MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SamPatt | 2026-02-13 18:29:21+00:00
Ah I understand you now. Yes I could have had a service do the digitizing then only done delivery myself. And given the time investment that probably would have been more sound. I don't think I'd do it all myself if I did it again.

I didn't know Gemini models were that capable. I admit I'm still skeptical about this approach though - even if it were capable of accurately labeling people and locations across decades, there's no way it could know when a scene is of personal interest. I kept a running log for each sibling as I was manually doing the labeling, knowing what they'd want to see, which presumably is only possible for me and my siblings to do with any accuracy.

If AI could ever do that then we've definitely hit ASI!
by mindslight | 2026-02-13 18:29:54+00:00
I myself was both sidesing up until June of 2020. But doing it at this point just seems like a type of denial.

Appealing to "prayers or pronouns" is specious. There have always been things that are politically incorrect to say, and which saying will alienate you from a chunk of people. Hence the heuristic of "no politics or religion" - a decent first-pass at avoiding putting your foot in your mouth. And in the workplace, there have always been vectoralist politickers with whom you just have to smile, nod, and validate their world view / ego. Whether you're smiling and nodding about the virtues of "DEI" or the virtues of playing golf, does it really matter? Plus ça change...

For more context of where I'm coming from, when Obama projected the rainbow flag on the White House, my immediate reaction was "the backlash from this is going to be terrible". I got how that alienated a large number of people, who in my opinion just kind of needed to be left alone until they and their prejudices pass, rather than being gloated at. But groupthink gonna groupthink...

If Trumpism were merely the opposing flavor of that, I wouldn't care! Project a cross on the White House and send every kid a copy of the ten commandments - ridiculous and inflammatory, but eminently ignoreable and recoverable. But Trumpism is not merely some traditionalist mirror of progressive virtue-signalling - as illustrated by the government-enabled terrorist gangs physically attacking American cities and whatnot. Rather, Trumpism is the wholesale vivisection and looting of the Constitutionally-limited US government, in favor of some autocratic big tech surveillance dystopia.

That's what flipped for me in June 2020 - the hard objective realization that Trump was never going to come around to accepting Covid as a pan-political problem that needed to be addressed to lead us through. If he had done this, he would have had a shoe-in second term, from the "war president" effect. But rather, the only thing he and his "base" know is division. It's why all of the policies currently being championed are merely some combination of destructive and ineffectual - constructively fixing the issue is never the goal, rather its merely letting the problem fester while preaching to an increasingly-committed choir of true believers.

If you're earnestly championing "open, peaceful, extended discussion", then you should at least be willing to recognize that Trumpism is a severely-escalated destruction of that ideal.
by 0xcady | 2026-02-13 18:30:14+00:00
We have an AI-powered pentesting service that automates vulnerability scanning and exploitation for MSPs and were selling it for cheap.

The MSP vertical has been surprisingly good for AI, with newer models the results only have continued to improve. Shannon beats a $2,000 vendor. We offer both traditional manual pentesting and AI-driven continuous testing. What we're seeing: clients do an initial manual assessment with our team, then get quarterly automated enagements. For MSPs, this solves two problems—the annual compliance checkbox (manual pentest) and actual ongoing security posture (continuous AI pentesting).
by bachmeier | 2026-02-13 18:30:51+00:00
Years ago, I tried the hot new Linux distribution. I tried to install a couple of popular packages, but they failed, due to lacking a dependency. I installed that dependency and it worked.

It's natural to file a bug report for this type of problem. I told them the missing dependency and assumed they'd make a minor adjustment and push out a fix for the buggy package. Instead, they closed the bug with a rude message about how it was a waste of everyone's time to file a bug report without an exact error message, and the buggy package just sat there.

They probably went on to become a SO mod, closing questions because they were duplicates of unrelated questions, but that's speculation.
by jannyfer | 2026-02-13 18:30:53+00:00
I’ve noticed since iOS 7-ish that some sliding animations have such a long tail-end easing of the animation that it blocks the touch input of the user. Like if you accidentally scroll to the side instead of down, you have to let go and wait for the side scroll to completely stop.

Then I watched Tim Cook have trouble with tapping the screen multiple times for one action at one of the older WWDCs pre-COVID.

I felt validated and exasperated. Does Tim just put up with this?
by sathish316 | 2026-02-13 18:30:59+00:00
There are several security flaws in OpenClaw:

1. Prompt injection - this is unsolvable until LLMs can differentiate command and text

2. The bot can leak secrets. The less secrets, API keys, passwords you provide the more useless it is

3. The VM on which it runs can get compromised resulting in leaking private conversations or confidential data like keys. This can be fixed with private VPNs and a security hardened VM or a MacMini like disconnected device.

I’ve found an interesting solution to problems #2 and #3 using a Secure vault, but none so far for Prompt injection. It follows the principle of least privilege, giving secure key access to only the shell scripts that are executed by a skill, along with granting access to the vault for smaller intervals like 15 mins and revoking the access automatically with TTL or time-scoped vault tokens. More details here - https://x.com/sathish316/status/2019496552419717390?s=46
by TomasBM | 2026-02-13 18:31:40+00:00
> it all seems comfortably within the capabilities of OpenClaw

I definitely agree. In fact, I'm not even denying that it's possible for the agent to have deviated despite the best intentions of its designers and deployers.

But the question of probability [1] and attribution is important: what or who is most likely to have been responsible for this failure?

So far, I've seen plenty of claims and conclusions ITT that boil down to "AI has discovered manipulation on its own" and other versions of instrumental convergence. And while this kind of failure mode is fun to think about, I'm trying to introduce some skepticism here.

Put simply: until we see evidence that this wasn't faked, intentional, or a foreseeable consequence from deployer's (or OpenClaw/LLM developers') mistakes, it makes little sense to grasp for improbable scenarios [1] and build an entire story around them. IMO, it's even counterproductive, because then the deployer can just say "oh it went rogue on its own haha skynet amirite" and pretty much evade responsibility. We should instead do the opposite - the incident is the deployer's fault until proven otherwise.

So when you say:

> originally prompted with a lot of reckless, borderline malicious guidelines

That's much more probable than "LLM gone rogue" without any apparent human cause, until we see strong evidence otherwise.

[1] In other comments I tried to explain how I order the probability of causes, and why.

[2] Other scenarios that are similarly as unlikely: foreign adversaries, "someone hacked my account", LLM sleeper agent, etc.
by eikenberry | 2026-02-13 18:31:47+00:00
I've been involved with free software for coming on 30 years, have maintained several reasonably popular free software projects and have 100% enjoyed it every time. Developing relationships with the community members and working with them toward a common goal is very rewarding. Not much more to say about this as these are subjective interpretations of our experiences and the experiences could be very different. But it definitely can be fun.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-13 18:31:57+00:00
> I also don't understand how he is able to get such high profile guests

His reach. He's an Indian Lex Friedman (and I mean that derogatorily [edit: what I mean is I dislike Lex Friedman's lack of substance and oversimplification of extremely complex subjects, and how Dwarkesh uses a similar tack]), but as such has significant reach.

Now that Indian consumers have now become a major bloc in most Western social media platforms, more Dwarkeshes will enter western discourse.

Furthermore, unlike Chinese, Indians overwhelmingly use Western platforms, and Indian policymakers have begun using this consumer power to push western companies to collocate and shift the center of gravity to Indian offices.
by etler | 2026-02-13 18:31:59+00:00
If someone uses AI to help them write, and they reviewed it, and it's high quality writing, I don't care how much they wrote by hand. But, if I can tell it was written by AI that's just a proxy for telling that the author did not put time and care into what they were writing.

AI bloats text and every other task it does into convoluted redundant cliches. This is true for text and code. Whether it was written by an AI or not, it's not worth my time. If you wrote it 100% by hand and it still sounds like AI, it's still bad writing and still not worth my time.
Show HN: DotNetDevs – a reverse job board for .NET developers
by Nannooskeeska | 2026-02-13 18:32:18+00:00
I built a reverse job board for .NET developers, inspired by RailsDevs (which unfortunately shut down last year). Developers create profiles and companies browse and reach out directly.

Stack: .NET 10, ASP.NET MVC, a little HTMX, Azure SQL.

This is the first side project I've actually shipped and I'd love some feedback.
by speak_plainly | 2026-02-13 18:32:44+00:00
Is this an actual bug or is this just a corrupt database or corrupt setting? What steps were taken to try to alleviate the issue, basics like resetting the keyboard dictionary? DFU restore of the phone? If you're not willing to troubleshoot an issue on your phone, rather than just throw it away and buy an Android, trying a 3rd party keyboard seems sensible to me.

Ultimately, Apple is responsible here but I don't think this is an intractable issue baked into the software. And yeah, maintenance is required despite what the perception might be. Apple even offers great support services for people who are not able to do it themselves.
by WoodenChair | 2026-02-13 18:32:52+00:00
No, I don't think you're missing anything. He never answered the title of the post ("Faster Than Dijkstra?"). Instead he went on a huge tangent about his experience writing software for routers and is dismissive of the algorithm because the router problem space he was working in did not deal with a node count high enough to warrant the need for a more complex algorithm. Dijkstra's algorithm is used for problem spaces with far higher number of nodes than he mentions... basically an article that talks about some kind of interesting things but doesn't say much about its central question.
by EnergyAmy | 2026-02-13 18:32:52+00:00
Iced is promising, using it for a small side project. Fairly straightforward and easy to use, but lacking basic things from more mature libraries (unsurprisingly, since it's still early). If you want something like a QTreeView for example, you're on your own. It's cool that it supports WASM, though I'd call it alpha support for now.
by spyder | 2026-02-13 18:33:29+00:00
Yea, LLMs have prompt-, harness- and even random seed variability, and it leaves you wonder maybe with a better prompt or system instruction a model could perform better. Too bad most benchmarks don't report that variability, because it could reveal that the model may only perform well if it's prompted in the style of their training data and not generalize well to unseen prompt styles. Also it could explain some of the benchmark vs real world usage gaps.

I remember some papers about earlier models having around 15% prompt variability, and with different tool use sometimes there are even more significant jumps. And if I remember correctly the reasoning models improve some of these because lot of the early prompting tricks is included in them like "thinking step-by-step", "think carefully" and some other "magic" methods.
Also another trick is to ask the models to rephrase the prompt with their own words because that may produce prompt that better align with their training prompts.
For sure the big model developers are aware of these and constantly improving it, I just don't see too much discussion or numbers about it.
by crossbody | 2026-02-13 18:33:34+00:00
The concept of the "end of the exponential" sounds like a tech version of Fukuyama's much mocked "End of History". Amodei seems to think we’ll solve all the "useful" problems and then hit a ceiling of utility.

But if you’ve read David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, Amodei’s view looks like a mistake. Knowledge creation is unbounded. Solving diseases/coding shouldn't result in a plateau, but rather unlock totally new, "better" problems we can't even conceive of yet.

It's the begining of Inifinity, no end in sight!
by tracker1 | 2026-02-13 18:34:25+00:00
Before she passed, I had one of my Grandmothers on Ubuntu for about a decade... I had to set it up for her, and I ran updates every few months for her, but she really didn't have an issue... Her Windows 9x era games even ran under Wine when they wouldn't load on Windows (7 I think), correctly.

Email, browser and a few games... she was pretty happy with it.
by moregrist | 2026-02-13 18:34:42+00:00
This is written with the idea that the exponential part keeps going forever.

It never does. The progress curve always looks sigmoidal.

- The beginning looks like a hockey stick, and people get excited. The assumption is that the growth party will never stop.

- You start to hit something that inherently limits the exponential growth and growth starts to be linear. It still kinda looks exponential and the people that want the party to keep growing will keep the hype up.

- Eventually you saturate something and the curve turns over. At this point it’s obvious to all but the most dedicated party-goers.

I don’t know where we are on the LLM curve, but I would guess we’re in the linear part. Which might keep going for a while. Or maybe it turns over this year. No one knows. But the party won’t go on forever; it never does.

I think Cal Newport’s piece [0] is far more realistic:

> But for now, I want to emphasize a broader point: I’m hoping 2026 will be the year we stop caring about what people believe AI might do, and instead start reacting to its real, present capabilities.

[0] Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46505735
by mnkv | 2026-02-13 18:35:03+00:00
The paper you're talking about is "Deal or No Deal? End-to-End Learning for Negotiation Dialogues" and it was just AIs drifting away from English. The crazy news article was from Forbes with the title "AI invents its own language so Facebook had to shut it down!" before they changed it after backlash.

Not related to alignment though

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybradley/2017/07/31/facebook...
by WarmWash | 2026-02-13 18:35:11+00:00
https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1qvf7hu/te...

It's unsurprising someone so out of the loop on its true status is so hyped on it's future...

If robotaxi was doing legit rides, Elon would be posting about it 20 times a day.
by big_toast | 2026-02-13 18:35:31+00:00
There was a small network of AI-intellectualism (and rationality) that grew highly relevant when AI took off post chatgpt. It feels adjacent to Tyler Cowen's network + tpot + hn/lesswrong. (I can't remember if Tyler specifically gave him a fast grant, but his first few interviews were GMU-centric.)

I personally liked that he stayed away from navel-gazing in politics when the blogosphere/podcasts went pretty heavy into that.

It did very well on twitter with a large number of high-follower-count tech people, and soon to be high-follower-count (basically AI employees). He had followed the zeitgeists general wisdom well (bat signal, work in public, you-can-just-do-things, move-to-the-arena, You-Are-the-Average-of-the-Five-People-You-Spend-the-Most-Time-With, high-horsepower). And he's just executed very well. Other people have interviewed similar people and generally gotten lower signal content. This moxie marlinspike interview is great though - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPRi7mAGp7I .
by bachmeier | 2026-02-13 18:36:03+00:00
> Open source is a no-strings-attached gift, and all participants should recognize it as such.

I've always felt this is incorrect. First, because lots of people use open source to further their careers, it isn't. Open source contributions are paid work if you benefit from them in any way. Second, if you use open source yourself, your work is no longer a gift. You're contributing back to the community you've taken from. The person you're being a jerk to because it's a "gift" might be the author of other software you've used.
by viking123 | 2026-02-13 18:36:14+00:00
I have said that Amodei is by far worse than Sam Altman. Altman wants money but this guy wants the money AND to be your dad by censoring the shit out of the model and wagging his finger at you what you can say or what you cannot. And lobbying for legislation to block competition. Also the constant "muh china" whining while these guys stole all the books in the world.

Every time I read something from Dario, it seems like he is grifting normies and other midwits with his "OHHH MY GOD CLAUDE WAS KILLING TO KILL SOMEONE! MY GOD IT WANTS TO BREAK OUT!" Then they have all their Claude constitution bullshit and other nonsense to fool idiots. Yeah bro the model with static weights is truly going to take over.

He knows what he is doing, it's all marketing and they have put shit ton of money into it if you have been following the media for the last few months.

Btw, it wasn't many months ago that this guy was hawking doubling of human life span at a group of some boomer investors. Oh yeah I wonder why he decided to bring it up there? Maybe because the audience is old and desperate and that scammers play on this weaknesses.

Truly of one of the more obnoxious people in the AI space and frankly by extension Anthropic is scammy too. I rather pay Altman than give these guys a penny and that says a lot.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-13 18:36:50+00:00
You can't have one party whose goal it to make sure government doesn't function in order to push their policy of 'shrink government' be in charge of making government function. No system will work when half the system is hostile to the system.

If the Republicans will happy spend money until we are all broke if it means we can limit the government's spending (huh? what? make that make sense) they will break it all (and are trying) in whatever way they can.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
by idle_zealot | 2026-02-13 18:36:56+00:00
This immediately devolves into "how do I know that other humans aren't philosophical zombies?" I take the "know it when I see it" approach, and LLMs don't reach that bar. They clearly do reach that bar for some people. In the context of the movie though it is supposed to be understood that the computers are self-aware and have internal worlds. They're treated as characters in the language of storytelling.
by palmotea | 2026-02-13 18:37:16+00:00
> There are plenty of other places to talk politics, religion, or share personal opinions. Work is best kept for work.

We could all use a bit more compartmentalization. This idea of "bring your whole self everywhere" is just a recipe for conflict and dysfunction. No two people are that compatible, let alone N people in a group.

Work should be about work, and work topics (which includes things like working conditions an unionization). Maybe you have a work friend you talk politics too, but that's a little non-work bubble at work. That's definitely not:

> hundreds of Google workers, outraged by the federal government’s mass deportation campaign...went public with a call for their leadership to cut ties with ICE. The employees are also demanding that Google acknowledge the violence, hold a town hall on the topic, and enact policy to protect vulnerable members of its workforce, including contractors and cafeteria and data center workers This week, the number of supporters has passed 1,200...

Work should also mind it's own business about non-work. If you're an activist on X, Y, or Z, it's none of your boss's business. If people are mad at you on twitter for saying A, B, or C, your boss shouldn't fire you for it (even if the mob demands appeasement). Employees should also not be nosy about what their coworkers think or do outside or work, if they're not mature enough to handle what they find out professionally (e.g. feeling the mere presence or someone who thinks X, Y, or Z creates a hostile environment, even if they never express or act on those thoughts).

And even if you're outside of work, if you're in a club about model airplanes (or instance), stick to model airplanes, etc. Don't bring up the latest outrage of the Bush or Obama administration.
by jacoka | 2026-02-13 18:37:26+00:00
I built this because I was tired of uploading large audio files to cloud servers just for a simple format change. This tool uses WebAssembly and Web Workers to process everything locally in the browser. It splits the audio into segments and encodes them in parallel, hitting around 180x speed for WAV exports. No data ever leaves your computer. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the performance!
by GorbachevyChase | 2026-02-13 18:37:37+00:00
I’m pretty sure that’s not remotely true. Look at the state of the Ganges River or the visibility in any major Chinese Metropolitan area. Many countries just ignore these patently obvious ecological disasters. The notion that climate was in a pleasant homeostasis until European people arrived is absurd on its face and contrary to geological record.

You are being scammed. Billionaires just want an excuse to assert control over all human activity. Climate Doom is an eschatological religion for atheists. Conserve forests, control industrial waste, substitute toxic products, of course. But your breath is an existential threat to all life on Earth? It’s ridiculous and it has completely derailed productive environmental efforts with carbon-trade scams and a regulatory priesthood demanding sacrifice. Meanwhile serious people can barely get a hearing on aquifer depletion, topsoil loss, overfishing, food quality, or source water protection.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-13 18:37:51+00:00
Probabilities have increased, but it's still not a certainty. It may turn out that stumbling across LLMs as a mimicry of human intelligence was a fluke and the confluence of remaining discoveries and advancements required to produce real AGI won't fall into place for many, many years to come, especially if some major event (catastrophic world war, systematic environmental collapse, etc) occurs and brings the engine of technological progress to a crawl for 3-5 decades.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-02-13 18:38:03+00:00
> more interesting podcasts out there

For deep dives into AI stuff google deep mind's podcast with Hannah Fry is very good (but obviously limited to goog stuff). I also like Lex for his tech / AI podcasts. Much better interviewer IMO, Dwarkesh talks way too much, and injects his own "insights" for my taste. I'm listening to a podcast to hear what the guests have to say, not the host.

For more light-weight "news-ish" type of podcast that I listen to while walking/driving/riding the train, in no particular order: AI & I (up to date trends, relevant guests), The AI Daily Brief (formerly The AI Breakdown - this is more to keep in touch with what's released in the past month) and any other random stuff that yt pops up for me from listening to these 4 regularly.