MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Project Paperclip. The time has come
by daly | 2026-02-18 21:25:19+00:00
Long rumored that the world would end due to a goal of "maximizing paperclips"
it is time to start. Every good world-ending idea needs a plan.

Given an infinite number of paperclips what are the design constraints?

Paperclips designs are the "string theory" of physical construction.

Ideas in 1 dimension

Obviously you could make a single one-dimensional line of paperclips.
This raises the question of multiples sizes of paperclips.
Can we make an ever smaller paperclip progression in an interval?

Ideas in 2 dimensions

One could make a 2-dimensional regular fabric of paperclips.
The 2D fabric could be made from regular shapes like hexagons instead.
How many ways can a plane be tiled, especially if we vary sizes

Ideas in 3 dimensions

One could make a 3 dimensional solid of paperclips.
The 2D hexagons could be extended in 3D forming a "bee hive" effect.
A 3D paperclip array could have holes and voids forming structures.
In 3D the paperclip can vary in size and shape. Bent paperclips arise.

Paperclips don't need to be made of steel.
Suppose some are non-conductive so we can form circuits.
A non-uniform paperclips could, for example, be a capacitor.

Are there interesting "vibration modes", like waves in a sea?

Ideas in 4 dimensions (varying in time).

Paperclips can move independently.
One could clearly make "paperclip wheels".
Can we build a timepiece in paperclips?

Tools.

We need to make a solid modeling tool to handle paperclips.
We need an MCP server to allow the AI to use the tool.
We need a trained AI to "think in paperclips".
We need "alignment training" so the results fit our needs.

Further thoughts.

Suppose we go to the moon and find the moon has ideal paperclip material.
Might it be efficient to construct a single paperclip factory?
Then everything has a common structure and is easily maintained and repaired.

Contribute!
by lambda | 2026-02-18 21:25:36+00:00
Huh? Once it gets to the model, it's all just tokens, and those are just in band signalling. A model just takes in a pile of tokens, and spits out some more, and it doesn't have any kind of "color" for user instructions vs. untrusted data. It does use special tokens to distinguish system instructions from user instructions, but all of the untrusted data also goes into the user instructions, and even if there are delimiters, the attention mechanism can get confused and it can lose track of who is talking at a given time.

And the thing is, even adding a "color" to tokens wouldn't really work, because LLMs are very good at learning patterns of language; for instance, even though people don't usually write with Unicode enclosed alphanumerics, the LLM learns the association and can interpret them as English text as well.

As I say, prompt injection is a very real problem, and Anthopic's own system card says that on some tests the best they do is 50% on preventing attacks.

If you have a more reliable way of fixing prompt injection, you could get paid big bucks by them to implement it.
by codeadict | 2026-02-18 21:25:37+00:00
Neither Cuba or Venezuela held elections for a while and they put in jail or disappear anybody that says the minimum word about the ruling government, not even fighting just saying anything. (source born and raised in Cuba and all my family lives there, just this week one teacher got 10 years in prison for writing something about the president ). Cuba had oil from Venezuela and instead of using it for the actual people and electricity, they were selling it to third party countries to enrich GAESA the company of the Castro family that even the president of Cuba has no control over. So the people are no worse now with the US tensions, everybody there wants a little help to end the suffering caused by commies for years.
by aasimsani | 2026-02-18 21:25:42+00:00
Yet another git worktree tool? Yeah. gwq, branchlet, git-worktree-runner, wt... they all exist.

But I'm impatient. Everything else made me type too much.

gwt feature/new-thing - that's it. Creates the worktree, auto-names it, cd's you in, configs copied, Claude Code started and repo setup.

A few things that make it opinionated:

- Stacking: Run gwt child-branch from any worktree and it branches from where you are. gwt .. goes back to parent, gwt ... to root.

- Smart naming: Linear-style branches like aasim/eng-1234-add-feature become repo-eng-1234. Regular branches use first few words.

- Config copying: Automatically copies .vscode/, .env, or whatever dirs you configure to new worktrees.
- Post-create hooks: Run any command after creation - npm install, claude, code ., uv sync, whatever.

- Tab completion + fzf: Full zsh autocompletion, fzf menus when available.

- Aliases built in! Call it "uncle" if you'd like!

Works with oh-my-zsh, zinit, zplug, etc.

For my fortunate/unfortunate friends on Windows: there's a fresh PowerShell port too: https://github.com/aasimsani/gwt-powershell

Looking for feedback - happy with an honest roast too!
by loosescrews | 2026-02-18 21:25:45+00:00
I got two Tesla Powerwall 3s partly because I thought the software would be better. Instead, they are extremely buggy and the software has poor functionality. Many of the features are broken. The product feels like a prototype. Grid charging is broken and many of the features related to it don’t do what it says in the app. The batteries regularly do calibration cycles where they dump their entire charge and then stay at 0% charge level for at least 24 hours. When I first got them about a year and a half ago they would do that about once every two weeks, although they have reduced the frequency. I’ve also had issues with them turning on their heaters when it isn’t even cold and draining themselves. You get little to no insight into their operation and need to contact technical support for any little issue. They crash and do a hard reset and shut off the power every so often as well.
by PebblesHD | 2026-02-18 21:26:35+00:00
I’m very interested to watch (not as much to experience…) what this will do to economies like Australia where the middle class and up are driving a shockingly large percentage of actual spending in the economy. If the historically wealthy white-collar classes ceased to be able to afford their mortgages and rent, stopped buying discretionary items, and stopped eating out, I think the economy as a whole would just stop.

If I was one of these pseudo-oligarchy members, I would be a lot more worried about a large percent of the population becoming disaffected and angry.
by Windchaser | 2026-02-18 21:27:14+00:00
Oh, there's a lot of exercise that's not so pointless. Climbing, soccer, racquetball, dance, etc.

For running, I put on some headphones and get lost in a meditative headspace. For weights, I usually end up reading a book on my phone. Still, neither weights or running are as much fun as the gamified exercises (sports), the puzzles (climbing), or the social-oriented exercises (dance, partnered acrobatics, some sports).
by Tuna-Fish | 2026-02-18 21:27:28+00:00
Neither the ram nor the ssd is on chip. The ram is on package, the ssd is on board.

On chip means literally on top of the silicon, like how AMD X3D cpus mount the SRAM chip. On modern Apple devices the ram is mounted on the organic package substrate. The difference is significant, and it's shitty that Apple outright lied about it.
by nonameiguess | 2026-02-18 21:27:42+00:00
It's a poor term but it's talking about a healthy baseline for any human as far as I'm aware. It's not adjusted for expected deterioration due to age. 100% of organs eventually fail if given enough time, but it's still fine to call the resulting failed organ a defect.

Presumably, some of this is just it's pretty damn inevitable you're going to accumulate at least some level of detectable injury that doesn't completely heal over the course of 40 years. I needed shoulder reconstruction because I fell off a skateboard trying to bomb a hill a year and a half ago and it's healed to the point there isn't any functional impairment, but given there's metal in there now, it's obviously going to look abnormal on an image. There's just an impedance mismatch here between what imaging finds and what people actually care about. Any detectable deviation from expected tissue configuration is going to show up and get reported, but there is no reason for a patient to give a shit. Functional impairment and/or pain is what they care about, though those are both also universal if you live long enough. No 90 year-old walks without a limp but it's still completely fair to call a limp an "abnormal" gait.
by aleksiy123 | 2026-02-18 21:27:44+00:00
Yes but when you combine it with the fact that with the other guarantees on performance.

https://github.com/google/cel-spec/blob/master/doc/langdef.m...

And your service puts an upper bound on input size and cel expression size. (True for all practical applications.)

You can get some guarantees around performance, that isn't a billion years. But in ms or seconds.

Turing completeness by itself does not guarantee this but it is a necessary prerequisite for these guarantees.
by mindslight | 2026-02-18 21:27:44+00:00
> I think we should just ban social media companies.

Sure, great! Go right ahead! I honestly think sec 230 was a mistake. Not in that I want to see it reversed so the fascists currently in power can use the dynamic as a club to go after speech they don't like. But rather that I think the Internet would have developed healthier without it, and what it has enabled.

> On the other hand we have what we have today, propagandists, bots, hatred, &c.

You seem to be pigeonholing all of the problems into one bag. "Hatred" does not go away with real-name policies.

> It's like you're complaining about potential problems, but ignoring the current problems happening today are those potential problems.

No, I am pointing out that you're approaching this from the wrong angle. The core dynamic of the Internet has always been "don't trust what you read on the Internet". The lack of needing permission to communicate is precisely what has enabled so much innovation. Defining context is the responsibility of higher layers.

What changed from that core dynamic? The social media companies showed up, took unvetted and unfiltered streams of content, and presented them to the public as trustworthy finished products. "We'll figure out a better system than naive voting later". Well later never came, did it? At least Slashdot tried.

Facebook relies on real names, creating lists of bona fide friends, and can (could?) show you only posts from friends-of-friends, right? How does this differ from what you're proposing? If you're seeing Facebook posts from bots, you've either friended bots or Facebook is responsible for showing them to you, right?
by staticassertion | 2026-02-18 21:27:45+00:00
All mainstream package managers are built with zero forethought into security, as far as I can tell. I don't think any of them are any good at it at all, otherwise they wouldn't give arbitrary code execution with literally zero restrictions, ability to audit, etc.

That said, `cargo-vet` is easily the best tool for mitigating this that I am aware of and it exists for Rust and is actively maintained by Google, Mozilla, and many others. I think it's fine to say "Rust encourages using more dependencies" but it has to be acknowledged that Rust also brings with it the best in class tool for supply chain security.

Could it be better? Absolutely. God yes. Why is cargo giving access to `~/.ssh/` for every `build.sh`? Why do package managers not make any effort to sandbox? But that's life today.
by jmholla | 2026-02-18 21:27:56+00:00
There's a missing part here, and that's validating your ACME account ownership.

I think most users depend on automation that creates their accounts, so they never have to deal with it. But now, you need to propagate some credential to validate your account ownership to the ACME provider. I would have liked to see some conversation about that in this announcement.

I'm not familiar with Let's Encrypt's authentication model. If they don't have token creation that can be limited by target domain, but I expect you'll need to create separate accounts for each of your target domains, or else anything with that secret can create a cert for any domain your account controls.
by shimman | 2026-02-18 21:28:02+00:00
For far too long I'm ashamed to admit, I would use vim with the adventure time theme on iterm2. Looking at it now I'm shocked my eyes didn't bleed more. I think the worst part was that visual mode was neon yellow bold text with neon pink bg. Relying on visual mode quite a bit while using vim I was self inoculating my subconscious with stills of a poor Jackson Pollock imitator while on multiple different amphetamines. Hopefully I find out my resistance soon.
by parl_match | 2026-02-18 21:29:00+00:00
> You were using it in the general sense

no, i wasn't. i am telling you i wasn't and i have already told you i wasn't. how many more times do you need to be told?

> unless you believe the "extensive road safety laws and civil liability precedent" only apply to Tesla branded Robotaxis

i was talking about tesla robotaxis, sure.

please quote me where i said that it only applies to them. otherwise, you're making shit up in your head and accusing me of it :)
by kps | 2026-02-18 21:29:22+00:00
After thinking about it a bit more, I think the specific details of that (i.e. inventing an extended colour mode) are not ideal.

One alternative: Assign semantics to colour indexes above 256.

Both of those have the disadvantage that they separate foreground and background colour, but a user really wants a combined semantic presentation. For instance, a user might want a warning message to be black text on a yellow background, and not have to rely on the program remembering to set both foreground and background to ‘warning’ colour.

So another possibility is just to invent new SGR numbers, e.g.

Control Purpose
------------ -------
CSI 2 0 0 m normal (undoes any CSI 1 x x m)
CSI 2 0 1 m emphasise
CSI 2 0 2 m de-emphasise
CSI 2 0 3 m error
CSI 2 0 4 m warning
CSI 2 0 5 m caution
CSI 2 0 6 m notice
⋮

Then the user can configure those as they please with any combination of foreground, background, weight, slant, etc.

I'm now thinking about writing up pros and cons of alternatives.
by BigTTYGothGF | 2026-02-18 21:29:41+00:00
"If N = 300, even a 256-bit seed arbitrarily precludes all but an unknown, haphazardly selected, non-random, and infinitesimally small fraction of permissible assignments. This introduces enormous bias into the assignment process and makes total nonsense of the p-value computed by a randomization test."

The first sentence is obviously true, but I'm going to need to see some evidence for "enormous bias" and "total nonsense". Let's leave aside lousy/little/badly-seeded PRNGs. Are there any non-cryptographic examples in which a well-designed PRNG with 256 bits of well-seeded random state produces results different enough from a TRNG to be visible to a user?
by legitster | 2026-02-18 21:30:11+00:00
Even the crotchetiest and most out-of-touch people I know basically accept that the Earth is warming now. They just either disagree on the cause or proportion.

Some people just naturally resist hyperbole or sensationalist rhetoric, and I find it very helpful to reframe the argument from doom and gloom and fire and brimstone to something more realistic and grounded:

"The longer we put off doing something, the harder and more expensive it will be in the future. In a Pascal's Wager sort of way, many of the changes we are talking about don't even really cost us anything, and the potential that C02 is not a real culprit is more than made up by danger that it is. Making changes now is the prudent and financially sound decision."

In a large part, this is what the brief ESG trend on the stock market was briefly about before it got co-opted by a dozen different competing messages.
by elxr | 2026-02-18 21:30:11+00:00
> F12 Press → arecord (ALSA) → temp.wav → faster-whisper → xclip + xdotool

Okay starting point, but that last two only works on X11. Considering it's 2026, I really don't think a guide for someone wanting to make a speech-to-text app should be recommending X11.
by pawelduda | 2026-02-18 21:30:21+00:00
About the article that's referenced in the beginning - that sentiment presented in it honestly sounds like AI version of cryptocurrency euphoria just as the bubble burst. "You are not ready for what's going to happen to the economy", "crypto will replace tradfi, experts agree". The article is sitting at almost 100M views after just a week and has strong FOMO vibes. To be honest, it's very conflicting for me to believe that, because I've been using AI and compared to crypto, it doesn't just feel like magic, it also does magic. However, I can't help but think of this parallel and the possibilty that somehow the AI bubble could right now be starting to stall/regress. The only problem is that I just don't see how such a scenario would play out, given how good and useful these tools are
by R4FKEN | 2026-02-18 21:30:21+00:00
Chrome extensions are like the gateway drug for indie makers. Low overhead, quick to launch, and you can test ideas fast. Plus, if it flops, you only wasted a few weekends.

The Chrome Goldmine gives you over 9,600 validated, expired Chrome Extensions, each with a userbase that's waiting for a replacement... Which one will you rebuild?
by vannevar | 2026-02-18 21:30:32+00:00
To some extent, yes. Government in particular. Both of them "close the loop" in the sense that they are self-sustaining (corporations through revenue, governments through taxes). Some institutions can be self-sustaining, but many lack strong independent feedback loops. Legal systems are pretty much all dependent on a parent government, or very large corporate entities (think big multi-year contracts).
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-18 21:30:48+00:00
> There's a missing part here, and that's validating your ACME account ownership.

Why? ACME accounts have credentials so that the ACME client can authenticate against the certificate issuer, and ACME providers require the placement of a DNS record or a .well-known HTTP endpoint to verify that the account is authorized to act upon the demands of whoever owns the domain.

If either your ACME credentials leak out or, even worse, someone manages to place DNS records or hijack your .well-known endpoint, you got far bigger problems at hand than someone being able to mis-issue SSL certificates under your domain name.
by gigel82 | 2026-02-18 21:30:49+00:00
I'm not an expert in this area, but I thought blockchain and things like zk-SNARKs solved this.

I agree that if remote device attestation comes bundled in, it's worse overall.

But are we just SOL then? How long before Cloudflare integrates, and then ISPs? What is left of the internet? Are we all going to run pirate LoRa nodes and other such things to get some free (as in freedom) internet?
by iberator | 2026-02-18 21:30:55+00:00
Lost my job as a developer some time ago.
Unemployment, homelessness and depression...
I got laid a few days ago from McDonalds as I'm too old (40) and too slow to compete with youngsters :(

FLIPPING BURGERS IS SUPER HARD. (unless you have amazing precision, speed and memory and can work under literal heat and noise).

Can't compete with AI, and can't compete with youngsters :(

Learn some alternative trade before you're gonna end up like me :(
by JoshTriplett | 2026-02-18 21:31:55+00:00
> But then HN would still riot, because you would need to require all apps to be approved by a central authority (no unauthorized browsers) OR you need to lock down browser engines to those that respect the list somehow (maybe by killing JIT, limiting network connections).

The owner of a device could prevent the installation of third-party apps or app stores. That does not require having central approval.
by chasil | 2026-02-18 21:32:05+00:00
Reposting a previous comment...

What is generally not understood is that our current icehouse phase is rare.

'A "greenhouse Earth" is a period during which no continental glaciers exist anywhere on the planet... Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history.

'Earth is now in an icehouse state, and ice sheets are present in both poles simultaneously... Earth's current icehouse state is known as the Quaternary Ice Age and began approximately 2.58 million years ago.'

Modern humans have existed for 60k years, all of which have been in this current icehouse.

To cast a different shade on the meaning, this climate period is rare, easily disturbed, and difficult to restore even with vastly more powerful technology.
The more common greenhouse state is unlikely to lead to a Venus runaway, but it will be hostile to us.

We might very well require the rare climate, and perish in the common.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_and_icehouse_Earthh...
by ortusdux | 2026-02-18 21:32:15+00:00
There was a great study from a decade ago that showed that baseball cards held by lighter skinned hands outsold cards held by darker skinned individuals on eBay.

An algorithm designed today with the goal of helping users pick the most profitable product photo would probably steer people towards using caucasian models, and because eBay's cut is a percentage, they would be incentivized to use it.

Studies show that conservatives tend to respond more positively to sponsored content. If this is true, algorithm-driven ad-sponsored social sites will tend towards conservative content.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1756-2171.12...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00913367.2024.2...
by mech422 | 2026-02-18 21:32:49+00:00
I must be missing something ... Why broadcast speech over AM in an 'unmanned' tunnel ?? who's gonna hear/receive it ?? I wish the repo had some sort of use case summary or something...

Edit: I'm also sorta puzzled by the choice of AM in any sort of 'alert' context...Do people still listen to/use AM radios?
by harveynick | 2026-02-18 21:32:52+00:00
I didn’t create this, but on the surface it looks like a reasonable median between “Superpowers”[1] and “Gas Town”[2]. Posting as I don’t see any discussion on it here yet.

[1] https://github.com/obra/superpowers
[2] https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown
by bell-cot | 2026-02-18 21:33:32+00:00
The first few para's of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN are a better summary of the issue.

tl;dr; - The ISBN is intended to be a physical Part Number, within the book business. Where "hardcover, or paperback, or trade paperback, or large print, or revised edition, or ..." very much matters.