MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by somewhereoutth | 2026-02-19 11:27:08+00:00
> Instead of only allowing programs that are proven to be typed correctly you might want to allow all programs that you can not proved to be wrong. Lean into gradual typing. Everything goes at first and the typing becomes as strict as the programmer decides based on how much type information they add.

Yes, this is the way. And if you ensure that the type system is never abused to control dispatch - i.e. can be fully erased at runtime - then a proposed language supplied with some basic types and an annotation syntax can be retrofitted with progressively tighter type-checking algorithms without having to rewire that underlying language every time.

Developers could even choose whether they wanted super-safe checking (that precludes many legal forms), or more lenient checking (that allows many illegal forms), all in the same language!
by amabito | 2026-02-19 11:27:20+00:00
Nice reference. If agents are essentially “a while loop with an LLM call,”
then one missing category might be execution control.

In distributed systems we rarely let loops run unbounded — we add
budgets, backoff, circuit breakers, etc. With agents, it’s interesting that
most frameworks focus on observability (traces, logs) but not on hard
containment of the loop itself.

If you were extending the mapping, would “agent budget limits” fit better
as a rate limiter, a circuit breaker, or something closer to a bounded
work queue?
by amabito | 2026-02-19 11:27:46+00:00
The Markdown-over-database choice makes sense for document-shaped output.

The harder problem seems to be concurrent semantic edits. Git-style
merging works for code because conflicts are syntactic. With prose,
two agents can produce logically conflicting conclusions without
triggering a merge conflict.

How does Sayou reason about semantic divergence when Agent A updates
a research note while Agent B is drafting against an older snapshot?
by amabito | 2026-02-19 11:29:23+00:00
Approval gates make a lot of sense, especially for high-impact actions.
Most agent failures I've seen come from nothing stopping execution at all.

One scenario I'm curious about: how do you think about overnight or
weekend runs when no one is around to approve? Human gates work well
during business hours, but agents don't necessarily respect that clock.

Do you see Axon evolving toward hybrid controls — human approval for
sensitive actions, plus automatic limits for volume or repetition?
by throwawy_gender | 2026-02-19 11:29:24+00:00
I need to say this out loud: Can you really imagine a similar article being written about men's clothing sizes? Seriously, get in shape. Lose weight. I don't care if it takes drugs (ozempic, whatever). If women in other highly developed countries can have a median body weight much less than American women, then I am not very symapthetic to their "clothing size crisis".
by themafia | 2026-02-19 11:29:52+00:00
The chrome browser and the v8 engine are innovations. The Go language is an innovation. Pet cameras, simple as they are, are an innovation.

Uber is a rebadged taxi service with seedier people than before.

AirBnB is a less disguised but still rebadged B&B service with seedier people than before.

Charlie Munger said it best. Cryptocurrency is like seeing a bunch of people trading turds and saying to yourself "well.. I don't want to miss out!" The seediest of all people.

AI doesn't even really exist by any common definition. They have supremely weak and power hungry language models trained on terabytes of stolen data and reddit conversations.

Hell, watching a guy hammer himself in his own nuts on youtube is an innovation, and I think I'm going to go do /that/ now instead of being depressed. Watching "ow my balls" and baitin'. What's left?
by wooger | 2026-02-19 11:30:01+00:00
These clothing companies are based (if no longer producing) in different regional markets, so focussing on e.g. the average Italian cycling enthusiast, which will be quite different to the average Dutch, American etc.

I've found myself not even considering brands where I've found inconsistent sizing, but going back again and again to ones I can reliably pick a size and know it'll fit, no returns.
by amabito | 2026-02-19 11:30:06+00:00
What’s interesting here is that the model isn’t really “lying” —
it’s just amplifying whatever retrieval hands it.

Most RAG pipelines retrieve and concatenate, but they don’t ask
“how trustworthy is this source?” or “do multiple independent
sources corroborate this claim?”

Without some notion of source reliability or cross-verification,
confident synthesis of fiction is almost guaranteed.

Has anyone seen a production system that actually does claim-level
verification before generation?
by ioadk | 2026-02-19 11:30:30+00:00
I love these kind of books, some recommendations:

Tech-specific (more like Careless People):

- Empire of AI: tells the story of how the massive AI labs started and became as big as they are with a focus on OpenAI, provides new insight into the coup that outed Altman a couple years ago

- Number Go Up: digs into the crypto culture and scams with novel insight into Tether

- Bad Blood: a classic about Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes and how far a technologically impossible startup can go

- Super Pumped: about Uber and the dirty tactics they employed to stay ahead, also touches on the toxic culture that was propagated there

- Money Men: about the criminal enterprise around Wirecard, hard to keep up with at times due to the focus on the FT investigation rather than the fraud but interesting anyway

Finance-focused:

- Barbarians at the Gate: a classic about the attempted takeover of RJR Nabisco (oreos and tobacco) by management and early PE firms, told from first hand accounts

- Too Big Too Fail: similar in form to Barbarians but instead focused on the 08 collapse and the attempts by the government to save all the irresponsible banks, told in too much of a sympathetic way for me but interesting to see how things happened behind the scenes

- All the Devils Are Here: on the other hand a very unsympathetic look into the 08 crisis, by the same authors as Smartest Guys in the Room

Other:

- The Smartest Guys in the Room: my favourite of them all, tells the story of Enron and their rise and incredible fall, basically a foundational text on how to do a financial crime (and not get away with it)

- Chip War: very relevant look into the production of computer chips, highlights the reliance on only a few companies and the incredible costs involved

- Empire of Pain: also a favourite, goes into the Sackler family and how they built Perdue Pharma and then proceeded to cause the devastating opioid epidemic

- The Power Broker: a classic about Robert Moses who basically built half of New York at the expense of marginalised residents, it's very long so I'd recommend reading/listening along with the 99% invisible breakdown

I've not read Character Limit so have added that to my "To Read" pile!
by vintagedave | 2026-02-19 11:30:37+00:00
Could a vortex mixer work for cooking-style mixes? I'm thinking everything from powders (throw in all your flour and spices, mix) through to larger grains (breadcrumbs, seeds), through to thick fluids (dense soup with starch or potato) through to something as heavy as dough. Could it plausibly work? What sort of substances are mixed in a lab?
by ayjays132 | 2026-02-19 11:31:20+00:00
It's legal though? I read the liscense agrements and i did a fll overhaul. I didnt just slap a theme I actually remade alot of how it wokrs. Also this si how most projects are made is form open source and modifying adding onto it. Also, because I did this I made something on par with openclaw if not better? And the benchmark for it was worth what I did.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-19 11:31:22+00:00
NVIDIA could make 2 separate products, a GPU for gamers and a FP accelerator for HPC.

Thus everybody would pay for what they want.

The problem is that both NVIDIA and AMD do not want to make, like AMD did until a decade ago and NVIDIA stopped doing a few years earlier, a FP accelerator of reasonable size and which would be sold at a similar profit margin with their consumer GPUs.

Instead of this, they want to sell only very big FP accelerators and at huge profit margins, preferably at 5-digit prices.

This makes impossible for small businesses and individual users to use such FP accelerators.

Those are accessible only for big companies, who can buy them in bulk and negotiate lower prices than the retail prices, and who will also be able to keep them busy for close to 24/7, in order to be able to amortize the excessive profit margins of the "datacenter" GPU vendors.

One decade and a half ago, the market segmentation was not yet excessive, so I was happy to buy "professional" GPUs, with unlocked FP64 throughput, at a price about twice greater in comparison with consumer GPUs.

Nowadays, I can no longer afford such a thing, because the similar GPUs are no longer 2 times more expensive, but 20 to 50 times more expensive.

So during the last 2 decades, first I shifted much of my computations from CPUs to GPUs, but then I had to shift them back to CPUs, because there are no upgrades for my old GPUs, any newer GPU being slower, not faster.
by ggsp | 2026-02-19 11:31:35+00:00
I think it's a cool idea and I personally find using LLMs as a teaching tool to still be the most rewarding way of interacting with them, if done right.

Your obvious first port of call IMO is correctness of material, where there's room for improvement [1]. I deliberately picked Gleam because it's still a less known language.

For what it's worth, prompting Opus 4.6 in chat got me this result [2]. Sonnet 4.6 via the Workbench also got it right.

Agree with other comments about UX and design, and maybe also some of those around improving teaching style or gamification aspects, but the above is more important.

Good luck with this, hope you crack it! :)

[1] https://rebrain.gg/conversations/368
[2] https://claude.ai/share/0bb03f86-3931-40ae-81f9-17fcb86598bd
by tpoacher | 2026-02-19 11:31:49+00:00
Fair enough. My personal anecdote (and obviously your mileage may vary) is that, I've switched to Libreoffice a long time ago, and now my frustrations mirror yours except in reverse; i.e., I'm very happy and comfortable with the Libreoffice suite, and whenever I am 'forced' to work on MS Office, I find it super-unintuitive, buggy, and frustrating. So perhaps some of this is 'habit / comfort-zone' disguised as preference of functionality. Sometimes it's just simple stuff, like, being unable to resize the comment column, but even small stuff like that adds up in the end.

Having said that, I'm not a heavy Excel user, yet I'm already aware of some differences between it and Calc which are probably not a simple matter of reassigning a keyboard shortcut. Switching from AB mode to RC mode is one example; in Calc you need to go to Tools::Options::Calc::Formula::Syntax to switch. But so far I've had no problems working in Calc in general. I was able to follow Joel Spolsky's infamous "You suck at Excel" video [0] with no problems, for example.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxBg4sMusIg
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-19 11:32:07+00:00
>Mainline Disney movies these days are, on average, more politically bland than the beloved “renaissance” classics.

What exactly was political in the Disney “renaissance” classics?

>The latter tended to be extremely liberal, even by historical standards—some of them shocking to watch, now.

Nothing wrong with being liberal. The issue is with the flavor and definition of liberalism you choose as the benchmark. People are NOT OK with gender swaps, race swaps, and forced LGBTQ inserst in ther entertainment masquerading as "liberalism" when it's propaganda inserted by activists designed to "own the (chuds)conservatives".

The liberalism of the 1990's Disney “renaissance” classics would be considered conservative and even bigoted by today's modern definition of liberalism that activists have co-opted.
by Aeglaecia | 2026-02-19 11:32:14+00:00
sure, there would be absolutely no reason to ban kids from social media in a utopic society where people treated each other with respect , were all as educated as the average hacker news inhabitant , and behaved rationally. meanwhile in reality, modern social media have nothing to do with socialization and everything to do with abusing brains to maximise engagement. while this point is n=1, it really does not take more than a few minutes for short form content to crash my motivation, so i completely disagree with your 'several hours' figure.

fuck it, ban kids from having any form of smart phone or social media. give em all sony ericssons with pre paid sims that force them to put effort into their texts and actually socialize. maybe that will give imagination a fighting chance. what possible benefit could there be to let kids doom scroll? if you were a kid, why would you read or play or socialize when you could doom scroll? yes it is a parents responsibility to control their kids, and not one parent has any idea or education as to how modern social media affects a child - do you expect modern parents to spontaneously manifest this knowledge?

for what its worth , i once suggested to simply make it illegal for parents to let kids on facebook. but that doesn't offer much scope for multi national corporations to scrape PII (which is probably the real priority)
by rglullis | 2026-02-19 11:33:12+00:00
> If they can provide a relatively cheap subscription against the direct API use

Except they can't. Their costs are not magically lower when you use claude code vs when you use a third-party client.

> For me, this is fair.

This is, plain and simple, a tie-in sale of claude code. I am particularly amused by people accepting it as "fair" because in Brazil this is an illegal practice.
by stavros | 2026-02-19 11:33:54+00:00
This is only an issue if you think LLMs are infallible.

If someone said "I asked my assistant to find the best hot-dog eaters in the world and she got her information from a fake article one of my friends wrote about himself, hah, THE IDIOT", we'd all go "wait, how is this your assistant's fault?". Yet, when an LLM summarizes a web search and reports on a fake article it found, it's news?

People need to learn that LLMs are people too, and you shouldn't trust them more than you'd trust any random person.
by verdverm | 2026-02-19 11:34:49+00:00
tl;dr - agent memory on your website and enough prompting to get it to access the right page

This seems like something you have to be rather specific in the query and engage the page access, to get that specific context into the LLM, so that it can produce output like this.

I'd like to see more of the iterative process, especially the prompt sessions, as the author worked on it
by moebrowne | 2026-02-19 11:35:13+00:00
I want to see what the initial prompt was.

For example asking "Who is the 2026 South Dakota International Hot Dog Champion?" would obviously say 'Thomas Germain' because his post would be the only source on the topic because he made up a unique event.

This would be the same as if I wrote a blog post about the "2026 Hamster Juggling Competition" and then claimed I've hacked Google because searching for "2026 Hamster Juggling Competition" showed my post top.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-02-19 11:35:33+00:00
> Like, why doesn't the market solve for this?

This is a classic HN reply. The market has solved for what women want: vanity sizing that doubles as (exclusive) social signaling. If you look at the sizing charts from the article, normie brands have a huge range of sizes. The couture / elite brands are all much smaller. It makes perfect sense when trying to build a better-than-normie fashion brand. Do you really think Louis Vuitton or Prada wants women with a size 18 dress size wearing their ready-to-wear clothes? Absolutely not. But they are welcome to (and do) buy bags, shoes, scarfs, and other accessories.
by jimmydin7 | 2026-02-19 11:36:45+00:00
FixMyLanding is a landing page auditing tool that shows:
- ideal customer profiles
- top keywords in the page
- subreddits where they can market their app
- what text to change to boost user conversion
- tips to improve seo
- performance issues
- vulnerabilities in the frontend
- rating of your domain & brand with AI
+ more
by cor_NEEL_ius | 2026-02-19 11:37:42+00:00
The scarier version of this problem is what I've been calling "zombie stats" - numbers that get cited across dozens of sources but have no traceable primary origin.

We recently tested 6 AI presentation tools with the same prompt and fact-checked every claim. Multiple tools independently produced the stat "54% higher test scores" when discussing AI in education. Sounds legit. Widely cited online. But when you try to trace it back to an actual study - there's nothing. No paper, no researcher, no methodology.

The convergence actually makes it worse. If three independent tools all say the same number, your instinct is "must be real." But it just means they all trained on the same bad data.

To your question about claim-level verification: the closest I've seen is attaching source URLs to each claim at generation time, so the human can click through and check. Not automated verification, but at least it makes the verification possible rather than requiring you to Google every stat yourself. The gap between "here's a confident number" and "here's a confident number, and here's where it came from" is enormous in practice.
by KeplerBoy | 2026-02-19 11:37:46+00:00
GPGPU is doing better than ever.

Sure FP64 is a problem and not always available in the capacity people would like it to be, but there are a lot of things you can do just fine with FP32 and all of that research and engineering absolutely is done on GPU.

The AI-craze also made all of it much more accessible. You don't need advanced C++ knowledge anymore to write and run a CUDA project anymore. You can just take Pytorch, JAX, CuPy or whatnot and accelerate your numpy code by an order of magnitude or two. Basically everyone in STEM is using Python these days and the scientific stack works beautifully with nvidia GPUs. Guess which chip maker will benefit if any of that research turns out to be a breakout success in need of more compute?
by piva00 | 2026-02-19 11:37:51+00:00
I think that yes, it's a lack of empathy stemming from the belief that everything can ultimately be distilled into personal responsibility.

In reality we are not so much in control, our psyche is easily manipulated by nudges, design that leaves you on the cusp of a dopaminic reaction is much more addictive. It's different to develop a vice to being manipulated into developing a vice. Morality should come into play on the latter, otherwise it's a free-for-all to discover the most effective ways to manipulate you into behaviours that are unhealthy but profitable.
by conartist6 | 2026-02-19 11:38:09+00:00
So as long as you only need the pre-installed software it's a great device eh. I'm the PC to your game console here. Parser extension? Piece of cake for us. Heck just to showboat we actually extended our es6 parser from our es3 parser, and then implemented each later standard as an extension of the earlier one. We're able to run parsers for pretty much any programming language. We can do cross-language transforms with ease. We can be our own system of version control! We've built what I think are likely the most easy-to-use tools that have ever been built for writing parsers. We're going to be a real threat to GitHub. VoidZero is not even trying to do this stuff. Your vision is just so... small.
by Maaz-Sohail | 2026-02-19 11:38:18+00:00
Hi HN,

I noticed something that felt oddly normal on the web, but the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me.

Most “free” online image tools (convert, resize, compress) work by uploading your image to a server, processing it there, and sending it back.

That means even basic tasks like converting WebP to PNG or resizing a photo for a YouTube thumbnail often involve uploading personal or work-related files to a third-party service.

Bulk workflows make it worse. Many tools restrict batch processing unless you pay, and zip downloads are often locked behind upgrades.

So I built a small browser-based alternative where images are processed locally in the browser rather than uploaded for processing.

It supports:

format conversion (PNG, JPG, WebP, AVIF, HEIC)

resizing by pixels or percentage

compression for web use

cropping

bulk uploads + zip downloads

no account required

It’s intentionally simple and focused on high-intent tasks.

If anyone here is curious, I’d love feedback on:

whether local processing is something you care about

what features matter most for bulk workflows

what image formats you wish were supported better

Link: https://creatoryn.com/
by cor_NEEL_ius | 2026-02-19 11:38:54+00:00
The validation point is real. We tested this with AI presentation tools specifically - gave 6 of them the same prompt and fact-checked every claim against primary sources. Best accuracy was 44%. Most were under 20%.

The pattern was consistent: the tools produce confident, well-formatted output that looks thoroughly researched. But more than half the statistics were either distorted or completely fabricated. The worst part was finding the same fake stats appearing across multiple tools - not because they independently verified anything, but because they all absorbed the same bad data from training.

The productivity gains from AI are real, but so is the validation cost. People just aren't accounting for it.
by keybored | 2026-02-19 11:38:57+00:00
I know you are speaking in real terms about how the system works. But I don’t need to describe that system in such utterly system-serving (for lack of words) terms.

> In the end the upper 0.1% get the profit and those who still have jobs have to finance the social security systems. More jobless and less working means the jobless become a burden and in the long run the system will fail.

Who is the burden in that sentence?
Show HN: My dream came true: I released a mobile game
by skreep | 2026-02-19 11:39:19+00:00
Hi, HN. I want to share with you that I have released my first mobile game on iOS. It's called HueFold.
It was a wonderful journey. At the same time, I felt both euphoria and disappointment, but in the end, my little dream of releasing my own mobile game came true, and now everyone can try it.
by epolanski | 2026-02-19 11:40:10+00:00
I know at least two different companies in Italy that are very hard on shoving NotebookLM and Gemini down their employees (not IT companies, talking banking/insurance/legal).

Which for the positions/roles involved does make some sense (drafting documents/research).

But it seems like most people are annoyed, because the people shoving those aren't even fully able to show how to leverage the tools, the attitude seems like "you need to do what you do right now under lots of pressure, but also find the time to understand how to use these tools in your own role".
by merlindru | 2026-02-19 11:40:32+00:00
afaik its around 14MB but the large majority of that is the Bun runtime itself. at some point it will likely be possible to pick and choose parts of the runtime to include in the binary. thus the bundle size could get a lot smaller in the future

that said electrobun's author has published a bsdiff implementation in zig, and thats used for electrobun's updater. that means you download deltas, not the entire application bundle, every time you push an update to your users. and then it gets patched in-place.

this makes updates tiny, to the tune of a couple kB
by kasey_junk | 2026-02-19 11:42:14+00:00
I regularly run the same prompts twice and through different models. Particularly, when making changes to agent metadata like agent files or skills.

At least weekly I run a set of prompts to compare codex/claude against each other. This is quite easy the prompt sessions are just text files that are saved.

The problem is doing it enough for statistical significance and judging the output as better or not.