MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pqtyw | 2026-02-13 22:59:34+00:00
> even the slightest deviation from the ideas of an all-powerful church and nobility would be progressively punished by censors, mutilation, or execution

Medieval Christian societies were by and large certainly less brutal than ancient Greek and Roman states which were based on conquest and subjugation and extreme exploitation of slave labour. While admittedly some things did regress we have to thank Christianity for introducing the concept of universal human right (at least on a basic level) which is not something that existed in any shape or form back in e.g. 0 AD.

> basic reasoning skills atrophied in service of weird nonsense theological arguments

Scientific method was pretty much invented in Christian universities. Of course the model they were operating on was "somewhat" flawed but the methods they invented to reason about it were certainly a stepping stone to

> Greeks than we know about some parts of Dark Age Europe

Yes there was an ~200-300 year gap.

> 1000 years of stupidity by the Protestants

The same people who brought back witching burning (coincidentally a wide spread ancient Roman practice which the church tried to stamp out with various degrees of effort and success during most of the early to high middle ages)?

> Catholicism is the only reason we didn't reach our current level of technical and intellectual development 1000 years ago.

lol... let's not get silly. Just how much technological progress do you think there was between e.g. ~ 300 BC and 400 AD? It was clearly much less rapid than e.g. between 1000 and 1400 AD.
by PlunderBunny | 2026-02-13 22:59:51+00:00
I don’t know about other countries, but in New Zealand there’s already recycling of leftover bits of drywall (we call it ‘gib board’ after a brand name). All the big building companies will accept leftover bits of gib board, but small bits can be thrown directly in your garden beds to help break up clay.

The gypsum used in New Zealand is mined locally.
by estebank | 2026-02-13 23:00:03+00:00
Learnability and usability are related but independent concepts. This feature is difficult to find out about unless told, relatively easy to remember once you first learn about it, and very intuitive once you try it out. Dragging from the corner is slightly easier to stumble upon or infer, but most people will learn about it because they were told about it. The alt drag version (both for resizing and moving windows around without having to go to the title bar) is in addition, becomes second nature quickly and is significantly nicer once you learn it.
by tehjoker | 2026-02-13 23:00:13+00:00
"Would it not be wildly irresponsible, they ask, to expose our entire species to even a 1-in-10 chance of annihilation?"

I have bad news about how decision makers have responded to risks about nuclear weapons and climate change in the past. During the development of the bomb, it was thought that the initial test had a small but plausible, at least to some but not all scientists, chance of igniting the atmosphere on fire in a chain reaction. It was thought that threatening and destroying enemies was worth the risk.

Of course, no such risk is worth taking to the average person. It only makes sense in an extremely narrow hypercompetitive viewpoint held by elites and dumb dumbs.
by digitalPhonix | 2026-02-13 23:00:16+00:00
Also used incorrectly most of the time. They meant to use “debatably”.

Arguably:

- used to say that a statement is very possibly true even if it is not certain (merriam-webster)

- in a way that can be shown to be true (cambridge)

ie. you can be prove it through argument, not “you can make the argument”
by janalsncm | 2026-02-13 23:00:48+00:00
Kind of. Corporate propaganda (ads) are very much still in the old Bush-era paradigm of “repeating a lie until it becomes true”. Coke and Pepsi don’t want you to believe “nothing is true”. They want you to believe their cola is superior. Coke isn’t going to waste money creating confusion about that topic.

The Kremlin will amplify conflicting opinions. Even critics of the government. Later it will come out that those critics were sponsored by Putin, undermining any critics by association.
by globalnode | 2026-02-13 23:01:47+00:00
Even if gpts results are debatable and we sometimes dislike misapplications of ai where its not needed. it feels as though another milestone is being reached. the first was when they were initially released and everyone was amazed. this second milestone seems to be that their competence has increased. I am often amazed at their output despite being a huge skeptic. I guess the fine tuning is coming along well but I still dont think we will see agi from these chatbots and I doubt theres a third milestone coming up.
by dale_glass | 2026-02-13 23:02:54+00:00
I disagree, I think TUIs are a great fit in some problem domains.

Think for instance the Debian package configuration dialogs -- they're far more comfortable than the same questions without a TUI, and still work over a serial console if you have to use one.

For tools like various kinds of "top", there's many potential tools you can use to the same end and intentionally using one that draws CPU graphs over one that just displays a number. Graphs are much easier to interpret than a column of numbers.

In many cases they're the optimal choice given some constraint -- like the desire to have minimal dependencies, working over SSH, and being usable without breaking the flow. Yeah, you could make a tunnel to a tool that runs a local webserver and delivers graphs by HTTP, but the ergonomics of that are terrible.
by jjmarr | 2026-02-13 23:03:03+00:00
If you want to live with no electricity, no running water, and a lack of refrigerated food, you could do so purely on welfare. In that sense, we already have the UBI that Marx predicted.

However, most people want fruits and vegetables instead of getting rickets, goiter, and cholera from an 1800s diet. Many are even willing to work 80+ hours a week to do so.
by misiek08 | 2026-02-13 23:03:05+00:00
Funny how Apple get to mediocre level with the phones while making really good progress with hardware and acceptable level on tablets and notebooks.

I see in Europe iPhone is now common - it was a little bit premium for long time, before. Only Samsung is so bad that iPhone still isn’t the worst experience, but iOS 26 brought so many bugs, issues and bad UX decisions that it’s depressing.

But having macOS with „completely different, but the same” natural scroll switch - you have the switch „separate” for mouse and touchpad, but they switch together as one. Incredible that company having such history makes so stupid features.

Having „lower level”/masses join the Apple-train I wouldn’t expect them to fix anything in near future. As long as money will flow - the won’t look at quality.
by optimalsolver | 2026-02-13 23:03:10+00:00
This is a depressing story, but the AI companies are in an impossible situation here. For every incident like this, there are many more people complaining about LLMs treating them like sensitive snowflakes.

What I'd like to know is how many people "Harry" has saved from going over the edge. It's like self-driving. We should expect many horrible accidents along the way, but in the end, far more lives saved.
by ruuda | 2026-02-13 23:03:13+00:00
I tried Zed for some time. Then it had a regression which broke it completely on my laptop. (Zed can't start any more, logging a PlatformNotSupported error even though earlier versions worked fine.) I carefully bisected it, and it turned out to be due to an intentional change in Blade. The issue was acknowledged, and confirmed by several other users. Then it got converted into a "discussion" because there was nothing actionable to do according to the devs. Then the discussion got closed because they are "directing all support questions to Discord going forward". Then Discord announced mandatory age verification.
by elevation | 2026-02-13 23:03:15+00:00
Yes, but this kind of dashboard was never going to be accessible anyway. It's a dense visual representation of vast system state with constant real-time fluctuation. Even in a browser, it would be hell to navigate the constantly changing state with a screen reader. And visually increasing the scale and contrast defeats the purpose of the density of the original display.

If you need to support screen readers, your UI would have to be totally different: You should allow the user to snapshot the system state and navigate it. Generate succinct summary text to impart the same sense that a dashboard would to a visual user. "Normal: All systems OK" "Critical: Boeing RPA servers down since 2:17PM PDT and 54 others". Once you've done this work, a CLI tool could expose this just as screen-readable:

$ cli status
all systems OK, last outage resolved 2:27 PDT

$ cli topjob cpu
117 Boeing RPA, 78% CPU
434 SAIC PDM, 43% CPU

$ cli downtime today 117
Boeing RPA down 10 minutes today, resolved now
by ragall | 2026-02-13 23:03:32+00:00
There's a non-profit called "Planet Wild" that funds re-greening projects all over Europe, Africa and even India. Here's one in Scotland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiDBAU2d7oE, or Spain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1QJvRsjg8M. Forest plantations are monocultures that kill biodiversity.
by mixmastamyk | 2026-02-13 23:03:48+00:00
Also look up "Cabeza de Vaca."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81lvar_N%C3%BA%C3%B1ez_Cab...

I found a book on his trip in a "little library," and was surprised they never mentioned this guy once in history class, at least enough for me to remember. Fascinating, sometimes funny story as well.
by meowface | 2026-02-13 23:04:32+00:00
I hate leaving snarky ad hominem replies but, yes: Zitron is simply a joke. I am not sure why some journalists and professionals seem to take him seriously. It's odd

The original article is also silly, as you say. It's just two tiresome cranks barking at each other. (Though I think I find Zitron's commentary less tethered to reality than what it's critiquing. Hypomanic exaggeration vs. deeply incurious pedantic skepticism.)
by arctic-true | 2026-02-13 23:04:33+00:00
Let’s say you adopt a puppy, and you don’t discipline it and you let it act aggressively. It grows up to be a big, angry dog. You’re so careless, in fact, that your puppy becomes the leader of a band of local strays. You still feed the puppy, make sure the puppy is up to date on its vaccinations, care for it in every single way. When the puppy and his pals maul a child, it’s you who ought to be responsible. No, you didn’t ask for it to do that. Maybe you would’ve even stopped it if you saw it happening. But if you’re the one sustaining another being - whether that be a computer program or a dog - you’re responsible for its actions.

A natural counter to this would be, “well, at some point AI will develop far more agency than a dog, and it will be too intelligent and powerful for its human operator to control.” And to that I say: tough luck. Stop paying for it, shut off the hardware it runs on, take every possible step to mitigate it. If you’re unwilling to do that, then you are still responsible.

Perhaps another analogy would be to a pilot crashing a plane. Very few crashes are PURE pilot error, something is usually wrong with the instruments or the equipment. We decide what is and is not pilot error based on whether the pilot did the right things to avert a crash. It’s not that the pilot is the direct cause of the crash - ultimately, gravity does that - in the same way that the human operator is not the direct cause of the harm caused by its AI. But even if AI becomes so powerful that it is akin to a force of nature like gravity, its human operators should be treated like pilots. We should not demand the impossible, but we must demand every effort to avoid harm.
by overgard | 2026-02-13 23:04:56+00:00
I just saw a video this morning of Sam Altman talking about how in 2026 he's worried that AI is going to be used for bioweapons. I think this is just more fear mongering, I mean, you could use the internet/google to build all sorts of weapons in the past if you were motivated, I think most people just weren't. It does kind of tell a bleak story though that the company is removing safety as a goal and he's talking about it being used for bioweapons. Like, are they just removing safety as a goal because they don't think they can achieve it? Or is this CYOA?
by xg15 | 2026-02-13 23:05:49+00:00
What do you mean with "how all this works"? Do you want to know how program code works, or how LLMs turn natural language into code?

For the former, I think some hand coding will get the best results.

A large part of "thinking like a programmer" is thinking about the sort of invisible structures that code will produce in a computer's memory when it runs - which is not the same as what's literally written in the code file. IMO, the best way to get a feel for that is to write code yourself, run it, examine the results, etc.

But writing code can be a rather dry activity if you don't have motivation for what to write. The usual vibe coded projects are probably too complex to hand code without experience. I think two good starting points could be Code Katas [1] or the Pico8 game engine [2] (and of course any good "intro to Python" or "intro to JavaScript" tutorial on the web)

--

For the latter, you could maybe start with the history of generative text models (like markov chains) and neural networks. Both technologies are several decades old and sort of form the very basic building blocks that made development of LLMs possible.

In particular, neural networks made use of the gradient descent and backpropagation algorithms that are still the basis of most LLM training processes - even if they might now run for months and take exabytes of training data.

Then there is of course the "Attention is all you need" paper that introduced the Transformer architecture - the kind of latest-generation neural network that underpins most LLMs - and basically started the whole LLM revolution. (It's also the "T" in GPT)

(For historical interest, there is also the whole theory of formal languages/grammars and automata - which was the previous attempt to understand human language with computers. That theory gave us a lot of things - such as the Turing Machine and the entire theory of how to build and read a programming language. What it didn't give us though was a way to process human language...)

--

As for the specific question of how an LLM can take this request in human language and generate that code from it that happens to fullfill all the requirements - that's an active area of research and I honestly doubt that right now anyone understands that in all entirety.

Through I believe Anthropic and LessWrong had some interesting blog posts about this topics where they tried to understand the functions of certain specific neurons in an LLM. See also "Golden Gate Claude".

[1] http://codekata.com/

[2] https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
Show HN: Vanilla JavaScript Mandelbrot Explorer
by krasotkin | 2026-02-13 23:05:57+00:00
I'm taking a course and we have a project to make an animation with JS and the HTML canvas. I started with a Mandelbrot zoom. I kept coming back to the project trying to optimize anything I could. I've made every optimization I could think to do and put this together for others to play around with. Most people would not reach for JavaScript as the best tool to render the Mandelbrot set, but because I had to for the assignment, the optimizations I made helped me learn a lot.

Code at: https://github.com/bryanhoffman/cis-223-animation-template-m...
by spacebanana7 | 2026-02-13 23:06:02+00:00
If it’s a commodity then it’s even more competitive so the ability for companies to impose safety rules is even weaker.

Imagine if Ford had a monopoly on cars, they could unilaterally set an 85mph speed limit on all vehicles to improve safety. Or even a 56mph limit for environmental-ethical reasons.

Ford can’t do this in real life because customers would revolt at the company sacrificing their individual happiness for collective good.

Similarly GPT 3.5 could set whatever ethical rules it wanted because users didn’t have other options.
by mrandish | 2026-02-13 23:07:08+00:00
Alex,

It's somewhat ironic that a web page about performant terminal user interfaces uses gratuitously complex CSS mask compositing and cubic gradients which reduce smooth scrolling on my 1 year-old, high-end Dell XPS laptop (>$3k) to Commodore 64 level (on default 'Balanced' battery mode). While it's pretty, it's also just a very subtle, non-critical background animation effect. Not being a CSS guru myself, here's what Gemini says:

> "Specifically, this is a Scrim or Easing Gradient. Instead of a simple transition between two colors, it uses 16 color stops to mimic a "cubic-bezier" mathematical curve. This creates a smoother, more natural fade than a standard linear gradient, but it forces the browser to calculate high-precision color math across the entire surface during every scroll repaint."

My Firefox smooth scrolls like butter on thousands of pages, so you might want ask your web designer to test on non-Mac, iGPU laptops with hiDPI and consider the performance cost of web pages with always-running subtle background animations in a world of diverse hardware platforms. In case it helps, here's the animation with the gradient layers disabled so you can see all 6,400,000 pixels which are being recalculated every scroll line (https://i.imgur.com/He3RkEu.jpeg).
by avaer | 2026-02-13 23:07:40+00:00
If you place blades on the sidewalk outside your house the cops will want to have a word with you. There's no excuse, and we should treat AI the same.

The law needs to catch up -- and fast -- and start punishing people for what their AIs are doing. Don't complain to OpenAI, don't try to censor the models. Just make sure the system robustly and thoroughly punishes bad actors and gets them off the computer. I hope that's not a pipe dream, or we're screwed.

Maybe some day AIs will have rights and responsibilities like people, enforced by law. But until then, the justice systems needs to make people accountable for what their technology does. And I hope the justice system sets a precedent that blaming the AI is not a valid defense.
by ginko | 2026-02-13 23:08:18+00:00
Is it really so hard for you people to imagine that MAYBE, there's politicians that see what social media look like these days and think they might want to do something against that?

The fact that all of these companies aren't European certainly doesn't help, but if you think this and GDPR, DMA etc. are purely schemes to milk foreign companies then you've been drinking way too much cynicism juice.
by JoshTriplett | 2026-02-13 23:08:28+00:00
> They do not intend, not even remotely, to sabotage the profit machines that those companies are

I think you are projecting values on entities that don't share those values. I don't think they'd have any problem destroying a pile of companies and not enabling replacements; they are not pro-business, and they have not shown a history of regulating in a fashion that's particularly designed to enable home-grown EU businesses. Predictability and consistency of enforcement are not their values, either. They don't seem to have any problem saying "act in what we think the spirit of the law is, and if you think you can just understand and follow the letter of it we'll hurt you until you stop".
by zachdotai | 2026-02-13 23:09:32+00:00
Tool invocation. Each time the agent emits a tool call, the evaluator assesses it against the original task intent plus a rolling window of recent tool results.

We tried coarser units (plan nodes, full steps) but drift compounds fast, by the time a step finishes, the agent may have already chained 3-4 bad calls. Tool-level gives the tightest correction loop.
The cost is ~200ms latency per invocation. For hot paths we sample (every 3rd call, or only on tool-category changes) rather than evaluate exhaustively.
by nosuchthing | 2026-02-13 23:10:44+00:00
"The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber is a great, more recent alternative with a lot more context around the non-linear trajectory of history - the modern myths of linear progressive societal progress from savages, to agriculture, to cities and centralized technological futurism.

Graeber also explores the question what defines a society, and how at certain points some groups of people identified their culture through "schismogenesis" more so in oppositional context to against other group(s)

It's a massive book, but really refreshing and full of delightful little anecdotes and footnotes all through out.
by Human-Cabbage | 2026-02-13 23:10:59+00:00
The optimistic case is that instead of a team of 10 people working on one project, you could have those 10 people using AI assistants to work on 10 independent projects.

That, of course, assumes that there are 9 other projects that are both known (or knowable) and worth doing. And in the case of Uber/Lyft drivers, there's a skillset mismatch between the "deprecated" jobs and their replacements.
by dang | 2026-02-13 23:11:03+00:00
This has been popping up quite a bit but as far as I can tell, neither the original thought piece nor (therefore) the critiques are particularly above-the-bar?

Something Big Is Coming (Annotated by Ed Zitron) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47007991 - Feb 2026 (31 comments)

Something Big Is Happening - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46973011 - Feb 2026 (74 comments)
by anthk | 2026-02-13 23:11:39+00:00
That happened in the Englightenment era too. The censhorship, tortures and whatnot, I mean.

>Catholics have generally become far more intellectually sound than the psychopathic libertarian elites that own us now. Their nihilism and narcissism will end up giving us another 1000 years of darkness.

Yeah, unlike the champions on killing 'witches', you know, the Germanic protestants.

Meanwhile, the Spanish Inquisition was depicted as brutal, but, trust me, you would prefer to be trialed by them that some bastard ruthless lord or worse, the villagers being more brutal than the Church itself.

Read about Alphonse X and the Book of Games. A book from the 13th century, Middle Ages, and yet more knowledgeable than the 90% of the self-called "Enlightened" Anglo-Saxon/Germanic protestants reinventing the wheel after the School of Salamanca from similar origins.

Humanism? Trades and agreements between nations? Modern Economics on value and production? It's all there from that School in Castille.
by hn92726819 | 2026-02-13 23:11:51+00:00
That argument is not going to hold up for long though. Someone can prompt "improve the open source projects I work on", an agent 8 layers deep can do something like this. If you complain to the human, they are not going to care. It will be "ok." or "yeah but it submitted 100 other PRs that got approved" or "idk, the AI did it"
by jcgrillo | 2026-02-13 23:12:04+00:00
I agree directionally that Tesla should be held accountable for marketing something called "full self-driving" when it clearly isn't. But ultimately it's the motor vehicle operator's responsibility to keep the vehicle under control regardless of the particulars of how that control system is built. There just isn't any way around that. The buck stops with the operator.

Blaming people is how we can control this kind of thing. If we try to blame machines, or companies, it will be uncontrollable.
by satiric | 2026-02-13 23:12:18+00:00
I think I've been this person before, but I've also been the person that makes the meeting go on for 20 minutes longer than necessary by bringing up stuff that doesn't need to be talked about in a big meeting. I've also been the one who thought he knew enough to try and force his opinion, when actually I was just being confidently wrong and not listening to others. So there's a time and a place.