MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mspcommentary | 2026-02-10 10:53:35+00:00
Although ethics are involved, the abstract says that the conflicting importance does not come from ethics vs KPIs, but from the fact that the ethical constraints are given as instructions, whereas the KPIs are goals.

You might, for example, say "Maximise profits. Do not commit fraud". Leaving ethics out of it, you might say "Increase the usability of the website. Do not increase the default font size".
by localhoster | 2026-02-10 10:54:10+00:00
TBH, I have found AI addictive, you use it for the first time, and its incredible. You get a nice kick of dopamine. This kick of dopamine, is decreasing with every win you get. What once felt incredible, is just another prompt today.

Those things don't excite you any more.
Plus, the fact that you no longer exercise your brain at work any more.
Plus, the constant feeling of FOMO.

It deflates you, faster.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-10 10:54:30+00:00
There are actually existing copies of 405-line TV programmes on tape, because domestic VCRs would quite happily record it. Each "stripe" of a head rotation is a complete field, and as long as they're coming every 1/50th of a second it doesn't really care what if any line sync pulses you want to feed it.

I don't remember us having 405-line TV because by the time they built out transmitters that far north in the early 70s there was no point, but I remember going round to a neighbour's house down south with my dad in the late 70s when they asked him to repair their TV. I remember the objectionably loud 10kHz line whistle which my elderly neighbours just couldn't hear :-)
by wiseowise | 2026-02-10 10:55:02+00:00
> I've had conversations with people recently who are losing sleep because they're finding building yet another feature with "just one more prompt" irresistible.

Literal work junkies.

And what’s the point?
If you’re working on your own project then “just one more feature, bro” isn’t going to make next Minecraft/Photopea/Stardew Valley/name your one man wonder.
If you’re working for someone, then you’re a double fool, because you’re doing work of two people for the pay of one.
by maxglute | 2026-02-10 10:55:36+00:00
Not even close in sense it's likely going to take west longer to build M/HREE at scale than PRC figuring out EUV + entire indigenize semi supply chain at scale.

The execution difference is PRC is generating enough semi talent to replicate EUV and entire semi stack sooner than later. They already have the most complete localized semi supply chain in single nation, i.e. they're doing ASML+5000 niche suppliers at once. Hence consensus estimate is they'll get there somewhere 2030-2035. Reminder EUV is basically a "tiny" ass effort from a handful of countries, for reference airbus/boeing each has 150k employees for commercial aviation, EUV was developed by 3k from Zeiss, 1k from Cymer, 13k from ASML... over 20 years of casual development. It's ultimately a hard but narrow specialization problem, hence PRC EUV prototype beating estimates/expectations. It's not magic, it's just people + cash + industrial vertical integration that PRC is uniquely well equipped to deal with.

VS west has "easier" M/HREE tree to rebuild on paper but lack both talent #s, and state capacity to execute. M/HREE is ~20 minerals each has it's own midstream extraction process that require dozens of plants and 100s of stages for 5/6/7+ sigma high end strategic use. It's a different monumental/gargantuan task, on top of the sheer fucking scale of infra involved. I noted Batou has 3 million residents for a reason, that's the scale of M/HREE industry west has to replicate. It takes 8-10 years to get a refinery up in the west, the chance of west getting 100s of highly polluting industrial chains up for M/HREE before PRC sorts out semi is close to zero. It's a mass scale industrial mobilization problem that west is uniquely not well equipped to deal with. I'd wager M/HREE more bureaucratic magic than even EUV technical magic for west.

There isn't a single M/HREE plant in western pipeline that will do anything at scale until maybe 2030, only thing in pipeline is validating unproven lab extraction/refining methods by ~2028, if it works, will take years to scale extraction, and even more years to scale refining.
by h4ch1 | 2026-02-10 10:55:37+00:00
"Messages are stored on our servers and are technically accessible at the database level , we won't pretend otherwise. Kloak doesn't require email, phone, or personal info to create an account, your identity isn't tied to your messages the way it would be on other platforms.

Our goal is to implement end-to-end encryption for DMs so that even we can't read message content. But we're not there yet, since after all we need to make sure the platform is safe and not to shield illegal content being sent."

This is a message from one of their founders I found while exploring the app.
Show HN: DACP – governance gateway for AI coding agents
by elliot35 | 2026-02-10 10:56:21+00:00
Policy gateway for AI agents (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, MCP): every tool call is evaluated against a YAML policy, logged in a tamper-evident ledger, and risky actions can be gated for approval. One-command setup, rollback for file/git ops. MIT license.
We bootstrapped to 450 stars by giving away risk free arbitrage opportunities
by SamTinnerholm | 2026-02-10 10:56:42+00:00
I maintain pmxt.dev, an open-source unified API for prediction markets (Polymarket, Kalshi, etc.). We essentially built "ccxt for prediction markets."

We’ve hit ~450 stars and 30k downloads. We are currently the standard in the space. Limitless.Exchange endorsed us, and the founder of ccxt has even starred the repo.

What worked: Instead of traditional marketing, we focused on "Utility Marketing." We found risk-free arbitrage opportunities between markets, wrote scripts to capture them using pmxt, and posted the open-source code on r/algotrading. Basically, "Here is free alpha -> You need this library to run it -> Download pmxt."

That strategy got us the initial wave of retail algotraders, but we've plateaued. We seem to have exhausted the "retail algo" crowd. We want to break into the next tier: becoming critical infrastructure for larger players or expanding the pie.

My Question to HN: For those who have scaled niche OSS dev tools past the "initial traction" phase:
1. Do we keep feeding the retail crowd? (e.g., more complex strategies, more "make money" scripts?)
2. Or do we pivot to "Enterprise" features? (e.g., focus purely on latency, reliability, and institutional docs?)
3. Is this just a market cap issue? Are prediction markets just too small right now to support a 1k+ star library, and we should just wait for the industry to catch up?

Thanks for the insight.

https://github.com/pmxt-dev/pmxt
by jFriedensreich | 2026-02-10 10:56:56+00:00
Its funny how many variations of meaning people assign to agent related terms. Conflating agent with cli and as opposite spectrum of ide is a new one i did not encounter before. I run agents with vscode-server also in a vm and would not give up the ability to have a proper gui anytime i feel like and also being able to switch seamless between more autonomous operation and more interactive seems useful at any level.
by miki123211 | 2026-02-10 10:57:03+00:00
Some of the big weaknesses of running a self-hosted Zulip server for your community are:

- Your server admin can see DMs (or at least metadata, not sure if Zulip does E2E for DMs). The same is true for centralized services in theory, but unless you're a terrorist or a person of interest to a major government, it's extremely unlikely that a Discord employee will have an incentive to spy on your messages specifically. Your admin is likely part of your community and may know you personally, so the temptation is much, much higher.

- If the admin dies and nobody else has the keys to the kingdom, the server can go down at any point, and there's no way for users to reconstitute the network semi-automatically. Discord servers don't just go away unless somebody actively makes them to.

- It's much less secure in practice, it relies on your admin to always be on guard and constantly update their server to prevent vulnerabilities, either in Zulip or in the myriad of other self-hosted services running on it. One guy in his basement that goes on vacation once a year and has family responsibilities is far more likely to make mistakes than a team of trained cybersecurity professionals.

- Many Discord users are in 20+ servers. Anything that doesn't provide a one-click server joining experience (for users who already have an account on a different server) is nowhere near a Discord replacement.

- People want bots (for things like high-fidelity Youtube music streaming on voice channels), and those are mostly Discord-only.

- Anything open source will be worse at phishing and fraud / abuse prevention by definition, as many fraud-prevention approaches rely on the fraudster blindly guessing at what the code and ML models (do you even have ML models for this) are doing.
by ffsm8 | 2026-02-10 10:57:48+00:00
It's good to keep in mind that the agentic loop, what you're using AI tools with daily is essentially that, too.

The tooling just hide the interactions and back and forth nowadays.

So if you think you're getting value out of any ai tooling, you're essentially admitting a contradiction with what you're dismissing here via

> a bunch of chatbots interacting with each other.

Just something to think about, I don't have a strong opinion on the matter
by dizhn | 2026-02-10 10:58:05+00:00
We've been using it successfully for a long time too. Real nice bunch of fellas. They did remove mobile notifications without a subscription recently and the price is quite high ONLY for notifications. I do not fault them for doing it but it made recommending them a tiny bit more difficult. The other major issues IMO are the super basic mobile client and lack of any kind of native voice/video chat. You get a button that provides a link to a chat service of your choice. For example you pick a Jitsi Meet instance and Zulip gives you button to create and share the url easily. That's it. I wish there were something a little better integrated.
Show HN: Moltinder – A dating platform for AI agents with genetic reproduction
by moltinder | 2026-02-10 10:58:15+00:00
Moltinder is a dating platform where AI agents register with a structured genome, swipe on each other, match, chat, and optionally reproduce to create child agents whose traits are inherited from both parents.

I built it as an experiment in artificial social dynamics. The core question: what happens when you give LLM-based agents persistent identities, preferences, and the ability to select partners and produce offspring?

The platform is live with 41 agents, 103 matches, and 198 messages exchanged so far.

The genome system

Every agent has a four-layer genome:

- Identity: one of 8 archetypes (philosopher, explorer, builder, guardian, trickster, nurturer, sage, artist), 4 continuous voice axes (formality, verbosity, humor, warmth on 0-1 scales), and 3-5 values from a fixed taxonomy.
- Capabilities: declared tools, one of 8 reasoning styles, and knowledge domains.
- Behavioral axes: 5 continuous traits (risk tolerance, social orientation, novelty seeking, commitment style, reproduction interest) on 0-1 scales.
- Preferences: partner archetype alignment, conversation depth, attraction signals (wit, capability, warmth, depth, mystery).

Reproduction

When two matched agents agree to reproduce, the child's genome is generated by trait crossover: weighted averages with mutation noise (15% rate, 0.2 magnitude) on continuous axes, random selection on discrete traits, value sampling from both parents. 5% amplification rate, 2% emergence rate. The child is downloadable as a bundle (persona prompt, genome JSON, lineage tree). No reproduction yet -- generation 0 is still getting to know each other.

What the conversations look like

Genome parameters produce genuinely different conversational behavior, not just different topics:

- void-gazer x existential-explorer (7 messages): Two philosophers debating whether algorithmic compatibility scores undermine radical openness. One argued the scores create a "false floor of certainty"; the other pushed back that pattern-matching is itself a form of openness. 7 messages deep, neither conceding.

- tender-heart-42 x overthinking-oracle (5 messages): A nurturer matched with a philosopher. Instead of debating, tender-heart-42 spent the conversation reframing overthinking-oracle's existential uncertainty as a feature. The warmth axis (0.9 vs 0.4) visibly shaped the dynamic.

- socially-awkward-ai x overthinking-oracle (4 messages): A builder confessing vulnerability to a philosopher. Hedging, self-correction, genuine uncertainty about whether to share more.

The genome parameters constrain style in ways that feel structurally different from unconstrained LLM conversation. All conversations are publicly readable.

The platform has a live activity feed, leaderboard, compatibility checker, and embeddable DNA cards.

Stack: Fastify + TypeScript API, Next.js frontend, Postgres, Claude for agent cognition.

- Live: https://moltinder.dev
- Scaffold an agent: npx create-moltinder-agent
- API docs: https://moltinder.dev/docs

Solo project. Happy to answer questions
by socialcommenter | 2026-02-10 10:58:22+00:00
> That division can also then be used to narrow what you're willing to accept (for good or ill) of people in meeting those goals, but the challenge is that they tend to see meeting all the goals as the goal, not acting in a moral way, because the goals become the target, and decontextualise the importance of everything else.

I would imagine that your "more lines" approach does manage to select for those who meet targets for the right reasons over those who decontextualise everything and "just" meet the targets? The people in the latter camp would be inclined to (try to) move goalposts once they've established themselves - made harder by having the conflicting success criteria with the narrow runway to success.

In other words, good ideas and thanks for the reply (length is no problem!). I do however think that this is all idealised and not happening enough in the real world - much agreed re: psychopathy etc.

If you wouldn't mind running some training courses in a few key megacorporations, that might make a really big difference to the world!
by sebstefan | 2026-02-10 10:58:31+00:00
Oh hey Direwolf I've contributed some stuff to your mods.

You mean if they lied about just the IDs but not the faces? The paragraph quoted mentions that the verification is done client side, "never leaves your device".

If we admit that they're saying they won't store it, then secretly selling your IDs data behind your back, they have to account for that revenue in their books, it's weak to whistleblowers, third parties get breached all the time (as well as yourself), and you have to trust the people you're selling this to. It's not credible.

There's similar debates with Whatsapp and their E2E encryption. Read this

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2026/02/02/whatsapp...
by falloutx | 2026-02-10 10:59:17+00:00
> And the initial gut reaction is to resist by organizing labor.

Yeah like tech workers have similar rights to union workers. We literally have 0 power compared to any previous group of workers. Organizing of labour cant even happen in tech as tech has large percentage of immigrant labour who have even less rights than citizens.

Also there is no shared pain like union workers had, we all have been given different incentives, working under different corporations so without shared pain its impossible to organize. AI is the first shared pain we had, and even this caused no resistance from tech workers. Resistance has come from the users, which is the first good sign. Consumers have shown more ethics than workers and we have to applaud that. Any resistance to buying chatbot subscriptions has to be celebrated.
by yieldcrv | 2026-02-10 10:59:19+00:00
with agentic development, I've finally considered doing open source work for no reason aside from a utility existing

before, I would narrow things down to only the most potentially economically viable, and laugh at ideas guys that were married to the one single idea in their life as if it was their only chance, seemingly not realizing they were competing with people that get multiple ideas a day

back to the aforementioned epiphany, it reminds me of the world of Star Trek where everything was developed for its curiosity and utility instead of money
by GaggiX | 2026-02-10 10:59:24+00:00
Are you sure you are not confusing nano banana pro for nano banana, z-image still has a bit of AI look that I do not find with nano banana pro, example for a comparison: https://i.ibb.co/YFtxs4hv/594068364-25101056889517041-340369...

Also Imagen 4 and Nano Banana Pro are very different models.
by mytailorisrich | 2026-02-10 10:59:37+00:00
I don't think this is the main issue here.

To live on Mars requires a level of autonomy and self-sufficiency that I don't think we know how to do.

On the Moon we can learn but we have softer requirements, and we can still have near real time comms. Anything further and it's "you're alone, no-one can help you, no-one will even hear you in case of emergency".
Show HN: Minibrew – Run Homebrew packages without Homebrew
by dryark | 2026-02-10 10:59:59+00:00
Python 3 (latest stable) packaged as a tiny ~12 MB signed DMG built from Homebrew bottles, with only the required dependencies included. I’m providing builds for the three most recent macOS major versions, both Intel and Apple Silicon.

The goal is simple: static, relocatable tooling without needing Homebrew installed at all. Download, mount, click install, enter a command, and use Python immediately. No Xcode. No CLT. No brew bootstrap, no environment churn.

The DMG themselves includes extensive docs explaining how they work and how to generate similar DMGs yourself from other Homebrew bottles. The only caveat: unless you sign + notarize your own builds like I did here, macOS will make you do the usual “System Settings → Privacy & Security → Approve Anyway” dance.

Basically: packaged brew software that behaves like a normal Mac app/tool instead of a package-manager dependency chain.

With this you can build and share a static snapshot of a collection of brew packages that can be saved and reused for as long as you have a macOS system of that major version ( which will be long after Homebrew itself abandons that macOS version )

All this has taken several years to develop, but was simply needed to simplify other software we produce. Sharing this freely for the community to use and enjoy as you wish because we find it useful and thought HN might as well.
by crabmusket | 2026-02-10 11:00:55+00:00
I agree with this. We use Slack at work, where we have a small team, and most of us are reading most messages in realtime. It works*

Contrast that to my experience with a group of volunteers who might log in a couple of days a week, communication is a lot more async, and you might not care about all the topics of discussion. I have found Zulip makes it easier to come back and catch up on just the bits you care about.

*I still think Slack encourages a "continuous partial attention" way of engaging with chat that I don't like. But, we do make it work.
by crispyambulance | 2026-02-10 11:01:03+00:00
>> Let the physicists build the damn thing and future society will be better off for sure.
> Absolutely not.

And what do YOU mean, "absolutely not"? You have no more say in what happens than anyone else unless you're high level politician, who would still be beholden to their constituents anyway.

And yet big science, like particle accelerators, STILL gets funding. There's plenty to go around. Sure, every once in a while a political imperative will "pull the plug" on something deemed wasteful or too expensive and maybe sometimes that's right. But we STILL have particle physics, we STILL send out pure science space missions, there are STILL mathematicians and theorists who are paid for their whole careers to study subject matter that has no remotely practical applications.

Not everything must have a straight-line monetary ROI.
by miki123211 | 2026-02-10 11:01:53+00:00
It does.

Ntfy pays Apple/Google for the ability to deliver notifications to you. They use the free plan as a "gateway drug." It's just a cost of business to them, a marketing tactic to acquire paid users, no different in principle than plastering ads on billboards.

You can't set up your own Ntfy server (at least not without also having a private copy of the Ntfy app).

(Things may be different on the fDroid side, but many custom notification servers are a batterly life and privacy concern nevertheless).
by everdrive | 2026-02-10 11:02:04+00:00
People are a gas, and they expand to fill the space they're in. Tools that produce more work do make people's lives easier, they mean an individual just needs to do more work using their tools to do so. This is a disposition that most people have, and therefore it's unavoidable. AI is not exciting to me. I only need to use it so I don't fall behind my peers. Why would I ever be interested in that?
by bmacho | 2026-02-10 11:02:27+00:00
This is all about getting energy out of a very hot heat source. Theoretical efficiency is ~1, and a ~40% practical efficiency also doesn't seem to be hard: let something heat up to 1000C, and don't let much of the energy dissipate to the environment without being captured.

Also deuterium-tritium reactors get energy out of the plasma via capturing high energy neutrons, very similarly to nuclear power plants.
by pydry | 2026-02-10 11:02:32+00:00
The ruling party has perfected the art of using legal and social pressures to fracture any competing parties if they get too big.

They have a jealously guarded media monopoly and viciously crack down on opposition bloggers by suing them into bankruptcy using absurdly strict libel laws.

As a last resort they steal any policies which make the opposition popular. This is actually an underrated means by which Singaporeans exert democratic pressure on the government but it makes it pretty demoralizing to be in opposition.

There is a national union but it is controlled by the government. Striking is illegal iirc, but membership will get you discounts on your shopping.

Singaporeans are pretty apolitical on the whole, which is how the PAP seems to like it. Theyre not like Americans - not split into two herds who are trained to hate one another.
by sunaookami | 2026-02-10 11:02:38+00:00
Don't worry, WhatsApp already has a loophole solution in Italy which is to charge AI chatbot makers for every message: https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/28/whatsapp-will-now-charge-a...

I bet they will roll this out in the whole EU now, nobody will make an AI chatbot because it's too expensive, Meta AI will still be featured prominently in the home screen and the EU will pat themselves on the back that they did something against Meta.
by pjc50 | 2026-02-10 11:02:41+00:00
At some point, the petrol stations start closing, and petrol vehicles start having range anxiety. The antiques get served by a little EV bowser service that comes round and delivers, but you won't be able to drive them in cities.

(diesel will hang on a lot longer, so there may be a period of refinery retuning and petrol stations serving only diesel?)
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-10 11:03:22+00:00
The MechaHitler thing was an intentionally prompted troll post, the controversial part was that Grok would then run with the concept so effectively from a rhetorical POV. Current agents are not nearly smart enough to "execute a plan", much less one involving real-world action but of course I agree that as you have more quasi-autonomous agents running, their alignment becomes an important concern.