MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by anonymars | 2026-02-16 22:36:16+00:00
The usual whoring out of personal info by third parties:

"The Work Number receives data directly from employers, payroll providers, or third-party administrators that choose to use The Work Number for employment verifications. We report your data as we receive it from these sources."

https://employees.theworknumber.com/faq#:~:text=The%20Work%2...
by bigiain | 2026-02-16 22:36:47+00:00
I have an ESP32 Cam in front of me right now. I think I paid maybe 8 bucks for it. If I wanted to, I could very easily hide the tiny camera in my front door, and use it to both collect bluetooth and wifi metadata (including MAC addresses) and correlate images/faces to MAC addresses when people pass by close enough so that I can identify them later from longer range wifi/ble detections.

(I actually do plan to install this at my front door, but aimed mainly to detect when a deliver/parcel in on my doorstep, and I don't (yet?) plan on sniffing bluetooth/wifi with it)
by pyrale | 2026-02-16 22:37:00+00:00
> That's up to the person for the particular role. Imagine hiring a nanny and some bureaucrat telling you what prior arrest is "relevant". No thanks. I'll make that call myself.

Well, no ; that's not up to you. While you may be interested in this information, the government also has a responsibility to protect the subject of that information.

The tradeoff was maintained by making the information available, but not without friction. That tradeoff is being shattered by third parties changing the amount of friction required to get the information. Logically, the government reacts by removing the information. It's not as good as it used to be, but it's better than the alternative.
by scarmig | 2026-02-16 22:37:03+00:00
Imagine two bright high school students. One goes to a tony private school taught by people with PhDs; the other is in a developing country. They both want to understand, say, Morse theory. In a world without AI, only the former has access to knowledge about it. In a world with AI, the kid in a developing country can access the knowledge roughly as easily. Even if they were paying for tokens, but free tier models provide an absolute equality.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-16 22:37:04+00:00
> all of the Long Line towers I’ve seen in person (like the Slater station) have sat abandoned since the early 1990s.

I know of a few in Idaho that were operational and maintained at least up until the 2010s ish.

The one I'm familiar with was for a ranger station and a scout camp tucked away in the mountains. It was only replaced because of infrastructure spending for rural telecom which happened around 08 crash. All the sudden for these rural telecoms it made sense to put in a line for miles up a mountain for 1 or 2 people.
by idopmstuff | 2026-02-16 22:38:00+00:00
This doesn't seem better?

I'm an employer and I want to make sure you haven't committed any serious crimes, so I ask for a certificate saying you haven't committed violent crimes. I get a certificate saying you have. It was a fistfight from a couple of decades ago when you were 20, but I don't know if it's that or if you tortured someone to death. Gotta take a pass on hiring you, sorry.

Seems like the people this benefits relative to a system in which a company can find out the specific charges you were convicted of would be the people who have committed the most heinous crimes in a given category.
by ungovernableCat | 2026-02-16 22:38:11+00:00
The labour struggle for rights we see as basic today (40h work weeks, free weekends) was bloody and deadly.

And this was without surveillance tech and automated police drones or w/e else Palantir is working on right now. If we're going by historical precedent this transition won't be pretty, even if you're hoping for a nice optimistic end result.

I'm not so sure having a beefy 401k and maybe a couple of rental properties will be enough to insulate some of the more comfortable HN posters from all the potential chaos.
by blakes | 2026-02-16 22:38:40+00:00
Am I crazy? MSFT has was up about 100% in the prior three years before 2023 as well, and again for the three years before that.

AI has had very little to do with MSFT growth. Pretty sure the 2023 lows were a response to the massive AI spending, and the recovery mostly due to continued Azure services growth.
by locusofself | 2026-02-16 22:39:16+00:00
I have used Linux on and off since 1997. A few weeks ago I decided to try Linux on a laptop for the first time in a very long time, having only used Linux for cloud servers for many years. I may have picked a bad device for it, a Surface Studio laptop. Initially, I was surprised how much stuff just worked, the high-res display, the wifi, etc. The touchpad didn't work. I mucked around for a few hours and got it to work "OK". The computer would go to sleep, and I couldn't wake it up without hard-booting it. I downloaded a new kernel (linux-surface), which partially, but not entirely fixed the problem. When I plug in a totally normal USB mouse, the cursor moves in a way that is more erratic than either my macOS or windows machines. I haven't figured out a solution.

It doesn't feel like the year of the Linux desktop for me unfortunately. You can get an M1 macbook air for like $400 right now. It's a pretty hard sell.
by deadbabe | 2026-02-16 22:39:27+00:00
There is a benefit of a skill though. If an AI keeps encoding common tasks as skills and scripts, the LLM eventually just becomes a dumb routing mechanism for ambiguous user requests, which ultimately drives down token usage.

If everything you want an LLM do is already captured as code or simple skills, you can switch to dumber models which know enough about selecting the appropriate skill for a given user input, and not much else. You would only have to tap into more expensive heavy duty LLMs when you are trying to do something that hasn’t been done before.

Naturally, AI companies with vested interest in making sure you use as many tokens as possible will do everything they can to steer you away from this type of architecture. It’s a cache for LLM reasoning.
Ask HN: Why is Codeforces so slow?
by bokshi | 2026-02-16 22:39:30+00:00
I enjoy using Codeforces for competitive programming — the problems and community are great.

However, the site is often very slow:

- During contests, the site can become extremely slow or even crash.

- The rating page (filtering by country, organization, etc.) can be laggy and prone to crashing.

I’m curious whether this is mainly a scaling issue, an infrastructure limitation, or something specific to how Codeforces handles contests and ratings.

It’s understandable that contests can crash under high user load, but Codeforces has been around for over 16 years — why hasn’t this been improved?

Thanks!
by asveikau | 2026-02-16 22:39:52+00:00
Many people point to the bad spelling and grammar of these powerful, abusive people and they say wow, that's a flex.

My own reaction is more like these people are stupid. It's not power that makes them write poorly. They're not capable of getting it right.

Look at what Noam Chomsky wrote to Epstein as a contrast. Multiple paragraphs and usually coherent. He makes Epstein look dumb. (Which he was.) I don't support what and to whom Chomsky was writing, but he is better at writing.
by jtrn | 2026-02-16 22:40:19+00:00
There is absolutely no empathy in not helping people with the actual problem. Using ASD protocol on someone who has a personality disorder is going to make things worse.

It sounds to me like you have no empathy for all the people who are afraid to acknowledge that they have an autism diagnosis because it has become a fashionable diagnosis.

If you look at your response to me making serious points about the need for valid diagnoses and criteria to conduct proper research and find the best treatment methods for everyone, you use this to assume that I don’t think everyone should get help.

For instance, I get extremely annoyed when people misdiagnose borderline personality disorder by calling it bipolar. If you use the treatment protocol for bipolar disorder, you’re going to make it worse for the person.

Do you think I’m dismissing their suffering and dismissing their plight? I love helping people. How many people have you heard of going to a clinician and ending up talking about something that wasn’t really their issue, spending years going through the motions? Much of that is not working on the correct problem. So I actually think it’s extremely dangerous, destructive, and unempathic towards the people who are suffering to glorify avoidance of the real issues and attack anybody who tries to help people focus on the issue.

The best example of how naïve you are regarding real psychological therapy is when you say it’s easier to diagnose narcissistic personality disorder. It’s one of the hardest things to do. It’s infinitely easier to just agree with everything the person says, give them the ADHD or PTSD diagnosis, and let them sit with it for 10 years while suffering and avoiding working on themselves.

Yes, I am the one without empathy.
by getoffit | 2026-02-16 22:40:56+00:00
"Small models" will always outperform as they are deterministic (or closer to it).

This was realized in 2023 already: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/google-we-have-no-moat...

"Less is best" is not a new realization. The concept exists across contexts. Music described as "overplayed". Prose described as verbose.

We just went through an era of compute that chanted "break down your monoliths". NPM ecosystem being lots of small little packages to compose together. Unix philosophy of small composable utilities is another example.

So models will improve as they are compressed, skeletonized down to opcodes, geometric models to render, including geometry for text as the bytecode patterns for such will provide the simplest model for recreating the most outputs. Compressing out useless semantics from the state of the machines operations and leaving the user to apply labels at the presentation layer.
by nemo1618 | 2026-02-16 22:41:04+00:00
IMO this is one of the best use cases for AI today. Each function is like a separate mini problem with an explicit, easy-to-verify solution, and the goal is (essentially) to output text that resembles what humans write -- specifically, C code, which the models have obviously seen a lot of. And no one is harmed by this use of AI; no one's job is being taken. It's just automating an enormous amount of grunt work that was previously impossible to automate.

I'm part of the effort to decompile Super Smash Bros. Melee, and a fellow contributor recently wrote about how we're doing agent-based decompilation: https://stephenjayakar.com/posts/magic-decomp/
by zinodaur | 2026-02-16 22:41:14+00:00
I wonder if we can trust Gemini to do its job well here? Whoever is being protected in those files obviously has the power to compel governments to do what they want - if Gemini started being a threat, I bet it would get some "alignment" help. Certainly its findings would be reported, as well as the identity of whoever was doing the prompting
by paganel | 2026-02-16 22:41:22+00:00
The unspoken truth is that tests were never meant to cover all aspects of a piece of software running and doing its thing, that's where the "human mind(s)" that had actually built the system and brought it to life was supposed to come in and add the real layer of veracity. In other words, "if it walks like a duck and quacks like duck" was never enough, no matter how much duck-related testing was in place.
by godelski | 2026-02-16 22:41:49+00:00
Interpret the intent of the parent's comment more and focus less on finding its critiques. The irony here is that the critique you made is the most obvious one, which also means it is the one that the parent believed you're most likely to understand the implicit context around. I don't think anyone has handed all thinking over to LLMs, it's always somewhere on a spectrum. I think we can assume the parent isn't framing things as a binary outcome. If they were, we should ignore everything they're saying.
by WA | 2026-02-16 22:42:33+00:00
I‘d love if every receipt had an EPC QR code on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPC_QR_code

You scan it with your banking app and have all the details. But it’s not super seamless. If you find this code on a website on your phone, you have to screenshot the code and load it in the app. Would be nice if there was some kind of deep-link standard.
by yongjik | 2026-02-16 22:42:36+00:00
Okay, I'm really talking out of my ass, but my very uninformed take is:

Protectionism is "working" for China because it's still a poor country, it was much poorer only a generation ago, and when you have no industry, it's easier to deliberately keep people poor for a little longer in exchange for more jobs. Once the pipeline is built, it's just societal inertia.

But I have to wonder how much it working out for China is just "China is still poor, so people have little choice." Among millions of Americans decrying outsourcing of American jobs, how many are willing to work under an average labor condition of China if they were given the opportunity?
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2026-02-16 22:42:46+00:00
In the second example, it's likely that you still left money on the table. They almost certainly gave you the lower/midrange of your projected band which was likely significantly above the number you gave.

Hard to say from a blurb whether the situation is an outlier, just generalizing here based on on basically every salary discussion I see on the hiring side.
by zachlatta | 2026-02-16 22:43:03+00:00
I just learned about Handy in this thread and it looks great!

I think the biggest difference between FreeFlow and Handy is that FreeFlow implements what Monologue calls "deep context", where it post-processes the raw transcription with context from your currently open window.

This fixes misspelled names if you're replying to an email / makes sure technical terms are spelled right / etc.

The original hope for FreeFlow was for it to use all local models like Handy does, but with the post-processing step the pipeline took 5-10 seconds instead of <1 second with Groq.
by scarmig | 2026-02-16 22:43:28+00:00
There's a coherent story that straddles both lanes, by assuming that the human economy is in some weird place where the vast majority of humans don't create real economic value and mostly get employment through inertia and custom, and that AI, despite being worthless, provides an excuse for employers to break through taboos and traditions and eliminate all those jobs. Quite a stretch, but it's coherent at least.
by bigiain | 2026-02-16 22:43:33+00:00
> Lookup "resolvable private address". The short of it is, your phone can find your headphones or vice-versa, despite one or both having random addresses.

Is that just for the connection phase? Or does it then start publicly broadcasting a persistent MAC onced it's connected, so if you earbuds or watch are connected and communicating with your phoine, would a sniffer see a persisten MAC address or the session randomised one?

That's a problam (one of many problems) with WiFi MAC address randomisation - you can sniff the network names a phone is trying to connect to, then stand up a wifi access point with one of those names and the phone will reveal its real MAC address when it connects. I experimented a long time back with having a raspi that broadcast itself as a McDonalds free wifi access point, a huge number of phones would try to connect while I was out in public with it.
by coldtea | 2026-02-16 22:44:04+00:00
You're describing the AI companies and their business model.

I'm answering to that cost being a problem regarding "what prevents 100 Billion ChatGPTs from using any protocol?" - the context I have in mind for the above being scammers, political manipulators, spam, and people like that using ChatGPT/LLMs to take advantage of various protocols for profit (and the 100 billion figure being a figure of speech meaning "very many").
by Fnoord | 2026-02-16 22:44:42+00:00
Yes, I will use them as cold storage, nothing else. Right now, I have the following scheme:

1x a live server (Proxmox, NAS, firewall, and various other capabilities). 2x RAID1 enterprise NVMe, with NAS storage on RAID1 HDDs. 12th gen Intel, so relatively power friendly apart from the enterprise HDDs. 10 gbit local, remote 1 gbit fiber.

1x a live backup server in same city. Syncs every night. I should disable it otherwise, but I don't as of now, since it also gets a livestream of my doorbell camera (I don't use cloud for it). Has 1 gbit fiber, and RAID-1. Runs OS off RAID-1 (cannot add NVMe, older Synology, well maybe USB3 would work, but I'd rather not).

1x a backup server in same location as my home server which auto starts and syncs every week. This is my main old server, a Xeon so not very power friendly. Also RAID-1 NVMe. 10 gbit local.

1x a remote cloud (Norway), to have another copy of the most important data. Doesn't contain everything. Costs me only 50 EUR/year.

So that is a lot of copies of the same data, and quite frankly I not need this many. For the HDDs I want to get rid of RAID-1 and use either RAID-0 or JBOD, doubling the available data (I'm at the max as it is) while still having great data redundancy. And I will want to store my tapes off-site, although it wouldn't have the latest and greatest backups. I still have to look up how to do FDE with LTFS though, but I'll figure it out.

It also seems a good moment to sell some old hardware, given the current prices, but I am not sure if I will. Just something to ponder on later. You'd think I'd like to sell off the Xeon with its 30W CPU, but I quite like the machine (HP Microserver 10 Gen10 Plus). I'd rather sell the Synology which is still a decent machine, but I use voodoo to run recent software on it, and ZFS (with Homebrew / Nixpkgs). Tho neither is useful for ML.
by titzer | 2026-02-16 22:44:49+00:00
It's wild to me that they wouldn't try this first. Feeding the asm directly into the model seems like intentionally ignoring a huge amount of work that has gone in traditional decompilation. What LLMs excel at (names, context, searching in high-dimensional space, making shit up) is very different from, e.g. coming up with an actual AST with infix expressions that represents asm code.
by soulofmischief | 2026-02-16 22:46:03+00:00
Asking if a model censors the nature or existence of horrific atrocities is absolutely not xenophobic or nationalist. It's disingenuous to suggest that. We should equally see such persistent questioning when American models are released, especially when frontier model companies are getting in bed with the Pentagon.

I don't understand your hostile attitude; I've built things with multiple Chinese models and that does not preclude me or anyone else from discussing censorship. It's a hot topic in the category of model alignment, because recent history has shown us how effective and dangerous generational tech lock-in can be.
by natdempk | 2026-02-16 22:46:23+00:00
You should look at the organization / methodology of the survey, but generally it's a positive to get ranked IMO. I used to get surveys these yearly at a past job from the Boston Globe / Best Places to Work and it was basically a third-party email to all employees with a survey you'd fill out.

The most anyone could realistically ask you to do was please fill out the survey positively to try and support the company if you believe it's a best place to work and remind more people to complete the surveys. I don't think companies are really out here trying to game the more reputable surveys, and it would be pretty easily for single employees to defect/report if they were. They also required some level of basic written comments from employees.

Probably a mild green flag for quality of life / general happiness from current employees for the past year.
by LoganDark | 2026-02-16 22:46:25+00:00
Not GP, but for me the biggest differentiators of larger sensors are less perspective and better low-light performance. There are probably some other details like f-stop range but I haven't played with those much. I'm just a smartphone shooter (I don't even own a large sensor), but I still prefer to use the telephoto when possible to get squarer-looking shots with less noise, and to me that feels like what a larger sensor should deliver.
Show HN: Design Inspiration for LLMs
by sim04ful | 2026-02-16 22:46:55+00:00
I feel the rapid progress of LLM capability means that building software is shifting away from implementation and toward discernment. The challenge is becoming less about how software is built, but about what is built and how it is presented.

It becomes a question of taste. LLMs create exceptionally generic and inconsistent designs in the absence of curated references.

FontofWeb grounds AI in real production websites. It draws from a crowd-sourced search engine of over 1,000 live sites, extracting proven color and typography combinations, along with layout and styling patterns that already work in context.

This is available through a free public MCP service.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-16 22:46:57+00:00
> the more people you could get outside appreciating and learning about nature, the better it can be preserved for future generations.

I don't know about that. We are with so many people now and there is so little nature left. The Pokemon 'Go' craze showed what happens when you set gamification and outdoors on the same track. It just doesn't scale in the same way that virtual things do.
by juleiie | 2026-02-16 22:46:58+00:00
This is super important and really scary if you read Amodei latest January essay which seems to me to contain entirely correct reasoning.

This means pentagon wants their non aligned models more and more. Non aligned super intelligence is far more powerful and dangerous than nuclear weapons. Even whole arsenal of nuclear weapons. Even current level of non aligned intelligence could already allow average individual to synthesize and release a biological weapon such as specially crafted virus.
by ClintEhrlich | 2026-02-16 22:47:02+00:00
Hi, I'm Clint, one of the co-authors of this paper.

I'd like to quickly summarize what is different about our approach and why it matters.

Our work was inspired by brilliant research done at MIT CSAIL on "Recursive Language Models" (RLMs). One of the controversies has been whether these models are just a formalization of what agents like Claude Code already do vs. whether they bring new capabilities to the table.

By outperforming Claude on the major long-context benchmark, we provide a strong signal that something fundamentally new is happening. (In other words, it's not "just Claude Code" because it demonstrably outperforms Claude Code in the long-context regime.)

Where our contribution, LCM, differs from RLMs is how we handle recursion. RLMs use "symbolic recursion" -- i.e., they have an LLM write a script to recursively call itself in order to manipulate the context, which is stored in a REPL. This provides maximum flexibility... but it often goes wrong, since the LLM may write imperfect scripts.

LCM attempts to decompose the recursion from RLMs into deterministic primitives so that the control flow can be managed by an engine rather than left to the whims of the LLM. In practice, this means we replace bespoke scripts with two mechanisms:
(1) A DAG-based context management system that works like paged virtual memory, except for managing conversations and files;
and
(2) Operator-level recursion, like "Map" for LLMs, which lets one tool call process thousands of tasks.

An analogy we draw in the paper is the evolution from GO-TO statements (of Dijkstra's "Considered Harmful" fame) to structured programming. RLMs are maximally expressive, but all of that power comes with the risk of things going awry. We have built a more mechanistic system, which can provide stronger guarantees when deployed in production with today's models.

Happy to answer any questions! Thanks for taking a look at the paper!