MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by d4mi3n | 2026-02-25 16:22:28+00:00
I'm still salty that I can't use em-dashes anymore for fear of my writing being flagged as AI generated. Been using them for years—it's just `alt+shift+-` on a Mac keyboard and I find them more legible in many fonts compared to the simple dash on the typical numpad.

It's so sad to me that good typographical conventions have been co-opted by the zeitgeist of LLMs.
by zdc1 | 2026-02-25 16:22:42+00:00
As someone who's lived there, it's definitely more about the consistency. Generally speaking, if you make a police report, it will be investigated. This includes for smaller issues like lost items too. From what I understand, their courts also give fairly consistent sentences.

Combine this with the fact that Singapore is small and full of security cameras, and it create a situation where breaking the law carries a decent risk of getting caught as police will have the willingness and resources to investigate.

On top of this, a massive proportion of the population are there on work visas. For these people, any sort of crime or bad behaviour would mean deportation and loss of their job.

As an aside, here's an interesting CNA documentary on their prisons: https://youtu.be/tJqRPycWUDg
by simianwords | 2026-02-25 16:22:49+00:00
>It could be unfeasible to increase prices so much whenever a new model was released.

This means you have no idea what I have been saying. A new model is costlier, but they release mini versions of old models that are way cheaper and compete with older models.

GPT 5 mini is way cheaper than GPT 4 but around the same performance

GPT-5 mini:

Input tokens: ~$0.25 per 1 M

Cached input: ~$0.025 per 1 M

Output tokens: ~$2 per 1 M

-----

GPT-4 (legacy flagship):

Input roughly $2.00 per 1 M

Output roughly $8.00 per 1 M

>Chinese companies are very opaque. I don't pretend to have insight into it.

False. The models are not opaque, you can literally download it and host it yourself. They have also released papers on how they reduced cost in certain areas.

This is literally them documenting the cost-profit ratio theoretical at 500%

https://github.com/deepseek-ai/open-infra-index/blob/main/20...

>The above statistics include all user requests from web, APP, and API. If all tokens were billed at DeepSeek-R1’s pricing (*), the total daily revenue would be $562,027, with a cost profit margin of 545%.

Not only that, there are other providers hosting these opensource models, there are so many companies - just go to openrouter.com

So this is your skepticism

- openai is subsidising their models so much that each year the keep doing it 20x and eventually reached 100x reduction

- all the investors are stupid and they still invest in openai despite unprofitability

- employees of openai and anthropic who have claimed that the unit costs are not high are also lying

- all other providers are in on the lie

- the chinese models like Deepseek is also in on the lie by posting research that is not plausible

- the fact that you can run models in your laptop today that beat previous years models is also not enough
by audunw | 2026-02-25 16:22:57+00:00
These anecdotes come from the very peak of Chinas demographic dividend. In a decade or two their demographic dividend will be in a steep decline.

China also needs to change something drastic to avoid brain drain. The migration of competent people is still one-way. There no path to become a Chinese citizen. China has come a long way, but Europe is still ahead on building liveable communities and wok/life balance, while the US is still attractive to those seeking freedom and prosperity. China has avoided issues due to a huge population and that demographic dividend. But eventually it’ll become an issue
by comrade1234 | 2026-02-25 16:23:06+00:00
You can turn off iOS automatically converting dashes to em-dashes. It also turns off smart-quotes which when used converts any sms you send from normal GSM-7 (7-bit) encoding to utf-8 which doubles the number of sms messages you're sending in the background (even though they're stitched together to look like a single message)

To turn off Smart Punctuation: Home > Settings > General > Keyboard > Smart Punctuation > Off.
by gilles_oponono | 2026-02-25 16:23:46+00:00
AI cost is a real problem, and month end bill shock can genuinely be traumatic. :-((
we want to believe we tackling it head-on at Edgee.ai
I won't claim we're the only ones, or even the best, ;-) but I'd love your feedback and to hear wether it fits your needs.
Tks
by sunaookami | 2026-02-25 16:23:48+00:00
I find the bigger problem with online comments are that people repeat the same comments and "jokes" over and over and over again. Sure we had those with YouTube 15 years ago when people always spammed "first!" and "who is listening in <year>?" but now it's gotten worse and every single comment is now just some meme (especially on Reddit) or some kind of "gotcha"...
by advael | 2026-02-25 16:23:53+00:00
Weird all these companies struggle so much to support remote services, ssh has been working for me pretty seamlessly for like the 20 years I've been using it and has allowed me to remote-control any computer I own with relatively reliable authentication (with some hiccups that tend to be patched pretty rapidly when found) throughout that entire period. I hear tell it worked even before I was using computers professionally, too
Show HN: Polos: Open-source runtime for AI agents with sandbox and durable exec
by ndeodhar | 2026-02-25 16:24:03+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Neha. I spent years at Google building infrastructure that handled billions of events at 99.999% reliability. When I started building AI agents, I was surprised at how much production plumbing you're expected to own yourself.

The agent itself is the easy part. The hard part is everything around it: where does it execute safely? What happens when it fails midway through a workflow? How do you trigger it from your existing tools? How do you even know what it did?

I kept stitching together Docker, a workflow engine, a notification layer, and custom retry logic. Every team I talked to was doing the same thing. So I built Polos - an open-source runtime that handles the production layer so you just write the agent.

What it does:

- Sandboxed execution: agents run sensitive operations inside managed Docker containers with built-in tools for file I/O, bash, and web search. You don't manage the sandbox or its lifecycle, Polos does. Will support more sandboxes like E2B in the future.

- Slack integration: @mention an agent in Slack, get responses in thread. Trigger workflows from Slack, receive notifications, collect input. Agents become part of your team's existing workflow.

- Durable workflows: if an agent fails mid-run, it resumes from the exact step that failed. Built-in prompt caching with 60-80% cost savings on retries.

- Observability: OpenTelemetry tracing for every step, tool call, and decision.

- LLM agnostic: works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or any provider via Vercel AI SDK and LiteLLM.

The stack is Rust orchestrator (Axum + Tokio + PostgreSQL), Python and TypeScript SDKs, and Vite UI. You can install and run a durable, sandboxed agent in under 5 minutes:

```

curl -fsSL https://install.polos.dev/install.sh | bash

npx create-polos

cd my-project && polos dev

```

Here's a 3-min demo of a coding agent that picks up a GitHub issue, fixes the code in a sandbox, and submits a PR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYVBpdZ_5eM

Happy to discuss technical decisions and more: why Rust for the orchestrator, how durable execution works without a DAG, and the sandbox lifecycle model.

GitHub: https://github.com/polos-dev/polos
by microtonal | 2026-02-25 16:24:30+00:00
The lack of data sovereignty does have large geopolitical consequences though. Without data sovereignty of EU government services and businesses, the US can blackmail EU continuously or even worse, in the case of e.g. a conflict over Greenland, cause chaos by turning off access to US tech. So for the EU, tech sovereignty is a matter of life and death.

Also, a lot of crap in Western countries is caused by tech broligarchs enriching themselves in favor of workers en destroying democracy for tech feudalism. So if we can bring down their sales Tesla-style, I'm all in for it.
by jehuie | 2026-02-25 16:24:32+00:00
I spent ~35 years working in and around government IT systems.

The recent claims about AI finally making COBOL “modernization” feasible got me thinking: if AI can understand, refactor, and generate COBOL safely, doesn’t that undercut the core argument for rewriting these systems in the first place?

Curious how others who’ve lived through large rewrites see this.
by unethical_ban | 2026-02-25 16:24:33+00:00
In a normal, mature government, advocacy for your nation's products would be reasonable, and even then, would be controversial in this instance. "Do not protect your citizens' privacy, our citizens might get ideas".

I think it's the assumptions that are baked in with the Trump regime. No subtlety, no mutual benefit, do as we say or else.
by wat10000 | 2026-02-25 16:24:55+00:00
The super conservatives share this belief that the US holds all the cards. This is the idea of American exceptionalism. We're special, we're uniquely capable, we can do anything we want because everyone else has no choice but to engage with us. If Europe abandons us, that's a win because they're just a drain on us. International trade is screwing us, so wrecking it will usher in a new golden age.
by vincentalbouy | 2026-02-25 16:25:05+00:00
Fair question.

If we were just a ChatGPT wrapper with a Booking API, we’d be already dead.

Our value isn’t the interface it’s the supply. We have direct relationships with hotels that log in daily to quote, adjust pricing, negotiate, and close deals. That’s not something you get with an API key.

You can vibe-code an Airbnb clone in an afternoon. Without supply, contracts, and operational execution, it’s useless. Marketplace take time to build network effect

LLMs can display data. They can’t negotiate, contract, invoice, manage edge cases, or execute group bookings end-to-end.

We’ll distribute via all major LLMs. But the defensibility is in our network and operations and date, not the UI that everyone could replicate
by master-lincoln | 2026-02-25 16:25:21+00:00
thanks for the laugh. Even if you only meant people from the US this is likely not true. What about government websites at .gov? 99% never visit them?

In other countries local TLDs are of course normal (e.g. .it for Italy, .za for South Africa, .cn for China...) and not only used for scam links.
by nadis | 2026-02-25 16:25:30+00:00
> For me personally, I’d trust Yegge’s Beads about as much as I’d trust most other OSS projects, not because the LLM is good, but because of those tens of thousands of eyeballs. I’d trust something an LLM produced just for me significantly less, because I’m the first person to run the thing.

I thought this was an interesting and valid point!
by softfalcon | 2026-02-25 16:25:36+00:00
This reminds me of the Unreal Tournament: Xan episode from the Secret Level series.

Link for those curious or confused as to what I'm talking about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F-rAW3vXOU

Forcing AI to fight in an arena for our entertainment, what could go wrong? (this was tongue in cheek, I am fully aware LLM's currently don't have conscious thoughts or emotions)
by zahlman | 2026-02-25 16:25:40+00:00
> it can introspect the interpreter state and execute code inside the live session.

So you could presumably also set it up to implement its suggestions (i.e. if it "executes" its proposed definition for `succ` that would actually just update it in the global namespace). Fun stuff.

> a terminal UI where you can switch between Python and the agent via <tab>.

I'd suggest rethinking this; people usually expect the tab key to auto-complete.

At any rate, thanks for writing the description yourself. The usual LLM-generated copy for these kinds of projects is really obnoxious.
by skeptic_ai | 2026-02-25 16:25:42+00:00
One more step closer to a closed source system. I think their objective is to move all your code on their systems so you can only modify the code through their AI so they have a moat and will be difficult to move away. They will “guard” your source code and you’ll never see it.

Imagine if tomorrow they make a 10x smarter AI, but they say: you can only use if you upload your source code to us and you can’t see anymore the source code.

So you either stay on lower end models or you give up and use a 10x model.

I only see one issue: will be very difficult for them to “guard” the source code and don’t let you access.
by Squid_Tamer | 2026-02-25 16:26:09+00:00
If you get desperate, I've given my agent a custom $PATH that replaces the forbidden tools with shims that either call the correct tool, or at least tell it what to do differently.

~/agent-shims/mvn:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Usage of 'mvn' is forbidden. Use build.sh or run-tests.sh"

That way it is prevented from using the wrong tools, and can self-correct when it tries.
by SirensOfTitan | 2026-02-25 16:26:11+00:00
You might absolutely be correct, but there is a bias within our field to overly focus on the technology at the expense of everything else.

You are speaking about well-off engineers as a fairly famous top 1% engineer. You need to consider your own bias here. What aren't you seeing?

I think labor organization is absolutely vital now, and it can certainly mix favorably with techno-optimism, but it is silly for us as an industry to sit back and let our jobs be forever changed without a seat at the table. It is silly to ignore the ways in which this technology could negatively change the median knowledge worker's ability to survive and thrive.
by WarmWash | 2026-02-25 16:26:19+00:00
Europe, if you want good tech businesses you need to create a tech business friendly environment.

Banning US tech companies without creating (really) fertile grounds for business is just going to be shooting yourself in the foot. A replacement Google won't grow on a farm only fed worker/consumer fertilizer.

It's almost diabolical that the only way Europe can get rid of the US, is to be more like the US.
by wredcoll | 2026-02-25 16:26:23+00:00
This is just... wildly vague. People break rules for all sorts of reasons, ignorance, desperation, mental impairment, sometimes just plain maliciousness or greed.

It's one thing to discuss something like a school campus with a small cohort of relatively similar wants and needs and a relatively small set of rules, it becomes much more complicated when dealing with the entire society's interaction with laws.
by totetsu | 2026-02-25 16:26:25+00:00
Safety has been dropped from Ai safety institutes

https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2025/06/stateme...

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/tackling-ai-security-risk...

Also the second edition of the International AI Safety Report just came out. https://internationalaisafetyreport.org/publication/internat...
by soco | 2026-02-25 16:26:40+00:00
And here we are again, spreading lies right?

Robert Habeck was NOT arrested, he and his friends were investigated in the broader case of neo-nazi propaganda which they were spreading as well. Unless you consider neo-nazi freedom of speech, of course.

The Pinocchio case meant exactly one official letter sent to that guy, lol "arrests". The investigation was dropped and everybody criticized the investigation.

Ricarda Lang case was a request to the well-known network Gab to identify who insulted the politician, because in Germany insults are a crime. Maybe in the US insulting is a popular free speech pastime, but this is not US. Gab refused to identify the person and that was that.

So, again, I can see when we are spreading lies to support some ideology, but they are just that: lies.
by m_j_g | 2026-02-25 16:26:50+00:00
This made me think of the secretary problem.

Early in life it makes sense to move on more easily, not because we value people or partners less, but because we’re still figuring out ourselves and how the world works. There’s just more uncertainty.

Later, when we know more about who we are and what fits, it’s natural to switch less.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-25 16:26:50+00:00
>Also, a lot of crap in Western countries is caused by tech broligarchs enriching themselves in favor of workers en destroying democracy for tech feudalism.

Not true. The reason my Col is off the charts, salary low and housing unaffordable is due to EU central bank printing too much money leaving us holding the bags, government's zoning laws making housing expensive and them importing millions of immigrants despite record unemployment numbers to put downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on housing. None of this is done by US tech bros, it's all done by EU rulers and elites.

US tech bros is an orthogonal issue that distracts from the core issues.
by AyanamiKaine | 2026-02-25 16:27:15+00:00
There is one thing I am the most scared off and that is believing a comment, video, picture is AI generated while it wasnt.

There is no real AI detection tool that works.

When we see something like emd-ashes its simply the average of the used text the models trained on. If you fall into one the averages of a model you basically part of the model ouput. Yikes.
Show HN: Oxynote – Technical knowledge base with live Prometheus charts
by swithek | 2026-02-25 16:27:30+00:00
Hey HN,

I wanted to share a project my friend Dovydas and I (Simon) have been working on for a while. It’s a knowledge base platform built specifically for developers and technical teams.

It has a similar feel to Notion and supports live collaboration, but it also has technical "power blocks" for API specs, runbooks, RFCs, as well as live metrics from external sources like Prometheus. On top of that, document changes can be reviewed like GitHub PRs, while still preserving rich text blocks and chart displays. The simplest way to describe it is: what if Notion, Grafana, and the PR review parts of GitHub were merged into one platform?

We started working on this because we realised Grafana is good at showing you that something is happening, but it’s not great at telling you why you should care, what "normal" looks like, or which runbook / decision / incident it relates to (it has description fields, but they’re fairly limiting). If you didn’t build the dashboard, you usually end up asking the person who did. Also: dashboards tend to get changed quietly, and the explanations (if they exist) usually don’t.

At the same time, Notion/Confluence work well for text, but they’re awkward for technical artefacts (runbooks, RFCs, postmortems, API specs), and the review features feel superficial. That’s why a lot of people, ourselves included, fall back to git-based docs. Git-based docs are closer to how engineers work, but then you’re running a docs "product" (Docusaurus / GitBook / etc.) with pipelines and deployments, auth layers, and live collaboration on long-form writing that’s rarely pleasant. And, of course, observability still sits somewhere else.

So we built Oxynote. It’s a technical knowledge base for dev + infra teams, with a bias towards simplicity (we took a lot of inspiration from Linear and the idea that you shouldn’t need a training session to use a tool). It keeps runbooks, procedures, API design docs, RFCs, and postmortems together with a proper review flow, and lets you put relevant metrics charts right next to the text. It also has a feature we call "freshness hooks", which lets you tie docs to related GitHub repos / Docker images / external websites, so you get a nudge when something there changes.

This is still an early-stage platform and we’ve got a lot we want to add. For example, live metrics charts currently support only Prometheus, but we’re planning to add SQL databases and other data sources next.

It’s completely free and there are no ads. We’d really appreciate suggestions, experiences (positive and negative), and ideas. Thanks!
by esafak | 2026-02-25 16:27:33+00:00
I was thinking of how to create a UX around quantifying or qualifying AI use. If products revealed that users had used in-app AI to compose their responses, they might respond by doing it outside the app and pasting it in. If you then labeled pasted text as AI they might use tools to imitate typing. And after all that, you might face a user backlash from the users who rely on AI to write.
by acoustics | 2026-02-25 16:27:49+00:00
How is any kind of antivirus or threat detection software supposed to operate on this standard?

Libel suits can be financially catastrophic, so even a tiny false positive rate could present risk that disincentivizes producing such software at all.

And a threat detection mechanism that has a 0.0% false positive rate is conservative to the point of being nearly useless.
by bilkow | 2026-02-25 16:27:54+00:00
Even if the false-positive rate is very small (e.g. 0.01%), you probably won't be affected, but more than a hundred thousand of websites would be and that would still be an issue. I have no idea how big is the false-positive rate.

There are many of reports of the same happening to other sites, some of the top ones (you can find many more by searching HN for "google safe browsing"):

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33526893

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25802366

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45675015
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-25 16:28:06+00:00
wait, this actually makes things sound even worse because anyone who might not like your product can add it to google and google can sometimes be none the wiser and then add it to phishing link which could then lead to their domains (ie. any TLD's hosted by radix.website) being lost in void essentially unless you have verified the domain in google analytics and even then I would consider this whole situation to be so messy.

At this point, NEVER buy any radix.website TLD domains.

I am seeing pinggy had the same issue with their .online domain and this actually definitely caused hurt to their business https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40195410 (I saw this post from their comment in here referencing it)
by muskanshafat | 2026-02-25 16:28:20+00:00
That is the easy case, right?

The Ontology problem is one layer harder. The edges I'm describing are inferred i.e, risk scores, behavioral patterns, connections between a person and a geography. There's no standardized form for them and no agreed technical definition of what deletion even means. That's where the enforcement gap is sharpest and what my intention is in writing that piece.
by a4isms | 2026-02-25 16:30:05+00:00
I encourage people to discriminate against me because I write like an educated African who works annotating AI training material.

Why not? I am a descendant of Africans. I am a mildly successful author by tech nerd standards. I was educated in the British Public School tradition, right down to taking Latin in high school and cheering on our Rugby* and Cricket teams.

If someone doesn't want to read my words or employ me because I must be AI, that's their problem. The truth is, they won't like what I have to say any more than they like the way I say it.

I have made my peace with this.

———

Speaking of Rugby, in 1973 another school's Rugby team played ours, and almost the entire school turned out to watch a celebrity on the other school's team.

His name was Andrew, and he is very much in the news today.
by techblueberry | 2026-02-25 16:30:16+00:00
The frustrating thing about wellness is that wellness influencers are subject to a similar level of bad incentives as everyone else. Maybe it's because wellness is not sexy. Sit less, exercise more, eat more vegetables, but then the people who get attention are the "one neat trick folks who want to tell you about something you _don't_ know." And I'm sure Bryan Johnson knows some things your average person doesn't. but is 2% good, 98% crap and he doesn't know which 2% is good?

Point being that maybe the surgeon general should be a wellness expert, but there's as much if not more corruption and snake oil in wellness as their is in big pharma.