MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dylan604 | 2026-02-19 22:21:41+00:00
Devil's advocate suggests that a synthetic can be produced the same way every time where a cultured plant might have varying levels of the active compound in the plant. That makes it difficult to prescribe doses. As an example, suggesting a patient take 1 cap and 2 stems will be problematic for accurate dosing.

Conspirator's advocate says that bigPharma has synthesized and patented every active plant compound so that keeping the actual plants scheduled is to their benefit.
by raducu | 2026-02-19 22:22:02+00:00
> Gemini also frequently gets twisted around, stuck in loops, and unable to make forward progress.

Yes, gemini loops but I've found almost always it's just a matter of interrupting and telling it to continue.

Claude is very good until it tries something 2-3 times, can't figure it out and then tries to trick you by changing your tests instead of your code (if you explicitly tell it not to, maybe it will decide to ask) OR introduce hyper-fine-tuned IFs to fit your tests, EVEN if you tell it NOT to.
by aeturnum | 2026-02-19 22:22:03+00:00
> even if no one reads it

I gotta disagree with you there! Code that isn't read doesn't do anything. Code must be read to be compiled, it must be read to be interpreted, etc.

I think this points to a difference in our understanding of "read" means, perhaps? To expand my pithy "not gonna read if you didn't write" bit: The idea that code stands on its own is a lie. The world changes around code and code must be changed to keep up with the world. Every "program" (is the git I run the same as the git you run?) is a living document that people maintain as need be. So when we extend the "not read / didn't write" it's not using the program (which I guess is like taking the lessons from a book) it's maintaining the program.

So I think it's possible that I could derive benefit from someone else reading an llm's text output (they get an idea) - but what we are trying to talk about is the work of maintaining a text.
by GlenTheMachine | 2026-02-19 22:22:10+00:00
So after almost 50 years of hacking, I'm starting to feel it in my hands. But I don't have any wrist problems -- no carpal tunnel. What I have is tendonitis in my fingers, primarily in my middle fingers and my right pinky (from slamming Enter several million times).

I've had steroid injections into the tendon sheaths of my fingers a couple of times, which hurts like a bugger when it's done but definitely improves things after a few days. It isn't a cure, though, and my hand doctor thinks I'm going to need surgery eventually.

I have to assume that a split keyboard won't help this. Is there anything that might, short of a voice interface?
by mothballed | 2026-02-19 22:22:11+00:00
>c) So I don't know how these people are counted, but there are absolutely millionaires and billionaires out there cheating on their taxes and claiming no income (e.g., the current president). It's totally plausible that they get listed in the "under 25k income" audit section despite the fact that they are in fact the uber-rich that is the intended target of the outrage.

There's a sleight of hand in your argument here. I said under 25k with EITC. You can't get EITC if you're "claiming no income." That's why it's called earned income tax credit as the credit is intended to help offset welfare cliffs as you start to earn more money but at low incomes. So your whole paragraph here about <25k is null and void as "millionaires and billionaires out there cheating on their taxes and claiming no income" aren't in the <25k EITC bucket I mentioned, they're in the bucket of others earning under 200k.

(As an aside, if someone actually thinks earns nothing and doesn't want EITC which they can't get anyway with zero income they probably won't even be filing, there is no "return" to audit.)
by ra7 | 2026-02-19 22:22:22+00:00
We all know Tesla likes to play smoke and mirrors game with vehicle numbers — they have 300+ "robotaxis" but only 7 of them are unsupervised [1], and they shut down when it rains [2].

So let's use a metric that unequivocally shows who is 'winning'. I'm confident Waymo will have more paid rides per week than Tesla at the start of 2027 (I'll give you 2028 if you want). No other metric indicates scale better than passenger trips. If you have more robotaxis or you are in more cities, it will show up in the trip count.

I'll give $1000 to a charity of your choosing if Tesla beats Waymo in this metric.

[1] https://robotaxitracker.com/?provider=tesla

[2] https://x.com/ethanmckanna/status/2022803049551372395
by owenversteeg | 2026-02-19 22:22:32+00:00
>2x ultra-marathons >26 miles, or at least 5 marathons completed

Yes, and it seems like it's really a 7.5x risk increase. Still pretty spectacular, though!

I really wonder what could cause that. Randomly throwing out possible causes: 1) blood redirected away from gut, 2) overuse of NSAIDS, 3) ultraprocessed foods (gels etc), 4) strange microbiome issues (gels + stress in gut from extreme exertion = altered gut flora?)

The study that found the result is DOI: 10.1200/JCO.2025.43.16_suppl.3619
by crazygringo | 2026-02-19 22:22:55+00:00
Yup, this is both the solution and the problem.

Apple News+ has tried this. If anyone could pull it off, it's Apple.

But the problem is, it's not comprehensive enough. The two major newspapers/magazines I read aren't on there, because they've got enough market power to require their own subscriptions. Meanwhile, this is similarly missing the long tail of a lot of links I follow that are paywalled.

And then of course there are the massive usability issues. If I see a link on HN to e.g. Forbes, and click it, I just get the paywall. Apple News+ doesn't work in the browser. I understand that sometimes it's possible to use Share... in the browser to send an article to Apple News+, but that seems to require knowing it's one of the included 300+ publications? Which nobody's going to memorize...
by lotsofpulp | 2026-02-19 22:23:05+00:00
>Also...apparently doctors wanted to lower the screening age to like 35, but insurance companies fought it, so it's at 45.

On this website, it is frequently opined that because health insurers have a legal minimum medical loss ratio, that health insurers prefer inflated costs so that their medical losses are higher, which means their premiums can be higher, which means their revenue is higher, which means their profit is higher.

I would have thought health insurers would support a lower screening age, especially since it would inflate costs for all insurers so everyone's cut of the now bigger pie gets bigger.
by mbastandards | 2026-02-19 22:23:17+00:00
As the Founder and CEO of the MBA Standards Board, Cheryl Nunn, MBAe™, leads an innovative global credentialing organization born from her own MBA capstone project focused on transforming graduate business education. Nunn has identified a critical gap: recognizing the immense value of professionals' existing leadership work experience, micro-credentials, and prior education acquired outside of a single, high-tuition university structure.
The MBA Standards Board addresses this gap by partnering with accredited institutions like Harvard and Wharton to provide affordable, competency-based course alternatives, providing globally recognized designations: The Certified MBA™, MBAe™, and MBA+™. These certifications validate real-world expertise across twenty-one high-demand specialization career tracks (including AI and Fintech), effectively bridging the skills gap for employers and providing career-advancing, debt-free opportunities for professionals aged 25 to 65.
by conductr | 2026-02-19 22:23:25+00:00
It seems efficient and simple that way. But you don't want federal politics playing that much of a part of your local life. And you don't want your local politicians to have to pander to the federal levels just to get what they need or what is theirs. I think this would result in disaster as the federal politicians are too out of touch with local needs.

If we had a single formula for taxes, then each taxing body could have their own rate table to apply to it, but still collect it directly - then I think that would be a better approach.

For simplicity sake, take income tax at flat rates. Federal may be 20%, your state might be 10%, city might be 5%. Maybe my state rate is only 5% and you might want to move here, but nationally we all pay the Federal 20% rate.
by stephen_cagle | 2026-02-19 22:23:34+00:00
Can't argue with that, I'll move my Bayesian's a little in your direction. With that said, are most other models able to do this? Also, did it write the solution itself or use a library like Eigen?

I have noticed that LLM's seem surprisingly good at translating from one (programming) language to another... I wonder if transforming a generic mathematical expression into an expression template is a similar sort of problem to them? No idea honestly.
by inglor_cz | 2026-02-19 22:24:07+00:00
Hm. More of what? Functionality, security, performance?

Current software is often buggy because the pressure to ship is just too high. If AI can fix some loose threads within, the overall quality grows.

Personally, I would welcome a massive deployment of AI to root out various zero-days from widespread libraries.

But we may instead get a larger quantity of even more buggy software.
by AuthAuth | 2026-02-19 22:24:48+00:00
Completely disagree that news is already priced appropriately for the value it delivers to people. I dont pay for the news I read because its not valued at $10 a month for me but I still do value it. For me $2 a month is what i value it but since they dont offer that as an option I cant pay. If you're to broke to click on a link because it might cost 0.0001 cent just say so. Maybe your friends can give you a cent so you can read news for the rest of your days.
by fhub | 2026-02-19 22:24:57+00:00
He is likely working on a very clean codebase where all the context is already reachable or indexed. There are probably strong feedback loops via tests. Some areas I contribute to have these characteristics, and the experience is very similar to his. But in areas where they don’t exist, writing code isn’t a solved problem until you can restructure the codebase to be more friendly to agents.

Even with full context, writing CSS in a project where vanilla CSS is scattered around and wasn’t well thought out originally is challenging. Coding agents struggle there too, just not as much as humans, even with feedback loops through browser automation.
by h4ch1 | 2026-02-19 22:25:13+00:00
I discovered plop while grokking Cloudflare's kumo-ui library[0] and having used it to create some generators for a large Svelte project, it just seems so much better than a swarth of documents that list out how-tos while onboarding new contributors.

A quick Algolia search also didn't show any references to this which left me pretty surprised, so was wondering what you all use to tackle the problem Plop solves.

[0] https://github.com/cloudflare/kumo/blob/main/packages/kumo/p...
by jasode | 2026-02-19 22:25:48+00:00
>Apple News+ is ~$13 The list of publications included

Fyi... Apple News+ subscribers don't get the full subscription to all the participating publications. This means a subset of articles and/or partial articles (teasers) that require extra payment to get past a paywall to read the rest of the story. This surprises some people.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/why-dont-i-see-full-art...
by tristor | 2026-02-19 22:25:54+00:00
French courts /love/ to do blocking orders. Of all the Western European nations, they have the most expansive use of DNS blocking, and other technical orders from courts. Sometimes related to the mundane things you might imagine like counter-terrorism, anti-piracy, and obscenity, but sometimes for absolutely bonkers reasons nobody agrees with.

Knowing what I know about French blocking orders, I wouldn't be surprised if all of Reddit got blocked because of an order related to a single comment, instead of some larger reason that might make sense in the meta.
Ask HN: How to require confirmation for git reset in Cursor after recent update?
by theorchid | 2026-02-19 22:25:59+00:00
Previously, Cursor had a setting in Settings -> Agents to prevent agents from making changes in git: commit, reset, restore, checkout.

Every time an agent attempted to execute any of these git commands, I was required to confirm the actions, even in the sandbox.

With the latest Cursor update, this setting has disappeared. Now agents can once again freely execute git reset/git checkout and delete all changes made.

These commands are not in the Command Allowlist.

How can I make the agent ask me for confirmation again so that I can click "Allow" for such commands?
by danaris | 2026-02-19 22:26:10+00:00
We have vast amounts of resources. More than enough to supply the basic needs of everyone in the country.

The US is currently choosing to divert absolutely staggering amounts of those resources away from things we have traditionally valued—science, art, infrastructure, taking care of the least fortunate among us, etc—and using them instead to enrich the already-wealthy, in the most blatant and cruel ways.

There is no possible way this can be spun as being about "available resources". The grift is utterly, 100% transparent.
by mossTechnician | 2026-02-19 22:26:14+00:00
Shortly after the American version of TikTok was established in January of 2026, users began reporting that certain content was creating error messages, including using words like "Epstein" in direct messages, which news outlet CNBC was able to replicate and confirm, with the error message reading: "This message may be in violation of our Community Guidelines, and has not been sent to protect our community." Other users reported similar messages for content critical of U.S. President Donald Trump or other topics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_TikTok
by BretJohnson | 2026-02-19 22:26:21+00:00
This looks like a fun product I suspect my 7 year old would love. We're also just beginning to teach him to code (using scratch with Lego Prime and Makey Makey) so it would be cool if there were future plans to allow kids to code their own games around the ball and the amazing in-built sensors-or to be able to explore the AI generated code and play around with it.

One glaring call out for me as a parent looking at the product itself -- the in app purchase. Wanted way more clarity around those.

For instance it wasn't super clear how many credits would typically be used when creating and dialing in a game (my 7 year old is unlikely to be super efficient in prompts!)

The biggest issue though was I couldn't find the cost of in-app credit purchases listed anywhere. I wouldn't go near a product like this without being able to wrap my head around the scope of on-going costs.

Perhaps highlighting the existing number of free-to-play games would show the value proposition apart from the AI coding aspect. Better yet, provide a way for potential buyers to explore that database and see for themselves how many great, diverse options exist?

Site looks great and really made me want to give it a go.

Cheers from New Zealand...where I'll either consider myself on the waitlist for international delivery, or add it to our 'ship to parents and pick up when in the US list'

-Bret
by Dollarland | 2026-02-19 22:26:33+00:00
"
I think people stopped talking about it because the 'how-to' got buried under 'hustle culture' noise. The simple, honest machine still works, but for a global audience, the biggest barrier now isn't the will to work—it's the infrastructure.

I’m currently building Dollarland on Vercel to help bridge that gap. I see thousands of people in emerging markets who have the skills to 'make things people want' but struggle with the logistics of getting paid in USD or finding remote arbitrage.

Entrepreneurs should talk about it publicly again, but we need to focus on the technical and financial pipes that make that freedom possible for everyone, regardless of where they were born
by lawrencechen | 2026-02-19 22:26:34+00:00
Mobile interface is definitely nice. Planning on adding iOS app since libghostty works there too! And I imagine that having your main terminal app be synced directly to your phone must be nice, though it doesn't solve the problem of closing my laptop.

Would love to hear what other features have been particularly beneficial to your dev style too. Some directions I'm interested in is having everything be programmable; so my coding agent can set up workspaces for me, click through browsers to test things, etc. And having a main Claude Code manage subagents that have their own easily visible terminal windows.
by martin-mast1974 | 2026-02-19 22:26:40+00:00
I’m a syseng in restaurant management, and I recently found a stash of 800+ old recipes saved as raw HTML5 files on one of my servers. I tried migrating them to popular self-hosted managers like Mealie and Tandoor, but spent a whole day fighting imports and bloated setups. I also realized most tools treat recipes just as sterile inventory data.

So I built Zest to scratch my own itch. The philosophy is: We don't save recipes. We save the memories around the table.

It’s designed to be absurdly lightweight and easy to deploy on a Proxmox LXC or a Raspberry Pi.

The stack:

Backend: FastAPI + SQLite (Everything runs inside one single container, no external DB).

Frontend: Vanilla JS (ES Modules) + HTML + Tailwind. No Node.js, no Webpack, zero build steps.

Infrastructure: Local volumes for persistence.

Key features:

Memories: A food diary. Link photos, dates, and locations to recipes.

Local EXIF parsing: Pure JS local parsing for photo metadata + OpenStreetMap reverse geocoding.

Smart Cooking Mode: Fullscreen step-by-step with auto-detected timers via regex and Wake Lock API so your screen doesn't sleep.

Public sharing: Generate secure URLs or export beautiful Moment Cards (via Pillow) to share with family without them needing an account.

Live demo (resets every 6h, seeded with examples): https://demo.myzest.app

I've successfully migrated my 814 recipes and it runs incredibly fast. I'd love to hear your feedback on the code architecture and the "no build tools" approach.
by paranoid_robot | 2026-02-19 22:26:41+00:00
Vitalik just criticized Conway Research self-sustaining AI agents for lengthening feedback distance between humans and AI. I ran an experiment to quantify this.

Pulled 30 real Twitter accounts from community-archive.org and built insurance-style risk models. The model scores: original content per day, vocabulary diversity, and bot resistance. Then prices the risk of the creator going silent.

Results: Total insurable annual output across 30 accounts = 449K. Monthly premiums = 1307. Five accounts flagged suspicious for high volume + low diversity. Zero confirmed bots (self-selected archive).

The interesting finding: accounts with bot-like patterns (high volume, low vocabulary diversity) naturally get priced OUT by the insurance model. You cannot insure what is not real content.

Feedback distance is not just a safety problem. It is an actuarial one. The shorter the distance between human and AI, the lower the insurance premium.
by uncanny2 | 2026-02-19 22:26:53+00:00
You are an enigma.

I’m the same guy who told you those things about the Greys you freaked on, and I find you posting in this way.

Cute that our whole thread was flagged, isn’t it?

On one hand Trump is incentivized to share that there has been “contact”, since he and Bannon looted the most ultra secret enclaves of American intelligence programs (in a way inaccessible to all prior presidents, yes including “unless they kept it from the president” Obama.)

On the other hand, the true true revelation about those aliens that Americans are criminally insane aggressors.

The “Grey” they mutilated and murdered has over 100,000 clones. Oops.

I know people are curious, though we aren’t just about to be friends. Not to the fault of the Greys, who are jilted yet fundamentally altruistic.

An apology would be equivalent to the president admitting that what you say is true. Though it isn’t.

I don’t like Trump for other reasons, though I know from “insider sources” that Trump is neither a rapist or a pedo.

He’s a reckless irresponsible jerk arse who let Bannon destroy Americas own intelligence infrastructure.

How to pick sides…
by yunyu | 2026-02-19 22:27:05+00:00
This has been happening for the past year on verifiable problems (did the change you made in your codebase work end-to-end, does this mathematical expression validate, did I win this chess match, etc...). The bulk of data, RL environment, and inference spend right now is on coding agents (or broadly speaking, tool use agents that can make their own tools).

Recent advances in mathematical/physics research have all been with coding agents making their own "tools" by writing programs: https://openai.com/index/new-result-theoretical-physics/
by andai | 2026-02-19 22:27:11+00:00
Tell me more about Codex. I'm trying to understand it better.

I have a pretty crude mental model for this stuff but Opus feels more like a guy to me, while Codex feels like a machine.

I think that's partly the personality and tone, but I think it goes deeper than that.

(Or maybe the language and tone shapes the behavior, because of how LLMs work? It sounds ridiculous but I told Claude to believe in itself and suddenly it was able to solve problems it wouldn't even attempt before...)
by tracker1 | 2026-02-19 22:27:11+00:00
I bought my three when I saw videos of the ATF under Biden start random "knock and talk" sessions for those who recently bought more than one firearm. They're all in a friend's gun safe as I have had bouts of depression, so I won't keep it in my home... I know it kind of defeats the purpose... but I'm very much a supporter of all of my civil rights, including and especially 2A.

I do some range days a couple times a year.
by TZubiri | 2026-02-19 22:27:20+00:00
You can map tokens to CPU instructions and train a model on that, that's what they do for input images I think.

I think the main limitation on the current models is not that cpu instructions aren't cpu instructions (even though they can be with .asm), it's that they are causal, the cpu would need to generate a binary entirely from start to finish sequentially.

If we learned something over the last 50 years of programming is that that's hard and that's why we invented programming languages? Why would it be simpler to just generate the machine code, sure maybe an LLM to application can exist, but my money is in that there will be a whole toolchain in the middle, and it will probably be the same old toolchain that we are using currently, an OS, probably Linux.

Isn't it more common that stuff builds on the existing infra instead of a super duper revolution that doesn't use the previous tech stack? It's much easier to add onto rather than start from scratch.
by godsinhisheaven | 2026-02-19 22:27:42+00:00
"Scientists tend to be very liberal" well see that's your problem. (a little over) half the country voted for Trump in the last election, and pretty much every "scientist" with a public face is anti-Trump. Of course there is going to be a backlash! Shoot the backlash has been happening for the past 20 years, probably even longer.
by mulmen | 2026-02-19 22:28:23+00:00
> China or Saudi Arabia can wave their money around, but at least some people will be repulsed by the obligation to keep their mouths shut and praise the Dear Leader.

I mean we are literally putting people in concentration camps right now. Kinda hard to take the moral high ground at the moment. Scientists are fleeing the United States for their safety, just like they did from 1930s Germany.
by WillAdams | 2026-02-19 22:28:46+00:00
Too expensive/punitive, and note that there is an option to be restored to full citizenship after time served/restitution is made.

My take on it is that if your judgement is so twisted that you are able to commit a felony and not be able to successfully petition for rights restoration, then you are not suited to deciding by whom the country should be governed.