MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wang_li | 2026-02-19 16:42:08+00:00
A couple of the stories where I feel I have expertise I found to be a bit objectionable. The title/headline was some clever or unexpected thing, but upon reading it turns out there is nothing supporting the headline.

E.g. "Integer Comparison is not Deterministic", in the C standard you can't do math on pointers from different allocations. The result in the article is obvious if you know that.

Also, in the Logistic Map in 8-Bit. There is a statement

> While implementing Algorithm 1 in modern systems is trivial, doing so in earlier computers and languages was not so straightforward.

Microsoft BASIC did floating point. Every 8-bit of the era was able to do this calculation easily. I did it on my Franklin ACE 1000 in 1988 in basic while reading the book Chaos.

I suppose what I'm saying is the premise of the articles seem to be click-baity and I find that off putting.
by furyofantares | 2026-02-19 16:42:10+00:00
I love everything about coding. I love architecting a system, and I love tending all the little details. I love to look at the system as a whole or a block of code in isolation and find nothing I want to change, and take pride in all of it. I also love making products.

LLM-agents have made making products, especially small ones, a lot easier, but sacrifice much of the crafting of details and, if the project is small enough, the architecture. I've certainly enjoyed using them a lot over the last year and a half, but I've come to really miss fully wrapping my head around a problem, having intimate knowledge of the details of the system, and taking pride in every little detail.
by mustaphah | 2026-02-19 16:42:34+00:00
Google is terrible at marketing, but this feels like a big step forward.

As per the announcement, Gemini 3.1 Pro score 68.5% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, which makes it the top performer on the Terminus 2 harness [1]. That harness is a "neutral agent scaffold," built by researchers at Terminal-Bench to compare different LLMs in the same standardized setup (same tools, prompts, etc.).

It's also taken top model place on both the Intelligence Index & Coding Index of Artificial Analysis [2], but on their Agentic Index, it's still lagging behind Opus 4.6, GLM-5, Sonnet 4.6, and GPT-5.2.

---

[1] https://www.tbench.ai/leaderboard/terminal-bench/2.0?agents=...

[2] https://artificialanalysis.ai
by bediger4000 | 2026-02-19 16:42:42+00:00
When conservatives were busy freaking out about the slogan "defund the police", I thought a little bit about that slogan. Every interaction I, a white middle class Midwestern, have had with police has been either to my detriment (traffic tickets mostly) or had zero good effects. I've had bicycles and even a car stolen. The first thing out of the cop's mouth was "you're never going to see that again". What benefit do police (as an institution) supply? Witnessing traffic accidents so insurance companies can decide who pays seems to be the big one.
by zooi | 2026-02-19 16:43:00+00:00
I used to share this sentiment but the more I used AI for programming, the less I enjoyed it. Even writing "boring" code (like tests or summaries) by hand increased my understanding of what I wrote and how it integrates into the rest of the codebase, which I think is fun.

Letting a robot write code for me, however tedious it would be to write manually, made me feel like I was working in someone else's codebase. It reminds me of launching a videogame and letting someone else play through the boring parts. I might as well not be playing. Why bother at all?

I understand this behaviour if you're working for a company on some miserable product, but not for personal projects.
by gus_massa | 2026-02-19 16:43:18+00:00
> We therefore conclude that theoretically motivated experiment choice is potentially damaging for science, but in a way that will not be apparent to the scientists themselves.

They are analyzing a toy model of science. The details and in figure 1. They have a search space that has a few Gaussians like

f(x,y,z) = A0 * expt(-(x-x0)^2-(y-y0)^2-(z-z0)^2) + A1 * expt(-(x-x1)^2-(y-y1)^2-(z-z1)^2)

but maybe in more than 3 dimensions and maybe with more than 2 Gaussians.

They want the agents to find all of Gaussians.

It's somewhat similar to a maximization problem that is easier. There are many strategies for this, from gradient ascent to random sampling to a million more of variants. I like simulated annealing.

They claim that the best method is random sampling, that only work when the search space is small. But it breaks quite fast for high dimensional problems, unless the Gaussians are so big that cover most of the space, and perhaps I'm beeing too optimistic. Add noise, overlapping Gaussians and the problem gets super hard.

Let's get to a realistic example, all the molecules with 6 Carbons and 12 Hydrogens. Let's try to find all of them and their stables 3D configuration. This is chemistry from the first year in the university, perhaps earlier, no cutting edge science.

You have 18 atoms, so 18 * 3 = 54 dimensions, and the surface of -energy has a lot of mountains ranges and nasty stuff. Most of them very sharp. Let's try to find the local points of maximal -energy, that is much easier than the full map. These are the stable molecules, that (usually) have names.

* There is a cycle one with 6 Carbons, where each Carbon has 2 Hydrogens, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclohexane Note that it actually has two different 3D variants.

* There is one with a cycle of 5 Carbons and 1 carbon attached to the cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylcyclopentane

* There are variants with shorter cycles, but I'm not sure how stable they are and Wikipedia has no page for them.

* There is also 3 linear versions, where the 6 Carbons are a s wavy line, and there is a double bound in one of the steps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Hexene I'm not sure why the other two version have no page in Wikipedia, I think they should be stable, but sometimes it's not a local maximum or the local maximum is to shallow and the double bound jump and the Hydrogen reorganize.

* And there may be other nasty stuff, take a look at the complete list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C6H12.

And don't try to make the complete list when of molecules that includes a few Nitrogen, because the number of molecules explodes exponentially.

So this random sampling method they propose, does not even work for an elementary Chemistry problem.
by bryanlarsen | 2026-02-19 16:43:23+00:00
You can do a thought experiment. A nuclear plant and a coal generator are very similar. They heat water to turn turbines to generate electricity. So best case scenario a nuclear plant costs the same as a coal plant, and has negligible operating costs in comparison.

A coal plant costs $5B/GW to build, vs the > $20B/GW a nuclear plant costs.

Those massive turbines are really expensive.

OTOH solar + batteries is well under $1B / GW.
by ch4s3 | 2026-02-19 16:43:27+00:00
You are advocating precisely nothing. You're criticizing a policy that is helping the poorest children learn to read which unlocks ever subsequent learning opportunity. There is no substitute for in person reading instruction. Your criticism is useless and misplaced. Again, Alabama has had 1 measles case in nearly a quarter century, while they have had a real problem teaching poor kids to read due to absenteeism.

Honestly you take is disastrously stupid. It's this sort of illness safety maximalism that lead to COVID learning loss to begin with.
by spwa4 | 2026-02-19 16:43:31+00:00
In other words: they just need to motivate their employees while giving in to finance's demands to fire a few thousand every month or so ...

And don't forget, it's not just direct motivation. You can make yourself indispensable by sabotaging or at least not contributing to your colleagues' efforts. Not helping anyone, by the way, is exactly what your managers want you to do. They will decide what happens, thank you very much, and doing anything outside of your org ... well there's a name for that, isn't there? Betrayal, or perhaps death penalty.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-19 16:43:32+00:00
Additional citations:

GOP angst over voter turnout builds as losses pile up - https://www.axios.com/2026/02/19/republican-angst-voter-turn... | https://archive.today/a9C1h - February 19th, 2026

GOP's new fear: Losing the Senate in November - https://www.axios.com/2026/02/06/gop-senate-midterms-2026 | https://archive.today/2iGNf - February 6th, 2026
by rglullis | 2026-02-19 16:43:44+00:00
> What law is actually being broken in Brazil?

"Tie-in sale": the business practice where a seller conditions the sale of one product (the tying good) on the buyer’s agreement to purchase a different product (the tied good).

The examples you are giving are not "tie-in" sales because the service from Playstation Plus, Spotify, Apple Music, etc is the distribution of digital goods.

> Unless I am mistaken Claude Code does not have a local model built into it, so it requires a server side component to work?

Which part are you not understanding?

I don't care about Claude Code. I do not want it and do not need it. All I care about is the access to the models through the client that I was already using!

> When it comes to “Claude Code” for all that we should care about, again given that “Claude Code” is what you are paying for.

No, it is not! I paid for Claude Pro. Claude != Claude Code.
by nickandbro | 2026-02-19 16:43:49+00:00
Does well on SVGs outside of "pelican riding on a bicycle" test. Like this prompt:

"create a svg of a unicorn playing xbox"

https://www.svgviewer.dev/s/NeKACuHj

Still some tweaks to the final result, but I am guessing with the ARC-AGI benchmark jumping so much, the model's visual abilities are allowing it to do this well.
by dxbednarczyk | 2026-02-19 16:44:01+00:00
Every time I've used Gemini models for anything besides code or agentic work they lean so far into the RLHF induced bold lettering and bullet point list barf that everything they output reads as if the model was talking _at_ me and not _with_ me. In my Openclaw experiment(s) and in the Gemini web UI, I've specifically added instructions to avoid this type of behavior, but it only seemed to obey those rules when I reminded the model of them.

For conversational contexts, I don't think the (in some cases significantly) better benchmark results compared to a model like Sonnet 4.6 can convince me to switch to Gemini 3.1. Has anyone else had a similar experience, or is this just a me issue?
by throwawayq3423 | 2026-02-19 16:44:15+00:00
> See... this is kinda how I know you have a political axe to grind.

> Allow me a quick rewrite of your breathless response in a more reasonable language.

The fact that you won't just reply point by point and want to spin up a self-important narrative tells me everything I need to know about this interaction.

> Was he targeted? Was he targeted willfully? Was he target ted willfully, while administration knew he was an American citizen? When did they know it? Did they stop their plans once they did?

I was pointing out how Trump is targeting and killing US citizens in America for peacefully protesting and your "both both sides do it!" attempt was a U.S. citizen literally fighting against the U.S. in a warzone.

>If so, ICE shooting a mother of two ( who was clearly not watching those two kids m ind you ) is just an expansion of powers Obama gave himself. Thanks Obama!

ICE had a specific mandate under Obama (and every other President) to go after only criminals. Trump perverted this mandate to form a militarized police force to attack democratic cities, killing protesters with no accountability.

We get it. You are above all this. You are too smart to think that either party is better than the other.

We get it. You can stop now.
by mrwh | 2026-02-19 16:44:37+00:00
Not to be that curmudgeon (who am I kidding), but it's made reviewing code very much less enjoyable, and I review more changes than I write. Engineers merrily sending fixes they barely understand (or, worse, don't think they need to understand) for the rest of us to handle, and somehow lines-of-code has become a positive metric again. How convenient!
by jsheard | 2026-02-19 16:45:16+00:00
It doesn't, and I wouldn't hold my breath for such a small company being able to navigate compliance for contactless payments. The Pebble does use standard watch straps though, so you could get one of the ones with a programmable payment chip embedded inside.

If that's all you use your smartwatch for, you may as well skip the watch and get an NFC bracelet or ring though. Those also exist.

e.g. https://www.curve.com/wearables/
by skerit | 2026-02-19 16:45:22+00:00
I'm glad someone else is finally saying this, I've been mentioning this left and right and sometimes I feel like I'm going crazy that not more people are noticing it.

Gemini can go off the rails SUPER easily. It just devolves into a gigantic mess at the smallest sign of trouble.

For the past few weeks, I've also been using XML-like tags in my prompts more often. Sometimes preferring to share previous conversations with `<user>` and `<assistant>` tags. Opus/Sonnet handles this just fine, but Gemini has a mental breakdown. It'll just start talking to itself.

Even in totally out-of-the-ordinary sessions, it goes crazy. After a while, it'll start saying it's going to do something, and then it pretends like it's done that thing, all in the same turn. A turn that never ends. Eventually it just starts spouting repetitive nonsense.

And you would think this is just because the bigger the context grows, the worse models tend to get. But no! This can happen well below even the 200.000 token mark.
by worthless-trash | 2026-02-19 16:45:40+00:00
I believe google issues legitimate dmca takedowns for copyright strikes, even when there is no infringement. They put the work to defend the strike on the apparent commiter, often with little to no detail.

While the false takedown may be rare. Using dmca as a mechanism to inflict pain where no copyright infringement has taken place is indeed common enough that it happens to small time youtubers like myself and others I have talked to.
by PlatoIsADisease | 2026-02-19 16:45:40+00:00
I worry Colonialism will come back again. Or at least in a different form.

Most International Relations practitioners are followers of (Systems) Realism. You might find some minor power with Idealists/Instituitonalists, but they only get that privilege by being under the umbrella of a great power.

Colonialism was not some greedy merchant/state thing, it was an Arms Race. It follows the inevitable forces produced by anarchy, there are no police to call so power is the greatest form of security. It causes a Tragedy of the Commons situation in the form of an Arms Race.

After Colonialism, we had essentially client states, which seems similarly brutal.
Show HN: FreeLLMRouter – Live ranked list of OpenRouter free models
by jacobchak | 2026-02-19 16:45:58+00:00
OpenRouter free models flake out often. Built this for reliable demo fallbacks. I use it for my MVPs and POCs' demo.

- Live model list + reliability rankings (community feedback)

- Filter by use case/health/exclusions via web UI

- await getModelIds() -> dynamic rotation

- GitHub (self-host): https://github.com/kaihochak/free-llm-router

- Hosted (200/day): http://freellmrouter.com

Feedback welcome!
by perrygeo | 2026-02-19 16:46:21+00:00
> explore new approaches and connect ideas faster

This is the hidden super power of LLM - prototyping without attachment to the outcome.

Ten years ago, if you wanted to explore a major architectural decision, you would be bogged down for weeks in meetings convincing others, then a few more weeks making it happen. Then if it didn't work out, it feels like failure and everyone gets frustrated.

Now it's assumed you can make it work fast - so do it four different ways and test it empirically. LLMs bring us closer to doing actual science, so we can do away with all the voodoo agile rituals and high emotional attachment that used to dominate the decision process.
by pipes | 2026-02-19 16:46:24+00:00
The snes to N64 jump to me is definitely the biggest. It wasn't just graphics, the gameplay completely changed too.
By the end of the snes era I had grown out of games due to endless platforms and 2d fighters (I was 13ish). I was 16 by time I started playing them again. Wave race 64 was just mind blowing. And like nothing else I'd played before.
by baby_souffle | 2026-02-19 16:46:25+00:00
> Would that include free use LLMs.

I can't comment on the self-hosted models but if they support tool calling / MCP then it should work. How well may be a function of model size/arch/quant ... etc though.

> I feel like the tendency for people to assume others have nearly $500 or so of credits on their AI to blow every month is kinda crazy.

My use is hobby level so $20/mo chatGPT sub is enough. I do hit my 5hr limits on a regular-ish interval but that's usually a sign that I need to step away from the work anyways.
by Kirby64 | 2026-02-19 16:46:37+00:00
> BMW Personal Pilot, Merc Drive Pilot, and Honda Sensing Elite are Level 3 automation tech you can buy right now. Tesla is still at level 2!!

You need to put about 10 asterisks on those. MB Drive Pilot has been discontinued due to "low demand and high cost", and those other 2 systems appear to have substantial restrictions. Meanwhile, FSD today "works" on pretty much any road or highway. I can easily see certain folks see that as far ahead of competitors, since it physically can do more in more places and operate in more conditions.
by bm3719 | 2026-02-19 16:46:55+00:00
I do the same here using Emacs, org-mode, org-agenda, and some light elisp. Home maintenance tasks are then combined with my work/personal planner. I lean on it very heavily, and things would start falling apart pretty quick without that. This is the best way I've found: outsourcing timers and reminders to the editor you're already in all day anyway.

Not sure how the average homeowner keeps track of such things, but I guess that's why a lot of houses are a mess (including mine when I bought it). Perhaps they just operate reactively: Something breaks, pay someone to fix.
by plagiat0r | 2026-02-19 16:47:05+00:00
Thank you, this draft is literally perfect and I wish we had this years ago. Most people don't know about acmev2 account rekeying either. It is great you decided to use account uri instead of public key thumbprint.

Recently I wrote a simple acmev2 tool specifically for manual upfront acmev2 account creation, rekeying and getting TXT records on stout for dns-persist-01:

https://github.com/pawlakus/acmecli

It also helps with stateless http01 printing thumbprint...
by kevstev | 2026-02-19 16:47:28+00:00
Personally I am already there- I go to Qwen and Deepseek locally via ollama for my dumb questions and small tasks, and only go to Claude if they fail. I do this partially because I am just so tired of everything I do over a network being logged, tracked, mined and monetized, and also partially because I would like my end state to be using all local tools, at least for personal stuff.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-19 16:47:44+00:00
99 year leases make complete sense. Much of the value of a 'house' in an urban area like Singapore is actually in the land, and the value is being created by the community on a day-to-day basis. It makes no sense for that value to be captured for all future time by a single owner, that just encourages pointless speculation and makes it harder to allocate real estate towards its highest and most valuable use.
Sharing internal AI adoption/spend stats from Sentry
by jshchnz | 2026-02-19 16:47:44+00:00
In the last 90 days:

- Sentry has spent $100k+ & used 100B+ tokens

- Top model was Opus-4.5 with 40%+ of overall usage

- Our single largest spender used 4.2B tokens

- ~150 average weekly active agentic coding tool users

- Total # of commits to repos are up 79%

302/372 full time employees = ~81% (not just eng) have tried an agentic coding tool (Cursor/Claude Code/Cowork/Codex)
by whiplash451 | 2026-02-19 16:47:54+00:00
I don't think we'll get ads in the enterprise version. There will be ads for individuals and usual business pricing for businesses.

I just think that OAI/Anthropic will try to keep both types of users locked into their walled garden via the UI.

The APIs may have a future, but at our own peril and zero guarantees. It's a tool to create traction and demonstrate capabilities to devs.
by philwelch | 2026-02-19 16:48:12+00:00
> The primary purpose of CPF is not a pension scheme. It is structured as a massive forced bond purchase scheme by citizens. Financially what happens is the 37% of citizen income buys a long term bond (till retirement age, on average decades) at rock bottom interest rates (it's pegged to the overnight rate or a minimum of 2.6%).

Social Security is effectively the same thing. Payroll taxes are collected and placed in the social security trust fund, which invests them in federal bonds.
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-19 16:48:31+00:00
ISBN reuse is a quite large problem for some especially small publishers. The intended use of an ISBN is a product code for a retail point of service. If the book prices were expected to be basically the same, reusing the same ISBN for an entire shelf of books was sometimes fine if the retailers didn't mind the inventory management problem of knowing which specific book titles were left. For "pulp paperbacks" intended for a spindle at a grocery store they probably didn't care to manage the inventory by exact title, they managed it by the spindle-full.
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2026-02-19 16:48:39+00:00
Agreed.

> You lock the system into a permanent political funding battle

Which is the way that things are tending to evolve into in much of Europe because after decades of touting and mandating "private-public partnerships" and mandatory "open-market" policies, now communes and cities find it difficult or impossible to maintain their municipality-based and owned utilities, including gas, water, electricity and public transportation, because they get basically forced to sell to the lowest bidder. In electricity, that's frequently simply the biggest and baddest competitor like Vattenfall or RWE, replacing century-old locally-owned operators that have had very good track records across two world wars and generations of consumers, operators that never had ANY need of being replaced, except for neo-liberal demagogues and improved opportunities of syphoning off profits from the public into already rich private pockets. It's just stealing made legal.
by FireBeyond | 2026-02-19 16:48:42+00:00
Hah. Yes. Couple of drops of water on an an MBA... laptop worked fine. Battery, fine. Healthy. Charging circuit would not work. Perfectly functioning laptop on AC, but unable to be on battery because 0% charge.

Me, at Genius Bar, expecting you know, maybe $300 with parts and labor?

"Here's a quote, sir, we're looking at $850+tax, perhaps we should talk about getting you into a new Mac today?"

No. The laptop was primarily connected to AC anyway and only 18 months old, if that. Sorry, Apple.
by takoid | 2026-02-19 16:48:45+00:00
Shared this in the other Gemini Pro 3.1 thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47074735) but wanted to share it here as well.

I just tested the "generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" prompt and this is what I got: https://codepen.io/takoid/pen/wBWLOKj

The model thought for over 5 minutes to produce this. It's not quite photorealistic (some parts are definitely "off"), but this is definitely a significant leap in complexity.
by decafninja | 2026-02-19 16:48:50+00:00
As some other posters have said, it’s the “accessories” that often give you a clue. Clothes, makeup, hairstyle, etc.

Also, Asians in their native countries are more distinctive vs. say, fully “Americanized” Asian Americans who I feel are a separate category that is more homogenous with each other than their country or ethnicity.

Another point I’ve observed more recently is that Korea and some parts of the Sinosphere are converging in aesthetics. Japan still seems to be doing its own thing. Though culturally I’d say Japan and Korea nonetheless share the most similarities.