MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Spooky23 | 2026-02-16 18:37:01+00:00
Possible, but they buy data from the carriers with similar profile possibilities. The DEA operates long standing and pervasive surveillance in “drug corridors” like I-95 from Maine to Miami. They do things like LPR and grabbing passenger pictures.

If Bluetooth is used, it may be a way to get a count of passengers or if the passengers change. I know based on newspaper accounts that they are particularly interested in cars that stop in Philly or Baltimore.

This stuff is frequently used against cops too so they may use the tech in similar ways. If you’re someone worried about getting raided, spotting a large number of new signals at the front door is an early warning potentially.
by parpfish | 2026-02-16 18:37:13+00:00
something i wonder about with AI taking jobs --

similar to the ATM example in the article (and my experience with ai coding tools), the automation will start out by handling the easiest parts of our jobs.

eventually, all the easy parts will be automated and the overall headcount will be reduced, but the actual content of the remaining job will be a super-distilled version of 'all the hard parts'.

the jobs that remain will be harder to do and it will be harder to find people capable or willing to do them. it may turn out that if you tell somebody "solve hard problems 40hrs a week"... they can't do it. we NEED the easy parts of the job to slow down and let the mind wander.
by hxtk | 2026-02-16 18:37:15+00:00
The Nightmare Course [1], so named because someone with that skillset (developing zero-days) is a nightmare for security, not because the course itself is a nightmare, and Roppers Academy [2] are both good for learning how to reverse engineer software and look for vulnerabilities.

The nightmare course explicitly talks about how to use Ghidra.

1: https://guyinatuxedo.github.io
2: https://www.roppers.org
by notahacker | 2026-02-16 18:37:28+00:00
This is one of the factors that lead to crimes not being better investigated at the time, but then fear of tensions would cases where the alleged perpetrators were white and the victims/witnesses non-white as in the OP's question. (And more generally, teenage girls from working class backgrounds got far less sympathy and far more scepticism than they should have done from the police and CPS and even social workers when they talked about being sexually exploited regardless of race. Certainly no evidence was found they were much more keen to listen to non-white victims or prosecute white people...)
by sfortis | 2026-02-16 18:38:14+00:00
i really enjoy gemini funny answers.

3-fast:

"That is a classic "efficiency vs. logic" dilemma.

If you’re looking for a strictly practical answer: Drive. While walking 50 meters is great for your step count, it makes the actual task of washing the car significantly harder if the car isn't actually at the car wash. Unless you’ve mastered the art of long-distance pressure washing, the vehicle usually needs to be present for the scrubbing to commence."
by doctorpangloss | 2026-02-16 18:38:36+00:00
Simply and utterly impossible to tell in any objective way without your own calibration data, in which case, make your own post trained quantized checkpoints anyway. That said, millions of people out there make technical decisions on vibes all the time, and has anything bad happened to them? I suppose if it feels good to run smaller quantizations, do it haha.
by Steegi | 2026-02-16 18:38:43+00:00
Author here. This post is not a threat report, it’s an architectural playbook for running tool-using agents safely in production. The patterns come from implementing these trust boundaries over the last few months and watching the naive model fail in predictable ways.

The core invariants:

1. Secrets never enter model context or env

2. All side effects go through a policy gate (exec-style argv, never sh -c)

3. Default-deny egress; a broker is the only egress path

4. Workspace-scoped read/write by default

5. Every side effect emits a structured, tamper-evident trace

6. Autonomy is earned per task class, with freeze/quarantine on anomalies

Preempting a few objections:

* “Allowlists are brittle.” Agreed. That’s why gating is one layer in a defense-in-depth stack (broker + isolation + trace), not the whole answer.

* “The broker can be manipulated.” True. The point is to reduce blast radius: typed actions with a fixed schema (not free-form), policy checks on every field, no secret return paths, full audit events.

* “Why not just use VMs?” VMs are fine. The invariant is scoped workspace + controlled egress + policy-gated side effects; the isolation tech is secondary.

If you disagree with any invariant, I’d love to hear which one and why.

If anyone wants it, email frank+openclaw+hn at lambda-phi.com and I’ll send a threat-model template + a starter command-gating policy.
by twotwotwo | 2026-02-16 18:39:17+00:00
For folks that like this kind of question, SimpleBench (https://simple-bench.com/ ) is sort of neat. From the sample questions (https://github.com/simple-bench/SimpleBench/blob/main/simple... ), a common pattern seems to be for the prompt to 'look like' a familiar/textbook problem (maybe with detail you'd need to solve a physics problem, etc.) but to get the actually-correct answer you have to ignore what the format is 'telling you' and often pull in some piece of human common sense.

I'm not sure how effectively it isolates a single dimension of failure or (in)capacity--it seems like it's at least two distinct skills to be able to ignore false cues from question format and to think of relevant common sense at the right times--but it's sort of fun because that is a genre of prompt that seems straightforward to search for (and, as here, people stumble on organically!).
by ssl-3 | 2026-02-16 18:39:30+00:00
With ChatGPT, at least, you can tell the bot to work that way using [persistent] Custom Instructions, if that's what you want. These aren't obeyed perfectly (none of the instructions are, AFAICT), but they do influence behavior.

A person even hammer out an unstructured list of behavioral gripes, tell the bot to organize them into instructional prose, have it ask clarifying questions and revise based on answers, and produce directions for integrating them as Custom Instructions.

From then on, it will invisibly read these instructions into context at the beginning of each new chat.

Mold it and steer it to be how you want it to be.

(My own bot tends to be very dry, terse, non-presumptuous, pragmatic, and profane. It's been years now since it has uttered an affirmation like "That's a great idea!" or "Wow! My circuits are positively buzzing with the genius I'm seeing here!" or produced a tangential dissertation in response to a simple question. But sometimes it does come back with functional questions, or phrasing like "That shit will never work. Here's why.")
by kjs3 | 2026-02-16 18:39:50+00:00
Ya...IBM and CDC both had/have architectures that heavily distributed tasks to subprocessors of various sorts. Pretty much dates to the invention of large-scale computers.

You also have things like the IBM Cell processor from PS3 days: a PowerPC 'main' processor with 7 "Synergistic Processing Elements" that could be offloaded to. The SPEs were kinda like the current idea of 'big/small processors' a la ARM, except SPEs are way dumber and much harder to program.

Of course, specialized math, cryptographic and compression processors have been around forever. And you can even look at something like SCSI, where virtually all of the intelligence for working the drive was offloaded to the drive ccontroller.

Lots of ways the implement this idea.
by paultopia | 2026-02-16 18:40:25+00:00
I love this. I use various text editors mostly used by devs (moving back and forth between emacs and sublime on mac and textastic on ipad) for serious longform writing all the time, usually using markdown +
pandoc, and it has a bunch of advantages and disadvantages.

IME the main advantages are (1) not having to fight with useless Microsoft word (and similar) behavior, bloat, bugs, etc. and (2) being able to mix in a spot of code as needed, for example compiling different sections together, doing a bit of text replacement and templating etc.

The main disadvantage is that the tooling isn't really there. I've done a stupid amount of yak shaving trying to get things like footnote folding in emacs, word count, etc., the spell checking is waaay behind, outline formats don't really work right (though they also don't really work right in word etc.)

So three cheers for anyone working on making the tooling problem better!!
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-16 18:40:28+00:00
> If someone is charged with and found innocent of a crime, you can't just remove that record. If someone else later finds an account of them being accused, they need a way to credibly assert that they were found innocent.

Couldn't they just point to the court system's computer showing zero convictions? If it shows guilty verdicts then showing none is already proof there are none.
by austin-cheney | 2026-02-16 18:40:51+00:00
Remember that data/content is king as the paradigm of business on the web? Its where we have been since the late 90s. Its the advertising economy. Both business and individual consumers don't want to pay for it any more. Self-hosted applications with a cloud premium upgrade are the new business model. For example why bother with all the invasive nonsense of Facebook if a person can self-host something that works better and share it with their real life contacts at their discretion?

The IPod won because it had the Apple app store. People don't need the app store to acquire high quality content any more and they certainly don't want their content locked into the limitations of leased access to some distribution model.
by mrbonner | 2026-02-16 18:41:04+00:00
Kimi 2.5 nails it:

Walk. It's only about a minute away on foot, and driving such a short distance wastes gas and isn't great for your engine (it won't warm up properly).

*Wait*—if you're taking your car to the car wash, you'll obviously need to drive it there. In that case, yes, drive the 50 meters, even though it's barely worth shifting out of park.
by dgxyz | 2026-02-16 18:41:06+00:00
Well I've just watched two major projects fail which were running mostly on faith because someone read too many "I used 15 AI agents to vibe code..." blog posts and sold it to management. The promoters have a deep technical understanding of the problem domain we have but little understanding of what an LLM can achieve or what it can understand relating to the problem at hand.

Yes you can indeed vibe code a startup. But try building on that or doing anything relatively complicated and you're up shit creek. There's literally no one out there doing that in the influencer-sphere. It's all about the initial cut and MVP of a project, not the ongoing story.

The next failure is replacing a 20 year old legacy subsystem with 3MLOC with a new React / microservices thing. This has been sold to the directors as something we can do in 3 months with Claude. Project failure number three.

The only reality is no one learns or is accountable for their mistakes.
by markolofsen | 2026-02-16 18:41:46+00:00
PicoClaw and OpenClaw are impressive viral AI agent projects, but their architecture is fundamentally single-machine and not suitable for production automation.
This post breaks down the missing pieces (fleet orchestration, NAT traversal, RBAC, audit logs, typed tool contracts, observability) and why “runs on a $10 board” is mostly a misleading framing.
Assistants are cool — infrastructure is what survives production.
by egorfine | 2026-02-16 18:41:47+00:00
> I would expect an identity verification firm that I'm hiring to secure and then physically delete

I would expect exactly the opposite. See, KYC stuff is something that no one wants, everyone hates and something that everybody is forced into from both sides: users and companies. KYC service is a product being created in pure hatred.

There are no penalties for leaking users' data. Bad PR? Oh please, it won't hurt a company which is already universally hated.

At the same time proper storage security costs money and time and creates friction.

Thus there are NO incentives to securely keep user data while there IS an incentive to care as less as possible.
by ass22 | 2026-02-16 18:41:58+00:00
The openclaw stuff for me is a prime signal we are now reaching the maximal size of the bubble before it pops - the leaders of the firms at the frontier are lost and have no vision.

There isnt gonna be a huge event in the public markets though, except for Nvidia, Oracle and maybe MSFT. Firms that are private will suffer enormously though.
by parpfish | 2026-02-16 18:42:20+00:00
this is tough because we've spent years building everything in education to be mediated by computers and technology, and now we're realizing that maybe we went a little overboard and over-fit to "lets do everything on computers".

it was easy to force kids to learn multiplication tables in their head when there were in-person tests and pencil-and-paper worksheets. if everything happens through a computer interface... the calculator is right there. how do you convince them that it's important to learn to not use it?

if we want to enforce non-ai lessons, i think we need to make sure we embrace more old-school methods like oral exams and essays being written in blue books.
by linguae | 2026-02-16 18:42:32+00:00
I’m also concerned about the continuing enshittification of software. Even without LLMs, we’ve had to endure slapdash software. Even Apple, which used to be perfectionistic, has slipped. I feel enshittification is a result of a lack of meaningful competition for many software products due to moats such as proprietary file formats and protocols, plus network effects. “Move fast and break things” software development methodologies don’t help.

LLMs will help such teams move and break things even faster than before. I’m not against the use of LLMs in software development, but I’m against their blind use. However, when there is pressure to ship as fast as possible, many will be tempted to take shortcuts and not thoroughly analyze the output of their LLMs.
by bonoboTP | 2026-02-16 18:43:11+00:00
On the positive side of this, research papers by competent people read very clearly with readable sentences, while those who are afraid that their content doesn't quite cut it, litter it with jargon, long complicated sentences, hoping that by making things hard, they will look smart.

But to expand on the spelling topic, good spelling and grammar is now free with AI tools. It no longer signals being educated. Informal tone and mistakes actually signal that the message was written by a human and the imperfections increase my trust in the effort spent on the thing.
by gosub100 | 2026-02-16 18:43:19+00:00
You were rude but I understand what you mean. People can obviously Google "reverse engineering tutorial" or something similar. And certainly "what are good resources for X" can be a way to signal interest in something, get people to respond, and not necessarily do anything about it. But I think the most charitable interpretation of that question is they want a group consensus for the best place to start, since Google might return a heavily promoted site that had deprecated info. I remember years ago people hated "cplusplus.com" because out of a volume that is the size of a textbook, it had a few bad examples. So instead they promoted cppreference. (For learning C++).

I think we should conclude people want to maximize learning while minimizing wasted time, hence they ask for the "best resources". Even though the question seems tiring at times (when I was on reddit I heard this constantly, and cynically projected that very few people actually used the resources they requested. But I solved this problem by quitting/getting banned from Reddit and never looked back).
by andrei_says_ | 2026-02-16 18:43:41+00:00
If the photo at the bottom of the post is a photo of the OpenAI team, then it’s white bros all the way.

Meaning, these products are being created by representatives of the kind of people carrying the most privilege and having the least impact of negative decisions.

For example, Twitter did not start sanitizing location data in photos until women joined the team and indicated that such data can be used for stalking.

White rich bros do not get stalked. This problem does not exist in their universe.
by co_king_5 | 2026-02-16 18:44:26+00:00
Amazon isn't interested in giving you a quality experience.

The customer service reps are warm bodies for sensitive customers to yell at until they tire themselves at.

Tolerating your verbal abuse is the job.

Amazon ever intended to improve the quality of the service being offered.

You're not going to unsubscribe, and if you did they wouldn't miss you.
by crystal_revenge | 2026-02-16 18:44:42+00:00
> There's a mass psychosis happening

There absolutely is but I'm increasingly realizing that it's futile to fight it.

The thing that surprises me is that people are simultaneously losing their minds over AI agents while almost no one is exploring playing around with what these models can really do.

Even if you restrict yourself to small, open models, there is so much unexplored around messing with the internals of these. The entire world of open image/video generation is pretty much ignored by all but a very narrow niche of people, but has so much potential for creating interesting stuff. Even restricting yourself only to an API endpoint, isn't there something more clever we can be doing than re-implementing code that already exists on github badly through vibe coding?

But nobody in the hype-fueled mind rot part of this space remotely cares about anything real being done with gen AI. Vague posting about your billion agent setup and how you've almost entered a new reality is all that matters.
by sweetheart | 2026-02-16 18:44:44+00:00
The recent developments of only the last 3 months have been staggering. I think you should challenge your beliefs on this a little bit. I don't say that as an AI fanboy (if those exist), it's just really, really noticeable how much progress has been made in doing more complex SWE work, especially if you just ask the LLM to implement some basic custom harness engineering.
by foresto | 2026-02-16 18:44:51+00:00
Google Talk support for XMPP: 2005-2013

Facebook Messenger support for XMPP: 2010-2015

Jabber.org support for new accounts: 1999-2013

First-class integration with two of the world's largest social networks put XMPP in practically everyone's hands for a time, but when all the major hosts left, network discoverability and typical account longevity dropped drastically. The landscape is bleak today.

And since then, our collective needs and expectations of a chat platform have expanded. XEPs have been developed to bolt much of that functionality onto the base protocol, but that has led to a fragmentation problem on top of the bleak server landscape.

This unfortunate situation might be navigable by a typical HN user, and perhaps we could guide a few friends and family members and promise to keep a server running for them, but I think the chances of most people succeeding with it are pretty slim today.
by roysting | 2026-02-16 18:44:51+00:00
Can you explain your reasoning about “forever convictions”, and for full disclosure, do you have a conviction and are thereby biased?

Additionally, do you want a special class of privileged people, like a priestly class, who can interpret the data/bible for the peasantry? That mentality seems the same as that behind the old Latin bibles and Latin mass that people were abused to attend, even though they had no idea what was being said.

So who would you bequeath the privileges of doing “research”?Only the true believers who believe what you believe so you wouldn’t have to be confronted with contradictions?

And how would you prevent data exfiltration? Would you have your authorized “researchers” maybe go to a building, we can call it the Ministry of Truth, where they would have access to the information through telescreen terminals like how the DOJ is controlling the Epstein Files and then monitoring what the Congressmen were searching for? Think we would have discovered all we have discovered if only the Epstein people that rule the country had access to the Epstein files?

Yes, convictions are permanent records of one’s offenses against society, especially the egregious offenses we call felonies on the USA.

Should I as someone looking for a CFO or just an accountant not have the right that to know that someone was convicted of financial crimes, which is usually long precipitated by other transgressions and things like “mistakes” everyone knows weren’t mistakes? How would any professional association limit certification if that information is not accessible? So Madoff should Ave been able to get out and continue being involved in finances and investments?

Please explain
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-02-16 18:45:08+00:00
It's more about losing a customer than about competition to me in the case of Nuvia. I guess technically if you squint hard enough you could say Arm and Qualcomm are competing for Qualcomm sells but that's a bit of a stretch.

The important things for Arm is not so much the few customers with competitive cores which are great marketing but the multitude of other customers who don't have the budget to design their own core. It's far from trivial as shown by the Google exemple.
by bigyabai | 2026-02-16 18:45:22+00:00
Very often, the regulators don't. Here in the US, half the country would refinance their mortgage for iMessage interoperability... if it were possible. Any time regulators reach for the "stop monopoly" button, Tim Cook screeches like a rhesus monkey and drops a press release about how many terrorists Apple stops.

If lobbying was illegal then you might have a point here, but alas.
by mdukefirst | 2026-02-16 18:45:47+00:00
I've noticed a few people hitting the sign-up flow and checking the privacy docs. I'm a solo dev and I take data privacy seriously—I'm not selling anything, and you can delete your data/account with one click in the settings. If you're hesitant to use your main email, feel free to use a burner just to test the Verification logic!
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-02-16 18:46:44+00:00
> The era spawning from the 1950s throughout the 1980s can be considered the golden era of telecommunication

I’m not so sure! These days we have FaceTime and dozens of other video and voice call services on our bodies 24/7 - and it’s so competitive among them that they are ALL free! We live in a golden age in a great many ways!

It’s awesome to learn about the engineering and history that got us to to this point.
by DangitBobby | 2026-02-16 18:47:00+00:00
I copied/pasted a comment with faulty logic (self-defeating) directly from a HN comment and asked a bunch of models available to me (Gemini and Claude) if it could spot the issue. I figured it would be a nice test of reasoning since an actual human missed it. The only one that found the logic error without help was Claude 4.6 Opus Extending Thinking. The others at best raised relevant counterpoints in the supporting argument but couldn't identify the central issue. Claude's answer seemed miles ahead. I wonder if SotA advancements will continue to distinguish themselves.
by renewiltord | 2026-02-16 18:47:24+00:00
Man, everything is privilege these days. You’re privileged to get full score on SAT, Steph Curry has 3 point privilege, Taylor Swift has singer privilege. I have nice warm blanket privilege and am currently experiencing President’s Day privilege. I remember when I had just started in engineering and experiencing new grad privilege and then receiving promotion privilege every year.

I’ve been thinking about going and getting grocery privilege today but I could use delivery privilege instead.