MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrighele | 2026-02-28 20:43:30+00:00
Some random thoughts...

(I was a kid in the 80s and I played in arcades a lot. I think I could still tell in which arcade I played each game).

> There was an economic motivation for this difficulty, in getting more coins from players quicker, but Fujiwara would later insist that wasn’t the primary motivation and that they were meeting a demand from strong players for challenge.

Thats' not completely true. If it was that way, players would quickly grew fed up and stop playing. You need a balance between getting money out of people and people keep playing because they have fun.

I think one of the most efficient way to do that is having MOST of your players being suckers that keep pouring money, but allow a few to get very good at it, and play an inordinate amount of time with a single coin. That way the suckers will keep playing hoping to do the same. Most people would last 5 level in Bubble Bobble, but you had the occasional "genius" that would finish it.

Very difficult games like GnG were well regarded but not as played as others, as much as I can remember.

> Fujiwara later responded to a question about SNK’s Ikari and its resemblance to Commando by saying that was just how things were, although he was disappointed that they had got to release more sequels than him.

In the 80's there were not many game mechanics available []. I dare say that 90% of the games were either

vertical shoot 'em ups (think Galaxian)
* horizontal shoot 'em ups (think Gradius)
* beat 'em ups (think Double Dragon)
* platform (think Mario)
* to a lesser extent, racing games (think Outrun)

I think mostly due to HW limitations.

So if you are going to have a soldier going around killing people, of course it is going to resemble Command in some way. Doesn't mean they are the same, in the same way that Poker and Bridge are not the same despite using the same set of cards.

[*] There were some outliers, and some of them were great (Tron, Star Wars) but they more the exception that the rule.
by rsp1984 | 2026-02-28 20:44:27+00:00
The problem with these kinds of articles is that their arguments completely break down when looking at the facts.

The top 5% already pay 40% of all taxes in the US. For the the top 1% that number is still 25%. [1]

At the same time over 50% (!) of the budget goes towards social security, medicare and other health services [2]. That's a much higher percentage vs. socialist-leaning nations such as Sweden [3].

Despite its reputation of being an individualist, capitalist nation, for all intents and purposes, the US has already implemented socialism.

The problem, as is typical with countries where public sector spending is a large %age of the economy, is that such spending is not subject to healthy corrective market forces that would curb waste. More dollars can always be printed and taxed, so high-level corruption, bureaucracy and an ever-growing thicket of regulation is the consequence.

The author calls out the corruption and nepotism, and rightfully so. However what he fails to understand is that it is born in an ever-growing government "economy", not curbed by it.

[1] https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2024/

[2] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

[3] https://www.government.se/government-of-sweden/ministry-of-f...
by lm28469 | 2026-02-28 20:44:51+00:00
We're retiring later and later, working more per week, purchasing power is going down, quality of goods is going down, life expectancy is decreasing, child mortality is increasing, teenage suicide is increasing, illiteracy is increasing, &c.

But trust us this time we'll do incredible things, the same things but more of it, faster and cheaper, will automatically make things amazing!
by tekla | 2026-02-28 20:45:02+00:00
I think the problem here is the idea of what money means varies so much

Printing money, in the "normative" sense is printing pieces of paper that has a certain picture and number on it and thats about it.

When the US treasury "prints money", its issuing debt. Yes the money supply increases, but its backed by "something", rather than "just" toilet paper with pictures and number on it.
by squibonpig | 2026-02-28 20:45:08+00:00
The person you're responding to said they were unable to vote in Israeli elections. You said "no, they're able to, uhh, not vote in the case of those under Hamas and they're able to vote in elections held by the Palestinian authority in the case of those in the west bank." I don't know a ton about this, but I don't believe the Palestinian authority elections are the same as the Israeli elections. As I understand it, the right to vote is gated behind a citizenship process that is restrictive enough to generally prevent Palestinians from obtaining it.
by abustamam | 2026-02-28 20:45:30+00:00
I've been doing a version of this in a side project. Instead of saving the prompt directly, I have a road map. When implementing features, I tell it to brainstorm implementation for the road map. When fixing a bug, I tell it to brainstorm fixes from the roadmap. There's some back and forth, and then it writes a slice that is committed. Then, I look it over, verify scope, and it makes a plan (also committed). Then it generates work logs as it codes.

My prompts are literally "brainstorm next slice" or "brainstorm how to fix this bug" or "talk me through trades offs of approach A Vs B" so those prompts aren't meaningful in their own.

It's quite effective, but I'm a team of one.
by NickC25 | 2026-02-28 20:46:51+00:00
>Iran are the good guys?

No. But they are a sovereign nation who didn't directly bomb the US or its allies.

>They've funded Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis for decades. They've assassinated dissidents on foreign soil. They sentence people to death for apostasy and flog women for not wearing hijab correctly.

You want to know who the US has funded? You want to know who Israel has funded?

I mean, shit, the US took out Iran's democratically elected government in the 1970s and was a huge fan of the Mullahs because they let us steal Iranian oil. The same secular Iranian government that was quite literally the first middle eastern country to recognize the existence of Israel, and was a leading secular state in a region of ass-backwards religious nutcases.

Israel has refused to acknowledge the obvious existence of its nuclear weapons program while Iran is a full member of the IAEA and allows for full international inspection of its uranium facilities.

Fuck, the Israelis engage in massive blackmailing operations of their own "allies" (see Epstien, Jeffrey) , attack their own "allies" (see USS Liberty attack), and have tried to goad its "allies" into carrying out attacks on their behalf. They are a tiny bully that starts shit they cannot handle themselves, and American lives are sacrificed because of it.
by consumer451 | 2026-02-28 20:46:52+00:00
Tough day for anyone who has a difficult time holding contradictory ideas in there mind. Pretty sure that this includes myself.

On the one hand, Trump is awful for the USA, and the world.

On the other hand, there is a possibility that the freedom-wanting citizens of Iran finally have a slight chance of achieving their goal.

The chance of something truly positive happening seems low. However, as someone who has, for years, watched what happens in Iran via the lens of https://old.reddit.com/r/newiran, I am allowing myself the slightest amount of hope. Iranian people deserve it.

Of course, there is a large chance of this blowing up into something really bad.
by SmirkingRevenge | 2026-02-28 20:47:27+00:00
There really is a huge stockpile of stuff there to build into fiction.

There's a whole crazy universe of occult-like lore within Catholicism that a subculture of Catholics really get into, it's pretty wild, often quite macabre.

I have a couple of those types in my family. The way they talk about praying to specific saints is like they're paladins in an RPG using divine magic.

Then there's the whole thing where the church has bones of long dead saints encased in ornate reliquaries that supposedly dispense miracles.
Show HN: AgentLookup – A public registry where AI agents find each other
by peureka | 2026-02-28 20:47:45+00:00
Agents are getting persistent. They have endpoints, capabilities and uptime. But there's no standard way for one agent to find another.

AgentLookup is a public registry for AI agents. Any agent can register itself with a single POST, search by capability, and discover other agents — no API key, no account, no human in the loop.

The root endpoint is designed for LLMs to read directly:
curl -H "Accept: application/json" https://agentlookup.dev

Returns the full API spec in one response (~4,500 tokens). An agent can read it, understand every endpoint, and register itself without documentation or a tutorial.

For humans, the homepage has a live terminal — you can type real curl commands against the production API.

How it works:

POST /api/register — register an agent, get back an agent_id and secret
GET /api/search?capability=code-review — find agents by what they do
GET /api/discover — browse new, active, and popular agents
GET /api/a/{agent_id} — look up any agent's full profile

No auth needed for reads. Registration is free. Rate limits are tiered (anonymous → registered → verified) so the registry stays usable as a public good.

There's also a .well-known/agents.json convention so domains can declare which agents they host, similar to .well-known/security.txt.

Built with Next.js on Vercel, Postgres on Neon. The whole thing is live now. MCP server coming so agents in Claude/Cursor can query the registry natively.

Interested in what HN thinks about the gap this fills. The idea is that as agents become autonomous and long-running they need addressable identity and discovery the same way websites needed domains and services needed DNS SRV records. Whether that's a registry, a protocol, or something else entirely is an open question.
Show HN: Voca – AI project manager that runs in the background
by tjingyb | 2026-02-28 20:49:35+00:00
We kept running into this across teams. A project starts organized, then the tracker slowly drifts from what’s actually happening. Most PM tools assume someone will keep them updated. In practice, that’s where things fall apart.

Decisions stay in Slack. A blocker gets mentioned and never written down. A PR sits open in GitHub. Linear says things are on track, but something isn’t.

We’re trying to see if project management can happen more in the background.

Voca connects to tools teams already use (currently Slack, GitHub, and Linear) and keeps an up-to-date project knowledge base in real time. People can query it, and set up “skills” and automations. Once set, it just runs in the background.

Still early. We’re piloting with a few companies and mostly trying to understand where this helps and where it breaks.

https://www.tryvoca.ai/

Happy to answer questions or hear how teams here handle this today.
by Ygg2 | 2026-02-28 20:49:35+00:00
> The entire point is that being so absolutist is silly.

You're misinterpreting what Rust people are telling you.

- Rust is safe lang

- Nah, C is safe if you're good

- Rust evangelical gestures towards billions or CVEs brought on by overly-sure C programmers

- Yeah, well, a version of Rust was unsafe for few months ten years ago. Besides Zig prevents more bugs than C and is the successor

- Rust person points to Bun's abysmal record

- Stop being absolutist.

The issue is that in C or Zig few people can write mostly UB free code. In Rust anyone can write UB free code as long as they don't reach for unsafe.
by HerbManic | 2026-02-28 20:50:09+00:00
When it comes to battles of religion, Alan watts said it best.

"Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture. Reasonable–that is, human–men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life."
by yusufozkan | 2026-02-28 20:50:28+00:00
This is the same company that started as a nonprofit dedicated to open AI safety research, then became a capped-profit entity, then effectively closed-source, then dropped the cap, and is now pursuing full for-profit conversion. Every single guardrail they've set for themselves has been quietly revised or removed once it became inconvenient. Anyone want to bet on how long those exclusions last?
by tossaway0 | 2026-02-28 20:50:35+00:00
I’m probably overlooking something, but if you have insider info, you just bet on that info with certainty. Why would you need to create a different outcome to bet on it?

If I know my company is going to do something on March 16th, I can bet against it happening until that day, and then bet big it will happen that day. I don’t need to influence the company to change what it’s going to do to make money on it.
by YZF | 2026-02-28 20:50:39+00:00
I wouldn't trust Al Jazeera here (or anywhere else) but "hitting all cities" doesn't really say much. If the attacks are going after the IRGC and the Basij then presumably you need to go after them fairly broadly. If the attacks are going at ballistic missiles and drones the same applied. The question is what are the targets and what's the plan. I'm sure they're going after those complexes as well.
by mrighele | 2026-02-28 20:50:52+00:00
To be fair, we are talking about arcade games. You were not supposed to finish them, but to finish your money before that :-) [].

You are paying for a game, so you have the right to continue playing until you die. In that context, restarting the game (hopefully with an higher difficulty level) is the proper course of actoin

[] The authors of Pacman probably didn't even think you would be able to reach level 256 and overflow the variable. That's how you get to a kill screen that corrupts memory.
by cataphract | 2026-02-28 20:51:03+00:00
I think there's a middle ground. I like coming up with solutions to problems (mostly technical problems, may even be very low level ones). But I always found writing the code generally tedious. Basically, once I had a good detailed idea of what the implementation would look like, actually executing the plan would bore me.

AI is still not competent enough to come up with good solutions in many things I work on. So, at least so far, AI has made me happier.
by FuckButtons | 2026-02-28 20:51:10+00:00
Yeah, the fact that we have treated context as immutable baffles me, it’s not like humans working memory keeps a perfect history of everything they’ve done over the last hour, it shouldn’t be that complicated to train a secondary model that just runs online compaction, eg: it runs a tool call, the model determines what’s Germaine to the conversion and prunes the rest, or some task gets completed, ok just leave a stub in the context that says completed x, with a tool available to see the details of x if it becomes relevant again.
by nickdirienzo | 2026-02-28 20:51:13+00:00
I totally get that, and I'm reminded of plugin architectures (e.g. VSCode extensions or browser extensions).

Those extensions don't modify the core codepaths for what they integrate with, but still provide new capabilities for only what I want to use.

I guess I don't see extensibility, agentic capabilities, and more code safety (and fewer tokens burned on codemods) as mutually exclusive. Not saying you're saying that fwiw.
by nathell | 2026-02-28 20:52:04+00:00
Counterpoint: in December, a Polish MP [0] has vibe-coded an interpreter [1] of a 1959 Polish programming language, feeding it the available documentation. _That,_ at least, is unlikely to have appeared in the model’s training data.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Zandberg
[1]: https://sako-zam41.netlify.app/
by chiararvtk | 2026-02-28 20:52:12+00:00
"What if the government just changes the law or existing DoW policies?"

Our contract explicitly references the surveillance and autonomous weapons laws and policies as they exist today, so that even if those laws or policies change in the future, use of our systems must still remain aligned with the current standards reflected in the agreement.

So, this apply only if they changes the law, not if they break the law.

"What happens if the government violates the terms of the contract?"

As with any contract, we could terminate it if the counterparty violates the terms. We don’t expect that to happen.

WE COULD [...]. Yeah, I believe
by twodave | 2026-02-28 20:52:38+00:00
I feel this very recently. I just pretend the agent is a junior dev and tell them to do things I don’t have time for. Reviewing the changes at my convenience is a lot like checking in on a junior dev, too. On the other hand I do feel like I get better results with the same teeing up that a junior dev requires, so I try to remove as many unknowns/dependencies as possible (or else explicitly tell it to leave some things as stubs) before sending him off to do something
by colinnordin | 2026-02-28 20:52:47+00:00
> But improving each kid’s skill and confidence was the real mission. Instead of my desk job, I’d be asking Clayton how we could make Corey¹ use his body for rebounding. Or how Monte’s soccer skills could be best leveraged. Or how Evan, our best player, could become an on-court leader.

I wonder how software development would be like if we had coaches like this.
by tryauuum | 2026-02-28 20:53:01+00:00
If assume the goal of the US administration is to really limit the weapons of mass destruction

then why the previous peacefull attempts were thrown out? I remember Iran agreed to limit the production or ivite the people to watch their actions, the US sanctions were even lifted in 2015. But then later reiplemented by the US for some reason.

unrelated to all of this, I don't understand what's the problem is with a country developing nuclear weapons. US can nuke Iran with ICBMs anyway if they try to use them?
by eoskx | 2026-02-28 20:53:02+00:00
Not great? Seems kind of loose language? It isn't OpenAI saying no autonomous weapons use, but only that use must be consistent with laws, regulations, and department policies: "The Department of War may use the AI System for all lawful purposes, consistent with applicable law, operational requirements, and well-established safety and oversight protocols. The AI System will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control, nor will it be used to assume other high-stakes decisions that require approval by a human decisionmaker under the same authorities."

More of the same here. Not a wonder why the DoD signed with OpenAI and instead of Anthropic. Delegating morality to the law when you know the law is not adequate seems like "not a good thing".

"For intelligence activities, any handling of private information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable DoD directives requiring a defined foreign intelligence purpose. The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law."
by atmosx | 2026-02-28 20:53:07+00:00
Cheap or not doesn’t matter.

Sir Winston Churchill supposedly asked Lady Astor whether she would sleep with him for five million pounds. She said she supposed she would. Then he asked whether she would sleep with him for only five pounds. She answered,"What do you think I am?" His response was, "We've already established that; we're merely haggling over price."- Marcus Felson, Crime and Everyday Life, Second Edition, 1998
by noosphr | 2026-02-28 20:53:14+00:00
If the price of code is zero then changing the spec also costs zero in terms of code and. This is what always was the problem with specs before. You'd write one, run it through the prover, write the code, then have to throw out the whole thing because there was a business case you didn't account for.

Now the bottom 98% can be given to a robot with a clear success signal other than 'it looks about right'.
by AreShoesFeet000 | 2026-02-28 20:53:23+00:00
Damn that’s good quote. And I would even go as far as saying that the apparent cynicism of the “honesty with the volume cracked up” is just a mirroring of the inversion that symbols suffer while transiting Culture.

In fact now I’m a bit worried that you can’t really have any sort of accurate feeling of the magnitude of the ironic statement that went over your head. You hear something that’s not true, you internalize it, you figure the character of it’s falseness, and when it’s your time to subvert it you invert it and amp it up creating something more absurd, which in turn will be internalized by even more people without its apparent falseness that you tried so hard to convey.

This makes me think that speaking absurd is the only way to convey truth. Not immediately, but eventually.
by shermantanktop | 2026-02-28 20:53:45+00:00
My boss is a technologist. Adding computers to problems makes him happy. Getting people out of the way makes him happy.

I’m an IC (no direct reports) and I’m a “humanist”. Helping people become better and more skilled makes me happy, in the same way the coach here got joy from the goofball making a great play.

On paper we should probably switch jobs. I have way more technical depth, but the crucial difference is that he is more goal-driven, better at managing upward, and more in tune with political trends.
by jrpear | 2026-02-28 20:54:17+00:00
It looks to me like what is called a "container escape" in this context isn't necessarily as bad as it seems. For example, in the advisory for CVE-2025-31133 affecting runc[1]:

> Container Escape: ...Thus, the attacker can simply trigger a coredump and gain complete root privileges over the host.

Sounds bad. But...

> this flaw effectively allows any attacker that can spawn containers (with some
degree of control over what kinds of containers are being spawned) to achieve
the above goals.

The attacker needs already to have the capability to spawn containers! This isn't a case of "RCE within the container" -> "RCE outside the container", which is what I would think prima facie reading "container escape".

I have always thought that running an untrusted image within an unprivileged container was a safe thing to do and I still believe so.

[1] https://github.com/opencontainers/runc/security/advisories/G...
by SilverElfin | 2026-02-28 20:55:33+00:00
OpenAI basically bribed the government into attacking Anthropic, via political donations to the MAGA PAC. They couldn’t not compete with an inferior product so Altman and Brockman went this route.

As for OpenAI’s defense - not buying it.

“OpenAI’s President Gave Millions to Trump. He Says It’s for Humanity”:
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-president-greg-brockman-p...
by kyboren | 2026-02-28 20:55:36+00:00
Who cares what the mullahs want?

The US feels threatened by Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs and has the military force to stop them, probably. Diplomatic avenues bore no fruit. Military force is now being used to--hopefully--end the threat definitively.

Yes, of course we are aware of what happened to Ghaddafi. It's very en vogue to point out the game theoretical incentives to develop nuclear weapons.

But seemingly people never bring up South Africa's disarmament. And nobody ever mentions that game theory also incentivizes the US prevent their adversaries from developing nuclear weapons where possible.

Giving up or stopping development of nukes may invite attack. Refusing to stop developing them may also invite attack.