MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sousousou | 2026-02-12 21:29:03+00:00
Sometimes I worry about the incentives for innovation in the US.

Step 1, find something to innovate on, sell the promise of it to investors.
Step 2, build a prototype or worst case, build it for real and start generating income from your truly innovate and unique product.
Step 3, get acquired by a large company and then shut down because your product competed with theirs.

End result, general public possibly benefited from your innovation, but in the long run, it was temporary.

Maybe the incentives would be better if it were harder for large companies to acquire small ones? If the path to riches where driven primarily by delivering value to customers. Would love to hear other's opinions on this.
by fragmede | 2026-02-12 21:29:15+00:00
Big picture, sure. We can talk about the millions that corporations will make and who's going to do what. But you're a person. $1 million in options is probably meaningful for you. Companies aren't IPOing, but the secret is that they're still paying employees cash for their options. SpaceX employees have had what's called a tender, which means they get to sell some of their hypothetical SpaceX options for cold hard cash in the bank that you can use to pay your mortgage. There's zero guarantee that Anthropic will do such a thing before the bubble bursts, but if they do, and you're there, who cares about a software company moat when you have enough money to buy a castle in Napa and pay to have a real actual moat with water in it and crocodiles, if that's what you want.

Others are made of different stuff, and are going to go right back to work, even though they could go off to a beach for the rest of forever somewhere.
by criddell | 2026-02-12 21:29:34+00:00
> The average human tested scores 60%. So the machines are already smarter on an individual basis than the average human.

Maybe it's testing the wrong things then. Even those of use who are merely average can do lots of things that machines don't seem to be very good at.

I think ability to learn should be a core part of any AGI. Take a toddler who has never seen anybody doing laundry before and you can teach them in a few minutes how to fold a t-shirt. Where are the dumb machines that can be taught?
by sedatk | 2026-02-12 21:29:56+00:00
The term "disc" for storage predates optical media. "Disc" was the common spelling for a disk (like a floppy disk) on British 8-bit computers like Amstrad CPC or Sinclair Spectrum.[1][2]

It seems like the distinction simply comes from British and American preferences.[3]

I have no idea how Apple jumped to such an arbitrary conclusion.

[1] Kempston Disc Interface manual: https://k1.spdns.de/Vintage/Sinclair/82/Peripherals/Disc%20I...

[2] Amstrad Disc Drive Interface manual: https://www.cpcwiki.eu/imgs/3/3f/DDI-1_User_Manual.pdf

[3] Etymonline entry for "disk": https://www.etymonline.com/word/disk
by BeetleB | 2026-02-12 21:30:10+00:00
> Its really weird how you all are begging to be replaced by llms, you think if agentic workflows get good enough you're going to keep your job? Or not have your salary reduced by 50%?

The computer industry (including SW) has been in the business of replacing jobs for decades - since the 70's. It's only fitting that SW engineers finally become the target.
by ranger_danger | 2026-02-12 21:30:12+00:00
Even if you self-host matrix there are still multiple ways you could be liable for content you don't even know exists. Especially the last 4 points here:

https://telegra.ph/why-not-matrix-08-07

There are even custom message/media types that people use to upload hidden content you can't see even if you're joined to the same channel using a typical client.
by lenerdenator | 2026-02-12 21:30:16+00:00
In this case, it has to do with how they're classified under Delaware law as a corporate entity.

I'm not a lawyer (I don't even play one on TV, damn you Odenkirk) so I can't tell you what that means as far as case law for companies getting punished for behaving badly, but in this case, there is supposedly some sort of legal backing for the classification.
by cuillevel3 | 2026-02-12 21:30:32+00:00
For everyone not reading the post:

> Practically speaking, that means that people and organisations running a Matrix server with open registration must verify the ages of users in countries which require it. Last summer we announced a series of changes to the terms and conditions of the Matrix.org homeserver instance, to ensure UK-based users are handled in alignment with the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA).

At least you can self-host matrix and messages are end to end encrypted, unlike IRC.
by innocentoldguy | 2026-02-12 21:30:33+00:00
Philips is the company that came up with the term "Compact Disc" for CDs, so we can blame them for goofing up the regional spellings and making the world more confusing.

I think Alan Shugart (or at least his team at IBM) started calling portable data disks "floppy disks," and then "hard disk" emerged to differentiate rigid disks from bendy ones. Maybe we can also blame him and his team.

The important thing is that someone gets blamed. :D
by stackghost | 2026-02-12 21:30:52+00:00
>As measured by prosperity life in the US is better; the poorest US state has a higher GDP per capita than most western European countries.

GDP per capita/prosperity is a poor proxy for quality of life. The US is lagging most of the developed world in most quality of life metrics, even as reported by US news outlets, which don't rank the US in even the top 20: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/rankings/quality-...

>Americans have bigger houses, more food, bigger cars,

The size of one's house or car is at best weakly-correlated with quality of life. I would rather not own a car at all and be able to walk everywhere, rather than spend hours of my life commuting in a gigantic SUV.

>bigger salaries, and access to better medical care and schools if they've got an okay job.

The US ranks the lowest in the developed world for life expectancy, and among the highest in obesity globally (obesity being a major determinant of health). The US remains the only developed country where an unlucky dice roll (e.g. genetic-linked cancer) will bankrupt you and destroy the livelihoods of your children.

This is not the flex you think it is.
by almosthere | 2026-02-12 21:30:59+00:00
10 years from now

/v1/fetch/music

Thought for 0.000001 seconds: Hmmm, the user is asking for a list of music, it looks like that's in the the postgres database music_track.... (

All endpoints will just directly be to the LLM that has all the access control rules, etc.. No hacking will be possible. No more code it's just all ST:TNG computer from here on out.
by aystatic | 2026-02-12 21:31:04+00:00
you're free to have your own opinion based on your experiences here, but i wouldn't blame anyone for feeling that way. for the record, i don't think dang or anybody is a transphobe, but i have to imagine the culture here is pretty off-putting to trans people

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36231993
by metalliqaz | 2026-02-12 21:31:10+00:00
I have a vision of some future advertisement going more-or-less like so:

Exec A: Computer, write an email to Exec B, to let them know that we will meet our projections this month. Also mention that the two of us should get together for lunch soon.

AI: Okay, here is an email that...[120 words]

[later]

Exec B: Computer, summarize my emails

AI: Exec A says that they will meet their projections this month. He also wants to get together for lunch soon.

In my vision, they are presenting this unironically as a good thing. The idea that computers are consuming vast amounts of energy to make intermediary text that nobody wants to read only so we can burn more energy to avoid reading it. All while voice dictation of text messages has existed since the 2010s.

It gets to the basic question... what is the real point of communication?
by tremon | 2026-02-12 21:31:27+00:00
Replace Honest Guy with local hospital or care home and bad guy with vulture capital, and you will find that this happens all too often; any time there's an established and captive audience, you will find vultures circling all around it.

At least there's invididual states actually responding to this malpractice: https://pestakeholder.org/reports/2025-state-healthcare-poli...
Ask HN: Do sociotechnical pressures select for beneficial or harmful AI systems?
by jerlendds | 2026-02-12 21:31:45+00:00
The full question I'm wondering about is as follows:

Do sociotechnical selection pressures reliably favor ML systems that (a) increase their own future deployment probability and (b) reshape institutions/data pipelines to entrench that probability, even without explicit 'survive' objectives?

I've gathered some links exploring this and tangential ideas here: https://studium.dev/drafts/f1 - I'd love to find more reading material
by lynndotpy | 2026-02-12 21:31:48+00:00
That's really not clear at all.

I earnestly can't anticipate what specific information-diet someone could have where they would so strongly assume that Google Deepmind (of all the various AI companies) is a clear and sole foil to Grok that they would assume anyone who didn't share that perspective to be feigning ignorance in bad faith.

Where-ever you're having these discussions where it's entirely unfamiliar to me (and evidently others). (I don't say this with scorn or malice!)

On the greater topic of "bias", it's kind of meaningless. There's correct answers and there are incorrect answers, and "bias" refers to some tendency away from an assumed default distribution. Randomly-generated strings might be the only "unbiased" response. This is really more a difficult epistemic question, and I'd prefer something that is biased towards what's most likely to be true (e.g. Wikipedia > someones Livejournal).

Given Grok has been intentionally made to generate text praising Hitler, and I have very very high confidence that Hitler actually sucks, I have very very low confidence in the ability for the Grok program to reliably generate text that's worth reading.
by Doctor_Fegg | 2026-02-12 21:32:37+00:00
Disk was already the standard spelling in the UK by 1984 (in a computing context), just as program was used in preference to programme. But Amstrad mistyped it as disc on the plastic mouldings for their first CPC, and were too cheap to change them. Consequently CPC 3in disks were always called discs even into the 90s.
by Bender | 2026-02-12 21:32:44+00:00
unlike IRC

There are a few IRC clients that support OTR. irssi-otr is one [1] weechat-otr is another [2]. Pidgin though I have not used it in a very long time. Hexchat using an always work in progress plugin. There may be others.

OTR could use some updates to include modern ciphers similar to the recent work of OpenSSH but probably good enough for most people.

E2EE aside having chat split up into gazillions of self hosted instances makes it much harder for chat to be hoovered up all in one place. It takes more effort to target each person and that becomes a government scalability issue. Example effort: [3]

[1] - https://github.com/cryptodotis/irssi-otr

[2] - https://github.com/mmb/weechat-otr

[3] - https://archive.ph/4wi5t
by BowBun | 2026-02-12 21:32:47+00:00
It's telling that the measure of quality of life you use in this comment is entirely materialistic in nature. I also challenge the idea that US provides 'access to better medical care', as it is pretty well documented that Americans spend more for lower quality care compared to similar developed countries.

I believe this cultural divide is a big reason America won't make it back to the top - insatiable desire for wealth and a lack of values-based principals. Ironically US companies are the first to tout their 'values' in the workplace.
by GaryBluto | 2026-02-12 21:32:48+00:00
So your solution to people using a decentralized, federated protocol to say things you don't like is to stop various servers interacting with each other? At that point why not just use federated services with multiple accounts?

It seems far too risky to sign up on a service for the purpose of intercommunication that is able (or even likely) to burn bridges with another for any reason at any time. In the end people will just accumulate on 2 or 3 big providers and then you have pseudo-federation anyway.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-12 21:32:53+00:00
I disagree.

AI is very good at conforming to your own biases and pulling out the subtext of a prompt.

If your prompt goes along the lines of "I think x is healthy plan a meal for x", grok (and other AI) will happily affirm that you are correct and really smart for recognizing that "x" is the healthiest diet and then it'll give you that diet.

That's a biased answer. AI biases to your own biases.

Or maybe said another way. AI starts with the baseline assumption that you are an expert and correct in your prompt. It can be hard to get an AI to call you out for being wrong about something.
by whaleidk | 2026-02-12 21:32:55+00:00
All I’m saying is that

by ‘I don’t read code,’ I mean: I don’t do line-by-line review as my primary verification method for most product code. I do read specs, tests, diffs selectively, and production signals - and I would advocate escalating to code-reading for specific classes of risk.

Is not at all what people consider “not reading the code” to be
by bmacho | 2026-02-12 21:33:01+00:00
> In most varieties of English, disk is the preferred spelling for magnetic media (hence floppy disk, hard disk, disk drive), whereas disc is preferred for optical media (hence compact disc, digital versatile disc, optical disc).

> For all other uses, disk is preferred in American English and acceptable in Canadian English, and disc otherwise.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disk#Usage_notes
by intended | 2026-02-12 21:33:10+00:00
The discussion point of use, would be that we live in a world where this scenario cannot be dismissed out of hand. It’s no longer tinfoil hat land. Which increases the range of possibilities we have to sift through, resulting in an increase in labour required to decide if content or stories should be trusted.

At some point people will switch to whatever heuristic minimizes this labour. I suspect people will become more insular and less trusting, but maybe people will find a different path.
by barnas2 | 2026-02-12 21:33:45+00:00
>Poker players have intuitive sense of the statistics of various hand types showing up, for instance, and that can be a useful clue as to which build types are promising.

Maybe in the early rounds, but deck fixing (e.g. Hanged Man, Immolate, Trading Card, DNA, etc) quickly changes that. Especially when pushing for "secret" hands like the 5 of a kind, flush 5, or flush house.
by unconed | 2026-02-12 21:33:47+00:00
Homework assignment: make a bode plot of the convolution filters [1 1 1] vs [1 2 1].

Which one turns +1, -1, +1, -1, .. into all zeroes?

You ought to know this because the fourier transform of [1 0 1] is a cosine of amplitude 2 on the complex unit circle e^(i*omega), which means the DC quefrency needs to be 2 to get the zeroes to end up at nyquist.

The frequency response H(z) (= H(e^i*omega)) of [1 1 1] on the other hand will have its minimum somewhere in the middle.

Also here's a post that will teach you how to sight read the frequency response of symmetric FIR filters off the coefficients:
https://acko.net/blog/stable-fiddusion/
by skiniks | 2026-02-12 21:33:54+00:00
Thank you, that's very kind! The name actually comes from "Runtime Accelerated Rendering Infrastructure" (RARI), but I love the Ferrari connection, it definitely fits the performance theme.

The inspiration was pretty straightforward: I wanted to build something for myself that was as performant as I could make it. I'd been using Rust a lot more in my day-to-day work and wanted to see if I could bring those performance benefits to React development without forcing JS devs to write Rust. The goal was to abstract away the complexity of Rust but still deliver the same benefits.

Congrats on shipping your project! What did you build?
by stansApprentice | 2026-02-12 21:33:57+00:00
Author here. The core idea is pretty simple: train linear probes on the model's internal state before it generates anything to predict if it'll succeed. Then use those predictions to route queries: Send easy ones to cheap inference, hard ones to expensive reasoning.

Two findings that surprised us:

1. The same model has completely different internal representations of "difficulty" depending on decoding settings. What GPT-oss thinks is hard with greedy ≠ what it thinks is hard with sampling.

2. Model difficulty and human difficulty are orthogonal. The problems they struggle with aren't the ones we struggle with, and this gap increases with extended reasoning.

Code: https://github.com/KabakaWilliam/llms_know_difficulty
Probes: https://huggingface.co/CoffeeGitta/pika-probes

Happy to answer questions.
by IncreasePosts | 2026-02-12 21:34:19+00:00
Look at Sundar's most recent remarks and tell me Google's isn't only focusing on AI: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/a...

Basically "we have youtube subscribers" is the only thing that isn't all about AI, but even that i'm sure they're trying to figure out how to shoehorn AI into that product
by righthand | 2026-02-12 21:34:37+00:00
Stores have whole grain bread. Germany isn’t unique and there are plenty of bakeries in the US that make fresh bread. If you can’t be bothered to make or buy good bread then that’s on you not the government.

The fact that they’re not going after any industry except to prop them up (meat, dairy) is a sign they aren’t doing anything about the unhealthy population in the US. The unhealthy population voted them in and doesn’t want to stop eating sugar.

If they really wanted to focus on changing the unhealthy lifestyles they would be promoting a high fiber diet but they didn’t they increased the recommended intake of protein which is not a healthy thing.

Furthermore I don’t know a single person who uses Federal guidelines to live. If they did they wouldn’t be eating the sugar anyways.
by keybored | 2026-02-12 21:36:28+00:00
American tech bros come up with democratizing tech every five years. And then oops, now the tech has enslaved us or just made the tech bros rich at the expense of everyone else. Oops.

The thing with “left wing” positions is that it depends on the conditions you live under. It does not depend on, like tech people get so incredibly tunnel-visioned about, the tech in isolation. You embrace and use the mills if you collectively own them; you smash them if they are being used against you.

I won’t claim that you are on the side of the billionaire tech bros. I don’t know if it is intentional.
by kelseyfrog | 2026-02-12 21:36:46+00:00
I've always wished there was a market for mod actions.

Moderation and centralization while typically aren't independent, aren't necessarily dependent. One can imagine viewing content with one set of moderation actions and another person viewing the same content with a different set of moderation actions.

We sort of have this in HN already with viewing flagged content. It's essentially using an empty set for mod actions.

I believe it's technically viable to syndicate of mod actions and possibly solves the mod.labor.prpbl, but whether it's a socially viable way to build a network is another question.
by taylorallred | 2026-02-12 21:36:49+00:00
I was really interested in lisps for a couple of years, but eventually I came to the conclusions: it's just hard to read. I know they say "the parens disappear" but even if that is the case, it simply requires you to jump around the expression holding lots of context in your head. I'm a fan of code that mostly reads top-to-bottom, left-to-right.
by MayeulC | 2026-02-12 21:37:22+00:00
I personally agree with the more elaborate response:

1. It lays down the policy explicitly, making it seem fair, not arbitrary and capricious, both to human observers (including the mastermind) and the agent.

2. It can be linked to / quoted as a reference in this project or from other projects.

3. It is inevitably going to get absorbed in the training dataset of future models.

You can argue it's feeding the troll, though.
by sebringj | 2026-02-12 21:38:11+00:00
ah gotcha... i was picturing like this massive web page that was dog slow that you just like made mad fast... but that's cool though. I'll run it.

I built autonomo on github, it's this mcp you plugin to your whatever ai editor and it drives the app/web/desktop whatever thing and validates it actually runs and works... keep building homie!
by riggsdk | 2026-02-12 21:38:17+00:00
Whenever plugging a hole like this, the OS should kinda leave it “open” as a kind of honeypot and immediately show a warning to the user that some exploit was attempted. Granted, the malware will quickly adapt but you should at least give some users (like journalists or politicians) the insanely important information about them being targeted by some malicious group.
by LocalPCGuy | 2026-02-12 21:38:53+00:00
Resist the urge to over-complicate things. With ADHD, it's really easy to hyperfocus and end up building a "beautiful" system that doesn't work at all for you. Then you give up and start all over. So instead, pick small things that you can incorporate into routines, which are a saving grace especially with ADHD - just include enough space for a bit of flexibility so it doesn't get stale/boring.

For instance, I have a morning routine which ensures I'm "presentable"/etc. When I start work I immediately create the day's note, go to the previous day and review, copy over any ongoing tasks, etc. My day note is the same thing every day: Things I did, Things I need to do, Meeting notes (important meeting notes get extracted to their own file), Random notes. Then setting in to work. Evenings are bit more flexible and the weekends tend to be the wild west, bit of a reset so I don't feel "trapped" in a cycle, etc.

I do struggle with weekly/monthly or longer intermittent routines. Even stuff like doing bills (automated as much as possible), re-ordering prescriptions, etc. So it's always a process.

Last thing so as not to go too long - not everyone runs into this, but in case you've gotten down on yourself at times and now realize it might be ADHD, give your self a break / forgive yourself. Same thing going forward. Not an excuse, not continuing to seek improvement, but realizing that when you stumble, there is a reason and it may not be something you can actually control. Reflect on what you could do to prevent it in the future, but do it without self-blame or criticism. Be kind to yourself, in other words.
Ask HN: What would you recommend a vibe coder learn about how all this works?
by alexdobrenko | 2026-02-12 21:38:59+00:00
I'm a writer who started building with AI coding tools about 8 months ago. No programming background. It's been one of the most fun things I've ever done.

I want to understand more about what's actually happening. What are the big concepts that, once you get them, make everything click in a more interesting way? The stuff that made you go "oh, THAT'S what's going on."
by uriahlight | 2026-02-12 21:39:14+00:00
It's like beating a dead horse. React is the literal worst of all the modern JavaScript frameworks and yet that's what everybody insists on using. Vue is light years ahead of it (and will be even further ahead when the new Vapor mode is released in 3.6). Svelte is ahead. Solid is ahead. Heck, even Marko is ahead.
by hdhdhsjsbdh | 2026-02-12 21:39:16+00:00
Acidified oceans, poisonous air, and frequent multibillion dollar extreme weather events are a small price to pay for a purely hypothetical $2,400 off my next car, which I am forced to own because the same companies that lobby against climate change regulations are the ones that tore up all the public transit infrastructure that would otherwise allow me not to own a car at all. Americans love getting fucked by our corporate overlords, we can’t get enough of it, it’s our way of life.