MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ankit219 | 2026-02-09 16:01:39+00:00
Bounded domains require scaling reasoning/compute. Two separate scenarios - one where you have hidden information, other where you have high number of combinations. Reasoning works in second case because it narrows the search space. Eg: a doctor trying to diagnose a patient is just looking at number of possibilities. If not today, when we scale it up, a model will be able to arrive at the right answer. Same goes with Math, the variance or branching for any given problem is very high. But LLMs are good at it. and getting better. A negotiation is not a high variance thing, and low number of combinations, but llms would be repeated bad at it.
by noncentral | 2026-02-09 16:02:02+00:00
OP here,
not trying to start a flamewar, but I’ve been thinking about this for a while.

People talk as if humans are a totally separate category from animals.
Honestly, I’m not sure that holds up.

At the physical level we’re just… animals that happened to cross some weird cognitive threshold.
Same basic biology, same evolutionary machinery.
Just running in a slightly different “mode.”

The mistake (I think) is that we take a regime shift and treat it like a fundamental essence.

If you prefer a dumb analogy:
water at 99°C vs 100°C.
Same molecules, but the behavior flips.
Dogs/cats/etc feel like 99°C water — extremely capable, but still below the point where something “runs away” into a new regime.

Humans just hit that temperature first.
That’s all.

And the awkward part is:
the “threshold” is something we defined after the fact.
It’s not written into physics. It’s just the coordinate system we happened to draw.

The RCC-ish way I’ve been framing it (very loosely):
1. No creature, including us, sees its whole internal state.
2. The further ahead you try to predict, the more your reasoning drifts.
3. At some point, if your self-model loop gets long/stable enough, you get a qualitative jump.
4. That jump looks “special,” but it’s just a phase change, not a different kind of matter.

Nothing magical.
Nothing metaphysical.
No “humans have X that animals lack.”
Just a kink in a smooth curve.

The uncomfortable conclusion:

Humans aren’t categorically different from dogs or cats.
We:
1. hit the threshold earlier,
2. had slightly bigger hardware,
3. lived in an environment that rewarded abstraction,
4. and then wrote mythology around it afterwards.

If another species ever crosses the same boundary, they’ll look “human” too.
And we’ll look… not special, just early.

If anyone wants the more formal RCC writeup (why drift happens, why long chains collapse, etc.), I can link it.
by S3verin | 2026-02-09 16:02:07+00:00
Roads are important for a good transportation infrastructure. However, cities in north america are overreliant on them. In European cities public transit is also important and in my opinion even more important than roads. Cars are not useful in cities compared to public transit / bikes / walking if the city is designed for humans and not cars. ( and yes, you still need roads for delivery and people who sometimes have to transport heavy things).
by 46493168 | 2026-02-09 16:02:09+00:00
FTA:

> I’d already understood addiction to be a treatable disease, not a personal failing. Still, these scans helped me appreciate how deeply addiction is rooted in neurobiology. A mere photograph of alcohol—to say nothing of a sip—was enough to send a person’s reward centers into a frenzy.

Ban alcohol advertising now and I’m not kidding or being hyperbolic.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-02-09 16:02:12+00:00
> It's a first principles thing.

This is fair. You can't really have a good debate with anyone if you don't agree on first principles. It think that's part of the problem with the worlds polarization these days.

We have this fundamental disconnect between 'the greatest good for the most people' on one side and 'the greatest good for MY people' on the other. It's literally two different answer to the question of life having value. IE - "They all have the same value." vs "Some are more valuable than others."

When you have disagreements that fundamental you will never find common ground. The zero-sum view of the universe is fundamentally incompatible with the other view.

The only way to stop it from becoming a thought terminating cliche when it comes up (in it's many forms) is to explicitly call it out as what it is - A fundamental an insolvable disagreement that can only be met with some level of compromise.
by ntoskrnl_exe | 2026-02-09 16:02:28+00:00
I don't imagine this was a 100% their decision, it's more like a response to the epidemic of all the world's governments suddenly coming up with adult verification schemes. Discord has already required it in some countries, and it's definitely easier to get everybody to verify themselves than require it on a per-jurisdiction basis. The personal data they get is a cherry on top.

Also, this is just the beginning, more social networks will require the same soon.
by vmn2k4 | 2026-02-09 16:02:29+00:00
Mesh of Growth does not engage in cloaking or spam practices under Google’s policies. All recommendations, reviews, and startup details live on real, crawlable URLs that return the same full HTML to both users and search engines, with JavaScript used only as a UI layer to present that content in a modal for better user experience. There is no difference between what Googlebot sees and what a human user sees. Every link is created through a manual, editorial decision by a verified founder, accompanied by original commentary explaining why a product is recommended. There is no forced reciprocity, paid placement, or automated link generation, and founders retain full control to edit or remove their content. This aligns with Google’s guidelines around natural, contextual links and user-first content, making Mesh of Growth closer to curated resource pages and editorial mentions than any form of link scheme or cloaking.
by palata | 2026-02-09 16:02:30+00:00
> The description still contains: "Age-restricted channels are exempt from the explicit content filter."

Wait! This does not mean they do not scan it. What I understand from that statement is that they filter explicit content, as in they prevent it from appearing on the user's screen.

When you enable the "NSFW" mode, you tell Discord "it's okay, don't filter out anything". But Discord probably still scans everything.

So that makes sense to me: if you don't validate your age, then Discord will not allow you to join channels that disable the "adult" filtering. I can personally live without adult content on Discord...
by nicktikhonov | 2026-02-09 16:03:07+00:00
I spent a day (~$100 in API credits) rebuilding the core orchestration loop of a real-time AI voice agent from scratch instead of using an all-in-one SDK. The hard part isn’t STT, LLMs, or TTS in isolation, but turn-taking: detecting when the user starts and stops speaking, cancelling in-flight generation instantly, and pipelining everything to minimize time-to-first-audio.

The write-up covers why VAD alone fails for real turn detection, how voice agents reduce to a minimal speaking/listening loop, why STT → LLM → TTS must be streaming rather than sequential, why TTFT matters more than model quality in voice, and why geography dominates latency. By colocating Twilio, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, and the orchestration layer, I reached ~790ms end-to-end latency, slightly faster than an equivalent Vapi setup.
by bluGill | 2026-02-09 16:04:43+00:00
AI might be 100x faster than me at writing code - but writing code is a tiny portion of the work I do. I need to understand the problem before I can write code. I need to understand my whole system. I need to test that my code really works - this is more than 50% of the work I do, and automated tests are not enough - too often the automated test doesn't model the real world in some unexpected way. I review code that others write. I answer technical questions for others. There is a lot of release work, mandatory training, and other overhead as well.

Writing code is what I expect a junior or mid level engineer to spend 20% of their time doing. By the time you reach senior engineer it should be less (though when you write code you are faster and so might write more code despite spending less time on it).
by pavel_lishin | 2026-02-09 16:04:58+00:00
> The ID is immediately deleted. We do not keep any information around like your name, the city that you live in, if you used a birth certificate or something else, any of that information.

This is also contradicted by what Discord actually says:

> Quick deletion: Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation.

What are the non-most cases?
by nihzm | 2026-02-09 16:05:01+00:00
This article is scratching the surface of the concept of desynchronization from the theory of social acceleration and the sociology of speed. Any technology that is supposed to create idle time, once it reaches mass adoptions has the opposite effect of speeding up everything else.

We have been on this track for a long time: cars were supposed to save time in transit, but people started living farther from city centres (c.f. Marchetti's constant). E-Mail and instant messaging were supposed to eliminate wait time from postal services, but we now send orders of magnitude more messages and social norms have shifted such that faster replies are expected.

"AI" backed productivity increases are only impressive relative to non-AI users. The idilliac dream of working one or two days a week with agents in the background "doing the rest" is delusional. Like all previous technologies once it reaches mass adoption everyone will be working at a faster pace, because our society is obsessed with speed.
by mexicocitinluez | 2026-02-09 16:05:06+00:00
> Thank you for giving me hope that good code is still being made.

So I've been on both sides, and it's why I responded. While you are absolutely correct that those situations do exist, I just wanted to point out it's not always that way. And I felt exactly as you did about software in general until I finally found a place or two that wasn't just a cash printing machine.

And it's pretty awesome. I've come to realize burnout is less about the amount of hours you put in and more about what you're doing during those hours.

It's tough, especially in the beginning. Push through it. Get some experience that allows you to be a bit more selective in what you choose, and fingers-crossed you'll find yourself in the same spot. One common denominator in all of the good jobs I've had was that the leadership in those companies (3 of them) were all tech-focused. Could be a coincidence, but it's a pattern I've seen.
Show HN: Discrete Fourier Transform on color eInk manga fixes rainbows [video]
by seam_carver | 2026-02-09 16:05:19+00:00
An interesting application of the 2D DFT to manga on color eink Kaleido 3 with math theory explained! Kobo Colour images.
Most of the slides are based on the DFT chapter in Digital Image Processing: A Practical Approach by Nick Efford. I learned DFT to understand this algorithm.
by VladCovaci | 2026-02-09 16:05:20+00:00
We built FounderSpace to help founders validate and position their startup idea before writing a single line of code. You describe your idea in plain English, and our AI analyzes market demand, competition, timing, and early adopters, then generates a clear validation brief with actionable next steps. The goal is to reduce wasted time on ideas that sound good but don’t have real demand. Would love feedback from the HN community.
by sebastiennight | 2026-02-09 16:05:27+00:00
> Recursive self-improvement doesn't get around this problem. Where does it get the data for next iteration? From interactions with humans.

It wasn't true for AlphaGo, and I see no reason it should be true for a system based on math. It makes sense that a talented mathematician who's literally made of math, could build a slightly better mathematician, and so on.
by Ygg2 | 2026-02-09 16:05:38+00:00
First off, let's say I'm wrong about Alpha Evolve. Fine, I made two more points; address them as well; that's just normal manners in a conversation.

Second, I question your idea of what Alpha Evolve is. You seem to think it's an LLM or LLM-adjacent when it's more like an evolutionary algo picking a better seed among the LLMs. That's not an LLM, if anything, it has some ability to correct itself.
by FpUser | 2026-02-09 16:05:55+00:00
This is weird. As soon as I thought about the subject the relevant article showed up on HN.

I was thinking about how to embed custom high level language into my backend application written in C++. Each individual script would compile to native shared lib loadable on demand so that the performance stays high. For this I was contemplating exactly this approach. Compile this high level custom language with very limited feature set to plain C and then have compiler that comes with Linux finish the job.
by anon_anon12 | 2026-02-09 16:06:01+00:00
Another company jumping on the bandwagon to data-farm in the pretext of safeguarding children. I really wonder if there's an actual method to actually safeguard children while also not holding on to data. Because, genuinely, you can't question this.. Companies would just say "we are trying to protect kids" and that'd be the end of the argument.
by pphysch | 2026-02-09 16:06:09+00:00
It's wild to see these comments from the same accounts that within the same 24-hours are (justifiably) hand-wringing over the corrupt and illegal actions of the US government, related to ICE, Epstein, etc.

The US government lies and does a lot of bad stuff, but we must believe everything they say about big bad chyna, the one entity big enough to hold the USG accountable.
by bryanlarsen | 2026-02-09 16:06:17+00:00
It does quite well and definitely catches/fixes things I miss. But I still catch significant things it misses. And I am using AI to fix the things I catch.

Which is then more slop I have to review.

Our product is not SaaS, it's software installed on customer computers. Any bug that slips through is really expensive to fix. Careful review and code construction is worth the effort.
Show HN: C-CMCP – Validated AI development workflow with quality gates
by PhantomKey | 2026-02-09 16:06:26+00:00
I built a workflow that coordinates Claude.ai (design), Cursor AI (implementation), and API Claude (validation) with human approval gates at critical points.

The problem: AI coding tools are great but there's no quality control. You get code that "looks right" but fails requirements, has bugs, or doesn't match what you actually asked for.

C-CMCP solves this with a 4-stage pipeline:
1. Claude.ai creates detailed task specs (MUST/SHOULD/COULD requirements)
2. You approve the task
3. Cursor AI implements the code
4. API Claude validates against the original requirements (~$0.01-0.03 per validation)
5. You review validation + test manually
6. Accept or request fixes

We built this in 2.5 hours and it's production-ready. Tested on Windows with PowerShell scripts that automate the workflow.

GitHub: https://github.com/stanpressman/C-CMCP

Built this for my own startup (password manager) but figured others might find it useful. MIT licensed, completely free.

Would love feedback on the approach and what features would make this more useful.
by Decabytes | 2026-02-09 16:06:33+00:00
I’m always amazed and slightly envious of what programming languages with large developer bases can do. I mean if a language is Turing complete it can do anything, but JavaScript takes this to the extreme.

Mind you I never said anything about quality or performance, obviously doing everything in JavaScript comes with it’s own issues but if you were to say that someone got JavaScript running in the Linux kernel as a POC I wouldn’t even be surprised
by LanceH | 2026-02-09 16:06:57+00:00
> There's so many things in games that are taken for granted at play time but which actually take a lot of thinking and work to get right.

I have a small list of these things in game dev. Over the years, I found some games that were more playable (in my opinion) than I thought they deserved to be. Kind of like a well written book with a bad story.

For me at least, the number one most important thing is how well the character -- person, car, spaceship, whatever -- moves. Does it handle well, as expected. I'm at the point where I think this may be the single most important aspect of a game that finds itself in a competitive space.

I think blizzard stands out for this with Overwatch and World of Warcraft. They avoid the jerky start and stops with their characters. Their characters feel both performant and natural at the same time, adhering to reality but breaking physics as necessary (air strafing for example).

Building out roads correctly feels like an offshoot of this for games which include cars. A car should be able to navigate a turn without going through weird contortions as it hits pinch points, or unnatural wiggles when roads join.
Show HN: I built a platform that connects people with travelers to carry items
by mrclove | 2026-02-09 16:06:57+00:00
I built Trip2Drop as a side project to solve a problem I kept running into like getting small but important items from another city or country when someone I knew was already traveling.

It has eventually become an early-stage marketplace that connects “receivers” (who need an item) with “travelers” (who are already traveling).

There’s no money making yet, and Trip2Drop is currently just a connecting layer, not a seller or logistics provider.
by joenot443 | 2026-02-09 16:07:03+00:00
I don't think it's super complicated. I think that prompting takes generally less mental energy than coding by hand, so on average one can work longer days if they're prompting than if they were coding.

I can pretty easily do a 12h day of prompting but I haven't been able to code for 12h straight since I was in college.
by amandine | 2026-02-09 16:07:09+00:00
The governance of the Matrix Spec has always been open, as explained on the website (https://matrix.org/foundation/about/) and in the Matrix Spec Change process (https://spec.matrix.org/proposals/).

Meanwhile in the last 2 years the Foundation has evolved a lot, in particular with the election of its Governing Board (https://matrix.org/foundation/governing-board/) representing all stakeholders of its ecosystem, and which has an advisory role to ensure the independence of the Foundation. The Governing Board has also set-up several Committees which are hosts to Working Groups which help run the various activities of the Foundation (https://matrix.org/foundation/working-groups/). You will note in particular the existence of the Governance Committee (https://matrix.org/foundation/governing-board/committees/#go...) and its corresponding Working Group which “exists to determine how The Matrix Foundation should be structured. It determines why the Foundation is structured the way it is, or look for alternatives when the Foundation has visible flaws.”.

In terms of the Foundation developing its own software: it has been a deliberate choice to not have any development (beyond moderation tools) within the Foundation. The reasons for it include the fact that the Foundation is already running at loss and can’t afford to pay a team of developers big enough to develop and maintain all the bricks of a Matrix stack. If the Foundation decided to develop everything itself it would need to set up revenue lines which would probably compete with the various vendors in the Matrix ecosystem, so the Foundation would rather support an active ecosystem than cannibalise it. That said, it may change in the future if that is the best choice for the project; or a Matrix vendor may choose to donate the code of their stack, like Element was donating Synapse until freeriders destroyed its business and forced them to fire half their employees to stay alive.

In terms of Synapse’s efficiency, it has improved lately despite losing some of the team, and thanks to having stopped dispersing the resources across two server implementations in parallel, and focused on one. As you say Continuwuity is an alternative implementation to look at if you are unhappy with Synapse.
by coryrc | 2026-02-09 16:07:43+00:00
Renewable PV is the cheapest way generate electricity during daytime at appropriate latitudes.

Notice several caveats: electricity, not heat; daytime, not nighttime; only for some places on the globe.

Most energy use doesn't use electricity. It's one thing to replace an average-16%-efficient internal combustion engine with electricity and another to replace a 96%-efficient condensing boiler.
by keepamovin | 2026-02-09 16:07:57+00:00
Where are those handy mainland astroturfers when you need 'em?

They weren't fighting for anything. They were unhappy. And people like Lai and others whipped them up and sent their anger in a direction. And a lot of those kids went to jail.

When they could have taken that energy and put it towards building a better tomorrow. In a place with so many opportunities and changing so fast, they bet it all on traditional education when they could have adopted the entrepreneurial spirit of their ancestral geneartions. Their violence only played into the hands of the Central Government to yield all the pretext it needed to enact the very things the "protesters" thought they were against.
Show HN: ActionBar – GitHub Actions in macOS menu bar
by pchm | 2026-02-09 16:08:14+00:00
I wanted a tool like this for a long time, but couldn't find one, so I built it[1]

* Log in with your GitHub account

* Minimal permissions — no access to your code needed

* Get a notification when a run completes

* Select repositories you want to monitor

* Native macOS app

Known issues:

After you install the app on your GitHub account, it takes about a minute for GitHub to propagate the changes to the REST API - and this makes it look like my app is stuck at the "Install on GitHub" step. Not great, but I couldn't think of a way to work around this, other than a (I hope) a descriptive error message.

Feedback welcome!

[1]: Maybe it already exists, but good luck googling anything with "github actions"
by alexpotato | 2026-02-09 16:09:00+00:00
My dad was a stockbroker in the 1970s and he had a great line:

“When computers first came out we were told:

‘Computers will be so productive and save you so much time you won’t know what to do with all of your free time!’

Unsurprisingly, that didn’t happen.”

Aka Jevon’s Paradox in practice
by coldtea | 2026-02-09 16:09:14+00:00
>Are the people leveraging LLMs making more money while working the same number of hours?

Nobody is getting a raise for using AI. So no.

>Are the people leveraging LLMs working fewer hours while making the same amount of money?

Early adopters maybe, as they offload some work to agents. As AI commodifies and is the baseline, that will invert, especially as companies shed people to have the remaining "multiply" their output with AI.

So the answer will be no and no.
by ashraf_mse | 2026-02-09 16:09:21+00:00
I got tired of EXPLAIN tools that sent my query plans to AI services or hallucinated index suggestions. Built this instead.
What it does:
• Paste your EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS, FORMAT JSON) output
• Get a breakdown of where time actually went
• Zero external calls. Your data never leaves the browser.
What it catches:
• 4.5s hidden in triggers while the scan took 0.03ms
• JIT compilation eating 700ms on a 1s query
• Bitmap heap scans with 99.9% recheck discard
• Recursive CTEs looping 100k+ times
What it doesn't do:
• AI guesses
• "Add index" recommendations when the index already exists
• Upload your sensitive query plans anywhere
18 edge cases tested. No API keys, no signup, no bullshit.
plancheck.dev
What should I add next?