MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by grayhatter | 2026-02-26 15:41:10+00:00
> But a short line "AGI is possible, powerful and perilous" is something 9 out of 10 of frontier AI researchers at the frontier labs would agree upon.

> At which point the question becomes: is it them who are deluded, or is it you?

Given the current very asymptotic curve of LLM quality by training, and how most of the recent improvements have been better non LLM harnesses and scaffolding. I don't find the argument that transformer based Generative LLMs are likely to ever reach something these labs would agree is AGI (unless they're also selling it as it)

Then, you can apply the same argument to Natural General Intelligence. Humans can do both impressive and scary stuff.

I'll ignore the made up 5 and 25%, and instead suggest that pragmatic and optimistic/predictive world views don't conflict. You can predict the magic word box you feel like you enjoy is special and important, making it obvious to you AGI is coming. While it also doesn't feel like a given to people unimpressed by it's painfully average output. The problem being the optimism that Transformer LLMs will evolve into AGI requires a break through that the current trend of evidence doesn't support.

Will humans invent AGI? I'd bet it's a near certainty. Is general intelligence impressive and powerful? Absolutely, I mean look, Organic general intelligence invented artificial general intelligence in the future... assuming we don't end civilization with nuclear winter first...
by craftkiller | 2026-02-26 15:41:51+00:00
Along similar lines, when I was reading the article I was thinking "this just sounds like a slightly worse version of nix". Nix has the whole content addressed build DAG with caching, the intermediate language, and the ability to produce arbitrary outputs, but it is functional (100% of the inputs must be accounted for in the hashes/lockfile, as opposed to Docker where you can run commands like `apk add firefox` which is pulling data from outside sources that can change from day to day, so two docker builds can end up with the same hash but different output, making it _not_ reproducible like the article falsely claims).
by edg5000 | 2026-02-26 15:41:59+00:00
I think this progressive/gentic vide coding would work better if the tools were better and storing the history in a good immutable way, kind of like an email program. I have very valuable sessions where I give the agent a good ephemeral spec, something not sensible to persist in the codebase, but important enough to track it somewhere. Throwing away history is a big no no. Bad GUIs/TUIs discourage from relying on the history. When I close a session, I feel I'm throwing away the history. I keep many terminals open, but eventually have to close them. Tools will get way, way better to facilitate this "general on the frontlines commanding the agents" style of work.
by tricorn | 2026-02-26 15:42:26+00:00
Serious answer to the base question: learn as much as you can about how it all works, learn how to use it in its current state, keep up as it changes, be prepared for sudden leaps in the technology. Do not underestimate it.

Yes, there is a lot of hype, wailing, gnashing of teeth, but if it is good enough to be a worry, it is also good enough to empower the individual to survive it.

Ultimately, if it is all hype, it will soon crumble; if it is not then productivity will increase by leaps and bounds. The only key issue is to make sure that all the gains aren't taken by a small group of people (whether the current rich and powerful, or those that displace them using new paradigms).

I suggest getting comfortable with the idea of a UBI.
by mercutio93 | 2026-02-26 15:42:27+00:00
The persistent identity files are interesting but there's a cost
problem. A recent paper (arxiv 2602.11988 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.11988v1) found context files
increase inference cost by 20%+ with marginal performance gains;
LLM-generated ones actually decreased success rates slightly.

Four identity files per agent injected every session feels like
monkey patching coherence with context. Context isn't memory, it's
just more tokens. The hard unsolved problem is cross-session
learning without the bloat.

Curious if you've measured the token overhead of the identity
files vs the performance gain they provide.
by ericd | 2026-02-26 15:42:27+00:00
Right now, there are Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms (CBAMs) going into place that put a price on the externality of carbon pollution in other countries with lower standards than your own. It's basically a carbon tax, the EU's just went into force. All the recordkeeping is probably not going to be cheap, but it seems like in theory, you could do something similar with other industrial emissions, and try to bring others onto the same level playing field, so that there's not that same pressure to cut corners.
by observationist | 2026-02-26 15:42:33+00:00
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

-Irving John Good, 1965

If you want a short, easy way to know what AGI means, it's this:
Anything we can do, they can do better. They can do anything better than us.

If we screw it up, everyone dies. Yudkowsky et al are silly, it's not a certain thing, and there's no stopping it at this point, so we should push for and support people and groups who are planning and modeling and preparing for the future in a legitimate way.
by kfallah | 2026-02-26 15:42:42+00:00
CLaaS is an open-source system that uses self-distillation to move feedback from context into model weights. Current approaches rely on system prompts and memory to personalize your model, but every token spent reminding is a token your model can't use for the actual task. Instead, with every piece of feedback, CLaaS triggers a weight update while avoiding the catastrophic forgetting you get with standard fine-tuning. The updated LoRA adapter hot-reloads into vLLM, so your next response comes from a better model.

Right now it runs on a single consumer GPU (tested on RTX 5090) with Qwen3-8B. Easy to set up with Docker Compose alongside a locally hosted OpenClaw, but the API works with any local model.
by nebezb | 2026-02-26 15:43:20+00:00
Any time you interact with the financial services industry in a meaningful way, they are doing almost exactly all of these checks on you. It is mandated by law, and they're overseen by FINTRAC in Canada and FinCEN in US.

When you applied for a bank account for your freelancing business (or startup idea), some people googled you, looked for PEPs (politically exposed persons) in your family, stored photos of your IDs and probably even printed them off, and sent everything in a nice package to some "risk" department. Who knows how that department is handling your data.

The only difference is that Persona is trying to put a front-end on it and selling the process as a SaaS. Look up "KYC/KYB saas" and you'll find hundreds of businesses doing this (including, of course, Persona).

edit: I want to emphasize that this isn't restricted to just business banking. Poor wording on my part. Lots of industries are legally mandated to conduct KYC/IDV. Notaries do it in home sales, your stock brokerage is doing it, employers in regulated industries do it to everyone on payroll. The list is very long. Unfortunately...

The government should take on responsibility for KYC imo, instead of letting 100 vendors come up with their own solutions. But that would probably have some nasty externalities.
Show HN: MCP server that checks if your project idea exists
by mnemoxai | 2026-02-26 15:43:34+00:00
I built an MCP server that reality-checks project ideas against GitHub, Hacker News, npm, PyPI, and Product Hunt before you start coding.

v0.3 adds a 3-stage keyword extraction pipeline:
- Stage A: Stopword filtering (removes noise like "a tool that can")
- Stage B: Intent anchoring (maps vague terms to searchable keywords)
- Stage C: Synonym expansion + Chinese-to-English term mapping (150+ terms across 15 domains)

Before: Chinese input "寵物預約看診 app" → searched raw Chinese → garbage results
After: Same input → "pet appointment veterinary booking app" → relevant results

Other stats:
- 204 tests, 93% keyword extraction accuracy
- Quick mode (GitHub + HN) ~2s, Deep mode (5 sources parallel) ~3-4s
- Zero config: `uvx idea-reality-mcp`
- Works with Claude Desktop, Cursor, any MCP client

Built with Python + FastMCP + httpx async. MIT licensed.

GitHub: https://github.com/mnemox-ai/idea-reality-mcp
by Razengan | 2026-02-26 15:43:48+00:00
> When they introduced a mobile first UI onto a desktop OS…

That's when I jumped to Macs and haven't looked back since. Windows is just a glorified game console to me now, but I have enough fun with PS5/Switch exclusives.

Though macOS is also becoming annoying, not quite to that breaking point yet, but worrying

Meanwhile Linuxland seems like a chaos of 10000 people who all think they're right, under an anal overlord

Maybe it's time to dig the Commodore 64 back up? :')

But who cares though, soon AI will make operating systems meaningless, right?
by retlehs | 2026-02-26 15:44:25+00:00
I’ve made over five reports for this exact spam scenario, and never once have y’all acted on them. I have a hard time believing you ban spam accounts that clearly violate your ToS.

I even wrote about a specific example of a YC company spamming me from my GitHub email at https://benword.com/dont-tolerate-unsolicited-spam
by phendrenad2 | 2026-02-26 15:44:31+00:00
Conventional conservative/capitalist wisdom is that corporations "don't pay taxes" because they just "pass it along to consumers as higher prices". That's why the juxtaposition here, that they are spending tens of millions to influence elections, is important. If corporations were just efficient market operators that moved goods and services, why so much lobbying? It's because the rich owners of corporations realized that with a small tweak, which we know retroactively as "Citizens United vs FEC", they could harness their corporate ownership to control the political, social, and governance landscape of the world.
by kstrauser | 2026-02-26 15:44:37+00:00
I took a continuing ed course on this recently, and it was horrid. You can do some pretty despicable stuff if you convince others that morality is fake and you can do whatever sounds fun. It’s like a cult of sociopathy.

Their general MO was to push a kid on the fringes to do something illegal, then blackmail them into upping the risk and illegality. They collected videos of all those “for lulz”. Various crimes included producing CSAM, torturing animals, and assaulting or killing random people.

It’s rare that I sit my kids down and have them watch training videos with me. With this, I did, to show them what’s out there and help them identify it if they ever came across it.
by pocksuppet | 2026-02-26 15:44:40+00:00
We did that with computer networks. We had this high-quality voice call service, and then someone thought it should be switched to transmit data instead, of which voice calls were just one type. Now you have a minimum voice latency of a few hundred ms because voice traffic is competing with data traffic, and you didn't actually get much more data throughput because it was only one wire pair.
by ACCount37 | 2026-02-26 15:45:15+00:00
Modern AIs are increasingly autonomous and agentic. This is expected to only get more prominent as AI systems advance.

A lot of AI harnesses today can already "decide to take an action" in every way that matters. And we already know that they can sometimes disregard the intent of their creators and users both while doing so. They're just not capable enough to be truly dangerous.

AI capabilities improve as the technology develops.
by candiddevmike | 2026-02-26 15:45:17+00:00
I'm SE and there are quite a few tax breaks available, especially if you structure as a S-Corp. The hard part is figuring out what all tax breaks are available as they're constantly changing, like last year you can deduct dental insurance premiums.

I still pay an eye watering amount, and being SE shows you the brutality of the system (estimated taxes are insane, especially the payment schedule for them when you're NET 30/60).
by grayhatter | 2026-02-26 15:45:25+00:00
> I can never work out if the companies are deluded and truly believe they're about to create a singularity or just claiming they are to reassure investors/convince the public of their inevitability.

You can never figure out if the people selling something are lying about it's capabilities, or if they've actually invented a new form of intelligence that can rival or surpass billions of years of evolution?

I'd like to introduce you to Occam Razor
by basch | 2026-02-26 15:45:26+00:00
Model training is completely different than keeping a summary of chats on the side and injecting it as context.

In my Gemini app, when k click new chat and click the filters button I have “Personalize Intelligence: Personalize chat when helpful.”

It is on every time I click new chat. Maybe you need to enable it in settings first. I can disable it to have a clean chat without personal context, but preserve the chat history unlike temporary chat.
by vunderba | 2026-02-26 15:45:40+00:00
Same. While it doesn't help that their name is about as generic as it gets, I searched across Kagi, Google, etc. and couldn't find any such YC company.

That being said, it wouldn't entirely surprise me if somebody's tried to start the tech equivalent of the casino "Black Book".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Book_(gambling)
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-02-26 15:46:00+00:00
> Well then, why didn't you come up with it first?

This is never a good question. It doesn't take much imagination to substitute X in "Why didn't you come up with X first?" with something of no value. Obviously, if someone finds something to be of no value, then they would not have come up with it, would they. Or at least they would not have pursued it.

Rather, one must give reasons for believing something has value. (And I seriously doubt this is "new", though novelty is itself irrelevant. Valueless things can be "novel", too.)

IMO, this glass technique is maybe interesting, but it is also sort of gimmicky, at least as presented.
by Lerc | 2026-02-26 15:46:14+00:00
Information leaks everywhere, as the ability to process it increases, I think ultimately it will lead to a world where there are no secrets, provided one has the resources and intention to look for something.

For a few years now I have been telling people how unprepared the world is for this change. Not understanding how this is possible will lead to people outright deifying AI that has the capability to do things like this. It will seem like omniscience.

I think the main protection we have in a world where you cannot effectively hide, is that anyone who abuses this ability will be operating under the same system. You can use it to your advantage, but not without getting caught.
Show HN: PBinder – Python repo to DOCX/PDF with call-site cross-references
by helloworld890 | 2026-02-26 15:46:16+00:00
I wanted to study large Python AI repos offline. Printing code helps focus but loses all context — no way to follow function calls without jumping back to the screen.
So I built pBinder. It converts Python repos into a Word document with a clickable TOC, symbol index, and call-site cross-references — every function call links to where that symbol is defined, including source line.
Portable Windows EXE. No Python, LaTeX, or Docker required. Batch export included.
Honest limitations: Windows only, PDF requires Microsoft Word, cross-references are .py files only.
pbinder.app — free trial available.
by lotsofpulp | 2026-02-26 15:46:30+00:00
My issue is claiming the problem is wealth, and then wanting to tax income, which is not wealth. That is how rich people keep wealth taxes low (e.g. land value tax rates).

All wealth sits on land, and all land is already constantly appraised and subject to land value tax. It would be a trivial change to collect marginal land value tax rates using beneficial ownership.

As an additional benefit, the income tax return, which enables a ton of corruption at worst, and time waste at best, is gotten rid of.
by parineum | 2026-02-26 15:46:32+00:00
It's actually not labor costs at all.

The difference between the USA and, for example, China, in manufacturing is the difficulty of getting a new factory built.

If you have a product designed and ready for production, it will take you years to build a factory in the USA. All the while you'll be losing money managing the build, paying your employees and, most importantly, letting your competitors get a head start.

Likewise, if you build that factory in China, it'll be up and running in less than a year and you can start making your R&D money back, get to market before your competitors and not bleed money keeping your companies doors open.

The labor costs are easily offset by removing the logistics of moving the product.

Tesla Gigafactories are a pretty good example of this. The first two took ~3 years to build in Nevada and New York. The third, in Shanghai, took 10 months.
by nerdsniper | 2026-02-26 15:46:40+00:00
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1681d

It's more than just "subject to a defamation lawsuit" (including class action lawsuits). Although for me, even if it were "just that", I'd still call it "potentially illegal". Rather, they'd potentially face FTC penalties and CFPB enforcement actions under 15 U.S.C. section 1681d(a), (b).

This law would likely classify such a company as falling under laws pertaining to "investigative consumer reports" under FCRA. This is any report on someone's "character, general reputation, personal characteristics, and mode of living" used for the purposes of employment, loans, housing, etc.

> A consumer reporting agency shall not prepare or furnish an investigative consumer report on a consumer that contains information that is adverse to the interest of the consumer and that is obtained through a personal interview with a neighbor, friend, or associate of the consumer or with another person with whom the consumer is acquainted or who has knowledge of such item of information, unless—

> (A) the agency has followed reasonable procedures to obtain confirmation of the information, from an additional source that has independent and direct knowledge of the information; or

> (B) the person interviewed is the best possible source of the information.

They'd find themselves subject to legal penalties under:

FCRA Willful Noncompliance (15 U.S. Code § 1681n) (if they did not disclose their existence/use/content of reports to employment candidates)

FCRA Negligent Noncompliance (15 U.S. Code § 1681o) (if they made somewhat reasonable but insufficient efforts to comply with the FCRA)

or

Administrative Enforcement (15 U.S. Code § 1681s)

and be subject to fines up to $4,700 per violation plus actual damages, plus punitive damages, plus legal fees. State Attorneys General can also bring FCRA lawsuits on behalf of their constituents, not just the federal government. FTC / CFPB can name the founders individually in the lawsuits, not just their corporate entity, and ban[1][2] them from operating any similar businesses in the future.

That all said, to some extent, YCombinator partners are on the record[3] supporting the idea of their startups sometimes doing illegal things. Generally they'll frame this as challenging outdated regulations, but they acknowledge that the founders whose strategies they fully support sometimes come into office hours and discuss how they're worried that the strategy puts them at risk of going to jail.

0: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1681d

1: FTC v MyLife.com, Inc., and Jeffrey Tinsley (CEO): https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2021/12/...

2: https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/b...

3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm-ZIiwiN1o&t=8m46s
by nickdothutton | 2026-02-26 15:47:00+00:00
In large companies, especially those which do not depend on especially talented or specialised workers, HR is very much just a "people risk" department. People are an input, with them comes some risk, like tonnes of coal which might cause pollution, or sacks of ingredients which might go off and poison customers. Over many years I have come to understand this is how BigCo HR operates.

The risks might be different, they might be a bully, they might do bad work, they might be dishonest, or even just screw up (honestly) when under pressure, it's all risk to HR. I decided not to be an employee of such companies 20+ years ago, although I am not in the "commodity employee" set.

Feel free to adopt your own mental models.
by MrSqueezles | 2026-02-26 15:47:45+00:00
"Hey AI, tell me what manufactured phone components require permitting in California." ... Copy paste copy paste copy paste

I can think of multiple manufacturers that do all engineering and have recently built manufacturing facilities in California and would manufacture there at scale too except other states gave them massive tax incentives. Tesla and Rivian both do initial manufacturing in California. Startups like Freeform, doing metal 3D printing at scale, are in California. This article is wrong.
by yunohn | 2026-02-26 15:47:57+00:00
Here’s the FTC’s definition of an ad:

> Any message designed to promote or sell a product, service, or brand, where there is a material connection between the speaker and the advertiser.

Yes, a discount is an ad - sometimes by the brand/manufacturer to get you to buy their product instead of a competitor, or by the seller to sell that product over others (for even mundane reasons like stock clearing).

Yes, sponsored content is an ad. The content creator is reimbursed for their output that is used to convince viewers to perform some purchase activity, usually over alternatives.

You’re really severely restricting the definition yourself by claiming an ad is “things that ublock origin” blocks. They can’t block physical banners and billboards or TV commercial breaks - does that now make them not ads? Whether you intended to buy something again doesn’t disqualify something from being an ad. In fact, that’s often when an ad is most effective - to buy the one they show you, instead of one you haven’t heard of or considered.
by whywhywhywhy | 2026-02-26 15:47:59+00:00
3D modeling is one where AI is going to topple existing methods with ease in all situations where clean polys and UVs are not required. Same way 3D scanned assets have. I won't be surprised at all if say the next Elder Scrolls game all the junk items are AI generated models.

Modeling is just so insanely time consuming and requires such a broad range of skills to do competently that the last day I have to look at a UV map I'm never going back.
by john_strinlai | 2026-02-26 15:48:18+00:00
>OTOH I think a lot of these methods don't matter that much because of plausible deniability. Stylometry and other stuff processes is always probabilistic, and can be dismissed.

while all of it is probabilistic, the issue is that the probability can quickly begin to approach 1 when multiple sources of data & varying techniques are combined.
by ownash | 2026-02-26 15:48:28+00:00
I used cape for a while - they had a promo where the service was cheaper. I'll be honest, the service itself - the signal I got on the device - was just not worth the full price of $99. It could just be my area. I also had to constantly turn voicemail on and off or else I wouldn't get voicemails.

The customer support team was great to work with and actually extended the trial price for me. But ultimately, the service just does not seem competitive on a usability level with major carriers and this was an issue for me. It very much could have been my local area but Verizon and T-Mobile are far, far more reliabl and comparable in price.