MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jcgrillo | 2026-02-24 05:02:05+00:00
The market is losing its shit over this because people are operating on the thesis that "AI will be able to ..." rather than "AI can demonstrably do ...". At some point they're all gonna get margin called on their futurisms. It would be a lot better if, before getting excited, we ask to see experimental results. So you say you have a world-beating security tool? Show me something it can do that all the other ones can't. That would be worth getting excited about, not a vague blog post about vibes and dreams.
by trinsic2 | 2026-02-24 05:02:33+00:00
Your example focused on time and place because taxes are done at a transactional level between the person purchasing goods online and receiving those goods in physically.

Age gating is not the same thing, there is no transfer of goods. It's someone's arbitrary idea of what should and shouldn't be allowed on the internet. And it's pretty clear at this point that it's about control over information. Plenty of articles on the subject if you care to look.
by refulgentis | 2026-02-24 05:02:51+00:00
They didn't need to come about at the same time. Photosensitive proteins (opsins) and cellular motility both predate multicellular life entirely. Even single-celled euglena detect light and swim toward it with no nervous system at all.
In early multicellular animals, cells were already chemically signaling their neighbors. A photosensitive cell releasing a signaling molecule near a contractile cell isn't a coordinated miracle. It is just two pre-existing cell types sitting next to each other in tissue, which is what bodies are. Natural selection then refines that crude coupling because even a tiny, noisy light response is better than none.

Each piece, light-sensitive proteins, cell-to-cell signaling, contractile cells, evolved independently and for other reasons long before being co-opted into anything resembling vision. The question "how could A and B arise simultaneously?" dissolves once neither A nor B was new.
by zapperdulchen | 2026-02-24 05:03:17+00:00
Great observation. Seems like we're back to prompt abracadabra.

My little experiment gave me:

No added hint 0/3

hint added at the end 1.5/3

hint added at the beginning 3/3

.5 because it stated "Walk" and then convinced it self that "Drive" is the better answer.
by chao- | 2026-02-24 05:03:54+00:00
This brings to mind the childhood of John Stuart Mill:

- Learned Greek starting age three.

- Was studying Plato at age six.

- Studied Latin starting at age eight.

And more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill#Biography

I guess it helps that he had Jeremy Bentham hanging around his house from an early age.
by ggm | 2026-02-24 05:04:19+00:00
Normally I hate the video links posted here, but I did this one with subtitles and 2x speed and it was informative, and the diagrams for once aided comprehension.

It made some things which have confused me in the ontology of fan/prob/turbo/jet clearer, and it explained a lot about why we've wound up with fully ducted fans, powered by jet engines with a high bypass ratio.
by flashbrew | 2026-02-24 05:04:37+00:00
You can pull content from any website and load it straight into your Memberstack data tables using two CLI tools: Firecrawl for scraping and Memberstack CLI for the import. No backend code needed. If you're using an AI agent like Claude Code or Codex, you can hand it this guide and it will run the whole workflow for you.

This guide walks through each step, from installation to a working import, with real commands you can copy and run. All three walkthroughs (scrape a single page, crawl a full site, and search the web) follow the same pattern: pull the data, shape it, import it.
by namibj | 2026-02-24 05:06:07+00:00
E.g. the German ID card can all on it's own, just using a server certificate configured/parametrized for this and signed by the government, do a simultaneous pseudonym passkey mint and age gate check.
That way you could easily block ID reuse; note that the passkey is locked to the card not the person as it's cryptographically derived from the pair of the card's private internal key, and the server's private key that goes to the certificate.

Access to this part of the card is secured by PAKE between the transport layer (TLS) encrypting and user interface providing NFC reader (for example phone with the app, or dedicated hardware) using a PIN.
by locusofself | 2026-02-24 05:06:14+00:00
I listed to this audiobook several years ago, and while it intrigued me to an extent, I had a hard time getting past the fact that the guy (who is an American white guy), calls himself "Culadasa".

I also found it troubling to try to take spiritual advice, no matter how practical, from someone who had been married and divorced multiple times.

More recently, he's been accused of inappropriate behaviors and was blackballed from some of the spiritual/meditation organizations he was a part of.

Perhaps it's my evangelical upbringing that has made me hardened and highly suspect of anyone trying to lead people in a spiritual way, but unfortunately I feel like I just keep getting proven right over and over again.
by ggm | 2026-02-24 05:07:04+00:00
Just at the time when the cohort of COBOL programmers who wrote the business logic and compliance s/w for almost all finance/fintech institutions which predate the modern era of software, and exist as inner core "DO NOT TOUCH IT" code, are dying off.
Which to me represents both an opportunity and a threat. The opportunity is to take the maintenance of the "DO NOT TOUCH IT" out of the greybeards hands, before the lid goes on the coffin.

The threat is that nobody is going to be asking "we did it because we could do it, but nobody asked if we should do it" about almost any change coming down the line.
by techpression | 2026-02-24 05:08:11+00:00
In the context of world politics and the hunt for sovereign hosting etc it also seems incredibly weird to put all of EUs identity handling in the hands of two American companies.

For clarity, the US could over night make all European digital wallets nonfunctional by requiring app stores to remove them and have them uninstalled remotely (iirc there is such a feature but it’s very rarely used).
Likely? No, still a very strange thing to put into law though.
by j45 | 2026-02-24 05:08:12+00:00
I would agree that it doesn't have anything to do with Claude.

I didn't meant to imply CS majors knew this either.

Understanding the impact of letting software run permission and operationally free within or against direct access to other software is a pretty basic thing.

Neither deterministic nor non-deterministic software performs as expected without getting it right.

We are new to non-deterministic software, let alone how it operates between different layers.

DevOps, hosting, security, etc, is all in a way software, and software configuration.

The more it's understood, the more it can inform software development, and in the case of openclaw, integrating systems.
Show HN: Memctl.com: Open-source shared memory infrastructure for coding agents
by meszmate | 2026-02-24 05:08:53+00:00
Hey HN. I built memctl because every AI coding agent starts each session with zero context. No memory of past decisions, no shared knowledge across your team.
memctl is a memory server that gives AI coding agents persistent context that carries over across sessions. Memory is shared across your team so every agent works with the same knowledge. It's branch-aware so context follows your git workflow, and everything is tracked with full history.
It works with any AI coding agent. Open source and self-hostable.

GitHub: https://github.com/memctl
Website: https://memctl.com

Launches on March 1st. Waitlist open.
Would to hear any feedback!
by josephg | 2026-02-24 05:09:17+00:00
As I understand it, reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability is allowed under the law. The only thing subject to copyright is your code. So long as a separate implementation (made by an AI model or made by hand) doesn't use any of your actual code, you have no claim over it. Only the code is yours.

AI models make the process of reversing and reimplementing drivers much cheaper. I don't understand the problem with that - it sounds like a glorious future to me. Making drivers cheaper and easier to write should mean more operating systems, with more higher quality drivers. I can't wait for asahi linux to support Apple's newer hardware. I'm also looking forward to better linux and freebsd drivers. And more hobbyist operating systems able to fully take advantage of modern computing hardware.

I don't see any downside.
by al_borland | 2026-02-24 05:10:19+00:00
I know it's available, but I always assumed it would be a 2nd class citizen.

I just tried to install in on my personal macOS system. I tried brew, as Microsoft gives instructions for it...

> Warning: powershell has been deprecated because it does not pass the macOS Gatekeeper check! It will be disabled on 2026-09-01.

It went on to do more and then prompted for my password, but I canceled out of it. I'm not looking to get started with anything that starts with a deprecation warning. This is what I'm talking about when I say it feels like a 2nd class citizen. I can only assume I can't use 100% Powershell to admin a system, like one could with Windows.
by monster_truck | 2026-02-24 05:10:54+00:00
I got bad news about the specificity for most things this serious. Think the only one we absolutely nail is infectious disease detection.

Spoilers: It's anywhere between 1-15 and 5-30% for false positives and 1-15/5-40 for false negatives. That's imaging, biomarkers, cancer screenings, etc

Like, where do you think the concept of "second opinions" came from? Whimsy? Lets go ask a second doctor if I actually have cancer, it'll be fun!
by zerosizedweasle | 2026-02-24 05:11:25+00:00
https://archive.ph/DuJwm

Silicon Valley morons. Send NVIDIA to 0

"Mr. Trump told Mr. Huang that when he spoke with Mr. Xi about the island, China’s leader would breathe heavily, said one of these people who was briefed on the conversation. The president didn’t like it. He urged Mr. Huang to make chips in America."
by rstuart4133 | 2026-02-24 05:11:30+00:00
> If courts wanted to act, they needed to act years ago.

My own view is copyright law is a mess. When technology changes what happens is all the interested parties (read: people wanting to make the public pay for their copyrighted material, the people paying the money don't get a seat at this table) get together in a room and hammer out a compromise. The compromise is always a whole pile of band-aids stuck onto the old version, which was of course mostly a whole pile of band-aids stuck on the previous version.

It's always been that way. When the printing press way first used to make serious money, Queens Elizabeth offered to pass laws regulating their use but was told her help wasn't required. I suspect the thinking her idea of the "help" was censorship. So the first version of copyright was "no thank you". But then the publishers discovered they were terrible at selecting books that would sell, and so they published a lot of lemons. The occasional success had to pay for all the bad ones. But without copyright, other publishers can just cherry pick the successful ones without all the expensive investment in the bad ones, which in the end meant no one made any money. So they begged for the very first band-aid - a new copyright law, and got copyright and censorship. It's band-aids all the way down.

This has happened over and over again - radio, TV, cassettes, CDs, movie theatres, all caused huge disruption, much hand wringing, lots of pontificating about how existing law should be applied to the newcomers, which just like now the newcomers mostly ignored.

If you look at copyright law, with its provisions like 70 years after the author's death, the Disney extension, it should be regarded as a standing joke at this point. The biggest part of the joke is the justification handed out to the people who pay for all these copyrighted works. It's all for our benefit. It's there to ensure the publishers supply us with a large variety of works to enjoy. It has a grain of truth to it. Back when copyright was 14 years, it was a pretty big grain. Now it's so small, it's a joke.

I have no sympathy for any of them.
by jcranmer | 2026-02-24 05:11:56+00:00
> Tell 50 million people they’re likely to have Alzheimer’s then tell them where to donate towards a cure, or treatments to slow it by a decade.

Pharmaceutical companies have spent something like $50 billion on developing Alzheimer's drugs with, well, the most furtive of straw-grasping to show for it. It's probably the most expensive single disease target (especially as things like cancer are families of diseases)... the failure to have good results isn't for lack of money, and merely throwing more money at it is unlikely to actually make progress towards meaningful treatments.
by creamyhorror | 2026-02-24 05:13:28+00:00
Incredible. Knowing about Abelian groups, being able to graph y = x^3 — 2x^2 + x in one minute, and performing integration at age 7. Chomping up university-level math textbooks by 8. A classical math prodigy.

I definitely empathize with "his preference for using an analytic, highly logical problem-solving strategy" (I'm not a genius ofc). It's often more immediately clear for me than visual/spatial manipulation.
by user_7832 | 2026-02-24 05:13:59+00:00
I wonder if anyone has any research on this field. I've often seen this myself (too often) where LLMs make assumptions and run off with the wrong thing.

"This is how you do <absolutely unrelated thing>" or "This is why <thing that actually exists already> is impossible!". Ffs man, just ask for info! A human wouldn't need to - they'd get the context - but LLMs apparently don't?
by CodeBit26 | 2026-02-24 05:14:01+00:00
I feel the hype is cooling down. LangChain was great for getting something running in 5 minutes, but the 'abstraction soup' makes debugging a nightmare in production. I'm seeing more people just using the OpenAI/Anthropic SDKs directly or very thin wrappers. It’s better to own your prompts than to hide them behind five layers of library code.
by deaux | 2026-02-24 05:14:04+00:00
Disagree, they rely on both equally, not much more on one of them. Consider the process of actually building a large structure with only a set of such diagrams. The diagrams primarily cover nouns (what, where, using what), whereas the human language formal instructions cover the verbs (how, why, when). You can't build anything with only one of the two.

And sure, the human language formal instructions often appear inside tables or diagrams, that doesn't make them anything less so.

This is based on having worked with companies that do projects in the 10 figure range.
by fhe | 2026-02-24 05:14:05+00:00
my question has always been why (I think most vertebrates) stop at two? It seems that an extra eye here and there could be really helpful. Maybe it's because all verterbrates evolved from an ancestor that had two eyes, and once the template is in place, it was simply too deep a local maximum to evolve out of? Similar to the 5-digit hand design that all vertebrates share.
by anonnon | 2026-02-24 05:14:24+00:00
Since no one's mentioned it, this was tried once before by a company called Micro Focus, which sold software to modernize "legacy" COBOL-based mainframe applications so they could run on x86, and while somewhat successful, they failed to disrupt IBM's mainframe business, because these legacy systems traditionally relied as much on the idiosyncrasies of the mainframe hardware itself and not just the COBOL language.

If all Anthropic is offering is some kind of smart language translation, I'm not sure they will have many takers. And whatever you think about mainframes, it is quite nice that our credit card networks work as efficiently and reliably as they do.
by simonw | 2026-02-24 05:14:27+00:00
I was careful to say "Good code still has a cost" and "delivering good code remains significantly more expensive than [free]" rather than the more aesthetically pleasing "Good code is expensive.

I chose this words because I don't think good code is nearly as expensive with coding agents as it was without them.

You still have to actively work to get good code, but it takes so much less time when you have a coding agent who can do the fine-grained edits on your behalf.

I firmly believe that agentic engineering should produce better code. If you are moving faster but getting worse results it's worth stopping and examining if there are processes you could fix.
by CodeBit26 | 2026-02-24 05:14:42+00:00
My system is basically a 'digital graveyard' if I don't use full-text search. I moved everything to Obsidian because it's just Markdown files on my drive. For links, I use a simple Telegram bot I wrote that dumps everything into a CSV. Low tech, but it’s the only thing I’ve actually stuck with for more than a year.
by palmotea | 2026-02-24 05:14:59+00:00
> Maybe there's a confusion that an "US" company should somehow be loyal to the US. This isn't the case, big publicly traded corporations work for the shareholders. They don't [owe] anything to the US graduate who's looking for a job.

That's not true. A US company should be loyal to the US: the fact that they are not is political dysfunction.

China, for all its faults, gets that, and it makes sure its companies are loyal to China. They're also in the process of burying the US economically and technologically. The US is falling behind in industry after industry, and its not creating new, sustainable technological edges at a sufficient rate. That's partially because the shareholder-mercenary American companies repeatedly make deals with the much more strategic China, that weaken themselves and America in the medium to long term.

> What is ironic is that this model has been forced to the world by the US, and nobody cared when it affected the manual workers. Now that it affects the educated elite, it's suddenly unacceptable.

It was always unacceptable. It's just that too-many idiot software engineers confused themselves for capitalist barons, because they had a 401k and a higher-than-average salary.
by tomhow | 2026-02-24 05:15:09+00:00
It's unacceptable to post snarky comments or nationality-based stereotypes on HN. Please make an effort to observe the guidelines, especially these ones:

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by falcor84 | 2026-02-24 05:15:39+00:00
I suppose I might not be understanding your and the GP's intent correctly, but I thought that the question was based on the following sentences:

> I think it would be good service to use AI tools to bring open source alternatives like sympy and sage and macaulay to par.

> It would be really nice to have better software written by strong software engineers who also understands the maths for mathematicians.

And my response is that I think that this sort of work, which is in the public scientific interest should be funded by tax money, and the results distributed under libre licenses.
Colt – Describe a browser task in English, get a Playwright script
by Vipul_Sharma_69 | 2026-02-24 05:16:06+00:00
COLT converts natural language instructions into browser automation. You say "Create a user with email admin@test.com and admin role" — it executes it on a live browser and exports a standalone Playwright script.
How it works:

1.Discover — crawls your web app autonomously, maps every page, form, modal, and element
2.Index — LLM-summarizes each state into a vector search index (discover once, run unlimited tasks)
3.Execute — ReAct agent loop drives the browser in real time with self-healing on failures
4.Record — exports reusable Playwright scripts, pytest tests, and typed Python functions

It handles Shadow DOM, cross-origin iframes, infinite scroll, pagination traps, and modals — the stuff that breaks most automation tools.
What it's not: Not a consumer AI browser. Not an RPA tool. It's for engineering teams who want to generate E2E tests or automate internal tool workflows without writing selectors by hand.
The key difference from other AI browser agents: they start from scratch every execution. COLT builds a persistent knowledge base of your app, so task #100 is as fast as task #1.
Built with Python, Playwright, and ChromaDB. Works with Groq, OpenAI, Anthropic, or local Ollama models.
Currently in closed beta — launching soon. Would love feedback on the approach, especially from anyone doing browser automation at scale
by munchler | 2026-02-24 05:16:06+00:00
> "Hey Claude, summarize, this document I downloaded from the Internet"

I think you've created confusion with this example due to its ambiguity. Let's be clear about the difference between a chatbot and an agent: Asking a chatbot (e.g. vanilla Claude) to summarize an unknown document is not risky, since all it can do is generate text. Asking an agent (e.g. Claude Code) to summarize an unknown document could indeed be risky for the reason you state.
by gls2ro | 2026-02-24 05:16:34+00:00
While personally this excites me: the idea that I can build a custom software that fits that specific problem is quite amazing.

But on company level I see it as a risk: suddently you might have 50 new small apps created by people who might not even work at the company who are not constantly tested for security/privacy ... but more important who once done are not pushing the frontier of how a much better solution might be in that area cause nobody is putting time into them. So as time passes by this has the risk to become legacy software used to run your business. yes of course you can point an AI to all of them and prompt it to make them better but that means focus on that instead of your core business.

Maybe we will see solutions appearing to manage this kind of tech debt.
by mbreese | 2026-02-24 05:17:24+00:00
The devil is in the details. The crux of the article is in these two lines:

> Across the U.S., the average annual cost of care for an infant and a 4-year-old is $28,190, according to Child Care Aware of America. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) considers child care affordable when it accounts for no more than 7% of a household’s income.

It’s been awhile, but the $28k number seems reasonable. It’s more expensive in different areas and the article goes into the numbers by state. But the part where it gets difficult to see is the 7% number. You only require $400k/year if you cap child care costs at 7%. When my kids were in daycare, it cost significantly more than 7% of our income.
by Maxatar | 2026-02-24 05:18:11+00:00
But it's not completely different and a "≃" would not mean the same thing, in fact it would weaken the statement.

e^x ≃ 1 + x + O(x^2) would only assert that lim (x->0) (e^x)/(1+x) = 1.

However "e^x = 1 + x + O(x^2)" means that for some function r(x) belonging to the set O(x^2), e^x is exactly equal to 1 + x + r(x). Another way to rewrite that equation that eliminates the "abuse of notation" would be:

e^x − (1 + x) ∈ O(x^2)

The particular r(x) in O(x^2) which makes it strictly equal is being left out, that's true, and usually it's left out for brevity or practical reasons or even because it's not even be known what r(x) is... but nevertheless it is not an asymptotic equation or an approximation, it is exactly equal to the value on the right hand side for some particular r(x) the exact details of which are being omitted for one reason or another.