MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amiga386 | 2026-02-08 12:03:47+00:00
It's a fumbled metaphor, mixing absolute and relative numbers, and I think it's supposed to say "pull out nine blue fish".

The point the article is making is that the "reporter" turned up and alledged to have found nine cases of daycare fraud. Nine sounds like a lot, right? But the article claims the state already knew 50% of the daycares claiming its aid were frauds (this is quite debatable, don't take it as fact). Presumably that's 50% of hundreds or maybe thousands of daycares.

If blue fish were much rarer in the pond, i.e. lower percentage of daycares defrauding the government, you'd be considered a savant for fishing once and pulling out nine blue fish... but if the pond has thousands of fish and 50% are blue, it looks a lot less impressive.
by ctcq | 2026-02-08 12:04:00+00:00
> I use it daily as a knowledge accumulator, research assistant, and autonomous task runner for my side projects. The memory compounds — every session makes the next one better.

Can you explain how that works? The `MEMORY.md` is able to persists session history. But it seems that it's necessary for the user to add to that file manually.

An automated way to achieve this would be awesome.
by outime | 2026-02-08 12:04:56+00:00
> 90% is a lot. Will you care about the last 10%? I'm terrified that you won't.

I feel like long before LLMs, people already didn't care about this.

If anything software quality has been decreasing significantly, even at the "highest level" (see Windows, macOS, etc). Are LLMs going to make it worse? I'm skeptical, because they might actually accelerate shipping bug fixes that (pre-LLMs) would have required more time and management buy-in, only to be met with "yeah don’t bother, look at the usage stats, nobody cares".
by KronisLV | 2026-02-08 12:05:17+00:00
> Didn’t realize this was science fiction.

Compared to my salary, the current cost of the models and tokens to do the work I normally would, is around 10%-25% of it.

Obviously, you still need someone to prevent the models from going insane and messing everything up, but in my experience (webdev projects, DevOps stuff, local software, well known domains), it is very much a force multiplier, as long as you acknowledge that you really need tests and various prebuild scripts.

So I predict one of two things happening:

A) de-valuation of software development work in well-explored domains (and perhaps some changes in regards to outsourcing, as long as cultural and communication differences can be compensated for); with the implications for those learning programming now
B) the squeeze coming in the other direction, making inference 3-5x more expensive, though maybe not with how every big org out there is trying to be a loss leader

Either way, it's an interesting direction - instead of ever becoming "proper" engineering (outside of RFCs and foundational stuff), we went from React/Vue/Angular/Svelte/Express.js/Laravel/Django/Rails/ASP.NET/Spring wild west and frameworks of the day (never being able to nail down what "good practices" are and stick to them for decades, but chasing the new thing forevermore), to even closer to producing non-deterministic slop, except that the slop kinda sorta works. Wild times.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-08 12:06:20+00:00
Alpha Centauri is a triple star, even if it is not the kind of three body system depicted in that story (mainly because one of the 3 stars is much smaller than the other 2, so it orbits stably around them like a very big and distant planet).

While the triple star Alpha Centauri does not have mass ratios between its stars that are compatible with the story plot, I think that ignoring this technical detail is a much less serious plot hole than those of the majority of the non-fantastic Hollywood movies, which are supposed to happen in the real world, but they still contain a lot of impossible actions.
by ushakov | 2026-02-08 12:08:32+00:00
very cool, if you want cross-platform microvms, there's an interesting project called libkrun that powers projects like Podman and Colima.

here's a Go binding:
https://github.com/mishushakov/libkrun-go

demo (on Mac):
https://x.com/mishushakov/status/2020236380572643720
by conartist6 | 2026-02-08 12:09:46+00:00
It's funny, but I think the accidental complexity is through the roof. It's skyrocketing.

Nothing about cajoling a model to write what you want it to is essential complexity in software dev.

In addition when you do a lot of building with no theory you tend you make lots and lots of new non-essential complexity.

Devtools are no exception. There was already lots of nonessential complexity in them and in the model era is that gone? ...no don't worry it's all still there. We built all the shiny new layers right on top of all the old decaying layers, like putting lipstick on a pig.
by asim | 2026-02-08 12:09:57+00:00
I wouldn't call it the new high level language. It's a new JIT. But that's not doing it justice. There's a translation of natural language to a tokenizer and processor that's akin to the earliest days of CPUs. It's a huge step change from punch cards. But there's also a lot to learn. I think we will eventually develop a new language that's more efficient for processing or multiple layers of transformers. Tbh Google is leapfrogging everyone in this arena and eventually we're going to more exotic forms of modelling we've never seen before except in nature. But from an engineering perspective all I can see right now is a JIT.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-08 12:10:44+00:00
No, then it still wouldn't work. Not until you use that other thing to get you to a planet where gravity is low enough that a dragon would be able to take off. The whole power-to-weight and wing-surface-area-to-weight ratio simply does not work. It (barely) works for bats though some of them can be of impressive size. The idea that something the size of a dragon can fly with that size wings on Terra is something that I do not believe is supported (hah!) by physics.
by nandomrumber | 2026-02-08 12:11:27+00:00
Energy retailers in Australia are literally just a billing interface and a poor excuse for a call centre.

They’re not really adding value in the same way a farm & associated agribusiness > harvest > global storage and distribution > mill > commercial scale bakery > distribution > retail outlet does.

This reminds me of an amusing comment I read or heard the other day: eggs are now more expensive than chickens. Somethings not right there. And it’s mostly higher costs of energy, and extremely stupid egg production regulations.
by nkmnz | 2026-02-08 12:13:11+00:00
Turkey ranks as “not free”, both in term of civil liberties and internet freedom.[0]

As a result, the most important question for me is: (how) will you protect your customers when they exercise their basic human rights or will you be a pro-active collaborator with the authoritarian regime?

Please don’t take this question personally - I admire everyone who has the guts to build a business and I wish you all the success! But a hosting provider is very much different from opening up a restaurant - it comes with a lot of power and ethical responsibilities.

[0] https://freedomhouse.org/country/turkey
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-08 12:14:23+00:00
> but normies just want stuff to "work."

Where in the world are you getting that this project is for "normies"? Installation steps are terminal instructions and it's a CLI, clearly meant for technical people already.

If you think copying-pasting an API key is too much, don't you think cloning a git repository, installing the Rust compiler and compiling the project might be too much and hit those normies in the face sooner than the API key?
Show HN: Curated list of 1000 open source alternatives to proprietary software
by ZenithSoftware | 2026-02-08 12:14:44+00:00
Hey people! I have been compiling a database of opensource alternatives and I'm super proud of it so far. It serves as a searchable directory for high-quality opensource. After tons of hours I've managed to compile a database of 1000+ opensource software.

I've seen other sites which have the same premise and all the GitHub Awesome Lists, but they lack in showing if the repo is active, abandoned, experimental, buggy/unstable, has a restrictive license or corporate influence like this does.

Thanks for your time, if you have any recommendations for features/additions I'd love to hear.
From Prediction to Compilation: A Manifesto for Intrinsically Reliable AI
by JanusPater | 2026-02-08 12:16:44+00:00
从预测到编译：本质可靠 AI 的公理化宣言
From Prediction to Compilation: An Axiomatic Manifesto for Intrinsically Reliable AI
________________________________________
定义｜Definitions
定义 1（预测系统）
Definition 1 (Predictive System)
以概率方式输出未来状态或动作分布的系统。
A system that outputs future states or actions in probabilistic form.
定义 2（执行系统）
Definition 2 (Executable System)
其输出将直接驱动物理世界状态变化的系统。
A system whose outputs directly cause physical state changes.
定义 3（执行合法性）
Definition 3 (Execution Legitimacy)
一个输出在物理上存在唯一、确定、可验证执行路径的性质。
The property that an output admits a unique, deterministic, and verifiable physical execution path.
________________________________________
核心命题｜Core Proposition
命题 1
Proposition 1
任何缺乏执行合法性的系统，不得被视为可靠的执行系统。
Any system lacking execution legitimacy cannot be considered a reliable executable system.
________________________________________
公理体系｜Axiom System
公理一：非臆想公理
Axiom I: Non-Hallucination Axiom
系统的任何输出，若不存在唯一的物理执行映射，则该输出在执行层面是非法的。
Any system output that lacks a unique physical execution mapping is illegal at the execution level.
________________________________________
公理二：预测–执行分离公理
Axiom II: Prediction–Execution Separation Axiom
概率系统仅允许生成目标、约束与假设，不得直接生成可执行动作。
Probabilistic systems may generate goals, constraints, and hypotheses, but must not generate executable actions directly.
________________________________________
公理三：编译优先公理
Axiom III: Compilation Primacy Axiom
所有可执行动作，必须由确定性物理模型与约束条件编译生成。
All executable actions must be compiled from deterministic physical models and constraints.
________________________________________
公理四：拒绝合法性公理
Axiom IV: Refusal Legitimacy Axiom
在约束冲突或无可行解时，系统拒绝执行构成合法且必要的输出。
When constraints conflict or no feasible solution exists, refusal to act is a valid and necessary output.
________________________________________
公理五：能效合理性公理
Axiom V: Energy Rationality Axiom
在确定性问题中使用概率搜索构成不必要的能量与算力浪费。
Using probabilistic search to solve deterministic problems constitutes unnecessary energy and computational waste.
________________________________________
推论｜Corollaries
推论 1
Corollary 1
生成式模型在未经编译层约束的情况下，不能直接接管物理执行权。
Generative models must not assume physical execution authority without a compilation layer.
推论 2
Corollary 2
世界模型适用于认知与规划层，但不构成执行充分条件。
World models are sufficient for cognition and planning, but not for execution.
推论 3
Corollary 3
模型预测控制（MPC）及其等价方法在执行层中具有结构上的必然性。
Model Predictive Control (MPC) and equivalent methods are structurally necessary at the execution layer.
________________________________________
结论｜Conclusion
结论
Conclusion
AI 系统若要在高风险、不可逆的现实环境中运行，
其核心能力不应被定义为预测准确性，
而应被定义为执行合法性。
An AI system intended to operate in high-risk and irreversible environments
must be evaluated not by predictive accuracy,
but by execution legitimacy.
从预测到编译，不是实现路线之争，
而是可靠智能的必要条件。
From prediction to compilation is not an implementation preference,
but a necessary condition for reliable intelligence.
by torlok | 2026-02-08 12:16:55+00:00
The convenience of having regular generics and dyn generics handled automatically is a great feature of Rust, sure, however you can write a template in C++ that directly calls a method, f.e. obj.Object::method(), which skips the vtable, achieving the same thing. Or you can keep manually writing everything in C because you refuse to learn C++.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-08 12:17:06+00:00
The weird thing about this is that interstellar space ought to actually be very hospitable to cold, highly efficient computational substrates. (This is for standard thermodynamic reasons: reliable computation must be free of noise, and low-temperature means low noise.) So there might be 'life' of a sort in interstellar space that's extremely smart and naturally long-lived compared to humans or even ordinary room-temperature AIs, but just can't do all that much in the outside world (i.e. has very low agency), except very slowly and with exceptional effort.

(Of course, these same constraints apply in a relative sense to the outer regions of planetary systems.)
by grumple | 2026-02-08 12:17:28+00:00
There's a shortage of over 500,000 tradesmen in the US right now, expected to reach a shortage of 2 million by 2030. And if you've ever tried to get somebody out for a repair: it's hard. They are expensive, and the tradesmen are often not good, and often pretty dumb, even about their own field. Add to that the regulatory gatekeeping, where it takes 5 years minimum of working under someone else to be able to work independently in some fields, and the low initial pay and poor treatment causing people to drop out... there's going to be a shortage for a long time. And even if their wasn't - the people in those fields now would be relatively easy to outcompete imo.
by zadnan2002 | 2026-02-08 12:17:57+00:00
Interesting investigation! Claude Code's Xcode integration is impressive, but one workflow friction I've noticed: you're still stuck at your desk waiting for approval prompts.

I've been working on exactly this problem - ForkOff sends push notifications to your phone when Claude needs approval, so you can actually leave your machine while it works. Turns out the async AI + sync approval bottleneck is a common pain point.

Would be interesting to see if Xcode's implementation has any hooks for remote approval workflows. The MCP tools you extracted look promising for that.

Early access: https://forkoff.app
by FrankWilhoit | 2026-02-08 12:20:18+00:00
Category error. No one cares whether the answers are right. What they care about is how they look getting them. Everything is performance and judged as such. "Conclusion: If a system’s failure can injure people, destroy assets, or cause irreversible damage, then...the use of AI makes it impossible to assign blame, and that is all anyone cares about." TIFIFY
by s-macke | 2026-02-08 12:23:39+00:00
There’s a small misunderstanding here. Reverse engineering by annotating a disassembly file is fine. However, the next obvious steps would be to write a sensible, high-level documentation of the internals of the game and then port it to a high-level language.
Indeed, whether this would run on the original hardware might be questionable for such an Atari Game. But have you seen modern C compilers like Oscar64 [0] for such old hardware? Never say never …

[0] https://github.com/drmortalwombat/oscar64
by blaze33 | 2026-02-08 12:24:28+00:00
As much as we speak about slop in the context of AI, slop as the cheap low-quality thing is not a new concept.

As lots of people seem to always prefer the cheaper option, we now have single-use plastic ultra-fast fashion, plastic stuff that'll break in the short term, brittle plywood furniture, cheap ultra-processed food, etc.

Classic software development always felt like a tailor-made job to me and of course it's slow and expensive but if it's done by professionals it can give excellent results. Now if you can get crappy but cheap and good enough results of course it'll be the preferred option for mass production.
by KronisLV | 2026-02-08 12:25:19+00:00
> Code must not be written by humans

This might be okay short term, e.g. when you just want to get something done.

Maybe not on the scale of decades, otherwise we will end up completely unable to code.

> Code must not be reviewed by humans

This is where it all goes to crap. Until the day when the AI agents can look at some output and be like "no, this is overengineering, this can be done way more simply, let's stick to the established patterns within the codebase" and do so consistently, not having oversight will compound failure. I don't mean between every single small change, but rather at least to catch failures before merging anything.

This could only be avoided if you could define a harness with thousands or tens of thousands of tests per codebase, encapsulating EVERYTHING that must and must not be done within the codebase, down to the way how gaps and colors and utility classes are to be used, which I don't see most people doing.

This will take both better models and 3-10 years of work to actually make using them more foolproof and consistent. Even so, context sizes might need to be in the hundreds of thousands of tokens for the average task, all of those human "hunches" and styles and approaches to a given codebase spelled out.

> evaluating success often required LLM-as-judge

This is just advocating for doing what's easy, not proper - this will lead to slop long term. Though maybe they say that's okay, as long as it works.

Most of the time you would want those checks to be more dependable than that, the same way how you wouldn't want your linter to have randomness.

> Tests can be reward hacked - we needed validation that was less vulnerable to the model cheating

Just have adversarial agents, the one that writes the code doesn't touch the tests and vice versa, even though each has all of the context, each is told to care about different things.

Seems like these people are trying to push an envelope, and it might look like it's going to work in some respects, but they're very much taking big risks on what's currently feasible vs not.

> If you haven't spent at least $1,000 on tokens today per human engineer, your software factory has room for improvement

Would be nice not to be broke, though.
by uxcolumbo | 2026-02-08 12:25:56+00:00
I tried to use it yesterday on my iPad. Some kind of element was blocking the menu.

Tried it today on my PC (big screen) - the intro animation is slow - 6-10 FPS and clicking on the menu item to reveal the items is slow as well. I could hear my fan spinning up.

Not everyone uses the latest greatest Mx chipset.

This tells me they haven't done any testing. Basically 'this looks cool' and 'works on my machine'.
by JamesTRexx | 2026-02-08 12:26:04+00:00
I enjoyed LineageOS for years on my Samsung S4 until it finally broke from a fall.
It's a shame there was no image to install on my new Xcover 7, but not unexpected as it was a newly released phone. But I doubt there will be an alternative/stripped Android available for this model as I haven't seen anything supporting a Xcover version anywhere.
Best I can hope for is eventually a support for rooting and de-installing unwanted bloat with an app manager.
by massysett | 2026-02-08 12:29:02+00:00
If I have a blatant disregard for millennia of scriptural knowledge traditions, so did Noah Webster when he compiled a dictionary. So did Carl Linnaeus when he classified species. So did the Human Genome Project. I have a pocket calculator, yet I know how to do long division. I use LLMs to learn and to enhance my work. A dictionary is a shortcut to learning what a word means without consulting an entire written corpus, as the dictionary editors have already done this.

Is my use of a dictionary a blatant disregard for millennia of scriptural knowledge traditions? I don’t think so at all. Rather, it exemplifies how human knowledge advances: we build on the work of our predecessors and contemporaries rather than reinvent the wheel every time. LLM use is an example of this.
by intothemild | 2026-02-08 12:29:49+00:00
No, sorry, but it is unreasonable.. Why should I need an apple device to compile my code for an apple device?

You can build Android apps on an Apple device, no problem. You can build Linux apps on an Apple device, no problem. etc... But the reverse isn't true. Its just more of Apple financially gate keeping their ecosystem so they make more money in as many channels as they possibly can.

Testing on real hardware is the ONLY time I would say that owning, or at least having access to the hardware has real tangible benefits, and I would argue that that you NEED or SHOULD do this.. But to block compiling to that ecosystem? Sorry but I fundamentally disagree.

Blocking compiling, means requiring xcode, which requires a mac, which requires you to give more money to Apple, and is no different IMHO than giving Apple $100 a year, because now you're giving them a lot more of that every X years (where x is how many years that laptop gets updates)
by oefrha | 2026-02-08 12:30:53+00:00
Yesterday I asked a question about a Claude Code setting inside Claude Code, don't recall which, and their builtin documentation skill—something like that—ended up doing a web search and found a wrong answer on a third party site. Later I went to their documentation site and it was right there in the docs. Wonder why they can't bundle an AI-friendly version of their own docs (can't be more than a few hundred KBs compressed?) inside their 174MB executable.
by Lerc | 2026-02-08 12:31:13+00:00
Yes, but many of those complex state of the art thing a comprised of parts that began as ideas like this.

You don't have to have a idea that beats everything in all circumstances. It doesn't even have to be better on even one thing to potentially be useful to others. Reading this article gave me some ideas related to a supplementary autoencoder I had been working with, where encode is ( A + B ) -> Latent, decode is (A+Latent) -> B . Which is essentially the same problem If you consider the A to be the Luma, B to be the Chroma, and the compressed Chroma to be the Latent.

In that respect, I found it useful to see a perspective on an analogous problem. That makes the "Is it useful for others" not only answerable, but true.
by davexunit | 2026-02-08 12:33:36+00:00
This is not the smallest REPL binary out there but it's far from the largest I've seen. My anecdotal evidence suggests it's somewhere in the middle or maybe smaller than average. We haven't configured our web server to gzip these assets (we should). Gzipped repl.wasm is 339K. This binary hasn't been run through wasm-opt, either.

Hoot is primarily an ahead-of-time compiler, not an interpreter, so this REPL demo has a lot of stuff that a production binary wouldn't have like a macro expander, runtime module system, and an interpreter. A significant chunk of extra code. We have a todo list example [0] in a separate repo, btw. On my machine, todo.wasm is 566K uncompressed, 143K gzipped. And that includes a virtual DOM diffing algorithm implemented in Scheme.

That said, there is quite some room to optimize binary size. For example, we know we're generating too many local variables in functions [1], many of which could be optimized away with an additional compilation pass. We expect that to have a significant impact on binary size. There's also certain workarounds we're doing due to features missing from Wasm at the time of implementation that add to total binary size. Lack of native stack switching for continuations is one example. Adopting the stack switching proposal should shave off some bytes.

[0] https://codeberg.org/spritely/hoot-ffi-demo/

[1] https://codeberg.org/spritely/hoot/issues/193
by Quarrel | 2026-02-08 12:33:49+00:00
Good for you.

FWIW, I suspect there isn't a single programmer you admire that hasn't looked back on moments in their career and cringed at some of their own code.

In some ways, I think it is the hurdle that Linus overcame as an undergraduate that I admire the most. Just putting it out there. This is code. Look at it. It might not amount to anything, but who dares wins.
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-08 12:33:53+00:00
this is a clever approach - credential-less proxying with scoped permissions is way cleaner than trying to teach the model what not to do. how do you handle dynamic auth flows though? like if an API returns a short-lived token that needs to be refreshed, does wardgate intercept and cache those or do you expose token refresh as a separate controlled endpoint?

and I'm curious about the filtering logic - is it regex on endpoint paths or something more semantic? because the "tasks with secure in them" example makes me think there's some content inspection happening, not just URL filtering.