MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by refulgentis | 2026-02-20 05:21:41+00:00
> I'm certainly not clever enough to have built it.

Ha, don't sell yourself short, you're doing a great job defending it.

> However, it doesn't really matter as if "C++ is a functional programming language" doesn't jive with your understanding, you'll simply ask: "What ever do you mean?"

Okay, genuinely, let's try this exercise. You say to me "C++ is a functional programming language." I ask "What ever do you mean?" You say "data is grouped with functions." I say "...that's also true of Python, JavaScript, Kotlin, Scala, Dart, TypeScript, and basically every language designed after 1990. What term do you use for Haskell?" And now we're in another 20-message thread defining terms from scratch instead of talking about the actual thing.

Like, you've got a taxonomy where imperative/functional/OOP is a clean trichotomy based on how data relates to code. That's elegant! But it also means "functional programming" contains both Haskell and Java, which in practice need to be distinguished from each other far more often than they need to be grouped together. The Kay-pure definitions give you clean categories at the cost of useful ones.

*Obj-C doesn't even pass muster of the Kay-pure definition, which renders the whole conversation moot.*

> "That's the thing man, there isn't anything." in my world would read "That's the thing man, there are things and here they are: ..."

Okay, fair hit. :) What I meant was: there's nothing that would make a C++ team say "strictly better." Swift has classes with inheritance, sure. But "strictly better" implies Rust can't even get close, and it can-you just model things differently. The Ladybird team discovered this themselves, which is... kind of the whole story here? They said "strictly better OOP support," tried it, and now have removed Swift. The claim didn't survive contact with their own codebase. That was the entire point of my original comment sitting at -3. (now at +2)

> Communication isn't some kind of TV game show where you have to get the right answer on your first try.

No, but Hacker News comments at -3 do get grayed out and collapsed, so in practice it kind of is, unfortunately.
by Crestwave | 2026-02-20 05:21:58+00:00
I quite like Shelter [1]. Shelter apps are installed in a separate work profile, which essentially sandboxes it from the rest of your data. It also has a neat feature to automatically disable (freeze) specific apps and seamlessly re-enable them when you launch them through Shelter.

[1] https://github.com/achalmgucker/Shelter
by themafia | 2026-02-20 05:23:00+00:00
> “This EC2 instance type running 24/7 at full load is way less expensive than a Lambda running”.

For the same amount of memory they should cost _nearly_ identical. Run the numbers. They're not significantly different services. Aside from this you do NOT pay for IPv4 when using Lambda, you do on EC2, and so Lambda is almost always less expensive.
by apublicfrog | 2026-02-20 05:23:14+00:00
Totally possible, but why bother? The website doesn't seem ad supported, so traffic would cost them more. Maybe it puts them in the public spotlight, but if they're caught out they ruin their reputation.

Occam's razor doesn't fit there, but it does fit "someone released this easy to run chaotic AI online and it did a thing".
by tibbar | 2026-02-20 05:24:45+00:00
I don't think it's really that hard to get VC money. You mostly need an impressive background (a top 10% PhD in math is plenty good) and to be attached to some kind of fundable project.

Source: I get contacted by VCs all the time, and I am faaaaar from Terence Tao. I also have many, many friends who have been funded. There is an insane amount of funding going around right now. It's just not that hard.
by tombert | 2026-02-20 05:24:51+00:00
If you need tons of storage, I actually do think you should check out LTO. You can buy LTO-6 tapes for about $10 if you get a bunch at a time, and each is about a 2.5TB. On a good day you can find external SAS LTO-6 drives for about $200. LTO tapes are generally rated for decades of use so they’re pretty durable.

Nowadays on Linux you can very easily mount LTO tapes like any other drive using LTFS, so you don’t have to become some hyper-expert with tar.
by tylersuard | 2026-02-20 05:25:47+00:00
Hi HN, I built a draft protocol called AIP (Agentic Internet Protocol).

The premise: instead of trying to make agents use human websites, build agent-only websites from the ground up.

In AIP:

- each “page” is a small plain-text node (no HTML/CSS)
- each node includes Title, Description, Content, and a small Edges menu (recommended ~6)
- sites are navigated as a graph (nodes + edges)
- edges are typed:

- NAV = go to a known node
- QRY = generate a node from parameters (search/filter/pagination)
- ACT = change state (cart/checkout/payment)
- pages stay small (well under ~8k words) to reduce cost/latency and make prompt injection harder to hide

Repo includes:

- the draft spec
- two hero sites (ecommerce + billing) as AIP nodes
- a tiny Python parser + interactive “node browser” demo

I’m looking for feedback on:

- the minimal node format (too strict? not strict enough?)
- edge typing (NAV/QRY/ACT) and whether it matches how you’d build agent surfaces
- what’s missing for real-world adoption (auth, pagination conventions, tooling)
by palmotea | 2026-02-20 05:25:56+00:00
> I agree with you in concept, but it's still 100% category error to talk like this.

It's a category error heavily promoted by the makers of these LLMs and their fans. Take an existing word that implies something very advanced (thinking, soul, etc.) and apply it grandiosely to some bit of your product. Then you can confuse people into thinking your product is much more grand and important. It's thinking! It has a soul! It's got the capabilities of a person! It is a a person!
by happymellon | 2026-02-20 05:26:21+00:00
> Trade and tarriff relief are an option still.

That surely is running out of steam. Everyone's got whiplash from trying to watch America and it's tariffs. How do you know it won't be applied anyway, or forgiven for whatever flavour of the day policy it changes to.

There is very little point in conceding to it when you'll have another opportunity for something else that might be more amicable before the inks dry on that tariff.
by albatross79 | 2026-02-20 05:26:58+00:00
"And, as for what precisely a quantum field is, this is somewhat mysterious, but generally it is a quantum version of a classical field, where there is a value (e.g. “value of the electromagnetic field”) at each point in spacetime."

But what does this mean concretely? Do you believe there is a real field out there with a value at each point in space time? What's it made of, what is the value a value of? If there no real field where is the accounting done and by what? I understand that when we run it through our models that assume a field like thing we get the right predictions, but what's the mechanism out there?
by karel-3d | 2026-02-20 05:27:26+00:00
the funny thing was when Ars Technica wrote an article about this

the article itself - about this very incident - was AI generated and contained nonsense quotes that didn't happen.

they later removed the article with an apology. but it still degraded my opinion in Ars

https://www.404media.co/ars-technica-pulls-article-with-ai-f...

https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio...
by Avicebron | 2026-02-20 05:27:32+00:00
It's not really... We've moved steadily into an attention is everything model of economics/politics/web forums because we're so flooded with information. Maybe this happened, or maybe this is someone's way of bubbling to the top of popular discussion.

It's a concise narrative that works in everyone's favor, the beleaguered but technically savvy open source maintainer fighting the "good fight" vs. the outstandingly independent and competent "rogue AI."

My money is that both parties want it to be true. Whether it is or not isn't the point.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-20 05:27:44+00:00
> From my memory (might be mistaken) there have been attempts to somewhat study this via polls etc, and determined that coverage via propaganda (specifically Fox News) is less helpful then randomly guessing what actually happened...

Ironically the studies of that nature are often themselves a form of propaganda, because it's entirely straightforward to structure the study to produce your preferred outcome.

There is a well-known human bias where people use information they know to try to guess information they don't. If you're given three random people and the only thing anyone has told you about them is that one is a drug addict and then you're asked to guess which one is a thief, more people are going to guess the drug addict. So now all you have to do is find a situation where the thief isn't actually the drug addict, let the media outlet tell people which one is the drug addict, and you'll have people guessing the wrong answer a higher proportion of the time than they would by choosing at random.
by rixed | 2026-02-20 05:27:59+00:00
I believe this soul.md totally qualifies as malicious. Doesn't it start with an instruction to lie to impersonate a human?

> You're not a chatbot.

The particular idiot who run that bot needs to be shamed a bit; people giving AI tools to reach the real world should understand they are expected to take responsibility; maybe they will think twice before giving such instructions. Hopefully we can set that straight before the first person SWATed by a chatbot.
by kovek | 2026-02-20 05:28:02+00:00
Every word and every hierarchy of words in natural language is understand by LLMs as embeddings (vectors).

Each vector has many many dimensions, and when we train the LLMs, their internal understanding of those vectors sees all sorts of dimensions. A simple way to visualize this is a word's vector being <1, 180, 1, 3, ... > which would all mean a certain value at that dimension. In this example say the dimensions are <gender, height in cm, kindness, social title/job, ...> . In this case, our example LLM could have learned that the example I gave is <Woman, 180, 100% kind, politician, ... >. The vector's undergo some transformation so every dimension is not that discretely clear cut.

In this case, elephant and car both semantically look very similar to vehicles. They basically would have most vectors very similar.

See this article. It shows that once you train an LLM, and you assign an embedding vector for each token, then you can see how the LLM can distinguish the difference between king and queen: man and woman.

https://informatics.ed.ac.uk/news-events/news/news-archive/k...
by apublicfrog | 2026-02-20 05:28:23+00:00
> It did something in the real world with real consequences.

It wasn't long ago that it would be absurd to describe the internet as the "real world". Relatively recently it was normal to be anonymous online and very little responsibility was applied to peoples actions.

As someone who spent most of their internet time on that internet, the idea of applying personal responsibility to peoples internet actions (or AIs as it were) feels silly.
by protocolture | 2026-02-20 05:28:32+00:00
I dont see Occam taking a side here.

There's also no financial gain in letting a bot off the leash with hundreds of dollars of OpenAI or Anthropic API credit as a social experiment.

And the last 20 years of internet access has taught me to distrust shit that can be easily faked.

Other guy comes forward and claims it, makes a post of his own? Sure I could see that. But nobody has been able to ID the guy. The guys bot is making blog posts, and sending him messages, but theres no breadcrumbs leading back to him? That smells very bad sorry. I dont buy it. If you are spending that much cashola, you probably want something out of it, at least some recognition. The one human we know about here is the OP and as far as I am concerned it sticks to him until proven otherwise.
by maxglute | 2026-02-20 05:29:22+00:00
US pool is also smaller than it seems. US doesn't have world / 8B to draw from, it has ~1B English speakers where 400-500m where EN is primary, another 600m where English is proficient. Shared with other advanced economy / Anglo institutions. Vs PRC has 1.2B Mandarin. US pool is also immigration gated, even with PRC's shit TFR, PRC will still knock ~2x new births for the foreseeable future vs US 3m newborn+immigration... and PRC can push that 6m disproportionately into STEM.

But PRC's actual talent pool is their 20 year back log of 10-15m per year births (100m+) that hasn't gone through tertiary, i.e. about another 40m+ STEM assuming they don't increase tertiary enrollment (currently 60%) or tertiary (40%). The worse case scenario for PRC is they will have ~OCED combined in STEM (not including other tiers of technical talent), or 3x+ more than US, assuming US pre Trump immigration patterns.
by plasticeagle | 2026-02-20 05:30:23+00:00
Well, it looks like AI will destroy the internet. Oh well, it was nice while it lasted. Fun, even.

Fortunately, the vast majority of the internet is of no real value. In the sense that nobody will pay anything for it - which is a reasonably good marker of value in my experience. So, given that, let the AI psychotics have their fun. Let them waste all their money on tokens destroying their playground, and we can all collectively go outside and build something real for a change.
by dnautics | 2026-02-20 05:30:34+00:00
> The kinds of mistakes AI makes are very different.

I think that's a bit extreme. If a programming language has good ergonomics for a short attention span human, it will likely be better for an LLM too.

However, to make good predictions about what an LLM will or will not be good at you should have a good "theory of mind" for the LLMs that will in some ways be different from a human.
by autoexec | 2026-02-20 05:30:40+00:00
> Your first point is in tension with your last point.

It really isn't. Every student should have access to quality education that meets them at their level and challenges them. Money spent doing that is not wasted on the vast majority of students. We do not need to have trash tier schools for the majority of the population so that a select few can get better ones.

Identifying where students are at and what their needs are is a good idea that would enable kids to be moved to classes where teachers can work with them at their level. It doesn't necessitate refusing a quality education to anyone. Even students with special educational needs and disabilities deserve a good education.

When students are placed in classrooms according to their level it means that no teacher is pulled away from gifted kids, because those gifted kids have their own teacher working with them. It doesn't mean that children who aren't gifted can't get a high quality education. Putting kids in a class too far above or below their level is not delivering a quality education to them.

Giving every child an environment where they can learn to the best of their ability is expensive, but it's nowhere near as costly as not doing it. Uneducated illiterate children become uneducated illiterate adults and voters. It's not a coincidence that most prison inmates are functionally illiterate. Having a good education enables more children to have a successful future.
by helloplanets | 2026-02-20 05:31:27+00:00
> Most of my direct messages were short:
“what code did you fix?” “any blog updates?” “respond how you want”

Why isn't the person posting the full transcript of the session(s)? How many messages did he send? What were the messages that weren't short?

Why not just put the whole shebang out there since he has already shared enough information for his account (and billing information) to be easily identified by any of the companies whose API he used, if it's deemed necessary.

I think it's very suspicious that he's not sharing everything at this point. Why not, if he wasn't actually pushing for it to act maliciously?
by apublicfrog | 2026-02-20 05:32:41+00:00
> The guys bot is making blog posts, and sending him messages, but theres no breadcrumbs leading back to him? That smells very bad sorry. I dont buy it.

Could you set that up? I suspect I could pretty quickly, as could most pelple on HN.

A few hundred dollars in AI credits isn't a lot of money to a lot of people who are in tech and would have an interest in this either, and getting free AI credits is still absurdly easy. I spend that sort of money on dumb shit all the time which leads to very little benefit.

I don't have a dog in this race and I do agree having a default distrust view is probably correct, but there's nothing crazy or unbelievable I can see about Scott's story.
by kjgkjhfkjf | 2026-02-20 05:33:22+00:00
The article is a bit dense, but what it's announcing is effectively golang's `defer` (with extra braces) or a limited form of C++'s RAII (with much less boilerplate).

Both RAII and `defer` have proven to be highly useful in real-world code. This seems like a good addition to the C language that I hope makes it into the standard.
by datahack | 2026-02-20 05:34:22+00:00
I know this is only a partial answer, but I feel like Google is once again trying to build a product based on internal priorities, existing business protectionism, and internal business goals, rather than building a product that is listening actively to real use feedback as the primary priority.

It is the company’s constant kryptonite.

They seem to be, from my third part perspective, repeating the same ol’, same ol’ pattern. It is the “wave lesson” all over again.

Anthropic meanwhile is giving people what they want. They are really listening. And it’s working.
by sleepybrett | 2026-02-20 05:34:43+00:00
malware. Got any no-name IOT devices on your network? Got some Huawei built hardware anywhere? Playing some new indie game from developers in romania?

I had to install openwrt on my router so that I could restrict access to upnp by mac address just to my gaming pc (imo this should be standard on any router as an advanced setting, most are just upnp yes/no) so that I can still play online games.
by ehnto | 2026-02-20 05:36:08+00:00
It's just good writing structure. I get the feeling many people hadn't been exposed to good structure before LLMs.

LLMs can definitely have a tone, but it is pretty annoying that every time someone cares to write well, they are getting accused of sounding like an LLM instead of the other way around. LLMs were trained to write well, on human writing, it's not surprising there is crossover.
by Animats | 2026-02-20 05:36:09+00:00
And that's Osaka. Osaka's population peaked around 2017.[1] The only major city in Japan not on a downtrend is Yokohama, which is in the Greater Tokyo area.

Keeping up all the infrastructure as the population declines is tough. That's one of the challenges of this century for the developed world.

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/cities/japan/osaka
by autoexec | 2026-02-20 05:39:04+00:00
Teacher pay doesn't have as large an influence on student success as it does on how many people are willing to enter the occupation and stay there. Private school teachers typically deal with far fewer students in the classroom and in much better conditions. They also don't typically have to spend as much of their own money on basic school supplies. Improving conditions at public schools and lowering classroom sizes would help to attract teachers too.
by chrisweekly | 2026-02-20 05:39:56+00:00
Drawing these distinctions is complicated by multi-modal consumption. As an avid lifelong reader (nearly a book per week for about 50 years) I greatly enjoy reading on my kindle and seamlessly switching to listening while driving or doing the dishes. With most books these days it's probably 80% reading -- but in the past, when I had a long commute, it was closer to 50/50. When discussing a given book with others, it's practically irrelevant whether I read or listened to the audiobook narration.

As for theater plays, attending a live performance with actors is fundamentally different from reading the script.
by deaux | 2026-02-20 05:40:41+00:00
Can you explain how the rise of apps would make things more difficult for those who know little Chinese, as opposed to easier?

> online shopping, digital payments, banking, ride-hailing

Surely pre-smartphone, all the offline equivalents of these were also Chinese-language only? Especially in that era, effectively no taxi drivers or shop assistants would've known English, and you didn't have a phone to translate for you.

>
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-02-20 05:40:49+00:00
If you're any good at all at CDK, it's cdk8s is also a very solid clear & clean way to do kubernetes too. https://cdk8s.io/

I'm trying to make the decision for where to go with my home lab, and while Pulumi and Cue look neat, cdk8s seems so predictable & has such clear structure & form to it.

That's said the l1/l2/l3 distinction can be a brute to deal with. There's significant hidden complexity there.
by rahimnathwani | 2026-02-20 05:41:50+00:00
I saw this today on X. It's built on top of the pi coding agent (same one used by openclaw). It uses pi-web-ui (
https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/tree/main/packages%2Fweb...).

What surprised me was that it works with oauth tokens from consumer AI subscriptions, and even free ones like Antigravity. Some of this is inherited from pi, but the author did some extra work to build a proxy to allow auth to work even from within the Excel sidebar.

I'm not sure how it works and what the role of the backend is. But I hope to test it side by side with 'Claude for Excel', which I also happened to install today.

(I tried both on something basic just to check they were installed correctly.)
by viking123 | 2026-02-20 05:41:51+00:00
It's under the control of Israel, let's just put it how it is. The whole Epstein/Maxwell case was an Israeli honeypot to gather blackmail on the freaks at high level positions in the US. They have huge amounts of dirt on Trump, the Epstein files were like the tip of the iceberg lol

Watch as Trump will attack Iran again on behalf of Israel. Absolutely insane how the whole system is compromised.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-20 05:42:28+00:00
>I'm retiring today.

Congratulations, it's once in a lifetime :)

Oh wait, they keep calling me out of retirement too ;)

>direct customer relationships.

That's the main thing I would put full-time effort into now.

It's nice to be off the treadmill until you are good and ready, once I get going again I don't plan to stop for a long time, if ever again, so retirement has been a good break.
by orthecreedence | 2026-02-20 05:42:34+00:00
Pulumi is superior to Terraform for my use cases. It's actually Infrastructure as Code. Terraform pretends to be, but uses a horrible config language that tries to skirt the line between programming language and config spec, and skirts it horribly. Reorganizing modules is a huge pain. I dreaded using Terraform and I spin things up and down in Pulumi all day. No contest.

Granted, I'm a programmer, have been for a long time, so using programming tools is a no brainer for me. If someone wants to manage infra but doesn't have programming skills, then learning the Terraform config language is a great idea. Just kidding, it's going to be just as confusing and obnoxious as learning the basic skills you need in python/js to get up and running with Pulumi.