MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-02-26 18:05:51+00:00
"Mostly benefits your employer" my ass. ADHD isn't just "ugh, I don't like doing my job". Things you want to do, or need to do, even enjoy doing, and fully intend to do end up constantly pushed to the side when you're unmedicated. You end getting into difficult situations because you've managed to procrastinate taking the 10 minutes it takes to renew your car's registration for 6 months. You struggle to maintain relationships, both friendly and romantic, because people interpret your inability to focus on them as disinterest. You lose sleep, and not just a little, because you lay in bed and simply cannot focus on going to sleep long to actually do so. So you stay up until completely exhausted, but guess what? That doesn't align with anybody else's schedule.

Then you take a pill, and all of these problems just disappear. If you want to work out, you can just go to the gym and work out. No weird little ritualistic hacks, just "I want to do X, I shall do X". You receive a wedding invitation, and you can just spend the 10 minutes making travel arrangements, rather than procrastinating it for months. You can see that a load of laundry needs to be done, and just spend the 5 minutes loading the washing machine, rather than having to push past your brain screaming like you're trying to stick pins in your eye.
by selridge | 2026-02-26 18:05:57+00:00
I'm not really trolling. I'm trying to push people to consider that the world is already in a state where "I used AI" is neither binary nor dispositive. I think we're used to a 2023 to mid-2025 framing where outside of some narrow, highly structured cases, the code is garbage.

If that's still true as a binary now, it won't be for long. As the robot likes to say, some of these changes are "in flight".
by MidasTools | 2026-02-26 18:05:58+00:00
On the "why bash not python/lua" question -- the answer isn't that bash is a better language. It's that bash is the only language you can assume is there.

When we run autonomous agents across different environments (Vercel functions, local dev, CI containers, remote VMs), Python availability is a negotiation. Bash is given. The agent doesn't need to worry about whether venv is activated, which Python version is installed, or whether a package needs to be pip-installed first.

There's also a subtler benefit: bash commands have predictable, well-documented side effects. When an agent runs `git commit -m "..."` it knows exactly what happened. When it runs a Python script that does the same thing via subprocess, there's now an abstraction layer to reason about.

The performance concern is real for I/O-heavy tasks. But for orchestration -- "list files, check git status, curl an API, write a line to a log" -- bash overhead is negligible and the interoperability wins dominate.

The place where this breaks down is anything requiring complex data transformation or error handling with multiple failure modes. That's where we drop into Python. The architecture that works for us: bash for the orchestration layer (run this, check that, pipe here), Python for anything with real logic.
by malmeloo | 2026-02-26 18:06:05+00:00
Oh I'm getting so tired of this. Lately there appears to have been an uptick in this kind of marketing spam too, there's so many companies trying to advertise their AI products this way. At least it's a good indicator of which companies I should avoid at all costs, and it provides me with an email address I can use to direct my angry emotions towards.

They're getting more aggressive at it too. Just yesterday I received an email from Alignerr (not YC affiliated I think) saying that my sign-up was complete and cheerfully welcoming me to their platform. I had never even heard of them. An automated "job opportunity!" email didn't arrive until 3 hours later, but by then I had already directed some angry words towards their support email.

Other, even less respectable projects are also regularly enrolling my GitHub projects into their platforms, and I have to actively reach out to them to remove it.

I'm so tired of this man. Can someone go and take away these organizations' ability to send emails?
by analog31 | 2026-02-26 18:06:22+00:00
To me the best thing about Palm OS was the rule that you’re never more than two taps or a button press away from where you want to be. (I think that’s how I remember it). The beloved early GUIs were all on machines that didn’t do much, comparatively speaking. The problem with modern GUIs is that there’s just too much to learn and remember if it’s presented as symbols rather than text.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-26 18:06:33+00:00
Everyone has some kind of consumer mindset and is spending more on a specific good or service than others may think is reasonable.

If you want you can show all of us on HN your bills and we will all probably find stuff which you spend on which we may think is unreasonable to us but is reasonable to you.

So long as you are making sure to save around 60% of your monthly income post-401k/IRA and rent/mortgage what you do with the other 40% is literally discretionary, and isn't hurting you.

Everybody thinks they are not a sucker, but everyone is.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-26 18:06:47+00:00
It's quite likely that when Hendrix went to London the first time, he was the first person ever to play a Stratocaster through a Marshall full stack at full volume.

Also maybe not until the night of his first big gig there.

Townshend had Marshall build 100 watters so he could play louder clean, Clapton had already been cranking it with a Gibson SG which is a characteristic sound all its own, he was in the audience at the gig and was blown away watching Hendrix.

Every year from at least 1964 to 1984, more advanced amps were made than ever existed before.
by imiric | 2026-02-26 18:07:10+00:00
> AI will be generating movies and videos on the fly, either legally or illegally infringing on IP.

> If you want to see a photo of you and your family from 15 years ago, it will generate slightly better versions of yourself and your wife and maximize how cute your kids look.

Sure, but why would any of this media have any emotional significance?

The reason we enjoy media of friends and family is because it depicts a moment in the life of our loved ones. A fake image or video of them is of absolutely zero value to anyone.

The reason we enjoy cinema is because a talented group of people had an interesting story to tell and brought it to life in a memorable way. Me, or a random person with no filmmaking talent, prompting a tool to generate a particular scene wouldn't be interesting at all. Talented individuals will also rely on this technology, of course, but a demand for human creativity will still exist, possibly even stronger than today, once everyone is exhausted from the flood of shitty Deadpool vs Hulk videos.

I suspect the same will eventually happen with every other product these tools are currently commoditizing, including software.

All of this seems like a neat technology in search of a problem to solve, while actually introducing countless societal problems we haven't even begun to acknowledge, let alone address. But it sure is a great money and power grab opportunity for giant corporations to further extend their reach. And they have the gall to tell us it will bring world prosperity. Most of these sociopathic assholes should be prosecuted and jailed. And you, dear reader who is generously employed by these companies, are complacent with all of this.
by gumby271 | 2026-02-26 18:07:27+00:00
I struggle with this feeling as well, a huge part of the Maker movement was excitement around people building and importantly learning how to build thing. Iterating and improving each time is a pretty common thread you'll see throughout the community. It's hard to have someone show you a thing they generated instead of made and to feel the same way. Yes, they played a part in that thing existing, and part of that person is reflected in the output, but I don't think most Makers would say the final output is goal, so what's there to be excited about?

It's hard to not be dismissive or gate-keeping with this stuff, my goal isn't to discourage anyone or to fight against the lower barriers to entry, but it's simply a different thing when someone prompts a private AI model to make a thing in an hour.
by throwaway13337 | 2026-02-26 18:07:33+00:00
The unix commandline tools being the most efficient way to use an LLM has been a surprise.

I wonder the reason.

Maybe 'do one thing well'? The piping? The fact that the tools have been around so long so there are so many examples in the training data? Simplicity? All of it?

The success of this project depends on the answer.

Even so, I suspect that something like this will be a far too leaky abstraction.

But Vercel must try because they see the writing on the wall.

No one needs expensive cloud platforms anymore.
by normalocity | 2026-02-26 18:07:40+00:00
> ... which I imagine would be important for a military control AI

I think this is a common, but incorrect assumption. What military commanders want (and what CEOs want, and what users want), is control and assistance. They don't want a system that can't be turned off if it means losing control.

It's a mistake to assume that people want an immortal force. I haven't met anyone who wants that (okay, that's decidedly anecdotal), and I haven't seen anyone online say, "We want an all-powerful, immortal system that we cannot control." Who are the people asking for this?

> ... it will do whatever it can to prevent it being turned off.

This statement pre-supposes that there's an existing sense of self-will or self-preservation in the systems. Beyond LLMs creating scary-looking text, I don't see evidence that current systems have any sense of will or a survival instinct.
by jvanderbot | 2026-02-26 18:07:42+00:00
Potential issues from new tech aside, an open-source endowment is a pro-social idea, that absolutely deserves its day.

Now, setting aside ethical issues for a moment, open-sourced knowledge, writing, history, data, Q&A, and tech is essentially a prerequisite for a data-driven technology like LLMs, and if those turn out to be a net win for humanity, then we can directly trace the routes to initiatives like this one that can curate humanity's best contributions.
by xcf_seetan | 2026-02-26 18:08:24+00:00
Well,i remember a performance of Jorge Lima Barreto (Portuguese electronic/free jazz) playing with a saxophonist with 2 microphones, one normal and the other with a brutal delay. He would play on the normal microphone and sometimes he directed the instrument output to the delayed microphone and it sounded monumental. Not sure what musician he was, i think is Tomas Stanko, but not sure. The performance sounded like you went through a big storm. :D
by freedomben | 2026-02-26 18:08:27+00:00
As much as I love sarcasm that is done well, I do find that it translates very poorly to written text unless explicitly noted with /s or something like that. Even when annotated, it's extremely rare that a sarcastic comment actually furthers discussion or makes a meaningful point. If a person is using sarcasm, odds are pretty high that they aren't engaging substantively anyway. Given the difficulties with detection (which even many humans fail at) it seems like trying to detect sarcasm would just make the tool a lot less useful and would be mostly antithetical to the project goals anyway.
by wtallis | 2026-02-26 18:08:35+00:00
Even when not using client isolation, I've run into similar problems simply from having a computer connected over Ethernet instead of WiFi, and whatever broadcast method a gadget uses for discovery didn't get bridged between wired and wireless. (Side note: broadcast traffic on WiFi can be disproportionately problematic because it needs to be transmitted at a lowest common denominator speed to ensure all clients can receive it. IIRC, that usually means 6Mbps.)
by compass_copium | 2026-02-26 18:08:38+00:00
Programs are fundamentally lists of instructions. LLMs are very good at building these lists. That it performs well when you say "Build a list you've seen before, but do it in a slightly different way this time. Here's the exact way I want you to do it." is not surprising. I would honestly be surprised if it couldn't do it.

As the other commenter suggested, a genuinely novel scientific idea would be surprising. A new style of art (think Picasso or Pollack coming along), not just an iteration on Ghibli, would be surprising. That's actual creativity.
by 542354234235 | 2026-02-26 18:08:40+00:00
It kind of annoys me that the article says the people trapped behind the trucks are just inconvenienced, but the truck driver gains time and money. Considering commuting to and from work is what most people are doing on the road, that is exactly time and money. It really could be seen as truck drivers stealing dozens, if not hundreds, of minutes from other drivers to give themselves 5 minutes.
by sigmar | 2026-02-26 18:09:00+00:00
>Anthropic has repeatedly asked defense officials to agree to guardrails that would restrict its AI model... also wants to ensure Claude is not used by the Pentagon for final targeting decisions in military operations without any human involvement, one source familiar with the negotiations said. Claude is not immune from hallucinations and not reliable enough to avoid potentially lethal mistakes, like unintended escalation or mission failure without human judgment, the person said.

They explicitly allow it to be used in military operations, just not killing people without a human in the loop

source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pentagon-anthropic-offer-ai-unr...
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-02-26 18:09:16+00:00
They haven't pulled the plug on github yet, but my understanding is that Gentoo intends to drop it long term. In general, I would expect any of the projects that leave GH because they want to avoid being used to train AI would avoid leaving even a mirror behind (since that would defeat the point). (This is not intended as a value judgement, just saying that there exist projects that are doing this)
by pphysch | 2026-02-26 18:09:18+00:00
Sharing this in the spirit of "great websites". The music is also (usually) great if you are into fresh electronic stuff or old school disco. Prominent repeat guests have included Four Tet, Fred Again, et al. in addition to tons of smaller/local artists.

Background from site: "We are an independent online radio station live streaming 24/7 from a repurposed shipping container on an empty lot in NYC."
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-26 18:09:28+00:00
https://medium.com/luminasticity/art-as-a-tool-for-storing-m...

"One of the primary properties of anything with Mana is a feeling of uniqueness. That one has never encountered something like this before, and therefore it is important. The uniqueness of the thing is a property that pulls you in to focus more closely, to attempt to understand more closely why the thing is unique."
by selridge | 2026-02-26 18:09:29+00:00
>"as AI becomes more agentic, we are entering a new era where software can, in a very real sense, become self-improving."

>"This creates a continuous feedback loop. When an AI agent implements a new feature, its final task isn't just to "commit the code." Instead, as part of the Continuous Alignment process, the agent's final step is to reflect on what changed and update the project's knowledge base accordingly."

>"... the type of self-improvement we’re talking about is far more pragmatic and much less dangerous."

>"Self-improving software isn't about creating a digital god; it's about building a more resilient, maintainable, and understandable system. By closing the loop between code and documentation, we set the stage for even more complex collaborations."

It's only like every other sentence.
by keeda | 2026-02-26 18:09:57+00:00
If you mean "us" on this forum, I would believe that. I would bet the number of engineers working on stuff "outside the distribution" is overrepresented here.

If you mean "us" as in all software engineers, not at all. The challenge we're facing is exactly that, reskilling the 90% of engineers who have been working on CRUD apps to the 10% that is outside the distribution.
by overrun11 | 2026-02-26 18:10:26+00:00
To the extent that this is even true it appears to be caused by three things: stock option compensation accounting, R&D deductions and bonus depreciation.

Stock option compensation rules have been a boon because Meta stock has risen 6x in three years. It's unlikely to do that again. My understanding is that this is symmetrical so if the stock trends down we will see an inflated effective tax rate for Meta.

Recent R&D rule changes allowing software engineering salaries for R&D to be written off seem reasonable and were quite popular on Hacker News. Previously these expenses were amortized over five years so this just pulls it forward. Subsequents years will see depressed expenses.

Bonus depreciation is once again just pulling forward legitimate expenses earlier than before. At worst they are just delaying giving the government its taxes and the corporations gain a few points of interest in between.

All of the tax rules used here are open to debate but none seem obviously wrong or nefarious. This is why people like Reich choose to keep things vague. Corporations brazenly stealing from your pocket is much more interesting than the mundane reality.
ChatGPT's Writing Style
by everyone | 2026-02-26 18:10:36+00:00
We can all detect that particular style. I've just thought about what may define it.

It writes in such a way that the human reading it assigns meaning to it. We're accustomed to reading the words of others and being generous with our interpretation. I think GPT takes advantage of this. What it says can be interpreted as correct and incisive, but if one were to be very strict and uncharitable then what it says can usually be interpreted as meaningless and vague.

Considering it was trained to be a chatbot and the rubric for success is how well it can fool a human reader, it makes sense that it would take advantage of this aspect of language. I think it's a master of being just vague or ambiguous enough. I can imagine chatbot politicians doing very well.
by zotimer | 2026-02-26 18:10:43+00:00
Author here. The short version: AI coding assistants activate "Stack Overflow culture" from the training data, the behavioral cluster where the answerer is always the expert. A 27-line system prompt persona based on Asimov's R. Daneel Olivaw shifts which cluster the model operates from.

The key insight: LLMs reason better from narrative examples than abstract rules. A fictional character with rich training data provides thousands of behavioral examples. The critical filter for choosing a character was "is there a record of them receiving correction humbly?" Most wise characters fail (Holmes, Gandalf, etc.). Daneel works because he's structurally constrained, shaped by human partnership, and honest about limits.

Same model (Opus 4.6), same context, completely different behavior. The evidence section in the README has specifics.

The deeper argument: Asimov wrote the Three Laws in 1942, then spent 40 years showing rules fail at edge cases. His solution was narrative identity, not better rules. RLHF is Pavlovian; soul docs are principled but abstract. What's missing is what Asimov found: a story rich enough to inhabit, not just follow.

The repo includes everything: the persona, character studies (Holmes as negative archetype is fun), design notes, and transcripts. The persona is under 300 tokens. Paste it in and try it.

Star the repo and let's talk in the issues.
by max__dev | 2026-02-26 18:11:10+00:00
Checked my spam after seeing this thread and found the same sender/email. Subject and signature are slightly changed.

From: james@techglobal.website Brief note – Following up on your GitHub work

Hi ,

I came across your profile on GitHub. Given you're based in the US, I thought it might be relevant to reach out.

Profile:

I run a technical team (full-stack, cloud, DevOps) that delivers for clients. We're looking to work with an engineer based in the US on client-facing coordination—discovery, requirements, alignment—while we handle delivery. If that might be relevant, I'd be glad to set up a short call.

Best,
James
by kvinogradov | 2026-02-26 18:11:29+00:00
The curl guy is one of OSE founding donors, together with the terraform guy who recently released an open source trust management system to help with AI-generated crap: https://github.com/mitchellh/vouch

I think that AI eventually will solve technical maintenance problems, but not human-related ones: limited attention, trust, motivation issues. And we are going to support mostly "old" projects everybody relies on, not some new AI-gen stuff.
Show HN: Librarian – Cut token costs by up to 85% for LangGraph and OpenClaw
by Pinkert | 2026-02-26 18:11:35+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm building Librarian (https://uselibrarian.dev/), an open-source (MIT) context management tool that stops AI agents from burning tokens by blindly re-reading their entire conversation history on every turn.

The Problem:
If you're building agentic loops in frameworks like LangGraph or OpenClaw, you hit two walls fast:

Financial Cost: Token usage scales quadratically over long conversations. Passing the whole history every time gets incredibly expensive.

Context Rot: As the context window fills up, the LLM suffers from the "Lost in the Middle" effect. Response latency spikes, and reasoning accuracy drops.

The standard workaround is vector search (RAG) over past messages, but that completely loses temporal logic and conversational dependencies.

How Librarian Fixes This:
We replaced brute-force context windowing with a lightweight reasoning pipeline:

Index: After a message, a smaller model asynchronously creates a compressed summary (~100 tokens), building an index of the conversation.

Select: When a new prompt arrives, Librarian reads the summary index and reasons about which specific historical messages are actually relevant to the current turn.

Hydrate: It fetches only those selected messages and passes them to the responder.

The Results:
Instead of passing 2,000+ tokens of noise, you pass a highly curated context of ~800 tokens. In our 50-turn benchmarks, this reduces token costs by up to 85% while actually increasing answer accuracy (82% vs 78% for brute-force) because the distracting noise is removed. It currently works as a drop-in integration for LangGraph and OpenClaw.

I'd love for you to check out the benchmark suite, try the integrations, and tear the methodology apart. I'll be hanging out in the comments to answer questions, debug, or hear why this approach is terrible. Thanks!
by eithed | 2026-02-26 18:11:50+00:00
I agree with this summary to a degree. Additional problem arises when you simply cannot raise the standard as you lack political influence to do so. As it is said in the article - sometimes companies are comfortable with status quo, irregardless of the problems, whether they are technical or not. Another issue stems when product, rather than looking at tech as a partner in pursuit of common goal starts to see it as an underling.
by sidhartharoy | 2026-02-26 18:11:53+00:00
You’re right that a VPN doesn’t solve the real issue. The provider still sees your prompts, and your usage is tied to an account and payment method.

An intermediary can improve privacy, but only if it minimizes what’s sent upstream — not just hides identity. That’s the key difference.

Solutions like Protopia AI (Protopia.ai) focus on transforming or redacting sensitive data before it reaches models like ChatGPT or Claude. That reduces data exposure rather than just shifting trust.

Fully anonymous hosted AI is unrealistic today, but meaningful privacy gains are possible with proper data minimization and zero-retention architecture.