MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by arctic-true | 2026-02-24 01:06:44+00:00
The fact that the companies that have already shoveled billions of dollars at this are continuing to do so is equally consistent with AI improvement and adoption stalling as it is with infinite improvement and widespread adoption. Yes, it’s irrational to chase sunk costs - but unlike the VC funds that backed Uber and its competition, may of the players in this game are exposed to public markets, which are not known for being rigorously logical. If you pull back on your AI investments, the markets will punish you - probably vigorously - and if your only concern is the value of your stock options, it is entirely rational for you to act in a way that keeps the market from punishing their value. We’re 3 years in without showing any ROI, and who’s to say we can’t get 3 or 5 or 10 more? Plenty of time to cash out before the eventual reckoning.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-24 01:07:24+00:00
Legally it's infringement but I don't have a lot of sympathy for semi-porous paywalls getting circumvented. If they don't want free readers, they can set up a hard paywall. If they offer free samples and I occasionally take one I'm not going to feel bad about it, or worry about that specific type of copyright infringement making it more difficult for journalists to make a living.
by dylan604 | 2026-02-24 01:08:25+00:00
This isn't any different than pre-Claude. We've always had people that wrote code, but had no clue about systems. Not everyone is a CS major. I've seen people do the strangest things that you would think a sane person would never do, yet, their the strangeness is happening by someone you would otherwise consider sane/smart. Not everyone is a sysadmin banging perl to automate things.
by so-cal-schemer | 2026-02-24 01:08:31+00:00
Papers by Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman published as AI Memos by the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory between December 1975 and March 1979.

As noted in Early standards, the tone of these papers is relatively informal and their typesetting targetted 1970s computer printing technology. Scans of original printed copies are available in the digital repository of MIT research and are listed in the Computer History Museum Software Preservation Group's Scheme Project

HTML transcriptions with internal navigation and bibliography links are available here. The formatting of these transcriptions aims to retain the character of the originals, with updated typography and navigation; the HTML versions are self-contained files which can be saved and viewed offline.

(Formatting recently updated.)
by snowhale | 2026-02-24 01:08:33+00:00
the measurement problem here is real. GDP captures output, not latent capacity or quality. an ops team that responds to 200 requests/week with AI at 2x speed doesn't show up in GDP if headcount stays flat. the value is captured in retention, fewer escalations, faster revenue ops cycles -- none of which hit a GDP line directly. the reason AI added zero isn't that it didn't work. it's that we're measuring the wrong thing.
by boxedemp | 2026-02-24 01:08:40+00:00
I've literally not met one person in tech who thinks LLMs will become sentient or conscious. But I always see people online claiming that there are lots of people who believe that.

Where are they?

Are we sure that's not a misunderstanding of the terminology? Artificial diamonds, such as cubic zirconia, are not diamonds, and nobody thinks they are. 'Artificial' means it's not the real thing.
When will conscious, actual intelligence be called 'synthetic intelligence' instead of 'artificial'?

Incidentally, this comment was written by AI.
by RigelKentaurus | 2026-02-24 01:09:11+00:00
For the U.S. economy, productivity is defined as (output measured in $)/(input measured in $). Typically, new technologies (computers, internet, AI) reduce input costs, and due to competition in the market, companies are required to reduce their prices, thereby having an overall deflationary effect on the economy. It's entirely possible that AI will have a small or no effect on productivity as measured above, but society will benefit by getting access to inexpensive products and services powered by inexpensive AI. Individual companies won't use AI to improve their productivity but will need to use AI just to stay competitive.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-02-24 01:09:30+00:00
> Superintelligence in 3 years doesn't really sound that crazy given how quickly I can write code with Claude. I mean we're 90%-95% of the way there already.

Yeah? So you must have a clear idea of where "there" is, and of the route from here to there?

Forgive me my skepticism, but I don't believe you. I don't believe that you actually know.
by josephg | 2026-02-24 01:09:34+00:00
> You can construct sum types in C by combining structs and unions, but it is not an out of the box feature like in Go. Sum types are a first-class citizen in Go.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean. Can you give me an example? How would you write a Result type in Go? (Result is defined as either Ok(val) or Err(err))
by fragmede | 2026-02-24 01:09:46+00:00
If someone tells me we can build a shed, I'm going to ask who's land are we building it on, who's paying for it, what zoning/permitting laws apply, who's going to own it (form an LLC or a -corp with shares). The kind of wood and the type of nails aren't even worth wasting time discussing until we've answered those questions first.
by vitorsr | 2026-02-24 01:10:25+00:00
Seems very promising but then you realize the LLM behind said agent was trained on public but otherwise copyright encumbered proprietary code available as improperly redistributed SDKs and DDKs, as well as source code leaks and friends.

In fact most Windows binaries have public debug symbols available which makes SRE not exactly a hurdle and an agent-driven SRE not exactly a tabula rasa reimplementation.
by zeta0134 | 2026-02-24 01:10:32+00:00
I don't use a list generally, because I have a fairly fixed path through my local grocery store and I know what I regularly need to stock up on. On occasion however, if I'm unsure, I'll close my eyes and browse the kitchen, pantry and linen closet in my mind's eye, to check the contents of the shelves. As long as the last time I looked at them matches reality, I get a pretty accurate inventory and can usually spot things I'm forgetting.

Recipes are the exception. If I'm cooking something I've never made before, there is no way I'm committing that ingredients list to memory.
by so-cal-schemer | 2026-02-24 01:10:55+00:00
SCHEME

AN INTERPRETER FOR EXTENDED LAMBDA CALCULUS

by Gerald Jay Sussman and Guy Lewis Steele Jr.

Abstract:

Inspired by ACTORS [Greif and Hewitt] [Smith and Hewitt], we have implemented an interpreter for a LISP-like language, SCHEME, based on the lambda calculus [Church], but extended for side effects, multiprocessing, and process synchronization. The purpose of this implementation is tutorial.
by kccqzy | 2026-02-24 01:11:27+00:00
The article asks, how can infinite come in many sizes, and then proceeds to list just two sizes: \aleph_0 and 2^{\aleph_0}.

If you are interested in this, you can choose to study (1) why is the set of real numbers the same size as the powerset of the natural numbers; (2) why is any set (infinite or not) smaller in size than its powerset; (3) doing arithmetic on sizes of sets, for example what it means to have one more than the size of the natural numbers or twice the size of the natural numbers; (4) the continuum hypothesis, that there is no set bigger than the natural numbers and smaller than the real numbers.

Unfortunately there’s not much else about cardinal numbers that beginners can readily grasp; you’ll have to switch your study to ordinal numbers.
by sfpotter | 2026-02-24 01:11:35+00:00
The reason it's preferred to use "=" instead of "\in" is because the way that Landau notation is generally used in practice is as a kind of ellipsis or placeholder. For example, the Taylor expansion e^x = 1 + x + O(x^2). I could just as well write e^x = 1 + x + ..., but the former conveys more meaning about what is hidden behind the ellipsis. It's an abuse of notation, but in the contexts that it's used, it's not clear what additional clarity using "\in" would bring over "=". Maybe also that big O is mainly used as a notation to facilitate doing calculations, less describing what family a function belongs to. Here are Knuth's thoughts, which I agree with: https://micromath.wordpress.com/2008/04/14/donald-knuth-calc...
by softmax9 | 2026-02-24 01:11:56+00:00
Hi, this is Emmett.

We’re building scalable multiplayer environments where AI agents learn cooperation and competition.

At small scale this works. At real scale, it becomes a runtime problem:

- Persistent agent state across sessions

- Scheduling long-running agent processes

- Low-latency coordination between agents

- Experiment orchestration at scale

- Observability into emergent multi-agent behavior

We’re hiring engineers to build the core runtime layer that makes this possible.

This will be hard. You will:

- Identify what needs to exist

- Design the system

- Build it end-to-end

- Measure impact

- Iterate

We expect high ownership and high output. Engineers here use AI tools aggressively (Copilot, Claude, Cursor, etc.) to operate faster, not to avoid thinking.

You should be comfortable with:

- Python and C++

- Systems design and performance tradeoffs

- Designing experiments and interpreting results

- Moving between backend, infra, and data as needed

Onsite in San Francisco. Small team. Low process. High trust.

Apply here:
https://softmax.com/jobs/softwareengineer

In the “Anything Else” field, mention you came from HN and include:

- A system you built end-to-end

- What broke at scale

- GitHub
by egorelik | 2026-02-24 01:13:06+00:00
I too find the phone market, especially in the United States, has outright abandoned users like me. About a year ago I rushed to buy what seems to have been the last flagship model sold in the United States to have micro SD card support (an Xperia 1V), as soon as I saw stocks were dwindling. Now there are none left, and while I should be good for a few years, I fret over what I will do next time.

Just the other idea, I tried transferring a large number of photos from phone to PC with a cable, just to see how bad it would be without a card. It was so slow I eventually gave up (not to mention the timestamps were messed up). I have no idea how anyone manages this way.
by XenophileJKO | 2026-02-24 01:13:17+00:00
I keep seeing the "Productivity Paradox" highlighted over an over again. I think one thing people are missing with this specific technology is that unlike many of the comparisons (computers, internet, broadband, etc), AI in particular doesn't have a high requirement at the consumer side. Everyone already has everything they need to use it.

There will be a period like we are in now where dramatic capability gain (like recent coding gains) take a while for people to adapt to, however, I think the change will be much faster. Even the speed of uptake in coding tools over the last 3 months has been faster than I predicted. I think we'll see other shifts like this in different sectors where it changes almost over a series of a few months.
by henrikschroder | 2026-02-24 01:13:22+00:00
> If people live side by side for 1000s of years, I think that's fair to speculate - there has to be a reason they didn't just assimilate into each other.

Yeah, they had completely different lifestyles that were reliant on completely different biomes. The Norse were farmers, they needed farmland and a little bit of forest for wood and hunting. The Sami were reindeer herders, they needed tundra. Neither could live where the other lived, they spoke languages from completely different families, they had completely different cultural traditions. Neither side had much that the other side wanted. Of course they didn't assimilate, how could they?

But when the industrial revolution came and iron ore was discovered up north, suddenly the desire to assimilate them (or genocide them...) appeared, because now they had something that the people in the south wanted very, very much.

> Though already in Harald Fairhair's day, it seems there were also Sami living among the Norse as boatwrights and smiths and maybe also as wandering professional hunters, hunting livestock predators for bounties - we know that kept going for a long time.

My understanding is that the Norse respected the Sami as a people different from them, and were a little bit afraid of their "magic", because they didn't understand it. They were perfectly happy to live apart, and do a little bit of trade in goods and services. Why go north to raid the Sami, when you could sail south and raid the fat and rich English or the French instead?
by levkk | 2026-02-24 01:13:49+00:00
The current behavior unfortunately is to just let it through and return an incorrect result. We are adding more checks here and rely heavily on early adopters to have a decent test suite before launching their apps to prod.

That being said, we do have this [1]:

[general]
expanded_explain = true

This will modify the output of EXPLAIN queries to return routing decisions made by PgDog. If you see that your query is "direct-to-shard", i.e. goes to only one shard, you can be certain that it'll work as expected. These queries will talk to only one database and don't require us to manipulate the result or assemble results from multiple shards.

For cross-shard queries, you'll need your own integration tests, for now. We'll add checks here shortly. We have a decent CI suite as well, but it doesn't cover everything. Every time we look at that part of the code, we just end up adding more features, like the recent support for LIMIT x OFFSET y (PgDog rewrites it to LIMIT x + y and applies the offset calculation in memory).

We'll get there.

[1]: https://docs.pgdog.dev/features/sharding/explain/
by lich_king | 2026-02-24 01:14:01+00:00
Most hardware drivers are simpler than people expect. The hardware is usually designed to do the sensible thing in a straightforward way, and you're just translating what the OS wants into a bunch of bits you need to write to the right hardware register.

On the flip side, the perceived barrier is high. Most folks don't have an intuitive sense of how the kernel or "bare metal" environment differs from userland. How do you allocate memory? Can you just printf() a debug message? How to debug if it freezes or crashes? All of these questions have pretty straightforward answers, but it means you need to set aside time to learn.

So, I wouldn't downplay the value of AI for the same reason I wouldn't downplay it with normal coding. It doesn't need to do anything clever to be useful.

That said, for the same reasonss, it's harder to set up a good agent loop here, and the quality standard you're aiming for must be much higher than with a web app, because the failure mode isn't a JavaScript error, but possibly a hard hang.
by owyn | 2026-02-24 01:14:14+00:00
I think the problem is just not enough training on that specific language because it's proprietary. Most useful Mathematica code is on someone's personal computer, not GitHub. They can build up a useful set of training data, some benchmarks, a contest for the AI companies to score high on, because they do love that kind of thing.

But for most internet applications (as opposed to "math" stuff) I would think Python is still a better language choice.
by bluGill | 2026-02-24 01:14:49+00:00
I've found ai really good at the rare problems. The code hangs 1 out of 200 times - it spends half an hour and finds a race condition and a proposed fix - something complex that is really difficult for humans to figure out. Now grated the above problem took a dozen rounds over a couple days to completly solve (and it happend more often than every two weeks), but it was able to find an answer given symptoms.
by rtpg | 2026-02-24 01:15:30+00:00
Banning access to social media for kids under 18 similar to how tobacco and alcohol is banned to underage people would be the more direct line.

This argument is quite close to what gov'ts are "trying" to do here! And I tihnk you'll find very few people ammenable to the idea that we should allow cigarettes to be sold to underaged people (even if in practice they still get access).

The argument on the "don't do the social media ban" side is quite an uphill battle if you dig into this metaphor too much
by throwaway2037 | 2026-02-24 01:15:42+00:00
As I mentioned in another comment, the original referenced source code from the Linux kernel is ISC'd, not GPL'd. See here: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/net/wi...

I don't work on the Linux kernel, but I do poke around the sources from time to time. I was genuinely surprised to see that some hardware drivers are not GPL'd. That is news to me, but makes commercial sense to when I think deeper about it. When these manufacturers donate a driver to Linux, I don't think GPL is a priority to them. In the case of Broadcom, they probably want their WiFi hardware to more compatible with SBCs to drive sales (of future SBCs that use their WiFi hardware and run Linux). If anything, choosing a more liberal license (ISC) increases the likelihood that their Linux driver will be ported to other operating systems. From Broadcom's commercial view, that is a win to sell more SBCs (free labour from BSDers!).

Also, if the original driver was GPL'd, I am pretty sure it is fair game (from US copyright and software license perspective) to use one LLM to first reverse engineer the GPL'd driver to write a spec. Then use a different LLM to implement a new driver for FreeBSD that is ISC'd. You can certainly do that with human engineers, and I see no reason to believe that US courts would object to separate LLMs being used in the two necessary steps above. Of course, this assumes good faith on the part of the org doing the re-write. (Any commercial org doing this would very carefully document the process, expecting a legal challenge.)

I do think this blog post introduces a genuinely (to me!) novel way to use LLMs. My favourite part of that blog post was talking about all of the attempts that did not work, and new approaches that were required. That sounds pretty similar to my experience as a software engineer. You start with preconceived notions that frequently shattered after you walk down a long and arduous path to discovering your mistakes. Then you stop, re-think things, and move in a new intellectual (design) direction. His final solution of asking LLMs to write a spec, then asking other LLMs to proof-read it is highly ingenious. I am really impressed. Please don't view that "really impressed" as my thinking that the whole world will move to vibe coding; rather I think this is a real achievement that deserves some study by us human engineers.
by wwweston | 2026-02-24 01:16:01+00:00
Not much faith required on this one: either a given priest will have both strong familiarity with congregational context and the ability to articulate it as instructions to an LLM or they’ll be missing one of those two. If they’re missing the context themselves, well, they can’t feed it to the LLM and best case scenario is probably that they engage the process closely enough the whole way to learn something from it. If they lack the ability to articulate the whole context that they know but can intuitively work with it, then they’re more likely to meet needs than the LLM — and I’d guess this is a common case.
by gosub100 | 2026-02-24 01:17:57+00:00
No, lobbying should be banned even if they pay tax. The only way corporations should have access to representation is by having their role formally defined by an amendment to the Constitution. As in, this government is formed by citizens who have these rights, and corporations that have these rights. Make it official and open, not the subversive manipulation where we act like they aren't there.
by henrikschroder | 2026-02-24 01:18:28+00:00
I think the explanation is much simpler, we know the Norse were a bit afraid of the Sami. They viewed them as a weird non-threatening neighbour people who had a weird language and weird magic. So you traded with them, you respected them, you said please and thank you, and then you were happy to see them gone because you didn't want them to curse you. (And I would assume the Sami were very happy to foster this belief since they were much weaker militarily)

Unlike the fat and rich continental Europeans that the Norse viewed as ripe for plunder, they did not fear them at all.
by taurath | 2026-02-24 01:18:28+00:00
Stuff is cheap, but basic security is expensive. Everyone pints to the stuff, but income vs rent and asset prices has only gone up and up!

Buying housing is utterly unaffordable for a very, very large percentage of young people even educated professionals in in-demand fields. Covering expenses is awful. That famous Emirati quote of “my father had a camel, I have a Land Rover, my son will have a Lamborghini, his son will have a Land Rover, his son will have a camel” - our parents had the Lamborghinis. The majority of my generation (milllenials) are worse off than their parents. Very few have kids because they can’t afford to have them. There are exceptions everywhere but if you just listen or see the culture it is a given that our future is fucked unless something radical changes - income inequality is the highest it’s EVER BEEN. Higher than the time of the French Revolution. Higher than the “Gilded age”.

It’s foolish to think that people are okay or that nothing will come politically of this. Go look out the window in any major city, the stark differences are there for anyone’s eyes to see.
by 9rx | 2026-02-24 01:18:46+00:00
C:

enum result_type {
OK,
ERROR
};

union result_value {
int value;
char *error_message;
};

struct result {
enum result_type tag;
union result_value value;
};

This is not technically closed, but does offer a close enough approximation. Again, not a first-class feature, so there is no expectation if it being true sum types.

Go:

type Result interface {
isResult()
}

type OK[T any] struct {
Value T
}
func (OK[T]) isResult() {}

type Error struct {
Message string
}
func (Error) isResult() {}

This one is closed. It perfectly satisfies being sum types. It may not satisfy your opinion of what makes for good ergonomics, but if you want to talk about ergonomics let's use ergonomic words, not type theory words.
by andai | 2026-02-24 01:18:47+00:00
Was building a claw clone the other day when for debugging I added a bash shell. So I type arbitrary text into a Telegram bot and then it runs it as bash commands on my laptop.

Naturally I was horrified by what I had created.

But suddenly I realized, wait a minute... strictly this is less bad than what I had before, which is the same thing except piped through a LLM!

Funny how that works, subjectively...

(I have it, and all coding agents, running as my "agent" user, which can't touch my files. But I appear to be in the minority, especially on the discord, where it's popular to run it as the main admin user on Windows.)

As for what could go wrong, that is an interesting question. RCE aside, the agentic thing is its own weird security situation. Like people will run it sandboxed in Docker, but then hook it up to all their cloud accounts. Or let it remote control their browser for hours unattended...

https://xkcd.com/1200/
by afavour | 2026-02-24 01:18:50+00:00
> AI in particular doesn't have a high requirement at the consumer side. Everyone already has everything they need to use it.

That isn’t actually true though, right now everyone has a hard dependency on a cloud service. That is currently sold to them at deep discount by companies that are losing billions.

When the market eventually corrects it’ll be interesting to see how much AI ends up costing. At the very least it will be comparable to the broadband internet connection you mentioned. Possibly a whole lot more.