MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by estimator7292 | 2026-02-24 18:59:35+00:00
Will today's LLMs achieve consciousness? Almost certainly not.

Will AI as a general concept ever achieve human level cognition and sentience? Depends on your definition of "ever".

Anyone who tries to feed you a line about "never" doesn't understand what they're talking about. On almost any topic.

AI as a concept is never going away and if we keep working the problem, we will eventually achieve a sentient AI. There's nothing magical about meat, there's only things that we don't understand.

To assert that only a human meat brain can be conscious is to assert that only humans can be conscious. That excludes alien life for one, and a large fraction of terrestrial life. One can argue quite successfully that many terrestrial species are conscious and aware. Elephants, great apes, whales, dolphins, octopi, pigs, corvids.

If an octopus is conscious (and I have good reason to believe they are) why is it so ridiculous to think that a hunk of silicon can do it?

Humans really are not special. We're just animals like any other. Our brains are not cosmically blessed and unique. There is no magic.
Show HN: Hacker Smacker – spot great (and terrible) HN commenters at a glance
by conesus | 2026-02-24 19:00:16+00:00
Hacker Smacker adds friend/foe functionality to Hacker News. Three little orbs appear next to every commenter's name. Click to friend or foe a commenter and you'll more easily spot them on future threads. Makes it easy to scroll and spot the commenters you love to read (and hate to read).

Main website: https://hackersmacker.org

Chrome/Edge extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hacker-smacker/lmcg...
Safari extension: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hacker-smacker/id1480749725
Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-smacke...

The interesting part is friend-of-a-friend: if you friend someone who also uses Hacker Smacker, you'll see their friends and foes highlighted too. This lets you quickly scan long comment threads and find the good stuff based on people you trust.

I built this to learn how FoaF relationships work with Redis sets, then brought the same technique to NewsBlur's social layer. The backend is CoffeeScript/Node.js/Redis, and the extension works on Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.

Technically I wrote this back in 2011, but never built a proper auth system until now. So I've been using it for 15 years and it's been great. PG once saw it on my laptop (back when he was still moderating HN, in 2012) and remarked that it was neat.

Thanks to Mihai Parparita for help with the Chrome extension sandboxing and Greg Brockman for helping design the authentication system.

Source is on GitHub: https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker

Directly inspired by Slashdot's friend/foe system, which I always wished HN had. Happy to answer questions!
by schopra909 | 2026-02-24 19:00:26+00:00
Hi HN, I’m one of the two authors of the post and the Linum v2 text-to-video model (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46721488). We're releasing our Image-Video VAE (open weights) and a deep dive on how we built it. Happy to answer questions about the work!
by bombcar | 2026-02-24 19:00:40+00:00
It used to be really, really good on Mac, simply phenomenal, even when it was "syncing" via a dropbox folder.

Now it's more clunky, gets in fights with Apple's (admittedly much better passwords/keychain) via overlapping dialogs, and generally feels much worse.

This is going to be the impetus to move me off.
by zerkten | 2026-02-24 19:00:50+00:00
A big part of the problem is being permitted to teach this stuff. As a UK CS grad from the early-2000s, my observation was that academic staff recognized the need for these skills. They weren't permitted to teach it due to time available and the view that it wasn't academic. Thankfully, my university's CS department offered courses in these kinds of topics taught by the support staff (read: sysadmins). These courses existed to help other departments with skills but were open to students.

Fast forward twelve years and my wife did the MCIT at UPenn (https://catalog.upenn.edu/graduate/programs/computer-informa...) where git and other topics woven into the curriculum. Even then, they were perhaps a novelty because their focus was bringing non-CS undergrads into a CS Masters program. So-called "conversion" master's degrees were the norm in the UK in 2002.
by vzakaznikov | 2026-02-24 19:01:08+00:00
Learn how a behavior model combined with autonomous testing helped us find interesting bugs in our reference Super Mario game implementation. The model validates every frame during exploration, but when it disagrees with the game, which one is wrong? This is bidirectional testing: the model tests the game, and the game tests the model. The process uncovered several real engine bugs, including a teleport bug in Level 4 where Mario gets snapped across the screen due to overlapping collision boxes. All code is open source: https://github.com/testflows/Examples/tree/v3.0/SuperMario
by personalcompute | 2026-02-24 19:01:16+00:00
Wow, I didn't expect to see Clonk on HN today! Almost 20 years ago, as a 13 year old in the US I managed to make friends with an older player from Germany, and then we collaborated on making Clonk Rage mods together in c4script. It was an amazing experience and did help me get more into programming, so I'm so sorry to hear about your experience! I do recall members of the development team at the time being accessible and active in the community, specifically Sven2, but I'm not sure about MatthesB.

Thanks for the nostalgia though. Amazing game.
by naillang | 2026-02-24 19:01:53+00:00
The contextual reasoning angle is interesting. When designing effect systems for AI-native code, a core challenge is encoding "what this function is allowed to do given its calling context" -- classic first-order approaches force you to thread that context explicitly through every call site.

Higher-order hereditary Harrop formulas would express this more naturally: "this predicate holds within this local context of assumptions" without the boilerplate. The expert system example resonates beyond medicine. The same problem appears in AI agent orchestration: an agent needs to reason about which operations are permitted given its current session state, permission scope, and the calling chain. That's deeply contextual reasoning, and it's one reason I think λProlog is underexplored in agentic AI tooling.
by buescher | 2026-02-24 19:02:19+00:00
I thought so. I'm a fan of Glider.

I personally reach for LTspice from Analog Devices first even if I have better available - it is quick, easy enough to use, and someone has ported the model you need to it already. There is a Mac version on their web site but I have never used it.

Micro-Cap is free-as-in-free-beer but windows-native and will do stability analysis (gain margin/phase margin).

Qucs-S + the backend simulator of your choice is probably your best bet for free software on Mac. Original Qucs is still developed but hasn't had a release in almost ten years. QucsStudio is now uSimmics and is closed-source and Windows-native. They all have their peculiar uses. I haven't used any of them much.

Online you can use PartsQuest Explore for free for public designs and short simulation runs. I have not used the online version much but it is basically the very powerful Siemens (Mentor) VHDL-AMS simulator that has gone by a number of names (Mentor never commits to names) on the backend. I have used that: it came with PADS Standard Plus. It surprisingly does just about everything at least usably well. It can use spice models or VHDL-A(MS) models. It can use RF s-parameter models. It can use control-theory laplace-transform block models. It will do stability analysis and monte carlo analysis. It can run VHDL models. You can model just about anything you can write the ODEs for in VHDL-AMS: try viewing source on their motor model for example. You won't get the filter synthesis or analysis tools you'll find in a dedicated RF simulator like Keysight Pathwave. You won't get the controls design and analysis tools in the Matlab/Simulink toolkits. But it does a whole heck of a lot.
by lostlogin | 2026-02-24 19:02:21+00:00
> You could add 100x the current headcount at all American airports and because the workers simply don't give a shit about doing good work, because they're treating it as a 9 to 5, where they have to go and suffer through a meaningless 8 hours, or worse, they treat it like their own personal access to other people's stuff to loot at will.

This places the blame solely on the workers. Their CEO earns a ludicrous multiple of their wage. They are treated like shit and are expendable. It’s a two way street, treat workers with respect and and you might get some respect from them.
by john_strinlai | 2026-02-24 19:02:37+00:00
this is why i love this game, it can go on forever!

or, instead of the focus of knives, we can talk about the actual point being made :)

the original comment, after the nice sound-bite, said: "Google and the state are not your nannies.'

if you consider rules and/or laws to be "nanny-ing", then the primary job of the state is to be a nanny. states have lots of rules. federal government has more rules, too. that was my point.
by naillang | 2026-02-24 19:02:41+00:00
Interesting to see the convergence across Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini CLI on what's becoming an informal SKILL.md standard. The README-for-tool-use pattern is obvious in retrospect but it took a while to get here.

Two things I haven't seen solved cleanly in the format yet:

1. Skill composition/dependencies. If skill A and skill B both need a Python library, there's no dependency manifest -- each skill has to defensively check and install its own requirements. An optional `requires:` block in the frontmatter would make composition cleaner and avoid redundant installs.

2. Versioning. If my workflow depends on the behavior of `hugging-face-cli@huggingface/skills`, is there a mechanism to pin a version, or is it always HEAD? Skills that evolve can silently break downstream workflows.

Would be curious if there's prior art from package managers (npm/cargo workspaces) that could be adapted here -- the distribution problem is similar.
by datadripsol | 2026-02-24 19:02:57+00:00
From spreadsheet chaos to operational clarity.
Most companies operate manually:

Export. Merge. Build charts. Repeat weekly.

That’s not a system.

It’s just operational overhead.

A real data stack has four parts:

Collection — pulling data automatically

Storage — one source of truth

Transformation — clean + define

Visualization — dashboards humans can scan

Spreadsheets are powerful tools.

They are not scalable systems of record.

If reporting consumes more than 5 hours weekly, you’re paying opportunity cost.

Build in phases.

Start simple.

Consistency beats sophistication.

Because the goal isn’t better reporting.

It’s faster, more confident decisions.

Next week, we’ll break down the foundation that makes a data stack trustworthy — clean data, ownership, and governance.
by SilentM68 | 2026-02-24 19:03:06+00:00
Hmm, that would be an interesting twist, but I'd be great if we could get some closure on V'Ger's fate as well. Heck even a BSG vs Star Trek multiversal crossover event would be good about now, considering the low-quality shows that are being put out ;)

https://youtu.be/9HXz2oOlN0A
by dsl | 2026-02-24 19:03:08+00:00
It is a simplification, not a strawman.

If you want to make the decision to install Hay Day, the user should be able to know that it is the Hay Day from Supercell or from Sketchy McMalwareson.

99.9% of apps should have no issue with their name being associated with their work. If you genuinely need to use an anonymously published app, you will still be able to do that as a user.
Show HN: Tfg – flake.nix generator for Terraform projects
by import-shiburin | 2026-02-24 19:03:17+00:00
Hello HN! Working as a SRE, our team handle a lot of terraform projects.
Dealing with them, one annoyance is matching terraform version for all of those projects, usually done by (1) finding file containing `required_version` field, (2) finding nixpkgs commit for that version, and (3) copying flake.nix from somewhere else. Using alternative version manager like tfenv or asdf is not possible for some teammates who are using NixOS as their daily driver.

This tool parses HCL of all .tf files in given directory, usually current working directory, looks for `required_version` of terraform, finds matching nixpkgs commit, and generates/updates flake.nix to use needed version of terraform.

Any feedbacks are appreciated. Thanks!
by naillang | 2026-02-24 19:03:25+00:00
The conditional write trick (write succeeds only if the ETag matches what you read) is doing a lot of work here. It's essentially optimistic locking over HTTP -- the same pattern that makes multi-writer CRDTs tractable, except you're using object storage's native version guarantees instead of vector clocks.

What surprises me: the failure mode they describe (a write fails because someone else wrote first, so you retry) has variable latency in the tail case. In a queue where producers and consumers are both competing on the same file, you could have a producer back off while a consumer also backs off, resulting in a livelock-adjacent situation at high concurrency. Would be curious what their measured p99 latency looks like under write contention.

The real insight though is that 'durable + consistent enough + cheap' beats 'fast + expensive' for a lot of asynchronous workloads. S3-compatible object storage as the substrate is a nice escape from the operational complexity of running Redis or SQS.
by rob | 2026-02-24 19:03:27+00:00
Warning: brand new bot account (@dang)

Comment 1: 2026-02-24T18:45:05 1771958705
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140914

Comment 2: 2026-02-24T18:45:32 1771958732
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140922

Two "comments" posted 27 seconds apart in different threads in the same formats.

Looks like this bot owner saw his first two comments 27 days ago got buried/flagged typing normally and decided to trick us with this new "I'm totally real, look at my lowercase writing!" soft-launch today.

Post history: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dirtytoken7
by bitwize | 2026-02-24 19:04:09+00:00
Of course it extends to PCs. It'd suck for us, but end users, software vendors, content providers, and service providers all benefit from a more restricted platform that can provide certain guarantees against malware, fraud, piracy, and so forth. It's pathologically programmer-brained to assume that the good old days of being able to run arbitrary code on a networked computing device would last forever. That freedom must be balanced against the interests of the rest of society to avoid risk from certain kinds of harm which can easily proliferate in an environment where any program can run with the full authority of the owner and malware spreads willy-nilly.
by mikkupikku | 2026-02-24 19:04:10+00:00
I'm responding to troosevelts question, not accusing anybody in particular of one or the other. I've seen plenty of both on the internet, but in general I don't think it's slave morality unless somebody is saying that having so much money is intrinsically evil, that to have gotten that much money is wrong in itself, regardless of what the individual actually did or is doing.
by eudamoniac | 2026-02-24 19:04:17+00:00
Wikipedia is an aggregate of "reliable sources" (read: left wing media outlets) and as such cannot be trusted as a source of fact in political matters. My spin is that I don't trust most of the claims made in the article.

For the sake of argument I will assume the article is entirely accurate. I don't care overmuch, honestly. I am not the biggest fan of democracy in general. It doesn't seem to work very well. China is running circles around us and they are not worried about voting for parties.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-24 19:04:31+00:00
> Megacorps have entire teams of people looking for ways to reduce their taxes, many of which are legally dubious but the risk of being caught * the size of the fine means it makes business sense to do it regardless of legality.

"Legally dubious" is the problem, because ambiguous laws are supposed to be interpreted most favorably to the defendant rather than the government, and then all parties have to incur much higher costs because the ambiguity means it goes to litigation, and there is a significant chance that all of those resources are consumed and it comes out in favor of the corporation in the end. The IRS much prefers to find cases where the taxpayer is clearly violating the law.
by nerdjon | 2026-02-24 19:04:45+00:00
I feel like I am really struggling to see the issue here with pricing, it is still a very cheap subscription and it does what we need it to do. And they were one of the ones that came out better in that recent security analysis of password managers. I see a lot of people upset here and I don’t get it.

Did they need to increase the price? Honestly I don’t know, without seeing their financials it is hard to say. But I would much rather they be able to be sustainable.

It likely doesn’t help that they are facing more and more free competition from Google and Apple. I know I have been considering a switch to Apple Passwords after the recent changes to it. I doubt this will excelerate it or anything because I will still want somewhere as a secondary area incase I loose access to my apple account.
by mikestew | 2026-02-24 19:04:52+00:00
It's a shame that the free/cheap password managers that regular people would use (like those by Apple, Google) seem unwilling to loosen their platform lock-in

How do you mean? You can export your passwords from the Apple app:

https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/export-passwords-iphf...

Does Apple have an Android or Windows app? Well, no, and if that's your meaning then I can see your point.
by FrustratedMonky | 2026-02-24 19:05:14+00:00
I agree. Just free/open data, does cost someone.

In science, it is the government that funds a lot of research. Specifically because the free market does fail at this.

A lot of tech success is built on top of government funding. In this analogy, the funding for people to eat while producing the free stuff for others to found tech startups upon.
by hahn-kev | 2026-02-24 19:05:23+00:00
I like the idea of requiring extra work to get notification access. But really what all these scams pray on are time sensitivity, take that away and you solve the problem in many ways. For example, your bank shouldn't let you drain your account without either being in person or having a mandatory 24hr waiting period. Same could be done with side loaded apps getting notifications, if it's side loaded and wants to read notifications, then it needs to wait 24 hrs. Mostly it won't ever matter.

Alternatively reading notifications could be opt in per app, so the reading app needs to have permission to read your SMS message app notifications, or your bank notifications, that would not be as full proof as that requires some tech literacy to understand.
by bombcar | 2026-02-24 19:05:45+00:00
If everyone goes to their subscriptions and cancels today maybe they'll get the message.

I've done it, and will spend the rest of the current renewal figuring out how well Apple Passwords works, I guess.

I'd like to sync everything but realistically I just need to extract and 2FA I have left in 1p; everything else can be password reset when the time cometh.
by apparent | 2026-02-24 19:05:58+00:00
I guess it's easier to lob silly fart claims rather than engage with the fact that what you've described is very foreign to most Americans.

As for sanctioning specific states, we do this plenty. There aren't many voices raised when it's done against countries that are our enemies. Sanctioning allies would obviously be a weird move, and countries in between, are in between.

I'll end by saying that you characterize this as a debate, when it isn't one. You're free to think it's grand to terminate employees based on their home life. I think it's terrible and am glad I don't work at a company that would ever do such a thing. But I don't think it's something that should be illegal, as long as everyone who went to work for the company knew what they were getting into.
by centricle | 2026-02-24 19:06:00+00:00
This totally aligns with my recent thinking, but there's a real risk in the model: If I'm yelling at Claude about something while I know the transcript is part of the output, I'm gonna naturally behave differently so I don't come off as some sort of asshole, so it's not the real ksmith's thinking. Nuanced, but it matters.

OTOH, an interview is basically the same thing: Here's me presenting myself as well as I can (even though it's probably not really accurate). But OTOOH, maybe I don't give a shit and just continue talking to Claude like I would do in real life, so who cares? It's not like HR is gonna pull me in for a talk about how I treat my teammates... yet.
Show HN: QueryVeil – An AI data analyst that investigates your data
by david-rodriguez | 2026-02-24 19:06:13+00:00
Hi HN,

I built QueryVeil because I was tired of two things: (1) uploading data to third-party tools, and (2) AI tools that just translate English to one SQL query and call it done.

QueryVeil is an AI data analyst that actually investigates. When you ask "why did revenue drop last month?", it doesn't just run one query — it plans an approach, runs multiple queries, self-corrects when it hits errors, and builds a report with its findings. Like a junior analyst who happens to live in your browser tab.

Everything runs client-side:

- *DuckDB WASM* for SQL execution — your data never leaves your machine
- *WebLLM* for local AI (Llama via WebGPU) — no API keys, no server costs
- *LangGraph agent* for multi-step investigations with tool use

What it actually does:

- Drop in CSV, Excel, JSON, or Parquet files (or connect to Postgres, MySQL, BigQuery)
- Get an instant data brief — row counts, column profiles, anomaly detection, data quality warnings — before you ask anything
- Ask questions in plain English. The AI agent runs multiple queries, self-corrects SQL errors (up to 3 retries), and generates charts automatically
- Proactive insights: correlation detection, outlier flagging, duplicate detection, temporal gap analysis — runs automatically on every new table
- Four modes: Chat, SQL editor (with schema-aware autocomplete), Jupyter-style notebooks (with cell references and variables), and a drag-and-drop report builder
- Share reports and notebooks via public links, embed them, or schedule email delivery
- Command palette (Cmd+K) for quick actions

Free tier: local AI (WebLLM/Ollama), unlimited files, all four modes, auto-insights.
Pro ($19/mo or $190/yr): 12+ cloud models via OpenRouter (Claude, GPT-4o, Gemini, DeepSeek, Llama, etc.), database connections, sharing, scheduled reports. 14-day free trial.

Technical details:
- Nuxt 4, Vue 3, Pinia, TailwindCSS
- DuckDB WASM handles millions of rows in the browser
- LangGraph StateGraph with ReAct loop — the agent has tools for SQL execution, schema inspection, column stats, and creating notebooks/reports
- Self-correction: when SQL fails, the error + schema context goes back to the AI for auto-fix
- WebLLM runs Llama-3.2-3B via WebGPU — zero server cost for the free tier
- Ollama support for people who prefer running models locally
- Server-side: Supabase (auth + Postgres), Stripe billing, OpenRouter proxy with model allowlist

Try the demo instantly — no signup, no email: https://app.queryveil.com/demo

It loads sample ecommerce data, auto-profiles it, shows proactive insights, and lets you chat or write SQL. Everything runs in your browser.

Landing page: https://www.queryveil.com

Solo developer, would love feedback — especially on the agent behavior and whether the proactive insights are useful or noisy.