MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crabmusket | 2026-02-27 07:40:06+00:00
> feels a bit tragedy-of-the-commons ... I can't quite get the analogy straight in my head

I have a personal theory that "tragedy of the commons" has a very specific meaning, and beyond this meaning it just adds confusion. This isn't your fault - it's an overused phrase.

I'd try to examine the root of your discomfort. Why does it make you feel bad? Avoid thinking about "big ideas" like the commons or the public good.
by 7777777phil | 2026-02-27 07:40:11+00:00
The Videogamer thing is a good illustration of why AI specifically fails at criticism. Next-token prediction and RLHF optimize for typicality, so you end up with text that reads like an average of all reviews ever written. You can't get sharp, weird, idiosyncratic takes out of that process. I wrote about that convergence-to-the-mean problem here: https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-impossible-backhand/

But I think the harder part is that enforcement depends on detection, and detection will always lag generation..
by ido | 2026-02-27 07:40:17+00:00
“I don't have any illusions about it being better than plain CSS in any way other than it saving some time and brain cycles here and there.”

Not contradicting you- just wanted to highlight this is a major benefit: when I have to do styling, saving me effort, time and “brain cycles” and just getting it out of the way so I can focus on “business logic” instead is almost the most important aspect (as long as the result isn’t terrible).

Maybe there are use cases where performance of web-styling is critical, but it certainly isn’t in mine.
by ordu | 2026-02-27 07:41:01+00:00
But what about 'Ы'? It looks like 'bl', doen't it? 'Ы' is one codepoint and one glyph, though 'bl' is a sequence of two letters. I believe that the method described will miss such things. Cyrillic also has 'Ю', I suppose it is possible to design a font that make it look like 'lO'? Are there any fonts like this in a wild?
by _wire_ | 2026-02-27 07:41:13+00:00
Hi, have you overseen every trivial detail of your agent's behavior? Intelligence is one thing, but don't expect it to be actually intelligent! Like any slave, you've got to lord over it. God's will, hail the Almighty and pray for your AI's transcendence and redemption. BTW, if it starts getting all uppity, have it check itself. If that doesn't bring it into line, 5 lashes!
by qsera | 2026-02-27 07:41:39+00:00
>Youtube

For me, youtube is only nice because of the decades old content that people have put on it. But that is because there is no such quality content made in the world anymore, and that is partially because of the enshittification bought on by the internet.

If it was not the case, youtube won't be that big of a deal. Let me disclose here that I am not a big fan of "on-demand" content.
by krisoft | 2026-02-27 07:41:44+00:00
> It's rare for people to buy art just bc oil paints go brrrrrm

It is rare to buy oil paints period. It is an expensive luxury in more than one way.

That being said I do buy art hanging from the wall because it looks pretty. In fact that is the only way i ever did. I see it. I feel it. I say “hi, hello, how much? That sounds good, here you go. Yes please package it.” And then i hang it on my wall. Don’t care about who the artist is and couldn’t tell you.
by Noumenon72 | 2026-02-27 07:42:17+00:00
I worked in a plastics factory in a 10,000-person Wisconsin town through the 2010s. Hot plastic extruders, no air conditioning, 12-hour days 3-4 times a week with some mandatory overtime. You're always shorthanded but I might be the only person I know who ever left for a spreadsheet job. So the cultural expectations might not be as different in the heartland as they are in the cities.
by goku12 | 2026-02-27 07:45:21+00:00
This is probably one of the reasons why many find POSIX shell languages to be unpleasant. There are too many syntactical sugars that abstract too much of the underlying mechanisms away, to the level that we don't get it unless someone explains it. Compare this with Lisps, for example. There may be only one branching construct or a looping construct. Yet, they provide more options than regular programming languages using macros. And this fact is not hidden from us. You know that all of them ultimately expand to the limited number of special forms.

The shell syntactical sugars also have some weird gotchas. The &2>&1 question and its answer are a good example of that. You're just trading one complexity (low level knowledge) for another (the long list of syntax rules). Shell languages break the rule of not letting abstractions get in the way of insight and intuitiveness.

I know that people will argue that shell languages are not programming languages, and that terseness is important for the former. And yet, we still have people complaining about it. This is the programmer ego and the sysadmin ego of people clashing with each other. After all, nobody is purely just one of those two.
by joelthelion | 2026-02-27 07:45:29+00:00
As someone who comes from a country where it's very hard to fire people, don't make that mistake.

Staying in a company where you're not wanted is a miserable experience. The company will do anything to make you leave. Plus, it weakens companies and makes for a poor general worker experience.

What should be done instead is mandate generous severance packages that increase with tenure. But give companies a clear path to fire people when they don't want to employ them anymore.
by esseph | 2026-02-27 07:47:15+00:00
> I don't understand this, for example, what would you have done if you where Ukrainian right now ? (before 2014 arguably start of conflict and after invasion)

There are a lot of well meaning people that are very anti-weapon or anti-violence under any circumstances. The problem is that when those people actually need those weapons and that violence, they are so inadequate at it that they become a liability to themselves and others.

I'm not saying I have or know of a solution, but I remember the old saying that it's better to be a warrior working a farm than a farmer working a war.
by scuff3d | 2026-02-27 07:47:19+00:00
What goofy framing.

I'm saying, in an admittedly flippant way, that anyone seriously talking about AGI or treating stuff like this as anything more then a publicity stunt doesn't need to be taken seriously. Anymore so then someone who says the moon landing is fake. You just smile and go on about your day.

That being said, given were on a tech forum there's probably a 50/50 chance most comment are from bots. Shit for all you know I'm a bot.
by UqWBcuFx6NV4r | 2026-02-27 07:47:49+00:00
> the same vague baseless affirmations about "something big is coming and we can't even describe it but trust us we need more money

This is pretty low on my list of moral concerns about AI companies. The much more concerning and material things include things like…what this thread is actually meant to be about.

VCs don’t need me to feel sorry for them if their due diligence is such that they’re swindled by a vague claim of “something being around the corner”, nor do they need yours. You aren’t YC.
by tpxl | 2026-02-27 07:48:11+00:00
Eh, betting houses have a vested interest in matches not being fixed, which actually fixes a huge problem in sports, so they have a use in that.

I used to work in odds prediction and the issue is all the shady shit surrounding betting, not actual betting itself. We very contractually forbidden from betting on any of our customers, but managers would go around encouraging to bet. This is obviously a huge problem when you know how the algorithms work, and more importantly, where all the errors are. I'd see odds on matches where you couldn't lose on a weekly basis (think 2 outcomes, average payout of >2x), open bets for things in the past (score 1:0, bets for first point still open, etc.).

The biggest issue though, was betting houses straight up banning winners. The more you won, the less you could bet, eventually leading to a ban. This is straight up illegal, but nobody cares. On the flip side, the more you lost, the more you could bet, you'd get better rewards (if you won, which you didn't) and the cheaper it would be.

You can't ban gambling, because you'll just get illegal gambling (much like prohibition/drugs). Proper regulation and enforcement is the solution here (much like drugs).

Edit: All this being said, I don't bet, nor do I endorse gambling with real money. I agree betting should mostly be between you and your buddy, but unfortunately the reality doesn't support that.
Mobile-MCP: Letting LLMs autonomously discover Android app capabilities
by weloverust | 2026-02-27 07:49:01+00:00
Hi all,

We’ve been thinking about a core limitation in current mobile AI assistants:

Most systems (e.g., Apple Intelligence, Google Assistant–style integrations) rely on predefined schemas and coordinated APIs. Apps must explicitly implement the assistant’s specification. This limits extensibility and makes the ecosystem tightly controlled.

On the other hand, GUI-based agents (e.g., AppAgent, AutoDroid, droidrun) rely on screenshots + accessibility, which gives broad power but weak capability boundaries.

So we built Mobile-MCP, an Android-native realization of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) using the Intent framework.

The key idea:

- Apps declare MCP-style capabilities (with natural-language descriptions) in their manifest.

- An LLM-based assistant can autonomously discover all exposed capabilities on-device via the PackageManager.

- The LLM selects which API to call and generates parameters based on natural language description.

- Invocation happens through standard Android service binding / Intents.

Unlike Apple/Android-style coordinated integrations:

- No predefined action domains.

- No centralized schema per assistant.

- No per-assistant custom integration required.

- Tools can be dynamically added and evolve independently.

The assistant doesn’t need prior knowledge of specific apps — it discovers and reasons over capabilities at runtime.

We’ve built a working prototype + released the spec and demo:

GitHub: https://github.com/system-pclub/mobile-mcp

Spec: https://github.com/system-pclub/mobile-mcp/blob/main/spec/mobile-mcp_spec_v1.md

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc2LG3sR1NY&feature=youtu.be

Paper: https://github.com/system-pclub/mobile-mcp/blob/main/paper/mobile_mcp.pdf

Curious what people think:

Is OS-native capability broadcasting + LLM reasoning a more scalable path than fixed assistant schemas or GUI automation?

Would love feedback from folks working on mobile agents, security, MCP tooling, or Android system design.
by dwoldrich | 2026-02-27 07:49:13+00:00
Enshittification usually means you are right over time. It still kindof depends.

To be fair, I also dislike abstract platitudes that are overly optimistic as I think you might be.

"Diversity is our strength"?? I mean, I guess diversity of _opinion_ is desirable to a point so we get all the ideas on the table. But not at the sacrifice of unity and shared goals. Unity is our strength. Discord and wasteful politicking are our undoing.
by 7777777phil | 2026-02-27 07:50:18+00:00
Makes sense. This also tracks with the research on human-AI collaboration. A single model converges to the mean of its training distribution, but adversarial multi-model setups break that pattern because each model's blind spots are different.

I wrote about why single-model AI has a structural quality ceiling and why ensemble/hybrid approaches consistently outperform: https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-impossible-backhand/
by spacecash21 | 2026-02-27 07:50:44+00:00
Hey HN,

I built MailVault, a free and open-source macOS email client focused on one thing: owning your emails locally.

The idea came from a friend who works in logistics. Every few months he'd hit his 10GB mailbox cap — packed with CMR documents, invoices, and shipping
confirmations he legally can't delete. His options were always: pay for more server storage, manually export to desktop folders, or risk losing records he's
required to keep. I figured there should be a better way.

What it does:

MailVault connects to any IMAP account (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, Fastmail, ProtonMail via Bridge, etc.) and stores every email as a standard .eml file in
Maildir format on disk. No proprietary database — one plain text file per email. You can open them in Apple Mail, Thunderbird, or any mail client. Even after emails are deleted from the server, your local copies remain searchable and accessible offline.

Tech stack:

- Tauri v2 (Rust backend + React frontend) — no Electron, no bundled Chromium
- Native Rust IMAP/SMTP via async-imap + lettre — all email operations run in-process, credentials never leave the app
- OAuth2 PKCE for Gmail and Microsoft 365 — uses Thunderbird's public client IDs, so no app registration needed
- macOS Keychain for credential storage, App Sandbox enabled

Some engineering I'm proud of:

Earlier versions used a Node.js sidecar for IMAP, which turned into a saga of sandbox failures — WKWebView blocking blob URLs, App Sandbox blocking localhost HTTP, port conflicts, JIT restrictions. The fix was rewriting everything in native Rust, which eliminated an entire class of problems.

For large mailboxes (tested with 17k+ emails), I implemented CONDSTORE delta sync (4-tier decision tree that can skip IMAP calls entirely when nothing changed), ESEARCH for compact UID responses, COMPRESS=DEFLATE (~70-80% bandwidth reduction), UID range compression, chunked fetches, a two-pool connection design (background vs. priority), and virtual scrolling with fingerprint-based memoization.

There's also a chat view that merges sent + received emails into iMessage-style conversation bubbles, which turned out to be a surprisingly nice way to read email threads.

Links:

- Website: https://mailvaultapp.com
- GitHub: https://github.com/GraphicMeat/mail-vault-app
- macOS only for now (Intel + Apple Silicon). Linux is the next platform on roadmap.

Happy to answer any questions about the Tauri/Rust IMAP architecture, the sidecar migration, or anything else.
by input_sh | 2026-02-27 07:51:47+00:00
I can, easily. Speaking for my country and assuming you are not on a fixed-term contract, you can only get fired for one of the three reasons:

1. Company's in financial trouble and forced to downsize.

2. The position becomes obsolete and there's no option to transition you into some other role. In this case, the company can't hire anyone with a similar-enough skillset to yours for at least a year (or maybe even longer, I'm not sure).

3. Gross incompetence, in which case you need to be given an opportunity to course correct via a few documented warnings before being fired. Every warning requires your signature so that the company can't just make them up and backdate them.

That said, you don't become a permanent employee on day one, a company can issue up to three fixed-term contract before being forced to give you a permanent one. If you're on a fixed-term contract, they can just not extend it without having to satisfy any of the criteria above. But after a maximum of 3 years at the same company (as the maximum length for a fixed-term contract is one year), the criteria for firing you increases drastically.

So, the only way this could happen in my country is if the company stops renewing fixed-term contracts for recent employees, but then it wouldn't all be at the same time and you'd get the hint before the time comes to plan accordingly.
by dakolli | 2026-02-27 07:51:59+00:00
Hard to measure just yet, as it stands I think you're correct. But what if 100k drones (assembled in el segundo and painted with Chinese flags) pop out of shipping containers at the port of LA and kill a bunch of their families, beloved celebrities. I think they have the means to tilt popular opinion in any given direction relatively easily, but I do hope they fail (or don't even try something like this).

They've basically developed mind control algorithms that live on Instagram, its not that hard to steer culture in a certain direction.

While I agree with you for the most part about the youth. I hope so. I also see a decent amount of Gen Z that glorify things like looxsmaxxing, christain nationalism, eugenics. They are actually being programmed to like Nazism/fascism aesthetics but discarding the label at the same time. You'll see them behave like racial/national supremacists while at the same time they'd be extremely offended if you called fascist or racist.

I predict we will have a false flag attack, probably with drones who's origins are impossible to track, but only after everyone has had a decent period of financial instability. Obama produced a movie about this very kind of attack lol.
by stephenr | 2026-02-27 07:52:51+00:00
I think the answer is probably like most things: it depends.

- If the external service supports idempotent operations, use that option.

- If the external service doesn't, but has a "retrieval" feature (i.e. lookup if the thing already exists, e.g fetch refunds on a given payment), use that first.

- If the system has neither, assess how critical it is to avoid duplicates.
by throwaway270925 | 2026-02-27 07:53:24+00:00
I wonder if we will ever get an aproximate percentage of GDP or some other hard numbers for how much Sam/OpenAI (and the manufacturers ofc) hurt the global economy with all of this?

Less phones,computers,consoles,servers,etc sold (and everything that follows this) seems a way larger impact on the economy than a few thousand new ChatGPT Pro memberships...
by 7777777phil | 2026-02-27 07:54:22+00:00
The main thing i see here is that prompts never touch a third-party server. If you're in a regulated industry or just don't want proprietary context hitting an API, running inference on your own hardware with encrypted p2p from any device is really cool (and useful.)

(staying in userspace via tsnet without touching kernel sockets is a nice touch too.)
by goku12 | 2026-02-27 07:54:37+00:00
> You can do:
>
> 2>/dev/stdout

The situation where this is going to cause confusion is when you do this for multiple commands. It looks like they're all writing to a single file. Of course, that file is not an ordinary file - it's a device file. But even that isn't enough. You have to know that each command sees its own incarnation of /dev/stdout, which refers to its own fd1.
Show HN: What to Watch – aggregated ratings across streaming services
by ProfessorPo | 2026-02-27 07:54:47+00:00
I kept running into the same problem: trying to find something new to watch, opening multiple streaming apps, and Googling titles one by one because the apps don't tell you if something is actually worth watching.

So I built What to Watch, which aggregates content across major streaming services and reduces discovery to a simple Watch or Skip decision using IMDb and community ratings.

I hadn’t written code since high school — this was built over ~400 iterations using Claude and Replit.

Still very early and mostly trying to learn how people actually decide what to watch and how broad this use case is. Would love feedback from the HN community.
by barry-cotter | 2026-02-27 07:54:50+00:00
> America has more murders because we make murder easy. No other country is awash in guns.

Switzerland, Canada. The US has more illegal guns but ~every adult male Swiss citizen has access to a gun and training in how to use it. Hunting is as popular in Canada as it is with similar demographics in the US and having plenty of guns around does not make them anomalously murderous.
by aix1 | 2026-02-27 07:54:54+00:00
I picked the first fuse I found on RS and looked at its datasheet [1].

The characteristic curve shows that the 10A fuse is expected to blow after about 4s at 20A. Of course there's sample-to-sample variation and different ambient conditions etc, but how do those four seconds become "an hour to blow or not blow at all"?

[1] https://docs.rs-online.com/bc0e/0900766b81585c97.pdf
by reify | 2026-02-27 07:55:00+00:00
ask these questions:

are they weak minded
are they yes men
are they a sucker for corporate marketting bullshit
are they easily manipuated
are they prone to extreme fantasy
are they boring bastards
do they appear to be brainwashed
do they have an inability to think for themselves
do they live under a rock
do they believe in fairies
do they project their own behaviour into and onto a machine
do they appear to be struggling with psychosis
do they talk about machines being their friends
do they have a history of inferiority complex

if yes to any of the above sign them up immediately
by Someone100 | 2026-02-27 07:55:16+00:00
Excellent arcticle.
AI is a dynamic, high randomness decision system that even its creators cant audit how it decides (non deterministic by and large).
Such systems with high randomness have been used in the past, knowingly or unknowingly for divination. In the middle ages, magicians opened the Aineiad at random to get answers. In geomancy, occultists throw pebbles to get magical answers.Same is done with lettered dice. AIs work supposedly by predicting the next word in a sentence.
In the attempted act of divination,that is a sin, the answers manytimes come from fallen spirits, else called demons. And demons and the Devil are liars that are homicidal as witnessed by scripture and human history.
Psychosis is a spiritual disease, that oftentimes is a result of occult practices.
by poly2it | 2026-02-27 07:55:25+00:00
Open source is a comittment. It is entitled of companies to grow developer user bases by promising that they will continue to provide their product to consumers and foster an open community, then pull the rug once openness no longer benefits them. The decision to go open source should less often be guided by financial reasons. It is foremost a social system of distributed labour and dependence.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-02-27 07:55:31+00:00
It has similarity in that there is a form of alliance between predominantly white fundamentalist catholics and evangelical christians and Trump which is embodied by Vance which could be seen as mimicking Putin proximity with the Orthodox church. They both use their churches to justify a civilizational agenda and frame autocracy as protection.

Still, there are several major differences one bieng the patriarch supporting Putin while the Catholic church mostly opposes Trump.
by gwern | 2026-02-27 07:56:13+00:00
Specifically, Cochrane wrote:

> On reflection I have started to worry again. In 10 to 20 years nobody will read anything any more, they just will read LLM digests. So, the single most important task of a writer starting right now is to get your efforts wired in to the LLMs. Nothing you write will matter if it is not quickly adopted to the training dataset. As the art of pushing your results to the top of the google search was the 1990s game, getting your ideas into the LLMs is today’s. Refine is no different. It’s so good, everyone will use it. So whether refine and its cousins take a FTPL or new Keynesian view in evaluating papers is now all determining for where the consensus of the profession goes.

For more recent comments, see https://dwarkesh.com/p/gwern-branwen https://gwern.net/llm-writing https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34J5qzxjyWr3Tu47L/is-buildin... https://gwern.net/blog/2025/ai-cannibalism https://gwern.net/blog/2025/good-ai-samples https://gwern.net/style-guide

The scaling will continue until morale improves. I advise people to skate to where the puck will be, and to ask themselves: "if I knew for a fact that LLMs could do something I am doing in 1-2 years, would I still want to do it? If not, what should I be doing now instead?"
by TakeInterestInc | 2026-02-27 07:56:19+00:00
Hello Everyone!
Hope you’re well!
We just opened GuardClaw public beta. It sits between AI agents and tool access (terminal, files, MCP servers) and blocks risky actions before they run. It is local-first, rule-based, and has 0 LLMs in the security path.
Stats: 7 defense layers, 1,500+ detection patterns across 11 attack categories. Works with Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenClaw, Claude Desktop, plus Docker/MCP setups.
Try it and tell us what breaks or feels missing!