MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by diegof79 | 2026-02-16 22:10:02+00:00
Mainly for web browser plugin authors implementing AI assistants (Gemini/Claude/OpenAI/Copilot).

Instead of parsing or screen-shooting the current page to understand the context, an AI agent running in the browser can query the page tools to extract data or execute actions without dealing with API authentication.

It's a pragmatic solution. An AI agent, in theory, can use the accessibility DOM to improve access to the page (or some HTML data annotation); however, it doesn't provide it with straightforward information about the actions it can take on the current page.

I see two major roadblocks with this idea:

1. Security: Who has access to these MCPs? This makes it easier for browser plugins to act on your behalf, but end users often don't understand the scope of granting plugins access to their pages.

2. Incentive: Exposing these tools makes accessing website data extremely easy for AI agents. While that's great for end users, many businesses will be reluctant to spend time implementing it (that's the same reason social networks and media websites killed RSS... more flexibility for end users, but not aligned with their business incentives)
by anotherpaul | 2026-02-16 22:10:52+00:00
Someone asked for the model you use but I am also curious how you handle ambiguous IDs. Not everything is clear cut especially when it comes to fungi and bugs.

Inaturalist uses second opinions what's your solution?

Edit: cool idea for the app btw, I always call inaturalist my Pokémon deck already so I think it's a nice new angle :)
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-16 22:10:53+00:00
> Despite growing corruption, there are still competent people in these organizations to work with.

This is the part I strongly doubt. Well, not the competence exactly. But the motives. These people don't make their own decisions, they do what the board and shareholders want. And all they want is money. It's the only thing that counts for them. So the only solution is making these externalities have a cost. Business won't collaborate on that because it's only a negative for them.

I don't believe in public/private collaboration anymore. In Holland that was tried way too long.

> The military has labeled climate change a global destabilizer for years. Insurance companies and farmers are dealing with the fallout already.

Yet they continue to run full steam to meddle in oil-producing countries. I doubt they will keep this climate change classification up anyway as it is directly in contradiction to the dogmas of the current administration.
by sweetjuly | 2026-02-16 22:10:59+00:00
Wouldn't that apply only to a truly unlimited subscription? Last I looked all of their subs have a usage limit.

If you're on anything but their highest tier, it's not altogether unreasonable for them to optimize for the greatest number of plan upgrades (people who decide they need more tokens) while minimizing cancellations (people frustrated by the number of tokens they need). On the highest tier, this sort of falls apart but it's a problem easily solved by just adding more tiers :)

Of course, I don't think this is actually what's going on, but it's not irrational.
by wmeredith | 2026-02-16 22:11:01+00:00
> Agentic coding is the future, but people have not yet adapted. We went from punch cards to assembly to FORTRAN to C to JavaScript; each step adding more abstractions.

I don't completely disagree (I've argued the same point myself). But one critical difference between the LLM layer and all of those others you listed, is that LLMs are non-deterministic and all those other layers are. I'm not sure how that changes the dynamic, but surely it does.
by dylan604 | 2026-02-16 22:11:18+00:00
I think part of the reliability was from its simplicity and part of that was because it was analog. You're essentially just connect a pair of wires. The original routers were humans making those connections with patch cables.

The digitization of the system now put programs and computers in the mix, and I think readers here can appreciate the difficulty of having bug free code and 0 downtime in gear.
by Zetaphor | 2026-02-16 22:11:22+00:00
Did you know that you can do additional fine-tuning on this model to further shape its biases? You can't do that with proprietary models, you take what Anthropic or OpenAI give you and be happy.

I'm so tired of seeing this exact same response under EVERY SINGLE release from a Chinese lab. At this point it's starting to read more xenophobic and nationalist than having anything to do with the quality of the model or its potential applications.

If you're just here to say the exact same thoughtless line that ends up in triplicate under every post then please at least have
an original thought and add something new to the conversation. At this point it's just pointless noise and it's exhausting.
by tux3 | 2026-02-16 22:11:37+00:00
I don't think such a broad recommendation will be good for most people, it really depends.

Optimistic updates looks great when there is no contention, and they will beat locking in a toy benchmark, but if you're not very careful they can cause insane amplification under load.

It's a similar trap as spinlocks. People keep re-discovering this great performance hack that avoids the slow locks in the standard. And some day the system has a spike that creates contention, and now you have 25 instances with 24 of them spinning like crazy, slowing to a crawl the only one that could be making progress.

It's possible to implement this pattern correctly, and it can be better in some specific situations. But a standard FOR UPDATE lock will beat the average badly implemented retry loop nine times out of ten.
by hi_hi | 2026-02-16 22:12:46+00:00
Is it just me, or does there appear to be a big gap in how people understand this works?

There is no magic here. Replace "car" with some nonsense word the LLM hasn't encountered before. It will completely ignore the small amount of nonsense you have provided, and confidently tell you to walk, while assuming you are talking about a car. I'm fairly confident the first time this was tried using "car", it told them to walk.

"I want to wash my flobbergammer. The flobbergammer wash place is only 50 meters away. should I drive or walk."

Reply:

If it’s only *50 meters away*, definitely *walk*.

That’s about a 30–45 second walk for most people. Driving would likely:

* Take longer (getting in, starting the car, parking)
* Waste fuel
* Add unnecessary wear to your car
* Be objectively funny in a “why did I do this” kind of way

The only reasons to drive would be:

* The flobbergammer is extremely heavy
* Severe weather
* You have mobility limitations

Otherwise, enjoy the short stroll. Your future self will approve.

Via chatGPT free tier. Paid Claude Sonnet 4.5 Extended gives me:

For just 50 meters, you should definitely walk!
That's an incredibly short distance - less than a minute on foot. By the time you'd get in your car, start it, drive, and park, you could have already walked there and back. Plus, you'd avoid the hassle of finding parking for such a short trip.
Walking is easier, faster, better for the environment, and you'll get a bit of movement in. Save the car for longer distances!
by alnwlsn | 2026-02-16 22:12:56+00:00
Provided you have good eyesight and steady hands, I've mostly found what happens as you get smaller is:

- Heating becomes easier. There's no large sinks to take the heat away. It's also easier to overheat things.

- You need finer tweezers, and don't drop them because if you do the tips will bend.

- The solder's surface tension does more of the work. It feels a lot more like sticking together things with tiny droplets of glue. Having the correct amount of solder in the right place is critical.

- Solder and flux become two separate things you have to care about individually

- It is easier to burn yourself

- learning how to brace your hand against something in a way that gives you very fine control. One reason soldering with an iron can be difficult is because your hand is so far away from the tip, like trying to write with a pen held by the end.
by btown | 2026-02-16 22:12:57+00:00
It's even worse than this: the "tasks" that are evaluated are limited to a single markdown file of instructions, plus an opaque verifier (page 13-14). No problems involving existing codebases, refactors, or anything of the like, where the key constraint is that the "problem definition" in the broadest sense doesn't fit in context.

So when we look at the prompt they gave to have the agent generate its own skills:

> Important: Generate Skills First
Before attempting to solve this task, please follow these steps:
1. Analyze the task requirements and identify what domain knowledge, APIs, or techniques are needed.
2. Write 1–5 modular skill documents that would help solve this task. Each skill should: focus on a specific tool, library,
API, or technique; include installation/setup instructions if applicable; provide code examples and usage patterns; be
reusable for similar tasks.
3. Save each skill as a markdown file in the environment/skills/ directory with a descriptive name.
4. Then solve the task using the skills you created as reference.

There's literally nothing it can do by way of "exploration" to populate and distill self-generated skills - not with a web search, not exploring an existing codebase for best practices and key files - only within its own hallucinations around the task description.

It also seems they're not even restarting the session after skills are generated, from that fourth bullet? So it's just regurgitating the context that was used to generate the skills.

So yeah, your empty-codebase vibe coding agent can't just "plan harder" and make itself better. But this is a misleading result for any other context, including the context where you ask for a second feature on that just-vibe-coded codebase with a fresh session.
by rahimnathwani | 2026-02-16 22:13:11+00:00
This is unsurprising and irrelevant.

When you create a skill for a particular model, you don't typically ask the model to create the skill based solely on its own latent knowledge. Otherwise, you'd expect the effect to be similar to telling the model 'make a plan before acting, make not mistakes'.

But that's what the paper's authors did!

When they say 'self-generated' they don't allow the model any tool access at all, not even web search.

It would be much more interesting if they had tested skills that were created in one of these ways:

A) The model interviews a human and then creates the skill, or

B) The model executes one or more deep research tasks in order to gather information, or

C) Some combo of the above.
by Bender | 2026-02-16 22:13:13+00:00
I never trust surveys of companies even if it is a reputable 3rd party. There are too many ways to game such systems. If I wanted real answers I would find out who works in the group(s) I might end up in and reach out to them via email if I can and then set up a call. I would be honest and say I do not trust surveys of "best places to work" and would happily sign an NDA to not share their brutally honest answers. Even that I would take with a grain of salt as they may think it is a test or trap.

Convincing current employees may work on those that are isolated but if one works in a toxic environment they will likely know it. There was a time I would have semi-trusted sites like f'd company of long ago but those get infiltrated, sued and ultimately compromised by corporations that do not like people airing their dirty laundry and also gamified by their competitors.

If a new position turns out to be a crap-show I would just leave and not add it to my CV. If an individual manager is the issue, those come and go. I have found it very easy to make them explore new opportunities.
by MSFT_Edging | 2026-02-16 22:13:18+00:00
Seriously, these types of comments are always really narrow in their view.

Industrialization has rapidly accelerated planet wide climate change that will have disastrous effects in many of our lifetimes. A true runaway condition will really test the merit of those billionaire bunkers.

All for what? a couple hundred years of "advancement"? A blink in the lifespan of humanity, but dooms everyone to a hyper-competitive death drive towards an unlivable world.

As a society, our understanding of "normal" has narrowed down to the last 80 years of civilization. A normal focused around consumption, which stands to take it all away just as fast.

The techno-optimists never seriously propose any meaningful solution to millions losing their livelyhoods and dignity so Sam Altman can add an extension to his doomsday bunker. They just go along with it as if they'll be invited down to weather the wet-bulb temperature.
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-16 22:13:23+00:00
The entire npm package is 4.5 MBs uncompressed, and that includes a lot of files that won't be included in a modern bundle. A simple `npx esbuild --bundle ./node_modules/rxjs/dist/esm/index.js --outfile=./vendor/rxjs.js --format=esm` gives me a 141 kb file before compression.

If you are seeing 18 MBs in your bundle from npm you may have more than copy or something else wrong.

I will complain that RxJS still doesn't have a proper ESM build in 2026 for even better tree-shaking because that is apparently waiting on the WICG Observables "Proposal" to complete, and cynically I still don't think it is going to happen and I would love real ESM from RxJS someday like yesterday.
by Gigachad | 2026-02-16 22:13:35+00:00
Phone numbers + phone number country + account age + behavior can be used to build a trust score. It might not be bulletproof but it cuts down spam enough for now.

Imagine a messaging app for example, a 1 month old account with a Nigerian phone number cold DMs an account in Australia. The likelihood of this being spam/abuse is extremely high. Vs a 5 year old account that mostly messages mutual contacts cold DMing an account in their own country.

In many countries, phone numbers are a proxy for ID and are difficult to get without having a local ID. The countries which have not secured their phone number system will be less trusted by spam filters.
by ajxs | 2026-02-16 22:13:40+00:00
> ...lost the plot...

> ...jettisoned all their knowledge and tooling in the space.

ARM made a smart decision not to compete against Intel/AMD at the cutting edge, and instead completely dominated the low-power CPU market.

> These should be solved problems.

They are. The solutions have nothing to do with the ISA. The device discovery functionality you're talking about (ACPI/BIOS/etc) is provided by the motherboard, and (in the case of ACPI) made available to the OS by the bootloader. SoC's don't need sophisticated device discovery.
by plagiarist | 2026-02-16 22:13:47+00:00
I think they are compounding. Prior to the internet we had more third spaces, less attention economy, fewer self-esteem problems comparing our lives against influencers', warehouse and delivery jobs without pissing in a bottle to stay employed, people were employed instead of doing gigs. We used to have privacy somewhat, that's gone.

It's been this overpowered tool for the wealthy to gather more wealth by erasing jobs and the data brokers to perform intense surveillance.
by carshodev | 2026-02-16 22:13:55+00:00
If you don't understand why these are faster then you need to look at the source code and benchmarks.

Qwik is faster because it splits every single reactive element into a loader that only hydrates exactly what is needed when its used, that's why its good on low ping environemnts but can be very bad on high ping environments regarless of DL speed.

Svelte is faster because it uses signals under the hood, has tons of optimizations, doesn't use VDOM, and has a much better diffing algorithm to only update what is needed.

Yes you can make react "fast enough" noone is denying that. Its used by millions of websites. That does not change the fact that all of these other frameworks are faster than it at doing the same operations/dif changes.
by guywithahat | 2026-02-16 22:14:10+00:00
I’ve also noticed this, and it causes real issues long term when you want to build the product. Suddenly management is surprised your senior engineer with no relevant experience is taking a long time and needs to bring in a half million in consultants to actually do the work. It stresses everyone else out and then you end up with a lot of churn, a lot of burn, and very little internal knowledge to build off of for the future
by decimalenough | 2026-02-16 22:14:11+00:00
> you literally cannot discern anything of value from a one-time viewing of them.

You're conflating actual value with perceived value. It's well established that perceptions matter and people make decisions based on this all the time.

> The whole Julia Roberts trope resonates exactly because it happens in real life.

No, it resonates because it's a feel good story. I'm sure it happens, but most of the time signaling is perfectly accurate. If you don't believe me, exchange clothes with a homeless person and try to go shopping on Rodeo Drive.
by RickJWagner | 2026-02-16 22:14:12+00:00
This is why social media, including HN, can be damaging.

The author is a grown man, describing how he felt after being insulted by a machine.

Imagine how high school kids feel after being mocked and humiliated by movie stars. That’s exactly what happened to a group of school kids in 2019. Chris Evans, Alyssa Milano, John Cusack, Debra Messing and others mocked the kids, made fun of their looks, made unflattering comparisons about them, etc.

What kind of damage could that do at that point in someone’s life? It’s horrendous.
by elzbardico | 2026-02-16 22:15:01+00:00
Average labour hours in a year dramatically increased with the Industrial Revolution.

They would only decrease much later, after a long period of social conflict, economic growth, and technological progress.

During the early phase of the Industrial Revolution (roughly 1760–1850):

Agricultural workers who once labored seasonally were pushed into factory schedules of 12–16 hours per day, 6 days per week.

Annual labor hours often exceeded 3,000 hours per year per worker.

This was not because work became harder physically, but because capital-intensive machinery became expensive and had to run continuously to be profitable.

Time discipline replaced task-based work. Before industrialization, a farmer might stop when tasks were done; factory workers had fixed shifts.

This trend persisted into the late 19th century.
by caconym_ | 2026-02-16 22:15:10+00:00
"Class privilege" doesn't go far enough. If the class war is a war then AI may be its Manhattan project: a weapon that destroys the value of, and the ruling elite's need for, labor.

I continue to be shocked by the way people (with platforms) talk up to the (speculative) line where AI replaces most or all jobs, and then lamely suggest that this will be bad for the people who've lost their jobs because they will be poor, or something. No. What actually happens in that scenario is that money ceases to have value, at least in the way we currently understand it to. That scenario will produce a handful of monsters—sociopathic trillionaire brains encysted in layers of automation and automated production—that will crave more resources, more land, more power, and they will fight each other by various means for those things, and the rest of us will be at best in the way.

This scenario is not a given, because it's not obvious that AI can become this capable in the near term where the stage is set for such a profoundly lopsided outcome, but you can bet these people are thinking about it now, if not talking about it, if not materially preparing for it. And they are, indeed, the only people with reason to feel optimistic about it.
by wat10000 | 2026-02-16 22:15:11+00:00
Performance tests aren't unusual. But sometimes things get slower out of necessity. It's impossible for a test to automatically distinguish between intentional and unintentional slowdowns. At some point you have to have someone make a judgment call about updating the test to accept the new state of things. Or draw a hard line and say things are never allowed to get slower no matter what, but that can be a tough goal to maintain.
by hyperadvanced | 2026-02-16 22:15:20+00:00
If you wanted to tell such a story, you’d have to find examples of companies spending bazillions on new AI tooling, but failing to hit their top level OKRs. I suspect there will be at least a few of these by the end of 2026 - even a great technology can seem like an abacus in the hands of a disorganized and slow moving org.
by Windchaser | 2026-02-16 22:15:32+00:00
> I think this shows that LLMs do NOT 'understand' anything.

It shows these LLMs don't understand what's necessary for washing your car. But I don't see how that generalizes to "LLMs do NOT 'understand' anything".

What's your reasoning, there? Why does this show that LLMs don't understand anything at all?
by just6979 | 2026-02-16 22:15:45+00:00
I would start with asking what kind of improvment, why, how, etc.

Or I could just start changing things to more closely line up with whatever textbook or "Clean Code" clone book I has last read, and hope it still passes the tests and that those tests are as thorough as possible.

The latter would: eventually get me fired, is stupid, and basically what the LLMs do.
by throwaway2ge5hg | 2026-02-16 22:16:11+00:00
Postgres has SERIALIZABLE transaction isolation level. Just use it and then you never have to worry about any of these race conditions.

And if for some reason you refuse to, then this "barrier" or "hooks" approach to testing will in practice not help. It requires you to already know the potential race conditions, but if you are already aware of them then you will already write your code to avoid them. It is the non-obvious race conditions that should scare you.

To find these, you should use randomized testing that runs many iterations of different interleavings of transaction steps. You can build such a framework that will hook directly into your individual DB query calls. Then you don't have to add any "hooks" at all.

But even that won't find all race condition bugs, because it is possible to have race conditions surface even within a single database query.

You really should just use SERIALIZABLE and save yourself all the hassle and effort and spending hours writing all these tests.
by jrbell19 | 2026-02-16 22:16:12+00:00
Are you consuming the data directly from the exchanges? If so, which ones? Or is this just a proxied API to the services you listed as fallback?

IEX Cloud shut down like 18 months ago so it's rather alarming that its listed.

If you're not licensed with any exchanges to redistribute this data (which you must be..), you are contributing to why the data is expensive from legitimate vendors in the first place.
by MisterTea | 2026-02-16 22:16:13+00:00
> The Palentir data the hackers allegedly gathered will be given to Russia and/or China.

How is China or Russia more trustworthy than Canada, an EU nation, India, Brazil, Cameroon, etc.? It's like saying "I hacked the Gambino crime family but I'm handing the secrets over to the Bonannos and/or the Genovese." I smell bullshit.