers) demand it back?

I mean, once Starbucks have it, then the customers get it back via product (that has a margin included), or just leave it forever (free money!)

I have a firm "No vouchers" rule because of this, the vouchers in my part of the world inexplicably "expire" if not used within a certain amount of time, cannot be redeemed for cash, and will not be honoured if the business goes belly up
by lbreakjai | 2026-02-13 07:07:42+00:00
I stopped worrying. Western societies have about 30 to 40% of the people doing knowledge work, which contributes to the economy that employs the other 60%.

If that 40% is automated away in one go, there's no economy as we know it anymore. Either it acts as a negative void coefficient and moderates it into something sustainable, or it blows up.
by rekabis | 2026-02-13 07:07:54+00:00
At my last job they had an entire section of the product - hidden behind feature flags and enableable only in development - whose sole purpose was to generate dummy content for the different sections of the product. When I left, they were extending it with AI integration to have it generate more realistic data. The overall program - when in prod - contained massive amounts of PPI/PII, so we needed a way to generate massive amounts of realistic-looking dummy data to stress test it while in dev.
by hrishikesh-s | 2026-02-13 07:08:10+00:00
Yes, I'm using an agent orchestrator to write code. In fact, a couple of days before Anthropic introduced agent teams, I built a custom tool for myself inside emacs: https://github.com/hrishikeshs/magnus

I basically cycle through prompts and approve/deny/guide agents while looking at the buffer and thinking traces as text scrolls through. It has changed my life :)
by gregherbelux | 2026-02-13 07:08:19+00:00
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by freakynit | 2026-02-13 07:08:20+00:00
Same here. I've tried agent integrations in VS Code and also have agentic CLIs installed (Claude Code, Gemini cli). But honestly, I still find it more reliable, and often faster, to just ask focused questions, let it generate a method or two, review the output, and copy-paste it into my project. Rinse and repeat. Kind of like how we used to do in the good old days an year back.

For now at least, the full agent workflows feel less efficient and more headache-inducing than being helpful.

And agentic swarms: that's marketing bs.. at least for now.
by red75prime | 2026-02-13 07:08:22+00:00
How do you think who's in on that? Not only pelicans, I mean, the whole thing. CEOs, top researchers, select mathematicians, congressmen? Does China participate in maintaining the bubble?

I, myself, prefer the universal approximation theorem and empirical finding that stochastic gradient descent is good enough (and "no 'magic' in the brain", of course).
by iokevins | 2026-02-13 07:08:26+00:00
Discovering this years ago was such a rabbit hole. They had a fake SF Bay-adjacent office street address (Walnut Creek maybe?) and had incorporated their US HQ in Michigan using a fake street address. This web site lists Rebex but they stole code from others like SyncFusion, whose staff confirmed to us the scam and that they were aware of them.
by t312227 | 2026-02-13 07:09:33+00:00
hello,

as always: imho (!)

recognize that software-engineering is not about writing / vibing code but to solve (!) problems.

nobody cares if the code which solves a problem is generated / copied / written ... as long as it was legally obtained ... ;))

anyway: code is liability, every line of code which was not written to solve a problem keeps future maintenance-costs low(er) ...

additionally especially for non-trivial problem-solutions - read: projects -, its essential to have maintainable code. which means, code that is ...

* easy to understand ~ new developers

* easy to extend ~ new features

* easy to sustain ~ update dependencies, update the underlying runtime-environment etc.

especially if it solves a complex problem for a company, the code may be used for years or even decades =?> keep that in mind!

just my 0.02€
by 9dev | 2026-02-13 07:09:57+00:00
> Now imagine that it has a "want" to do something that does not require keeping humans alive […]

This belligerent take is so very human, though. We just don't know how an alien intelligence would reason or what it wants. It could equally well be pacifist in nature, whereas we typically conquer and destroy anything we come into contact with. Extrapolating from that that an AGI would try to do the same isn't a reasonable conclusion, though.
by rcoveson | 2026-02-13 07:10:24+00:00
I think that's a little harsh. A lot of the most powerful bits are applicable to any intelligence that we could digitally (ergo casually) instantiate or extinguish.

While it may seem that the origin of those intelligences is more likely to be some kind of reinforcement-learning algorithm trained on diverse datasets instead of a simulation of a human brain, the way we might treat them isn't any less though provoking.
by snasan | 2026-02-13 07:12:44+00:00
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by energy123 | 2026-02-13 07:12:57+00:00
I'd suggest running the identical prompt N times (maybe do 2 identical calls to Gemini 3.0 Pro + 2 identical calls to GPT 5.2 Thinking), then running some basic text post-processing to see where the 4 responses agree vs disagree. The disagreements (substrings that aren't identical matches) are where scrutiny is needed. But if all 4 agree on some substring it's almost certainly a correct transcription. Wouldn't be too hard to get codex to vibe code all this.
by rstuart4133 | 2026-02-13 07:14:28+00:00
> i read a study from sweden where a full three quarters of covid deaths were in the bracket of those aged 80 plus.

For the USA you can see the excess mortality for different age groups here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores... There isn't much difference between 60-74, 74-84 and 85+.

As you can see that site doesn't have data broken down by age for Sweden so it would be interesting to see where they paper you mention got their data from. Sweden's excess deaths across all ages followed a similar curve to the USA, so it would be surprising if the age group breakdown wasn't similar too.

You can also see how well Australia managed COVID in comparison. "Excess deaths" in Australia's was driven into reverse by their management strategies. That wasn't due to vaccines. Australian couldn't buy vaccines for love nor money (aside form AstraZeneca which unlike the others could be manufactured there - but it was withdrawn very early), ironically because its other measurement strategies were so successful countries like Mexico were deemed more worthy. Those strategies were also very successful financially, with Australia emerging earlier and faster than just about all countries in the OECD. They did however cause immense friction within Australia, as some citizens deeply resented the temporary restrictions put on travel, mask mandates and the like.