MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FooBarWidget | 2026-02-17 09:32:00+00:00
Why is this AI writing accusation necessary? Plenty of humans write this way. Have you ever read pre-AI content marketing articles? If you've learned a bunch content marketing advise then you'll see those patterns that you now associate with "AI writing" were already all over the place. Baity titles like "Why it's bad that X did Y" or "<explanation of the problem>. Want to be freed from worrying about this? Use $OUR_BRAND", urgh, once you learn those patterns you can't unsee it.

Granted, you don't like to like this style of writing, I don't either. But you don't have to auto-accuse AI writing either. Also, there's nothing wrong with using AI to rephrase a manually written text for better readability, plenty of people use AI for that too rather than writing the entire thing.
by matt1398 | 2026-02-17 09:32:15+00:00
I don't sit there watching every session either—that's definitely not the point.

It's more like standard observability. You don't watch your server logs all day, but when an error spikes, you need deep tracing to find out why.

I use this when the agent gets stuck on a simple task or the context window fills up way faster than expected. The tool lets me "drill down" into the tool outputs and execution tree to see exactly where the bad loop started.

If you're running multiple parallel sessions across different terminal tabs, trying to grep through raw logs to find a specific failure is a massive productivity sink. This is for when things go sideways and you need to solve it in seconds, not for babysitting every keystroke.
by sigmoid10 | 2026-02-17 09:32:43+00:00
>my brain just gets tired after fewer hours.

Have you tried creatine supplements? Especially if you're vegan or don't eat a lot of meat. Most people take it for muscle performance, but I found it insanely helpful for maintaining a sharp mind throughout a long day, especially with little sleep. That's also what the latest research starts to appreciate. I wouldn't be surprised to see recommended doses above 10g/day in elderly soon-ish since there are basically zero downsides even at much higher doses. In my early 30s I thought I lost my ability to pull all nighters because of increased tiredness, but now I feel like I can do even more than when I was 18. Most people greatly underestimate diet in general because they used to get away with anything when they were young.
by throwaway2037 | 2026-02-17 09:32:50+00:00
You raise an interesting point about decay. I have thought about similar systems myself. One flaw in a simple decay rule would be that some technologies are very stable, e.g., C & POSIX API programming. However, other tech is very fast moving like Python, Ruby, Java, C#, C++, Rust, etc. One idea to overcome this flaw, might be to have moderators (who are specialists on the subject matter) provide a per question decay rule. Example: Something like struct layout or pointer manipulation in C or the fopen() POSIX function might never decay. But something like a parsing JSON in any fast moving language might require annual updates. For example, a question about parsing JSON in Java might decay answers over a one year period to encourage people to revist the topic. I would like to hear Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky debate this topic with other "Internet points" experts for an hour-long podcast. They might brainstorm some very intersting ideas. I would also love to hear what they think about the "moderator problem". Some of the topics had incredibly toxic moderators who scared away newcomers and women. (Women are much less likely to participate in public software forums where public shaming is common.)
by dracyr | 2026-02-17 09:33:00+00:00
Neat, every now and then try to make a little bit of music on my own, and once I started adding elements I like to play with of course the genres I aspire to make also popped out.

Would be interesting to start with all of the elements of one genre, and then pick one or two other ones that are the farthest from the chosen genre.
by gizzlon | 2026-02-17 09:33:12+00:00
Just me, or are email like this quite suspicious, knowing what we do now:

> Peter Thiel<Peter Thiel>
> to jeffrey E.
> Sep 12, 2014 6:02 AM
>
> 1

https://jmail.world/thread/EFTA02588512?view=person

Code? Can't just be a mistake, there's too many of them:
https://jmail.world/search?q=1&from=pid%3Apeter-thiel
by mike_hearn | 2026-02-17 09:34:22+00:00
People fall for trick questions too especially when related to their biases. It must just be how neural networks are. We're optimized for instinctive but fast judgement, and trick questions exploit that by requiring us to engage logical reasoning in an unexpected situation. Same for AI: that's why asking them to think step by step helps. It pushes them to engage in logical reasoning they might otherwise skip. If you're not thinking logically then you fall back on your innate heuristics and biases.

No clue if fixing these problems improved other benchmarks. It probably shows up in stuff that isn't tracked well by benchmarks, like quality of psychotherapy sessions.

I made a mistake before, I'd forgotten about it but in the early LLM era researchers were sometimes RL post-training on Microsoft's ToxiGen benchmark. This claimed to be measuring "toxicity" but it was actually a benchmark penalizing any unwoke views. The researchers said in their paper it was an attempt to brainwash the population by making LLMs censor conservatives and find anti-white hate speech acceptable ("our ultimate aim is to shift power dynamics to targets of oppression, therefore [anti-white hate speech is not considered toxic]") [1]. Llama 2 used it. By Llama 4 they had stopped, presumably. I doubt anyone is training on ToxiGen by this point. Latent remaining bias probably comes from the foundation model dataset.

> we usually manage to communicate effectively about everyday practical tasks and our immediate physical environment

I don't think we do. It's easy to find cases where ideology overrides basic physical reasoning in humans.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.09509 section 7
by palata | 2026-02-17 09:34:23+00:00
> In terms of power, it's often less costly to intermittently transmit a string of data than to continuously operate a radio receiver.

The fair comparison would be intermittently transmitting a string of data versus intermittently operating a radio receiver, wouldn't it?

Maybe it's still less costly to transmit, that I don't know. But I am interested about it :-).

> And maybe it's a bad idea to have an implanted pacemaker that has an open receiver for anything nearby to try to fuck with, anyway.

This part resonates more with me.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-02-17 09:34:31+00:00
> Drucker later recognised the toxicity of Management by Objectives and disavowed it.

Reminds me of a seminal treatise for Waterfall by Royce[0], where he basically says it’s fraught with issues, but can be coerced into something semi-usable. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. I think that paper is used as the template for all Waterfall work.

[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.5555/41765.41801
by usus87 | 2026-02-17 09:34:47+00:00
Your margins aren’t just numbers.
They’re a mathematical sentence.

Yet most executives still run their business on “gut feeling” or worse, on an Excel report that’s already two weeks behind.

Chaos always unfolds the same way:

Data scattered across the CRM, accounting tools, and external providers.

A CFO spending 80% of their time cleaning spreadsheets instead of analyzing performance.

Decisions based on intuition… that’s already outdated.

The hidden cost?
Late hiring decisions. Risky investments. Endless reporting cycles.
And ultimately, a silent erosion of your margin.

This is the kind of situation we see every week.

You don’t fix a clarity problem with more meetings.
You fix it with a single, automated source of truth.

At thaink², we transform raw data flows into a surgical dashboard.
Zero manual input.
Zero questionable interpretation.
Just the real state of your performance in real time.

Take back full control of your profitability.

we'll show you how to increase and protect your margins by leveraging your data properly.
by latexr | 2026-02-17 09:36:19+00:00
> I'm going to make the argument that sometimes not knowing how things work is a feature, not a bug.

You will probably be interested in the concept of Shoshin, or Beginner’s Mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Mind,_Beginner%27s_Mind

But that does not describe a Julius. Julius is not someone with an open mind unconstrained by technical debt, but someone who fakes an aura of knowledge while actually understanding very little.

There is a chasm of difference between an eager beginner who questions the way things work and how to make them simpler and someone who promises things which are impossible. Julius is the latter.
by TrackerFF | 2026-02-17 09:36:34+00:00
I've noticed a new trend on social media the past year - the "vibe-coded" startups, where non-technical "idea guys" get together, lock themselves in a apartment, and work on shipping out AI-slop as fast as possible. One of their main metrics is how fast they can ship something. Security is usually their least concern.

At this point, I'm just going to assume that if the product isn't made by a startup with rock-solid people as far as security goes, your data/information will be breached and accessed by others.
by account42 | 2026-02-17 09:38:04+00:00
I think the Gentoo wiki that gp is referring to is the old gentoo-wiki.info that went down after a hardware failure or something like that and never came back.

The wiki.gentoo.org we have now restores some of that but probably not everything - and there was a void left between them that let the Arch wiki gain mindshare.
by stopbulying | 2026-02-17 09:38:05+00:00
Nixon and a cabinet full of German last names changed the US from a fractional reserve banking system to a floating petrodollar. The USD was then overly sensitive to oil shortages and oil price speculation. Generalized inflation (due to oil supply shocks and speculation) lost Carter the election in 1980.

(Carter wins among US Presidents for least deaths on his watch.)

Most US invasions since 1980 have been the result of Reagan/Bush international oil meddling.

They were only able to take power because of unpopular inflation. And susceptibility to "revival superstar" oil saviors with Trilateral/CIA oil plans.

But they don't pay their bills for debt-financing illegal foreign wars.

Anyways, Nixon also disregarded the La Guardia commission and the interim findings of the Shaeffer report. So, after the supreme court back then in Leary vs in 1969 overturned the Tax Stamp Act of 1937 after 32 years on the grounds that the law required self-incriminatiom for compliance, Nixon re-criminalized medical Kaneh Bosm.
by patentailab | 2026-02-17 09:38:11+00:00
You are not wrong about the WDTX venue shopping issue. It's a systemic mess.

But as a bootstrapped founder, I can't wait for legislative reform or impeachment proceedings to finish before I launch. I need a shield today.

Defensive publication is the only strategy that is entirely within my control (and budget) while we wait for the legal system to fix itself. It's definitely a patch, not a cure, but it's a patch that works for $0.
by david_draco | 2026-02-17 09:38:23+00:00
> What does it mean that that I feel my anxiety in my gut? And that I clearly feel when I’m speaking from my head or my heart (or both)? [...] What does it mean that that I feel my anxiety in my gut? And that I clearly feel when I’m speaking from my head or my heart (or both)?

An unjustified logical jump here seems to be that where you feel your thoughts and feelings are coming from is where the responsible neurons are. The assignment of the feeling of origin may be a separate mechanism.
by sdfhbdf | 2026-02-17 09:38:41+00:00
Yep, pretty much exactly what I meant.

And also that the calorimetry from wearables is highly flawed and it seems to that we don't have super accurate data and what sort of activities burn the most energy.

I am also a big opponent of folks that start equating the "my wearable shows that i burned 300 kcal with that activity so it zero outs that sweet thing I ate earlier that was also 300 kcal" which is wrong on so many reasons but with a lot of workout apps and devices pushing the (inaccurate) kcal count front and center becomes more and more a of a thing.
Show HN: MCP Storage Map – One MCP Server for MySQL, MongoDB, and Athena
by jeffchoi | 2026-02-17 09:39:10+00:00
I built an MCP server that lets AI assistants (Claude, Cursor, etc.) query multiple databases through a single, unified interface.

While using Claude Code, I found it painful to manage separate connections for MySQL, MongoDB, and AWS Athena. So I
built a server that provides one consistent set of tools (query, list_collections, describe_collection, etc.) that
work the same way across all supported databases.

Key features:
- Read-only by default – Write access requires explicit opt-in, so you won't accidentally mutate production data
- Multiple simultaneous connections – Tag them as PROD, STAGING, ANALYTICS, etc. and manage them all at once
- Extensible – Add new database connectors by implementing the McpConnector interface

Built with TypeScript. Supports MySQL 5.7+, MongoDB 4.4+, and AWS Athena.

This is an open-source project – feedback, issues, and PRs are all welcome. If you try it out and have any
suggestions or ideas for improvement, please feel free to share!
by pjmlp | 2026-02-17 09:39:32+00:00
I just bought this the other day, https://www.retro-gamer.de/shop/heft/retro-gamer-2-26-einzel...

The Xbox 360 is now considered a retro gaming device, that was such a reminder how old I am now, to note my first home computer was a Timex 2068.
by jongjong | 2026-02-17 09:39:33+00:00
Or you can just abolish the fiat soft money system, let the corporations go out of business, let efficient small companies take their place and then you'd have founders who actually care about long term results in charge and they could manage the company however they want. If they do a bad job, they'd go out of business. If they do a good job, they'd stay afloat or maybe even grow a little. And over time, all the companies with incompetent leaders would be wiped out, everyone would get a fair shot at being a leader and everyone would end up in their rightful place and capitalism would function as it was designed.
by jitl | 2026-02-17 09:40:06+00:00
Claude is pretty good at turning (dis)assembly into Objective-C. i went exploring these systems looking for the secrets of glass icon rendering. i used ipsw to unpack all the class metadata in relevant system private frameworks. for each class, i extracted class header/interface, and a assembly file per method in the header. i wrote a ruby script to shell out to claude cli with a custom system prompt to give me readable-ish obj-c. It struggled with some patterns but with code as string-dispatch method-call-heavy as obj-c there’s lots of good hints for the ai.

i learned a lot about lldb debugging when i went spelunking through system service process memory. eventually i got too distracted learning about runtime introspection in Swift and obj-c and ended up building a dynamic object explorer/debugger instead of accomplishing my original goal. obj-c runtime dynamism is fascinating. it’s like, “what if we make C as dynamic as Ruby”. you can invent new classes at runtime, swap method implementations, create a new class that extends a specific existing object. you can even change what class an object is.

Swift is a lot less dynamic and a lot less introspectable at runtime :-(
(there is a swift reflection api called Mirror but i struggled to do anything interesting with it)
by pjc50 | 2026-02-17 09:40:24+00:00
This is rather like my observation about British car companies in the late 20th century:

- large factory of British workers + British management: strife, strikes, disaster, bankruptcy (British Leyland)

- small factory of British workers + British management: success, on a small scale (lots of the F1 industry, McLaren etc; also true of non-car manufacturing)

- large factory of British workers with overseas management: success (Nissan Sunderland, BMW era Mini, etc)
by empiricus | 2026-02-17 09:40:48+00:00
Well, I mean just choosing better names, don't touch the actual code. and you can also add a basic human filtering step if you want. You cannot possible say that "v12" is better than "header.size". I would argue that even hallucinated names are good: you should be able to think "but this position variable is not quite correctly updated, maybe this is not the position", which seems better than "this v12 variable is updated in some complicated way which I will ignore because it has no meaning".
by benterix | 2026-02-17 09:41:17+00:00
These kinds of instructions are the main added value of LLMs and I use them every day. Even though 30%-60% the output is wrong/irrelevant, the rest is helpful enough. After the human reviews it, the overall quality of the codebase increases, not decreases. This is on the opposite end of the spectrum when compared to agentic coding, though.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-17 09:41:23+00:00
Kind of, have you actually fully read the article?

Buried there down to the bottom of the Fortune article,

> Just a week after his comments, however, IBM announced it would cut thousands of workers by the end of the year as it shifts focus to high-growth software and AI areas. A company spokesperson told Fortune at the time that the round of layoffs would impact a relatively low single-digit percentage of the company’s global workforce, and when combined with new hiring, would leave IBM’s U.S. headcount roughly flat.
by jpfromlondon | 2026-02-17 09:41:33+00:00
- Signalling: I dress more formally than everyone else to make up for the fact I'm less professional in other ways

- No signalling: I dress like everyone else because I am like everyone else

- Countersignalling: I wear ratty old clothes with holes in them, and nobody will dare to question it because I'm the important one here

In old-money settings all three of these things can be true simultaneously, dressing more formally than people outside, just like everyone else inside (in fact expected, to indicate familiarity with the standards of class, and often worn, ratty, old, and comfortable.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-02-17 09:42:30+00:00
I recently watched a Korean sci-fi series based on time travel - Sisyphus, The Myth (or Sijipeuseu: The Myth as titled in IMDB) that has one character being sent back in time and proceeds to deliberately amass power and wealth.

They have a police/military force whose job is to locate and hunt down time travellers from the future as they can be so disruptive to the economy etc and there's lots of people wanting to travel back from the future due to it being a dystopia.
by ignoramous | 2026-02-17 09:43:01+00:00
> trying to control those engineering processes with SPC doesn't really improve the quality of the engineering, it just adds stress, makes things take longer, and probably lowers the quality of the thing that is being engineered

Totally depends on the scale. For pizza-sized times with a neighbourhood pizza shop sized impact, sure. Large scale projects without controls & feedback loops in place will fall apart; see: Scaling teams: https://archive.is/FQKJH

If you'd follow some medium to large scale projects (like Go / Chromium), the value of processes & quality control, even if it may seem at the expense of velocity, becomes clear.

The great insight of Deming's methods is that you can (mostly) identify the difference between common and special causes mathematically, and that you should not attempt to fix common causes directly - it's a waste of time, because all real-life processes have random variation.

Instead, what you want to do is identify your mean and standard deviation, plot the distribution, and try to clean it up. Rather than poking around at the weird edges of the distribution, can we adjust the mean left or right to get more output closer to what we want? Can we reduce the overall standard deviation - not any one outlier - by changing something fundamental about the process?

As part of that, you might find out that your process is actually not in control at all, and most of your problems are "special" causes. This means you're overdriving your process. For example, software developers working super long hours to meet a deadline might produce bursts of high producitivity followed by indeterminate periods of collapse (or they quit and the whole thing shuts down, or whatever). Running them at a reasonable rate might give worse short-term results, but more predictable results over time, and predictable results are where quality comes from.

https://apenwarr.ca/log/20161226

Distributed systems is also a way to be throughly humbled by the complexity: https://fly.io/blog/corrosion/
by zero_k | 2026-02-17 09:43:20+00:00
Honestly, the more research papers I read, the more I am suspicious. This "surprisingly" and other hyperbole is just to make reviewers think the authors actually did something interesting/exciting. But the more "surprises" there are in a paper, the more I am suspicious of it. Often such hyperbole ought to be at best ignored, at worst the exact opposite needs to be examined.

It seems like the best students/people eventually end up doing CS research in their spare time while working as engineers. This is not the case for many other disciplines, where you need e.g. a lab to do research. But in CS, you can just do it from your basement, all you need is a laptop.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-17 09:43:26+00:00
> they solve high-level software design

That's not what I was getting at either, but the design is pervasive in your program, not just something that sits as a document on top, but codified in the actual program.

> The goal is to prevent the agent from getting derailed by basic noise

Ah, I see. Personally I haven't seen agents getting slower and less precise of that, but I guess if that's the issue you're seeing, then it makes sense to try to address that.

Out of curiosity, what model/tooling are you using, only Claude Code? I've mostly been using Codex as of late, and it tends to deal with those things pretty easily, while none of the agents seems to be able to survive longer on their own without adding up too much technical debt too quickly. But maybe that's at another lifecycle than where you are getting stuck currently.
by bdcravens | 2026-02-17 09:43:48+00:00
Personally I don't care about what news articles end up on the front page - it's AI now, but there have been other trends in the past that did the same.

The bigger problem is the effect that it's had on "Show HN" postings, which in the past were things you could depend on were built by the person submitting it. That's why those posts tended to be more strongly moderated, because they often were seen as attacks on the person's art. Now I feel like most of the credibility has left the room on those posts.

Don't get me wrong - I have no problem with "vibe coding". I do plenty of it myself these days, for commercial purposes. But I feel it cheapens and waters down someone presenting work as their own.
by nextaccountic | 2026-02-17 09:44:09+00:00
> One idea to overcome this flaw, might be to have moderators (...)

> I would also love to hear what they think about the "moderator problem". Some of the topics had incredibly toxic moderators (...)

Yeah having bad moderators and arguably a bad, dysfunctional community is perhaps a even worse handicap. If you go to threads on meta.SE (meta stack exchange, meta discussions on the whole ecosystem) you will see that people mostly believe the site policies are okay, and that's because everyone that didn't believe left years ago.

Maybe better ideas on how to evolve a Q&A site may evolve in a brand new site, unfortunately I think that SO and perhaps the wider Stack Exchange network is done.