MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ted_bunny | 2026-02-10 21:03:47+00:00
Love the phrasing, as if a 10 year old can "have sex with" a 30 year old in an agentic and consenting manner. The people who get off on this stuff are always going to toe the line. I am okay with going down this slippery slope, because this should not be normalized to any degree. This reminds me of guys who are suddenly freedom of speech activists when someone tells them they can't say the N word. Please. If this is the hill you want to die on, be my guest.
by srean | 2026-02-10 21:03:48+00:00
We as humans had a similar argument regarding 0. The thought was that zero is not a number, just a notational trick to denote that nothing is there (in the place value system of the Mesopotamians)

But then in India we discovered that it can really participate with the the other bonafide numbers as a first class citizen of numbers.

It is not longer a place holder but can be the argument of the binary functions, PLUS, MINUS, MULTIPLY and can also be the result of these functions.

With i we have a similar observation, that it can indeed be allowed as a first class citizen as a number. Addition and multiplication can accept them as their arguments as well as their RHS. It's a number, just a different kind.
by Jare | 2026-02-10 21:04:07+00:00
I think the keyword here is "some".

It already seemed like we were approaching the limit of what it makes sense to develop, with 15 frameworks for the same thing and a new one coming out next week, lots of services offering the same things, and even in games, the glut of games on offer was deafening and crushing game projects of all sizes all over the place.

Now it seems like we're sitting on a tree branch and sawing it off on both sides.
by cubefox | 2026-02-10 21:04:08+00:00
Okay, I haven't really tested hallucinations like this, that may well be true. There is another weakness of GPT-5 (including 5.1 and 5.2) I discovered: I have a neat philosophical paradox about information value. This is not in the pre-training data, because I came up with the paradox myself, and I haven't posted it online. So asking a model to solve the paradox is a nice little intelligence test about informal/philosophical reasoning ability.

If I ask ChatGPT to solve it, the non-thinking GPT-5 model usually starts out confidently with a completely wrong answer and then smoothly transitions into the correct answer. Though without flagging that half the answer was wrong. Overall not too bad.

But if I choose the reasoning GPT-5 model, it thinks hardly at all (6 seconds when I just tried) and then gives a completely wrong answer, e.g. about why a premiss technically doesn't hold under contrived conditions, ignoring the fact that the paradox persists even with those circumstances excluded. Basically, it both over- and underthinks the problem. When you tell it that it can ignore those edge cases because they don't affect the paradox, it overthinks things even more and comes up with other wrong solutions that get increasingly technical and confused.

So in this case the GPT-5 reasoning model is actually worse than the version without reasoning. Which is kind of impressive. Gemini 3 Pro generally just gives the correct answer here (it always uses reasoning).

Though I admit this is just a single example and hardly significant. I guess it reveals that the reasoning training is trained hard on more verifiable things like math and coding but very brittle at philosophical thinking that isn't just repeating knowledge it gained during pre-training.

Maybe another interesting data point: If you ask either of ChatGPT/Gemini why there are so many dark mode websites (black background with white text) but basically no dark mode books, both models come up with contrived explanations involving printing costs. Which would be highly irrelevant for modern printers. There is a far better explanation than that, but both LLMs a) can't think of it (which isn't too bad, the explanation isn't trivial) and b) are unable to say "Sorry, I don't really know", which is much worse.

Basically, if you ask either LLM for an explanation for something, they seem to always try to answer (with complete confidence) with some explanation, even if it is a terrible explanation. That seems related to the hallucination you mentioned, because in both cases the model can't express its uncertainty.
by miki123211 | 2026-02-10 21:04:10+00:00
It's an anti-brute-force mechanism. It's not for you, it's for all the other accounts that an unattested phone (or a bot posing as an unattested phone that just stole somebody's credentials via some 0-day data exfiltration exploit) may be trying to access.

Sure, banks could probably build a mechanism that lets some users opt out of this, just as they could add a Klingon localization to their apps. There just isn't enough demand.
by Schiendelman | 2026-02-10 21:04:49+00:00
That transience, ironically, comes from the regulatory structure we try to use to protect community by trying to protect the buildings themselves. The things we've done that make it hard to build end up preventing new downtowns and markets in places that don't have them today, like residential areas. So then everyone's forced to the old markets for all their new needs, transforming them. If we let go, we'd see new downtowns and new markets in places that might be suburbs today, just like the old markets happened - organically, where a developer thinks they'll make money on one.
by jpadkins | 2026-02-10 21:04:51+00:00
So if the arguments are rooted in medical reasons, it's okay to be inhumane? Nazi propaganda argued that getting rid of Jews helped prevent the spread of diseases, because we all know that Jews are disease carriers. See how slippery the slope is here? Certainly you have seen the MAGA folks point out the measles outbreaks are coming from illegal immigrants, right?

I am quite sure that people felt justified in their reasoning for their behavior. That just shows how effective the propaganda was, how easy it is to get people to fall in line. If it was a matter of voluntary self sacrifice of personal freedoms, I wouldn't have made this comment. People decided to demonize anyone who did not agree with the "medical authority", especially doctors or researchers that did not tow the party line. They ruined careers, made people feel awful, and online the behavior was worse because how easy it was to pile on. Over stuff that is still to this day not very clear cut what the optimal strategy is for dealing with infectious disease.
by mtlynch | 2026-02-10 21:04:59+00:00
> I'm on a super similar journey. Started in 2022, did about 400k in revenue in 2025 at 79% margin, we'll se how this year goes. Theres a world where i'd love to add a lot of scale, but that'll rely on some experiments (underway) panning out. It's 'failure' in most peoples books but 2x'ing would be great too?!

Nice, congrats!

Yeah, I think depending on what bubble you're in, bootstrapping to 400k and 2x'ing every few years is either failure or amazing. The VC/hypergrowth path doesn't appeal to me, so I think something that gives you $100k+/yr in profit is a huge success.

> I'd love to learn more about your process of the sale.

Sure, I wrote a couple of posts with the details.[0, 1]

[0] https://mtlynch.io/i-sold-tinypilot/

[1] https://mtlynch.io/lessons-from-my-first-exit/
by jimnotgym | 2026-02-10 21:05:08+00:00
> The "currency" is often based on perception of what the leader likes

As a leader we could start by making the currency a positive thing? I make it clear that stopping late more than once a twice a year is negative, for instance. People stopped doing it.

>When you're two or more levels away from the point of execution it's very easy to be out of touch.

It is, so make an effort not to be out of touch. I left one job and the cleaner sent an apology for not being able to say goodbye, since she was off. She didn't work for me in any way. Why? Because I talked to her, and listened to her. Last week someone had a tough time who works for someone, who works for someone who works for me. I went and sat with them for a couple of hours.

I don't know everyone's name at the coal face, there are hundreds, but I know what they do and ask them about it. If their area has made an improvement, I go and see it, and say well done. I saw someone limping down the stairs one day, I asked them what happened. When I saw them walking well the following week I remarked on it. They stopped and chatted for a few minutes, then told me all about a problem with one of our systems. It confirmed what I thought. Every time those conversations happen they tell me a bit about what is going on in the real world. I'm careful not to criticise, and to use the info against anyone. I get my tea from the main canteen on the other side of the campus so I bump into people, not just managers. When I get asked to approve spend, I write and ask if I can visit the area so I can understand. If I support it I write to the next person in the approval chain (if there is one after me) and tell them why. I take my team to visit people in other departments, and introduce the other person, and explain what they do, so they know I know. I'm famous for having the longest ever tour of one of our sites, because I asked so many questions about the technology, and spoke to every one I met. I think I have a pretty good idea what is going on.
by frumplestlatz | 2026-02-10 21:05:35+00:00
You don't have to like Apple to recognize that they take a materially different stance from Google when it comes to user privacy.

Take this, for example: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102630

You can trivially disable web access to your data; at that point, Apple literally does not have the keys to your end-to-end encrypted data and cannot read or disclose it.
by jonahx | 2026-02-10 21:05:57+00:00
But you can define the complex field C. And it has many benefits, like making the fundamental theorem of algebra work out. I'm not seeing the issue?

On a similar note, why insist that "i" (or a negative, for that matter) is an "attribute" on a number rather than an extension of the concept of number? In one sense, this is a just a definitional choice, so I don't think either conception is right or wrong. But I'm still not getting your preference for the attribute perspective. If anything, especially in the case of negative numbers, it seems less elegant than just allowing the negatives to be numbers?
by TooKool4This | 2026-02-10 21:06:10+00:00
> Why do we need triple the administrative staff that was utilized in the 1960s across industries like education, healthcare, etc.

Well for starters the population has almost 3x since the 1960s.

Mix in that we are solving different problems than the 1960s, even administratively and I don’t see a clear reason from that argument why a shitload of work is meaningless.
by accounting2026 | 2026-02-10 21:06:13+00:00
If such a simplistic explanation was true, LLM's would only be able to answer things that had been asked before, and where at least a 'fuzzy' textual question/answer match was available. This is clearly not the case. In practice you can prompt the LLM with such a large number of constraints, so large that the combinatorial explosion ensures no one asked that before. And you will still get a relevant answer combining all of those. Think combinations of features in a software request - including making some module that fits into your existing system (for which you have provided source) along with a list of requested features. Or questions you form based on a number of life experiences and interests that combined are unique to you. You can switch programming language, human language, writing styles, levels as you wish and discuss it in super esoteric languages or morse code. So are we to believe this answers appear just because there happened to be similar questions in the training data where a suitable answer followed? Even if for the sake of argument we accept this explanation by "proximity of question/answer", it is immediately that this would have to rely on extreme levels of abstraction and mixing and matching going on inside the LLM. And that it is then this process that we need to explain how works, whereas the textual proximity you invoke relies on this rather than explaining it.
by jmalicki | 2026-02-10 21:06:14+00:00
> Whilst true, this is a kind of "you're holding it wrong" argument. If LLMs had model of what differentiates good code from bad code, whatever they pull into their context should make no difference.

Good code is in the eye of the beholder. What reviewers in one shop would consider good code is dramatically different than another.

Conforming to the existing code base style is good in and of itself, if the context it pulls in makes no difference that makes it useless.
by fleeting900 | 2026-02-10 21:06:18+00:00
Speaking from the other side, but having been on your side for most of my 20s and 30s and felt exactly how you do, they probably do feel you detached from them.

Their lives fundamentally changed to the extent that as you say, any gathering necessarily must be on terms that allow them to parent.

And the level of last-minute cancellations and apologies increase.

And on top of that, they’re just not prioritising reaching out to you. Mainly because parenting occupies 25 hours of most days and they’re exhausted, but they’re also probably assuming that any activity in reach for them, like simply getting coffee at a playground while they try to make sure their kid doesn’t eat too much sand, is not your idea of a fun time.

So your outreach tapered down in response, but that is ultimately your choice.

The alternative requires you to quite selflessly keep up the outreach and be OK with a lower hit rate, and lean into the fact that you have far, far greater flexibility to meet on their terms than they do to meet on yours.

Not doing that is not an unreasonable choice, but they probably miss you and want you to be part of their kids lives.

Anyway, thanks for sharing this point of view. It’s a hard situation.
by JCattheATM | 2026-02-10 21:06:48+00:00
> It’s still a significantly better place to live than America or Europe though.

They keep a small, 'racially pure' population, ban any negative press, kill any undesirables....sure it is.

> The same can be said about the Us which stirs up wars in other countries, kidnaps other countries presidents and has ICE arresting kids.

The US under Trump has changed a lot, this is true, but in most states it's not putting people to death for minor reasons and actually allows enough freedom to make love worth living. You'd have to be an NPC to be happy living in Singapore IMO.
by miki123211 | 2026-02-10 21:07:27+00:00
So I guess we'll have a system whose API is "open and interoperable", meaning "spread across 3000 pages of 5 ETSI TS PDfs that nobody can understand, with the only integration environment available after an expensive security audit, and requiring you to send an email to an email address that hasn't existed for the last 5 years."

/s
Show HN: Cube – The Agentic Analytics Platform [video]
by micrum | 2026-02-10 21:07:28+00:00
You might know Cube as an open-source semantic layer (https://github.com/cube-js/cube). Started in 2018, now 19K+ stars, 1000+ releases.

We kept hitting the same wall: everyone wants AI analytics, but AI without business context hallucinates. The fix is a semantic layer — a model that defines what "revenue" or "churn" actually means. But building one by hand takes weeks.

So we built an AI agent that writes the semantic layer itself, then uses it to answer questions and build dashboards with no hallucinations.

Connect your data → agent builds the model in seconds → ask questions in natural language → get accurate results grounded in your business definitions.

Three months in GA. Running in 200+ companies. 500K+ lines of semantic layer code generated. Teams like Brex and Drata using it in production.
OSS core isn't going anywhere.

Agentic analytics is a cloud layer on top. Free tier available. https://cube.dev/

The founders are in the thread to answer your question.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-10 21:07:33+00:00
YMMV, but the issue I usually run into with Arch is that unless you watch patch notes like a hawk, updates will break random things every so often, which I found quite frustrating. The risk of this increases the longer the system goes without updates due to accumlated missing config file migrations and such.

Even as someone who uses the terminal daily it's more involved than I really care for.
by awesome_dude | 2026-02-10 21:08:07+00:00
Just for the record - this is package local - it's fine within the package it is defined in, but no other package will use the implementation, they will all use the standard library.

Others have linked to the much more "fun" https://github.com/bouk/monkey which is an actual monkey patch, in that it changes the code that is called from anywhere in the runtime
by dagss | 2026-02-10 21:08:21+00:00
Isn't talking about "here’s how LLMs actually work" in this context a bit like saying "a human can't be a relevant to X because a brain is only a set of molecules, neurons, synapses"?

Or even "this book won't have any effect on the world because it's only a collection of letters, see here, black ink on paper, that is what is IS, it can't DO anything"...

Saying LLM is a statistical prediction engine of the next token is IMO sort of confusing what it is with the medium it is expressed in/built of.

For instance those small experiments that train a network on addition problems mentioned in a sibling post. The weights end up forming an addition machine. An addition machine is what it is, that is the emergent behavior. The machine learning weights is just the medium it is expressed in.

What's interesting about LLM is such emergent behavior. Yes, it's statistical prediction of likely next tokens, but when training weights for that it might well have a side-effect of wiring up some kind of "intelligence" (for reasonable everyday definitions of the word "intelligence", such as programming as good as a median programmer). We don't really know this yet.
by ssivark | 2026-02-10 21:08:47+00:00
> It instead is a chat where a thousand group chats are open, and no once wants to read any of them.

Do you mean people are happy to post on a thousand different threads, but no one reads posts from anyone else?

Why do you even have so many different active threads? Why not just let "resolved" threads be, and funnel conversations into fewer threads? (esp if you want ephemerality i.e. conversations to expire with time)

> 300+ members in a makerspace

If you have 300+ people discussing a wide variety of things, how do you ever expect to maintain your sanity with only channels and without threads? Won't every channel be quickly flooded and really hard to resurface anything useful from past discussions?

> I cannot [...] unless I have elevated access

Is your complaint that your Zulip space is not moderated well and that it would be helpful to ad-hoc decentralize some of the maintenance work across more participants?
by pryce | 2026-02-10 21:08:51+00:00
> whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly.

We've already been here in the 1980s.

The tech industry needs to cultivate people who are interested in the real capabilities and the nuance around that, and eject the set of people who am to turn the tech industry into a "you don't even need a product" warmed-over acolytes of Tony Robbins.
by jfengel | 2026-02-10 21:08:58+00:00
I don't see why there has to be a "gap" at all. The country had half as many people in 1950, and it got along fine. The world is different now, but I don't see why it takes 300 million people to run the country today.

If the US gets back to 150 million people, it will look different, but I don't see why it has to be any worse than it is now. And I can think of a lot of reasons why it might be better.
by nine_k | 2026-02-10 21:09:25+00:00
BTW the New Deal tried central planning and quickly rejected it. I'd say that the intense application of the antitrust law in the late 1930s was a key factor that helped end the Great Depression. The war, and wartime government powers, were also key: the amount of federal government overreach and and reforms do not compare to what e.g. the second Trump administration has attempted. It was mostly done by people who got their positions in the administration more due to merit and care about the country than loyalty, and it showed.

The post-war era, under Truman and Eisenhower administrations, reaped the benefits of the US being the wealthiest and most intact winner of WWII. At that time, the highest income tax rate bracket was 91%, but the effective rate was below 50%.
by metamet | 2026-02-10 21:09:32+00:00
Outside of simply not being true, the sentiment of what you're saying isn't much different than:

"Essentially all software is augmented with Stack Overflow now, or if not, built with technology or on platforms that is."

Agentic development isn't a panacea nor as widespread as you claim. I'd wager that the vast majority of developers treat AI is a more specified search engine to point them in the direction they're looking for.

AI hallucination is still as massive problem. Can't tell you the number of times I've used agentic prompting with a top model that writes code for a package based on the wrong version number or flat out invents functionality that doesn't exist.
by fakedang | 2026-02-10 21:09:42+00:00
Land cruisers are almost collectors items now in the Middle East. Transcends across wealth and status. Doesn't matter if it's a middle class office worker with a large family, a soccer mom living in the Palm or a filthy rich oil sheikh with an arsenal of sports cars stored away in his garage - they all have Land Cruisers (or the Prado).

I might actually just get into the hobby of collecting Land Cruiser models, and maybe a few Japan-exclusive Toyota models.
by TooKool4This | 2026-02-10 21:09:44+00:00
I don’t feel like reading what is probably AI generated content. But based on looking at the model fits where hyperbolic models are extrapolating from the knee portion, having 2 data points fitting a line, fitting an exponential curve to a set of data measured in %, poor model fit in general, etc, im going to say this is not a very good prediction methodology.

Sure is a lot of words though :)
by cogman10 | 2026-02-10 21:09:54+00:00
Wayland was turned on by default in ubuntu 21.04 xorg (the x11 server) was removed from ubuntu in ubuntu 25.10.

Desktops like gnome have dropped support for x11 so you can expect that wayland will be the only way to do things from here on out.

There is a compatibility layer called "xwayland" that should work, but there's definitely some rough edges between x11 apps and wayland apps. x11 gave all apps a pretty large ability to intercept information from across the system. Wayland locks that down pretty significantly.
by tflinton | 2026-02-10 21:10:16+00:00
Don't forget stand-ins, much of this hasn't discussed that credit card networks do a lot of "stand-ins" when the issuer is unreachable (bank goes down, latency too high, etc). It's a bit unclear how things like Wero would operate when a network issue hits as Wero and EU rails won't just assume the liability for the transaction and hope it clears later as it does on Visa/Mastercard.
by boelboel | 2026-02-10 21:10:45+00:00
I'm not sure if most of 4chan was actually so on board with the whole gamergate thing and all the things which followed. pre-/pol/ 4chan was a whole different thing. It was outsiders joining 4chan which did most of the posting, twitter and facebook were the ones which allowed this to happen.

Internet starting with a 1000 4chans wouldn't create what we have today (you'll just get lots of small fringe groups), internet starting with a 1000 facebooks/twitters/... will always end in extremism of a big portion of the population.