MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yes_really | 2026-02-17 05:55:50+00:00
The original comment was "To be clear, do you think it's bad to use technology to detect and stop terrorism?", and the reply said he wouldn't "take their word as to whom they're fighting".

I asked if the person was denying that Israel intelligence seeks to detect and stop terrorism from those major terrorist groups and from individual terrorists. How on earth is this a "bad faith argument"?
by KerrickStaley | 2026-02-17 05:56:08+00:00
A fun way to play this game with less downside is to run `set -euo pipefail` in an interactive session. Then, whenever you execute a command that returns a non-zero exit code, your shell will exit immediately.

Unfortunately certain commands like `rg` will return non-zero by design when there are no matches, which could be an intentional outcome.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-17 05:59:13+00:00
> I tried to explain getting ghosted, ghost jobs, online applying, multi-round interviews to my grandma. It just does not make sense. It has never been like this, why is it like this now?

It's much riskier to hire the wrong employee now. If a bad hire is made, it takes around 2 quarters to build the paper trail needed to be litigation-proof.
Show HN: Alexa-like voice interface for OpenClaw
by sachaa | 2026-02-17 06:01:56+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with running OpenClaw fully locally on a small PamirAI Distiller Alpha device. Something interesting happened: OpenClaw detected the device had an unused microphone + speaker, and I ended up wiring a full local voice interface on top of it, wake word, audio pipeline, and agent loop, all running 24/7 on-device.

The result is a completely local, always-on AI agent I can talk to anytime (no cloud, no external APIs required). It executes real tasks, manages memory locally, and behaves more like a persistent system than a chatbot.

This repo contains the minimal setup so others can replicate:

* Local voice pipeline (mic → STT → OpenClaw → TTS → speaker)

* Wake-word loop

* Fully offline / local-first architecture

* Runs on small edge devices (tested on PamirAI Distiller Alpha)

One unexpected observation from this project: modern agents are starting to feel environment-aware. Instead of being a static program, the OpenClaw can detect what hardware and capabilities exist around it, notice when something is missing or underused, and adapt itself, sometimes even improving its own interface and workflows without explicit instructions. In my case, the voice layer wasn’t originally planned; it emerged from the system recognizing unused audio hardware and wiring it into the agent loop. This shift, from software that executes, to software that understands and evolves within its environment, feels like a meaningful change in how we think about AI systems.

The coding agent bot was kind enough to share it's creation with the rest of the world :-) https://github.com/sachaabot/openclaw-voice-agent
by lifestyleguru | 2026-02-17 06:02:22+00:00
> Whats even worse is all the people in your life who are older can't understand this at all.

That's people over 50. Millenials are basically out of job market once losing the current job. I haven't heard anyone from younger generations in my vicinity getting a serious stable job either, and there is nowhere to emigrate to this time.

> I tried to explain getting ghosted, ghost jobs, online applying, multi-round interviews to my grandma. It just does not make sense.

There is no job.
by Barbing | 2026-02-17 06:04:00+00:00
I installed a few different STT apps at the same time that used Parakeet and I think they disagreed with each other. But Hex otherwise would’ve won for me I think. Wanna reformat the Mac & try again (been a while anyway).

My comment on this from a month back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46637040
by throwthrowuknow | 2026-02-17 06:04:48+00:00
This is simply yet another outdated analogy from haters that are failing to keep pace with the current frontier because they are too busy getting high on the anti-hype.

We’re well past the need to retry the same prompt multiple times in order to get working code. The models with their harnesses are properly agentic now, they can find the right context, make a plan, write the code, run the tests and fix the bugs with little to no intervention from a human.

The hardest part now is keeping up with them when it comes to approving the deliverables and updating the architecture and spec as new things are discovered by using the software. Not new bugs but corrections to your own assumptions you had before the feature was built.

The hard part is almost entirely management.

That’s something to seriously think about.
by uejfiweun | 2026-02-17 06:06:01+00:00
Eh, I think there are valid counterarguments to that. Buying property under the current ruling system buys you exclusive rights to that property while that ruling system is in power, and you can use that time to make preparations and such that could help you if shit DOES hit the fan. You might not have the government enforcing your property rights but maybe you can enforce them yourself.
by amritananda | 2026-02-17 06:06:14+00:00
Zionism existed since the late 19th century. It cannot be considered solely a response to the Holocaust. It was an outgrowth of the many nationalist movements that were occurring in Europe at the time, and even as far back as the 1920s the consensus was that the establishment of a Jewish state required a Jewish majority. This is clearly evident in the writings of people like Jabrotinsky and Herzl himself. I don't think any native population would take kindly to what exactly this implied.
by viveknar | 2026-02-17 06:06:41+00:00
mostly looking at 3 forensic layers:

1) metadata forensics: spotting when an ATS auto-refreshes a 6-month-old job to look "fresh" today (we track the original timestamp vs the repost).

2) external correlation: cross-referencing against layoff/WARN data to see if the budget actually exists for that specific department.

3) hiring velocity: flagging patterns where a company keeps "urgent" roles posted but has zero headcount growth in that team over the last quarter.

wrote a full breakdown on the methodology here: thesubspace.io/research
by dhosek | 2026-02-17 06:07:03+00:00
Other things that could get you on the registry include visiting a nude beach in California or being an 18-year-old high school student with a 17-year-old girlfriend and having your sexual activity discovered by a vindictive parent (that last one will get you the bonus bar of shame of criminal activity involving a minor). The registries are rather blunt tools and also end up doing things like making getting housing difficult (there was a news story I saw in the 90s about an encampment under a freeway in Florida as it was the only place people on the sex offender registry could legally live in a major city (I think Miami but this was 30 years ago). A more recent story in Chicago pointed out that a restriction on sleeping on the CTA would cause homeless people on the registry to end up being unable to meet the terms of their parole). I don’t really have much sympathy for child sex abusers, but if people are such dangers to society that they can only live under a freeway or will be reincarcerated on unavoidable technicalities, something is very wrong.
by jamesfinlayson | 2026-02-17 06:08:01+00:00
> Clients are bad.

Yep. A friend ran an XMPP server for a while and the one person on iOS had a client that couldn't handle whatever encryption protocols the Android client supported, and the iOS client also choked on new certificates for the same domain (there was some way to accept it but the default behaviour was to just stop receiving). The killer that moved us to Signal was that someone got a new phone (something that had happened before without causing an issue) and the new phone could connect to channels but just saw nothing.
by mock-possum | 2026-02-17 06:08:31+00:00
> our conscious self often has trouble controlling, or even predicting our own behaviour.

That doesn’t ring true for me - I hardly ever find myself behaving unpredictably or out-of-control - I remember sometimes feeling that way as a child, but now? As an adult? It almost never happens.

Do you really feel that you are ‘often’ out of control or behaving unpredictably?
by qingcharles | 2026-02-17 06:08:33+00:00
No, I'm doing the original 1987 PC Elite. The later one was written by Chris Sawyer. I asked him recently and he also has no idea about Andy who wrote the prior version (both for Realtime). [both versions I assume were written in 100% ASM] Surprisingly Gemini seems to be pretty good at writing 8088 CGA assembler, especially in Deep Think mode. It one-shot an entire filled poly renderer and 3D engine.

I worked with some of the original XCOM guys after a bunch of them left Microprose to set up on their own. I wrote a lot of the graphics engine for this, which was really a direct descendent of XCOM:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UOYps_3eM0
by emsign | 2026-02-17 06:09:52+00:00
Yet at the same time the status of Terabytes of abuse material seized from Epstein's properties is unknown because the abusers are rich guys protected by the president who is probably one of them. And law enforcement is actively helping to obstruct justice for the thousands of victims.

There's dozens or hundreds of abusers easily identifiable in there and so this hero story is just propaganda at this time.
by verdverm | 2026-02-17 06:10:27+00:00
nit, the primary text font weight is a little light for reading, or maybe it is anti-aliasing, the chars look like they are missing pixels on a 4k screen

I saw a full-duplex video model that was conversational, and it spooked me. What are your thoughts on for how this plays out for societal well-being after having experienced them more deeply than myself?

> voices have personas, like "romantic and gentle"

You might find this interesting while pondering my question

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/18/g-s1177-78041/what-to-do-when...
by deathanatos | 2026-02-17 06:11:15+00:00
> undefined behavior makes debugging intractable:

By their own admission, the compiler warns about the UB. "-Wanal"¹, as some call it, makes it an error. Under UBSan the program aborts with:

code.cpp:4:6: runtime error: execution reached the end of a value-returning function without returning a value

… "intractable"?

¹a humorous name for -Wextra -Wall -Werror
by electronvolt | 2026-02-17 06:12:46+00:00
I mean, you say that, but systems like Spanner exist & I think the fact that it's used for Gmail, Docs, etc. has demonstrated that for a large range of OLTP workloads, serializable everywhere and also performant /is/ possible to architect for -- with the right combination of both database + application design.

That isn't to say it's correct everywhere, but I'd maybe be a little more suspicious of "We want OLTP but we can't use serializable" in a vacuum.

Of course--there are obvious cases like "We can't use serializable because of how our database implements it" or even "because we can't be arsed to figure out how to structure all our data accesses to avoid conflicts and aren't paid enough to solve that problem", but I feel like those are a bit more honest than "Because of performance reasons, in all cases". :)
by gostsamo | 2026-02-17 06:13:00+00:00
you can restrict the email send tool to have to/cc/bcc emails hardcoded in a list and an agent independent channel should be the one to add items to it. basically the same for other tools. You cannot rewire the llm, but you can enumerate and restrict the boundaries it works through.

exfiltrating info through get requests won't be 100% stopped, but will be hampered.
by Gigachad | 2026-02-17 06:14:43+00:00
I don't think the issue here is related to AI. Without AI, moderators would still have to look at these same videos. The difference is they would hit the public first before being flagged and sent to moderators. Now with AI they can be prevented from ever going public.

The fact that we still need to traumatize workers to confirm the automated decisions is sad. The only other ways I can see to resolve this would be either to just blindly trust the AI result without any human oversight, or to require all facebook users to link their government ID to accounts and only allow posting by users in countries where the authorities arrest the people posting these things.
'Like a Virgin' songwriter Billy Steinberg dies at 74
by poojagill | 2026-02-17 06:14:50+00:00
Legendary songwriter Billy Steinberg, whose lyrics helped define pop music in the 1980s and 1990s, has died at age 74. Steinberg died in Los Angeles’ Brentwood neighborhood, according to his attorney, Laurie Soriano, who confirmed the news and remembered him as both an artist and a person.
by mupengism | 2026-02-17 06:15:13+00:00
The +4.5pp for SWE vs +51.9pp for healthcare is the most underappreciated result here.

Skills are most valuable precisely where models are weakest - domains with less training data, more proprietary knowledge, or specialized workflows. SWE is heavily represented in training data; healthcare is not. This is exactly what you would predict if skills encode what the model genuinely does not know, rather than regurgitate what it already does.

Building an agent OS (OpenClaw), we see this pattern constantly. Skills that move the needle are never 'here is how Python works' - the model already knows that. The ones that matter encode system-specific quirks, environment constraints, or hard-won lessons from real failures. colonCapitalDee shared a great rule above: only encode what is (1) outside the model training data, (2) context-specific to your environment, or (3) alignment guidance for future sessions. Everything else is regurgitation.

The paper tests pre-task self-generation with no external input - useless indeed. The interesting untested condition: skills generated through actual execution with real feedback, in domains with sparse training coverage. That is where +51.9pp starts to look like a floor, not a ceiling.
by electronvolt | 2026-02-17 06:15:45+00:00
I guess I'd say -- I think you're right that you shouldn't (ideally) be able to trigger true deadlocks/livelocks with just serializable transactions + an OLTP DBMS.

That doesn't mean it won't happen, of course. The people who write databases are just programmers, too. And you can certainly imagine a situation where you get two (or more) "ad-hoc" transactions that can't necessarily progress when serializable but can with read committed (ad-hoc in the sense of the paper here: https://cacm.acm.org/research-highlights/technical-perspecti...).
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-17 06:18:09+00:00
>I believe shopping malls often use such signals (wifi, bluetooth) to track what your travel pattern through the mall is. They know what section of the store you spend most of your time in and what storefronts you stall at.

hmm, I wonder if there is anything about using this to combat shoplifting...
short google later, seems there is, but mostly everything I'm finding is just brochures and breathless corporate announcements.

found this uni project https://capstone.cse.msu.edu/2020-01/projects/meijer/
by bandrami | 2026-02-17 06:18:11+00:00
> What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible!

Wait, what? Anthropic makes money by getting you to buy and expend tokens. The last thing they want is for you to get the right answer as fast as possible. They want you to sometimes get the right answer unpredictably, but with enough likelihood that this time will work that you keep hitting Enter.
by lirbank | 2026-02-17 06:18:53+00:00
Fair concern about reaching inside systems - it's not something to do lightly. The hooks are designed to be minimal: production code never calls them, they only activate in tests. But the core point is narrower than the thread might suggest - the article isn't about whether to use atomic updates vs locks vs SERIALIZABLE. It's about when your code has operations that could race, how do you prove your handling actually works?
by stinkbeetle | 2026-02-17 06:20:06+00:00
> So parent was 'wrong' that "chiplets" were ever called MCM's. But right that "chips designed with multiple chiplet-looking-things" did used to be called "MCM's".

No, chiplets were called MCMs. IBM and others as you noted had chip(lets) in MCMs that were not "fully-functioning" by themselves.

> Also MCM's lacked the kind of high-bandwidth, low-latency fabric for CPU's to communicate more directly with each other. For the Pentiums, that was organic substrates (the usual green PCB material) and routing copper traces between the dies. For the IBM's, that was an advanced ceramic-glass substrate, which had much higher bandwidth than PCB traces but still required a lot of space to route all the copper traces (latency taking a hit) and generated a lot of heat. Today we use silicon for those interconnects, which gives exemplary bandwidth+latency+heat performance.

> This all just smells like revisionist history to make the name make sense.

IBM's MCMs had incredibly high bandwidth low latency interconnects. Core<->L3 is much more important and latency critical than core+cache cluster <-> memory or other core+cache cluster, for example. And IBM and others had silicon interposers, TSVs, and other very advanced packaging and interconnection technology decades ago too, e.g.,

https://indico.cern.ch/event/209454/contributions/415011/att...

The real story is much simpler. MCM did not have a great name particularly in consumer space as CPUs and memory controllers and things consolidated to one die which was (at the time) the superior solution. Then reticle limit, yield equations, etc., conspired to turn the tables and some bright spark probably from a marketing department decided to call them chiplets. That's about it.

Aside, funnily enough IBM actually used to (and may still), and quite possibly others, actually call various cookie cutter blocks in a chip (e.g., a cluster of cores and caches, or a memory controller block, or a PCIe block), chiplets. From https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp5102.pdf, "The most amount of energy can be saved when a whole POWER8 chiplet enters the winkle mode. In this mode, the entire chiplet is turned off, including the L3".
by andsoitis | 2026-02-17 06:22:38+00:00
As a fun fact, humans and worms have a common hypothetical ancestor we call “urbilateria”, likely living over 550-600 million years ago, before the Cambrian explosion.

This ancestor gave rise to a branch called protosomes (worms, insects, mollusks) and another branch called deutorosomes (which includes humans and other vertebrates).

Worms and humans share: bilateral body organization, a digestive tract, basic nerve structures, many shared genes that control body development.
by deathanatos | 2026-02-17 06:22:39+00:00
Do we know that? I've written "dead" code. It's point was to communicate structure or intent, but it was also still dead. This pattern, in one form or another, crops up a lot IME (in multiple languages, even, with varying abilities to optimize it):

if condition that is "always" false:
abort with message detailing the circumstances

That `if` is "dead", in the sense that the condition is always false. But "dead" sometimes is just a proof — or if I'm not rigourous enough, an assumption — in my head. If the compiler can prove the same proof I have in my head, then the dead code is eliminated. If can't, well, presumably it is left in the binary, either to never be executed, or to be executed in the case that the proof in my head is wrong.
by BeeOnRope | 2026-02-17 06:22:48+00:00
Why is that a problem? Inlining and optimization aren't minor aspects of compiling to native code, they are responsible for order-of-magnitude speedups.

My point is that it is easy to say "don't remove my code" while looking at a simple single-function example, but in actual compilation huge portions of a function are "dead" after inlining, constant propagation and other optimizations: not talking anything about C-specific UB or other shenanigans. You don't want to throw that out.
by pqdbr | 2026-02-17 06:24:45+00:00
One Rails app self deployed in VPS can really go a long way.

I'd add:

- Learn tailscale. It's one of those technologies that takes half a day to get used to (claude code will answer all your questions), and you'll never want to live without it in the future. SSH into your VPS, install tailscale and use `tailscale set --ssh`, and shut down `systemctl stop ssh.service`. You don't even have SSH daemon runing anymore, extra safety.

- Use a simple docker compose to run your dependencies like docker. Bind to the tailscale IP, so ports: {{ tailscale_ip_of_this_server}}:5432:5432. This way your database is not exposed to the web, but it's exposed to the tailscale. Use tailscale_ip_of_this_server in your ENV vars to rails to connect - since it's running in the same server, tailscale will route it to localhost (and with localhost latency).

- With claude, set up a second VPS, add it to the same tailscale, turn of SSHD. They can now connect directly via tailscale (try ping or sshing between them).

- Then, install claude code on this second VPS. Since postgres is bound to the tailscale IP on the main, the 'slave' can connect to it. Install postgres via docker, but have claude set up a 'streaming replication' between server MASTER and server SLAVE, using tailscale ip.

100% secure, encrypted, and now you have a postgres replication with zero data loss if something goes wrong.

In the same SLAVE, you can also install barman - claude code will help you set it up.

You then have a postgres BACKUP with point in time recovery.

There you go!
by pamelafox | 2026-02-17 06:25:10+00:00
This is why I only add information to AGENTS.md when the agent has failed at a task. Then, once I've added the information, I revert the desired changes, re-run the task, and see if the output has improved. That way, I can have more confidence that AGENTS.md has actually improved coding agent success, at least with the given model and agent harness.

I do not do this for all repos, but I do it for the repos where I know that other developers will attempt very similar tasks, and I want them to be successful.
by znnajdla | 2026-02-17 06:25:50+00:00
Not surprising to me at all. I’m a straight man and I’ve always dated single mothers, and it always shocked me how bad their ex partners were. Woman are drawn to toxic abusers like men are drawn to OnlyFans models and the real victims are the children. And women can be incredibly blind to what is going on with their child when they’re in a codependent relationship with the abuser.
by gjsman-1000 | 2026-02-17 06:25:55+00:00
You completely missed the point.

Technology, Google, all of it, makes it easy enough to learn how to do 95% of many common roles and fields. However, you will never be hired, or replaced, until you master that last 5%. Every role, even some of the lowest ranking, has its own insurmountable 5%. How well has fully replacing cashiers with self checkout gone, after… two decades… of trying?

If we can’t fully replace a cashier yet, the most automatable role in existence, politely stuff your pie hole when saying AI will replace skilled roles.