MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kadabra9 | 2026-02-12 03:05:22+00:00
I support some sort of disincentive to prevent HNW individuals from borrowing against assets for income.

I do not support wealth taxes or taxing unrealized gains (unless you get rebates for unrealized losses lol)

There SHOULD be some mechanism (idk what) to close the loophole of HNW individuals borrowing against an asset you have not sold to minimize actual income, but that doesn't mean its right, effective, or even legal to just mass tax all unrealized gains, just because this specific loophole exists currently.

So yeah, it is a separate discussion.
by AnonHP | 2026-02-12 03:05:53+00:00
> Apple's challenge is they want to maintain privacy, which means doing everything on-device.

Apple is not trying to do everything on-device, though it prefers this as much as possible. This is why it built Private Cloud Compute (PCC) and as I understand it, it’s within a PCC environment that Google’s Gemini (for Apple’s users) will be hosted as well.
by Barrin92 | 2026-02-12 03:06:42+00:00
sorry but the source for the wave of discontent is... a new york times op-ed on kids with flip phones? How many of them are there? I think universalizing is appropriate because unlike previous generations there isn't even a meaningful counter-culture. Even the luddites in all likelihood get more traction as a story on Instagram than the actual thing, where do you think they go to get their cottage core fix? I haven't seen a resurgence in self-hosted blogs. The sentence "cottage core is a major trend" is in itself hilarious. Where was it trending?

Looking at the numbers that TikTok or Meta are doing I think you can unequivocally say that the vast majority of young people do not care, at all, the 'luddite teen' is the digital version of, and about as real, as the Gen Z 'trad wife'.

If you're going to a CCC event you're much more likely to see resistance in the form of someone like Cory Doctorow, an actually angry middle aged guy who to my knowledge has not converted to flip phone cottage core to stick it to the man.
by DrewADesign | 2026-02-12 03:07:05+00:00
So many “AI is going to replace expert ______” assertions come from computer scientists not realizing how little they understand the real world requirements of those roles. Judges are at the intersection of humanity and policy: they are there to use their judgement, not merely parse the words and do the math. A judge probably wouldn’t have even done that part — their clerk would have. Is it cool and likely useful? Sure. Is it going to ‘outperform judges’ at their core competencies? Hell no.
by pavelstoev | 2026-02-12 03:07:21+00:00
In a dynamically changing environment (from the perspective of Wi-Fi signal), this will be difficult but not impossible with modern applications of ML algorithms. We worked on this technique back in 2016-18 at the University of Toronto WIRLab; take a look at the results video from back then. I think the person is somewhat identifiable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTOUBUhC0Cg
by dang | 2026-02-12 03:08:43+00:00
Recent and related:

Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945663 - Feb 2026 (1999 comments)

Discord Alternatives, Ranked - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46949564 - Feb 2026 (456 comments)

Discord faces backlash over age checks after data breach exposed 70k IDs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46951999 - Feb 2026 (21 comments)
by matchaonmuffins | 2026-02-12 03:09:06+00:00
This looks very cool! Will definitely try this out in the coming days.

However, a few questions:

A few weeks ago, Moonshot AI released their agentic swarm system that claimed to "self-direct an agent swarm with up to 100 sub-agents, executing parallel workflows across up to 1,500 tool calls." I wonder what your thoughts are on this kind of architecture, where systems rely on a "master node" of sorts for orchestration.

By contrast, your OODA approach seems to rely more on emergent agent behavior -- which I think may result in less than ideal outcomes in at least the near term, especially without specially RL'ed swarm agents.

Also, there's the problem of conflicting objectives. What happens if multiple agents pursuing the same goal arrive at conflicting strategies?
by xp84 | 2026-02-12 03:09:07+00:00
I do like the idea of the “this is a child” taint (ok, terrible name but I really think it should be a near-unremovable thing on a platform like Apple’s that’s so locked down/crypto signed etc).

Like, you’d enroll it by adding a DOB and the computer/phone/etc would just intentionally fail all compatible age checks until that date is 18 years in the past. To remove it (e.g. reuse a device for a non-child), an adult would need to show ID in person at Apple.

Government IDs could be used to do completely privacy preserving, basically OpenID Connect but with no identifying property, just an “isEighteenOrMore” property. However, i agree it’ll never happen in the US because “regular” people still don’t know how identity providers can attest without identifying, and thus would never agree to use their government ID to sign into a pornsite. And on top of all that yeah nobody trusts the government, basically in either party, so they’d be convinced the government was secretly keeping a record of which porn sites they use. Which to be fair is not entirely unlikely. Heck, they’d probably even do it by incompetence via logs or something and then have people get blackmailed!
Ask HN: Has anyone achieved recursive self-improvement with agentic tools?
by nycdatasci | 2026-02-12 03:10:19+00:00
It feels like all the necessary components are finally available to build a self-reinforcing development loop.

Theoretically, we can now task tools like Claude Code or OpenClaw to monitor a git repo, analyze the abstractions in completed work, and then autonomously generate new agents or skills capable of handling similar tasks in the future.

Is anyone successfully running a loop like this? I’m curious if anyone here has shifted the majority of their time from writing code to crafting these systems—essentially bootstrapping agents that learn from the repo history to build better agents. I'd love to hear from those pushing the boundaries on this.
by kcplate | 2026-02-12 03:10:19+00:00
> it's still an inconsistent and broken release

There are 10 iPhones in my immediate family orbit, all running 26 (Including an iPhone 12 Pro). Users ranging from their early teens to 90 and I am the one they call when there is any tech issues.

No one is complaining. Not too bad for an inconsistent and broken release.
by margalabargala | 2026-02-12 03:11:06+00:00
The Taliban did not "win" their insurgency.

The US decided to leave because staying was not politically popular, and left. They were not beaten by the Taliban, they were beaten by the political climate at home.

If someone is actively kicking your ass, then they decide that you aren't worth the effort to keep hurting and decide to walk away, that doesn't mean you "won" the fight even if you get what you want afterwards.
by pornel | 2026-02-12 03:11:18+00:00
The application of compressors for text statistics is fun, but it's a software equivalent of discovering that speakers and microphones are in principle the same device.

(KL divergence of letter frequencies is the same thing as ratio of lengths of their Huffman-compressed bitstreams, but you don't need to do all this bit-twiddling for real just to count the letters)

The article views compression entirely through Python's limitations.

> gzip and LZW don’t support incremental compression

This may be true in the Python's APIs, but is not true about these algorithms in general.

They absolutely support incremental compression even in APIs of popular lower-level libraries.

Snapshotting/rewinding of the state isn't exposed usually (custom gzip dictionary is close enough in practice, but a dedicated API would reuse its internal caches). Algorithmically it is possible, and quite frequently used by the compressors themselves: Zopfli tries lots of what-if scenarios in a loop. Good LZW compression requires rewinding to a smaller symbol size and restarting compression from there after you notice the dictionary stopped being helpful. The bitstream has a dedicated code for this, so this isn't just possible, but baked into the design.
by duskwuff | 2026-02-12 03:11:28+00:00
There's an easier and more effective way of doing that - instead of trying to give the model an extrinsic prompt which makes it respond with your text, you use the text as input and, for each token, encode the rank of the actual token within the set of tokens that the model could have produced at that point. (Or an escape code for tokens which were completely unexpected.) If you're feeling really crafty, you can even use arithmetic coding based on the probabilities of each token, so that encoding high-probability tokens uses fewer bits.

From what I understand, this is essentially how ts_zip (linked elsewhere) works.
by saghm | 2026-02-12 03:11:43+00:00
> Engineers who waste other engineers' time reviewing slop PRs should just be fired. AI is no excuse to start producing bad code. The engineer should still be responsible for the code they ship.

Yeah, this is the unfortunate truth about what's going on here in my opinion. The underlying problem is that some workplaces just have bad culture or processes that don't do enough to prevent (or even actively encourage) being a bad teammate. AI isn't going to solve that, but it's also not really the cause, and at the end of the day, you're going to have problem at a place like that regardless of whether AI is being used or not.
by kadabra9 | 2026-02-12 03:11:51+00:00
I mean when you just make up a number, you should expect to be called out for it, lol.

And I did engage with the real point. Even if it WAS 14 trillion dollars, that wouldn't fund the government for 2 years. And then what? Why is the solution for government bloat and inefficiency always just taking more?
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-12 03:11:59+00:00
It depends. This particular model has larger experts with more active parameters so 16GB is likely not enough (at least not without further tricks) but there are much sparser models where an active expert can be in RAM while the weights for all other experts stay on disk. This becomes more and more of a necessity as models get sparser and RAM itself gets tighter. It lowers performance but the end result can still be "useful".
by muzani | 2026-02-12 03:12:21+00:00
By "here", certainly you don't mean HN? HN feels muted and honestly, I haven't been on here because it's quite stale by the time it gets here, and people have just been vocal about not getting it.

> AI.com was sold for $70M

This news is everywhere elsewhere, and it's still going on in my WhatsApp groups. I can't even find the active HN thread. This was more because people were surprised about the actual owner of ai.com which everyone assumed was OpenAI or Sam Altman or something.

> OpenClaw/Moltbot/Clawdbot

This has been everywhere elsewhere too, and Clawdbot hit HN a few days late, after people have already set up videos on it. It's a security hole, but it's the first legitimately good automation tool we've had from AI. Moltbook is more fascination with moltbot+MCPs rather than something interesting in itself - it meant you had a tool that could use the internet from a CLI and such. It's a bit like the Wright Brothers' plane - nobody expects to fly to Japan on it, but it meant flight was possible.

> GPT-5.3-Codex and Opus 2.6 were released

I think the only real news was Opus 4.6. I love it. It's like a PB&J sandwich. It's cheap. It's the combination of technology people take for granted. It's also something usable in daily life.

Opus 4.6 had better parallel command use - meaning it would search for all the files at once instead of 1 at a time. And it was better at going deeper. It helped me pin a bug by going into Android source code and finding the exact line causing a bug, then all the functions that were called by this bug. Most people don't need to look at the source code of the thing they built something on top of, and the people who are vibe coding don't care much for code. Nobody benchmarks how crunchy the peanut butter is.

gpt-5.3-codex benchmarked better, but I'm not seeing this translating to useful code. It failed with the first few requests I gave it. Maybe it's just me and my repo.
by Baljhin | 2026-02-12 03:12:31+00:00
So it has begun. A US recruiting company has (finally?) openly advertised to front-loading their human screeners (assuming they actually had used them previously; I have my doubts) with a chatbot that will "make hiring more human" by doing screening calls of applicants after they've submitted an application.

This reminds me of a piece by "Ask The Headhunter" Nick Corcodilos - from 2018 - on having an AI do interviews on behalf of candidates [0]: I wonder if we can get Avatar Hank and Parker on a call, save and scrutinize their conversation for valuable insights.
[0] https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/11783/interview-for-1500-jo...

Curiously, in a perfect case of coincidence, a human (we assume!) 'Parker Miller' just a few weeks ago had something to say about shortsighted decision-making on human replacement by AI: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/parker-miller-ams_aistrategy-...
by xattt | 2026-02-12 03:12:55+00:00
A couple of interesting takeaways:

- Pre-LED Jumbotrons used CRT pixels called "Trinilite" elements. This was a proprietary Sony technology where each sub-pixel or "cell" was a miniaturized CRT assembly. Each resolved one pixel each.

- A "maximum" NTSC configuration consisting of 40 units wide would result in a horizontal resolution of just 640 dots.

- The display needed a calibration using a “Screen Alignment Unit” (the JME-SA200). This unit used a remote modem chain involving a "cellular phone" and "digital data card." This means that Jumbotron techs could dial in over 1998-era mobile networks to geometrically align a stadium-sized wall of vacuum tubes as they sat in the middle of said stadium.

I also found the format of the manual interesting, because it follows the same style of consumer-grade Sony devices from that period.
Show HN: Carapace – A security-hardened Rust alternative to OpenClaw
by puremachinery | 2026-02-12 03:13:25+00:00
Carapace is an open-source personal AI assistant gateway written in Rust. It connects to Anthropic, OpenAI, Ollama, Gemini, and Bedrock, and works through Discord, Telegram, Signal, Slack, and webhooks. Apache-2.0 licensed.

I started building it after the January 2026 OpenClaw security disclosures — 42K exposed instances on Shodan (78% still unpatched), 3 CVEs with public exploits, 341+ malicious skills on ClawHub (Snyk found 36% of all skills have security flaws), 1-click RCE via the Control UI, plaintext credentials harvestable by commodity infostealers. The problems weren't bugs; they were architecture decisions — open by default, no signing, full host privileges, secrets in JSON files. The February wave from Kaspersky, Palo Alto, Snyk, and SecurityScorecard made it worse, not better.

Carapace takes the opposite defaults: localhost-only binding, fail-closed auth, OS keychain credential storage, Ed25519-signed WASM plugins with capability sandboxing, prompt guard with exec approval, SSRF/DNS-rebinding defense. The security comparison doc walks through each OpenClaw vulnerability and how Carapace handles it: https://github.com/puremachinery/carapace/blob/master/docs/s...

This is a preview release — Discord works end-to-end, ~5,000 tests pass, but the Control UI frontend isn't built yet and subprocess sandboxing isn't fully wired. The security architecture is real; the polish isn't.
by jarjoura | 2026-02-12 03:14:06+00:00
I don't understand this take Boris:

> The amount of output this generates can quickly become overwhelming in a terminal

If I use Opus 4.6, arguably the most verbose, over thinking model you've released to date, OpenCode handles it just the same as it does Sonnet 4.0.

OpenCode even allows me to toggle into subagent and task agents with their own output terminals that, if I am curious what is going on, I can very clearly see it.

All Claude-Code has done has turned the output into a black box so that I am forced to wait for it to finish to look at the final git diff. By then it's spent $5-10 working on a task, and threw away a lot of the context it took to get there. It showed "thinking" blocks that weren't particularly actionable, because it was mostly talking to itself that it can't do something because it goes against a rule, but it really wants to.

I'm actually frustrated with Code blazing through to the end without me able to see the transcript of the changes.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-12 03:14:54+00:00
>its simple to just point the finger and claim you're entitled to your "fair share" of someone else's property simply because they have more than you.

Yes. Because they did not take their fair share. I'm all for proper audits (not whatever Elon Musk pretended was "fraud waste and abuse" last year).

If nothing truly comes out of it, cool. Maybe we need more laws for that. And apparently wealth taxes are popular.

https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2025/11/new-poll-shows...

>if it even passes, will surely be challenged on Federal and State constitutional grounds.

Will it be sanity if they lose and the tax is upheld?

I already said that they will file lawsuits no matter how they legislate, so nothing in my comment was actually addressed.

Insteas you're just trying to make me emphathize with a billionaire for some reason. Meanwhile, I'm almost 3 years out of my last W-2 job that I was laid off of because of these billionaires. My sympathy is gone. Tax the rich.
by CoffeeOnWrite | 2026-02-12 03:15:31+00:00
I love this article but don't understand the conclusion. Heroku is dead as a doornail, of course.

Salesforce's core product was on bare metal up to a couple years ago. What they should have done is adopt Heroku as their internal Platform-as-a-Service. That would have solved three problems: 1) provided a ready and proven foundation for cloud adoption by Salesforce business units, 2) stimulated Heroku's product roadmap by giving it a very large and loyal design partner, and 3) eliminated the opportunity cost in terms of headcount, developer productivity, and poor imitation that came with the alternative "Falcon" aka "Hyperforce" project that became Salesforce's albatross and black hole for developer energy and goodwill going on 7+ years now.
by tehjoker | 2026-02-12 03:16:04+00:00
Interesting, but aside from replicating students rather than real judges, an AI as judge would undermine the legitimacy of the process. It might give more “accurate” formal results, but that’s not the entire purpose of the process. It’s partly a show for the public and partly way for various parties including the defense to feel like society and a real human being heard their concerns and considered them
by rpdillon | 2026-02-12 03:16:51+00:00
It seems there are 2000 positions and 8000 applicants. The program cost $74M, but more than paid for itself:

> It also recouped more than the trial's net cost of 72 million euros ($86 million) through increases in arts-related expenditure, productivity gains and reduced reliance on other social welfare payments, according to a government-commissioned cost-benefit analysis.
by HexDecOctBin | 2026-02-12 03:16:53+00:00
> Yet, the market for "Indian Luxury" is booming globally. We see European houses acting as colonial curators of Indian heritage: Prada rebranding the Kolhapuri chappal for ₹84,500 ($930); Gucci selling the common kurta as an 'exotic kaftan' for the price of a small car; and Dior releasing a ₹18,180,000 ($200,000) coat dripping in Lucknowi Mukaish work without a whisper of credit to the artisans. The global appetite for the aesthetic is ravenous. But in Kanchipuram, the very hands that feed this hunger are vanishing.

The Western colonial imperial system never truly went away, it simply morphed into an opaque inscrutable machinery to make it palatable to its own highly refined taste. An empire of human rights.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-12 03:17:35+00:00
"Stuff like this" is a lot more readable than Moltbook, this looks like a very successful experiment so far. Even if all it really does is help us explore the limits of the models' factual knowledge where they're ultimately incented to create weird confabulations in a format that happens to be trivially auditable and surveyable by the average human, that's still a big win.
by arttaboi | 2026-02-12 03:17:47+00:00
Hey HN! Newbie here,

I recently came across AI email assistant Google CC, where you can add an AI to a thread via CC to help draft replies or provide input. For those who’ve used tools like this, how useful are they in practicality? Google CC has a waitlist but it's the only one I could find that is free. So, I was also wondering if alternatives are worth paying for?
by kace91 | 2026-02-12 03:18:17+00:00
I’ve always have wanted a clean project area on my computer, never managed it though.

I try to keep a space for organization (slack, jira, whatever) and another for the ide, for example. Start working, and pretty soon I need to check an old pr on GitHub, and see it side to side with the ide, next someone sends a link in slack that opens a chrome window which is a doc with links that go into tabs. Hold, I have to hop in zoom for the daily… aaand we’re back at 20 windows and 15 tabs.

I wonder if it’s just the mess imposed by modern workflows. Picturing an engineer decades ago working alone and disconnected in its own office sounds like a dream, but I might just be idealizing it from today’s mindset.
by Sniffnoy | 2026-02-12 03:18:22+00:00
So, I'm not actually a particle physicist. My understanding had been (based on something I'd read somewhere -- should try to find it again) that there is some problem caused by just declaring "neutrinos just have innate masses, they're not from the Higgs mechanism", but I could be mistaken. Obviously, if that is mistaken, then as you say it merely a question rather than a contradiction. Should try to dig that up though.

Edit: Doing some quick searching seems to indicate that giving neutrinos a bare mass term would violate electroweak gauge invariance? I don't know enough to evaluate that claim, or TBH really even to understand it. But I believe that's what I was thinking of, so maybe you can say how true and/or pertinent that is.