MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by unyttigfjelltol | 2026-02-18 23:16:52+00:00
I spent several years trying to get ground truth out of digital medical records and I would draw this parallel to AI slop:

With traditional medical records, you could see what the practitioner did and covered because only that was in the record.

With computerized records, the intent, thought process, most signal you would use to validate internal consistency, was hidden behind a wall of boilerplate and formality that armored the record against scrutiny.

Bad writing on LinkedIn is self-evident. Everything about it stinks.

AI slop is like a Trojan Horse for weak, undeveloped thoughts. They look finished, so they sneak into your field of view and consume whatever additional attention is required to finally realize that despite the slick packaging, this too is trash.

So “AI slop,” in this worldview, is a complaint that historical signals of quality simply based on form, no longer are useful gatekeepers for attention.
by lambda | 2026-02-18 23:17:22+00:00
OK, with MiniMax M2.5 UD-Q3_K_XL (101 GiB), I can't really seem to fit the full context in even at smaller quants. Going up much above 64k tokens, I start to get OOM errors when running Firefox and Zed alongside the model, or just failure to allocate the buffers, even going down to 4 bit KV cache quants (oddly, 8 bit worked better than 4 or 5 bit, but I still ran into OOM errors).

I might be able to squeeze a bit more out if I were running fully headless with my development on another machine, but I'm running everything on a single laptop.

So looks like for my setup, 64k context with an 8 bit quant is about as good as I can do, and I need to drop down to a smaller model like Qwen3 Coder Next or GPT-OSS 120B if I want to be able to use longer contexts.
by daveguy | 2026-02-18 23:17:46+00:00
I'm saying it doesn't take much for someone to say, "yeah, I would have voted for the guy already in power". I'm surprised it wasn't much higher than that.

So no, you definitely misrepresented my theory. It doesn't take a specific threat of violence for someone to say "sure, I would have cast a vote with the winner." And yet it was only ~1.5% higher than before the election. Are you saying you don't even recognize the bias of saying "yeah, I'm good with the winner"? Or the bias of a honeymoon period? I mean, June 2025 was before 90% of his craziest shit. But you go on.
by lich_king | 2026-02-18 23:18:10+00:00
> Today's AI can basically compete with the low quality stuff that makes up most of social media, it can't really compete with higher quality stuff

But compete in what sense? It already wins on volume alone, because LLM writing is much cheaper than human writing. If you search for an explanation of a concept in science, engineering, philosophy, or art, the first result is an AI summary, probably followed by five AI-generated pages that crowded out the source material.

If you get your news on HN, a significant proportion of stories that make it to the top are LLM-generated. If you open a newspaper... a lot of them are using LLMs too. LLM-generated books are ubiquitous on Amazon. So what kind of competition / victory are we talking about? The satisfaction of writing better for an audience of none?
by iamnothere | 2026-02-18 23:18:15+00:00
> First: bad people doing bad things. I think most people are good people most of the time. Most people know blackmail is bad. But there are some people who would blackmail all the time if it was simply easier to do. The reason they do not blackmail is because blackmail is hard and you’ll probably get caught. AI lowers the barrier to entry for being a terrible person.

> Second: bad AI doing bad things. We do not yet know how to align AI to human values.

Strange that the author doesn’t see the contradiction here. Harassment, hate, etc are human values. Common ones! Just, like, look around. Everyone has the option to choose otherwise, yet we often do not. (This is referred to as a “revealed preference.”)

It may be that AI is such a powerful tool that it’s like giving your asshole neighbor a nuclear weapon. Or it may not be. If it’s more mundane, then it likely falls more in the category of knives, spy cameras, certain common chemicals, and AirTags: things that could (and sometimes will) be misused, but which have legitimate uses and are still typically legal in most parts of the world.

Despite thinking most applications for AI are low value, I am firmly against restricting access to tools because of potential for misuse, unless an individual has shown themselves to be particularly dangerous.

If you want an angle to contain potential damage, make a user responsible for what their AI does. That would be fair.
by anonymars | 2026-02-18 23:18:31+00:00
So presumably what you are saying is something along the lines of, "A human creating an artifact does make that artifact human", i.e. "A human creating an artifact does make that artifact a human artifact."

But does that narrow facet have a bearing on the topic of "AI rights" / morality of AI use?

Is it immoral to drive a car or use a toaster? Or to later recycle (destroy) them?
by groundzeros2015 | 2026-02-18 23:18:47+00:00
Yes, David graeber talks a lot about the idea of bullshit jobs but fails to identify them concretely. As we see in this thread, whenever someone puts up an example, there is actually value he misses because he is unfamiliar with the workplace and business.

The example used here was advertising. And then when we push on the example the fallback is to the subjective - feeling unfilled, definition.

So I am still look for concrete examples of bullshit jobs to justify the original comment that AI will find efficiencies by letting us throw these away.

Got any? You are an expert on the text so I’m hoping you can identify one.
by DrewADesign | 2026-02-18 23:19:51+00:00
> People would be willing to pay for a premium when there is tangible performance improvement.

Developers like to assume this because it’s something they value in their own software usage, and something they know how to address. That’s not something you can generalize to non-developers. Look, feel, and features are the main difference users see between FOSS and most commercial software— not performance. In fact, FOSS performance is obviously better in many/most cases. That’s why almost the only FOSS software projects with a significant number of non-dev users are run by organizations that employ designers — Mozilla, Blender, Signal, Android, etc.

Unless you’re making a tool for developers or gamers, or the competition is intolerably bad, people rarely pay for increased performance.
by TimTheTinker | 2026-02-18 23:19:53+00:00
Don't underestimate the power of LLMs to build targeted bespoke systems. I used to work on an internal QA team at a software company, and it quickly became the "internal web app" team after I built 2 web apps (to coordinate manual testing and handle the post-release fix approval process). I'd bet a lot of money that the team I was on is currently building a lot of new apps and features for internal use using Claude Opus or OpenAI Codex.

For companies that are willing to pay a few more developers, they can build some bespoke apps for internal use (if simple enough) to coordinate workflows.

Of course, highly complex, domain-specific software will never be dethroned. No one can build a Linux replacement with an LLM. Same for DaVinci Resolve, Apple Logic Pro, Pianoteq and ArcGIS. But glorified CRUD apps that handle basic workflows and integrations will likely be subject to losses on the low end, where a few devs and a Claude Code subscription can handle basic cases.
by altairprime | 2026-02-18 23:20:14+00:00
If sizes were updated to, say, 14Z, where Z is a common industry-wide body shape code, then it would be vastly simpler to find clothing that fits — and people who were a 22 before might now be a 16S, once the clothes are proportioned properly for their non-hourglass body.

The problem underlying this is that retailers do not want to advertise for more than one body shape, because that not only reduces their total profit (9x the models hired, 9x the designs to create, more complicated size ranges than simply blowing up a size 6 design with a photocopier), it also would force everyone in the industry to be revealed all at once as cheaping out on design and production, once the use of H for hourglass spread (since anyone who isn’t using a letter code is obviously Hourglass Only, based on the data). Corporations have multiple strong financial incentives not to do this, and their shareholders would revolt and fire any CEO who tried to reduced profits by incurring massive increases in design cost, product variants, model staffing, and retail/online logistics for the sake of “unattractive” non-hourglass women.

I think the EU’s “no more shredding clothes” initiative is going to have some very interesting ramifications over the next few years, as clothing manufacturers will have to choose between seeing people buy their unsold inventory at the local equivalent to Goodwill here in the U.S., or have to start selling clothing “made to order” with only a limited quantity kept in the store for try-on purposes. Apple, weirdly, already has a perfect logistics pipeline for exactly this approach; you can get an off-the-shelf option in stores, or you can customize it in eight to ten different ways and get something labeled “CTO” — Custom To Order. But that’s not a cheap logistics pipeline for a company that only has to set the copier inflation percentage based on your size choice today — the designs are for size 6 and then they blow it up by 140% for size 10 or whatever (yes, seriously, for real). So it may end up that once the clothing industry has to start making clothing on-demand, they will quickly expand into more options than the “print a ream of t-shirts and try to sell them in 3 months” profit-maxing approach that they’ve all coalesced into today.
Show HN: NSED is public – Mixture-of-Models to Hit SOTA using self-hosted AI
by t_peersky | 2026-02-18 23:21:15+00:00
Hey HN,
We're open-sourcing (source-available, BSL 1.1, patent pending) the orchestrator behind our paper benchmark results. NSED (N-Way Self-Evaluating Deliberation) is a Rust binary that coordinates multiple LLMs through structured rounds of proposals and cross-evaluation, using quadratic voting to prevent any single model from dominating the consensus.

The result: Three open-weight models (20B, 8B, 12B) on consumer GPUs — 64GB total VRAM, ~$7K hardware — score 84% on AIME 2025. The same models individually or with naive majority voting score ~54%. That's frontier-model performance on hardware you can buy at Micro Center.

How it works:

Each agent independently proposes a solution
Every agent evaluates every other agent's work
Scores aggregate via quadratic voting (cost of influence grows quadratically → no single model can dominate)
Repeat. Agents see prior results, refine, re-evaluate
System converges toward the highest-quality answer through adversarial cross-checking

It's provider-agnostic — mix Ollama, vLLM, OpenAI, Anthropic, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint in the same deliberation. Everything streams over NATS JetStream with full persistence: every proposal, evaluation, score, and reasoning trace is logged and streamable via SSE.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2601.16863
Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the quadratic voting mechanism, benchmark methodology, or anything else.
by krisoft | 2026-02-18 23:21:16+00:00
Pray tell where did i say that all parents should be responsible whose children were harmed by a third part? I’m specifically talking about this case.

Unpredictable random acts of violence happen. Would be lunacy to punish the parents for that. On the other end of the scale here we are talking about abuse ongoing for years. By someone who the mother brought into the child’s life. Somewhere between those two ends of the scale i run out of sympathy for the excuse of “she didn’t know”. Where exactly the bundary is I don’t know. What i know is that in the scenairo described in the article i strongly believe we are in the “she should have known” territory.

Think it through. Do you think that the kid who was praying for someone to come help her, and for whom the law enforcement officers were sufficiently concerned about that they started learning brick manufacturing, do you think that kid was not at least a little bit off? You know, just enough for their mum’s to become concerned and start looking for an explanation?

You call what i say monstrous cruelty. I tell you what i think is monstrous cruelty: no kid, ever, in the history of humankind has ever had the opportunity to consent to being born. Giving life to a kid is a choice. Especially in this day and age. By choosing to father a kid or give birth to a kid one becomes responsible for the wellbeing of said kid. How far and how deep that responsibility goes can be debated. I strongly believe that the parents (both the mom and the dad) is responsible who they bring into their young kid’s life. They are responsible for knowing what is going on with the kid. (Not necessarily every step and every breath of the kid, but you know the large stuff, like for example are they being sexually abused.) The parents are also responsible to have a relationship with their kids where they would be confided by their kids if something goes terribly wrong. So the kid would go ask them for help, before praying for some help comming from who knows where. These are basics. And these are separate but interlacing failures on the part of the mother. And that is why i think what she did (or didn’t do) is monstrously cruel.
by gzread | 2026-02-18 23:21:26+00:00
Reminds me a bit of the Narcissist's Prayer:

That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
by keeganpoppen | 2026-02-18 23:21:28+00:00
no it doesn’t. not at all. “abnormality” is a measure vs. the median… what else could “abnormal” possibly even mean? how could anyone ever be abnormal in any way otherwise, given the number of possible avenues of abnormality in the universe? this logic can only even “play ball” with a singular “is this person abnormal or not?” boolean… if there existed even two axes of abnormality then by your folksy definition it cannot actually exist. QED.
by georgemcbay | 2026-02-18 23:22:04+00:00
> It's quite amazing watching the "climate change isn't real" folks transition to "climate change is no big deal", then to "climate change is too hard/expensive to deal with".

At the top level (of government and corporate entities) those people always knew it was real, the messaging just changed as it became harder to keep a straight face while parroting the previous message in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence.

Exxon's (internal) research in the 1970s has been very accurate to the observed reality since then.

They just didn't care that it was real because they valued profits/power/etc in the moment over some difficult to quantify (but certainly not good) future calamity.

You would think they would care at least in the cases where they had children and grandchildren who will someday have to really reckon with the outcome, but you'd be wrong, they (still) don't give a shit.
by saithir | 2026-02-18 23:22:33+00:00
Sometimes we definitely want 'items' though, so for example I am in a physical bookstore and see a book I might be interested in, so I buy it, to find out later back home that I already have the very same book - and edition - already. It's a scenario that anyone with some amount of books definitely encountered multiple times, I know I did it myself a few times. :)

Ability of an ISBN search of my collection would have helped me in this case - scanning a barcode is easy enough task to accomplish.

And even if I had a different edition, the resulting title from searching for a different edition would be enough to help me figure out that I should not buy a book I already own.
by jeroenhd | 2026-02-18 23:22:35+00:00
I like the look and esthetics but there are some places where the design doesn't fit well. For instance, I've had to change my phone's background to accommodate for the theme and that should definitely be the other way around. Some screens also were just buggy in general, even screens as simple as the voicemail screen.

Turning off transparency helps a lot for accessibility but if that's necessary then it should've been the default. Whatever they're doing with uniform app icons is working out worse than Google's implementation in my opinion, though.

The rollout of Liquid Glass has been rather unfortunate, full of missed or ignored flaws that seem obvious, full of bugs and design flaws, and for a design that seems most at home in their failed VR headset rather than 2d phones, laptops, and desktops. At least their controls are still somewhat usable and it hasn't turned into a full Windows 8 moment for them.

I think it's a great example of how Apple has become just as terrible and uncaring as the massive companies, which can only lead to more resentment from the Apple purists who joined the brand back in their underdog days.
by polliog | 2026-02-18 23:22:38+00:00
First of all, I want to say that I am not at all against programming with AI. However, I also believe that if a person programs with AI, they must still comply with certain standards. Such as not putting emojis in console logs and not pushing node modules.

In any case, I don't want to discourage you, and I wish you all the best.
by Propelloni | 2026-02-18 23:23:07+00:00
The e-mail posted somewhere in the comments, assuming it is legit, makes it clear that FLOSS Fund requires certain paperwork for tax reasons to the benefit of the receiver. Apparently the Pocketbase developer is receiving the money personally, which means it is income and will be taxed. Apparently, again, it would also be taxed in India (the seat of FLOSS Fund) and the paperwork would allow to avoid double taxation.

This appears much more reasonable to me than the hoops I have to jump through to declare my taxes as an US expatriate and avoid double taxation with my country of residence.
by kccqzy | 2026-02-18 23:23:15+00:00
The simplest brand to buy men’s clothes for me is Levi’s: their sizes correspond exactly to the waist circumference in inches. Example: https://www.levi.com/US/en_US/jeans-by-fit-number/men/jeans/...

It’s basically the only brand where I can buy online without trying it on, and still be confident that it will fit as expected.
Show HN: Codereport – track TODOs, refactors, and bugs in your repo with a CLI
by pulko | 2026-02-18 23:23:24+00:00
I got tired of TODOs, temporary hacks, and refactors that never get addressed. In most repos I work on:

- TODOs are scattered across files/apps/messages
- “Critical” fixes don’t actually block people from collecting debt
- PR comments or tickets aren’t enough actionable

So I built codereport, a CLI that stores structured follow-ups in the repo itself (.codereports/). Each report tracks:

- file + line range (src/foo.rs:42-88)
- tag (todo, refactor, buggy, critical)
- severity (you can configure it to be blocking in CI)
- optional expiration date
- owner (CODEOWNERS → git blame fallback)

You can list, resolve, or delete reports, generate a minimal HTML dashboard with heatmaps and KPIs, and run codereport check in CI to fail merges if anything blocking or expired is still open.

It’s repo-first, and doesn’t rely on any external services.

I’m curious:

Would a tool like this fit in your workflow?
Is storing reports in YAML in the repo reasonable?
Would CI enforcement feel useful or annoying?

CLI: https://crates.io/crates/codereport + codereport.pulko-app.com
Senior Embedded Linux / Device OS Engineer
by ayeeye1careers | 2026-02-18 23:23:54+00:00
Hi,

We’re a start-up company based in London and building building a privacy-first, offline-first edge AI platform that runs on real devices (camera boards, HDMI sticks, edge nodes).

We need a Senior Embedded Linux / Device OS Engineer to own the device OS end-to-end (bootloader → kernel → userspace), including Yocto/Buildroot, secure boot & device identity at OS level, OTA with rollback/recovery, and driver integration (V4L2/USB/HDMI/GPIO/I2C/SPI). This is not a research role. This is about shipping reliable hardware into the real world. Please see more details of the role as follows:

Location: Remote / Hybrid (UK / EU preferred)

Type: Full-time

Responsibilities

· Linux bring-up on custom hardware (bootloader → kernel → userspace)

· Yocto or Buildroot build systems

· Device provisioning, secure boot, identity at OS level

· OTA updates with rollback and recovery

· Driver integration (V4L2, USB, HDMI, GPIO, I2C, SPI)

· Power, thermal, watchdog, storage integrity

· Debugging at the metal (serial, JTAG, logic analyser)

Required Experience

· 5+ years embedded Linux

· Shipped production devices

· Comfortable with poor documentation and hardware quirks

· Strong C / shell / low-level Linux skills

We are committed to remote/hybrid(UK/EU preferred), and we offer a competitive salary and a senior role that allows you to get the full picture of the project as well. That said, would you be open to a short intro call to see if there’s a good fit? If yes, please feel free to contact ayeeye.career@gmail.com

Thanks!

Look forward to hearing from you.
by legitster | 2026-02-18 23:24:17+00:00
> Empirical evidence is just too hard to ignore.

Except it's the opposite - empirical evidence is very easy to ignore. Between herding, the replication crisis, and the overall insularity of academia, trust in "studies" has never been lower.

But people still respond very well to demonstrative or pragmatic evidence. Empirically there's nothing special about a keto diet. But demonstratively the effects are very convincing.
by lurquer | 2026-02-18 23:25:54+00:00
Do you think the original article was NOT written (or at least heavily revised) by AI?

What does the following even mean?

“diluting the semantic density and specific gravity of the argument.”

Or this beaut:

“By accepting these ablated outputs, we are not just simplifying communication; we are building a world on a hollowed-out syntax that has suffered semantic ablation.” (Which reduces to ‘if we accept ablated outputs, we accept ablated outputs.’)

Or this;

“ The logical flow – originally built on complex, non-linear reasoning – is forced into a predictable, low-perplexity template.”

The ‘logical flow’ of what? It never even says. And what is ‘non-linear’ reasoning?

For all I know the original author wrote it all. But, a very close reading of the original article screams fluff to me… just gibberish.

That is, I don’t know if there was much ‘meaning’ in the original to begin with. If I’m going to read gibberish, I’d prefer it to be written in the style of a hard-boiled detective. That’s just me though.
by rconti | 2026-02-18 23:25:55+00:00
I reinstalled MacOS on a 2011 MacBook Air and it was actually shockingly hard. Thankfully, my machine booted and worked fine, so I didn't need to create a bootable USB stick. From memory:

- Network recovery boot cannot connect to your wifi because reasons. It'll see the SSID, but won't even prompt for password. It's totally unclear why nothing is working.
- Fall back to old IOT SSID with ancient protocols
- You cannot directly download or install High Sierra (the latest supported OS) for reasons I don't remember.
- I can't remember how, but somehow you can install Lion
- Launch beautiful Mac desktop. App store won't work because the certs are too old, or something. Safari won't work, because the supported SSL protocols are too old.
- Use a modern Mac to download a DMG installer for a slightly newer OS
- Copy it to a USB stick
- Find a USB stick big enough to hold it, try again
- Plug USB stick into target Mac, copy installer to desktop, run it
- Now you have a more modern OS that can actually connect to websites
- Also teh app store works, so you can upgrade to High Sierra using the app store.

But yeah. Man, the desktop was so beautiful and refreshing.