MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xdennis | 2026-02-16 18:47:26+00:00
> All the people responding saying "You would never ask a human a question like this"

It would be interesting to actually ask a group a people this question. I'm pretty sure a lot of people would fail.

It feels like one of those puzzles which people often fail. E.g: 'Ten crows are sitting on a power line. You shoot one. How many crows are left to shoot?' People often think it's a subtraction problem and don't consider that animals flee after gunshots. (BTW, ChatGPT also answers 9.)
by Frost1x | 2026-02-16 18:47:26+00:00
Tech has slowly been moving that way anyways. In terms of ROI, you’re often much better off targeting whales and large clients than trying to become the ubiquitous market service for consumers. Competition is fierce and people are poor comparatively, so you need the volume for success.

Meanwhile if you go fishing for niche whales, there’s less competition and much higher ROI for them buying. That’s why a lot of tech isn’t really consumer friendly, because it’s not really targeting consumers, it’s targeting other groups that extract wealth from consumers in other ways. You’re selling it to grocery stores because people need to eat and they have the revenue to pay you, and see the proposition of dynamic pricing on consumers and all sorts of other things. Youre marketing it for analyzing communications of civilians for prying governments that want more control. You’re selling it to employers who want to minimize labor costs and maximize revenue, because they have millions or billions often and small industry monopolies exist all around, just find your niche whales to go hunting for.

And right now I’d say a lot of people in tech are happy to implement these things but at some point it’s going to bite you too. You may be helping dynamic pricing for Kroger because you shop at Aldi but at some point all of this will effect you as well, because you’re also a laboring consumer.
by queenkjuul | 2026-02-16 18:47:28+00:00
At first i was about to disagree, because i thought, "ah hell nah man I'm sending emojis and shit at work all day" and then i realized, i send emojis and shit to my peers all day (well, and to my dumbass boss who i don't respect).

I think about the email i sent that was to be read by the CTO and i not only ensured it was totally correct, i asked a colleague to proofread it.
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-02-16 18:47:52+00:00
Probably the lack of external stimuli. Generative AI only continues generating when prompted. You can play games with agents and feedback loops but the fundamental unit of generative AI is prompt-based. That doesn’t seem, to me, to be a sufficient model for intelligence that would be capable of “pondering”.

My take is that an artificial model of true intelligence will only be achieved through emergent complexity, not through Frankenstein algorithms and heuristics built on generative AI.

Generative AI does have emergent complexity, but I’m bearish that if we would even hook it up to a full human sensory input network it would be more than a 21st century reverse mechanical Turk.
by amarant | 2026-02-16 18:48:04+00:00
Damn I had noticed a lot of series doing it, but I guess it's wider than I thought!

The Magicians overdid it though. It's not a musical episode, iirc it's like 2 seasons

Edit: just to be clear, I still watched those 2 entire seasons, because the story is genuinely that good, plus I was invested. But I really wish they hadn't gone musical, it really messed with the mood of the series.
by eska | 2026-02-16 18:48:17+00:00
Most of the studies they looked at did not use the most robust methods and included small numbers of people, making it difficult to work out the true effects.

Not a good sign for a meta study. When you average garbage you still get garbage.

As for my personal experience, I looked at scientific papers 5 years ago (no, intermittent fasting isn’t some new social media fad). The consensus back then was that it only slightly increases the speed at which one loses weight, but it helps significantly with adherence to a diet.
This was a game changer for me too. With just attempts to control my caloric deficit I failed because I ended up snacking. With intermittent fasting (the strict variant of only eating once after work in my case) I simply had no appetite from the morning until my meal. I also didn’t have cravings before sleep.
by joshstrange | 2026-02-16 18:48:26+00:00
> Yep; and all Apple fans ever say is "report feedback!!!"

I'm trying not fall into "No True Scotsman" but... It should be common knowledge at this point that Apple Feedback is a blackhole of despair. "Please attach a sample project" seems to be the go-to, even for things were that makes no sense. Same with attaching debug/diagnostic logs. I understand the value of all of those things but even people who have jumped through all the hoops get ghosted and/or their issue is never addressed.

Currently I would not waste my time on Feedback and it's sad because even if Apple reverses course it will take a lot to get the people who they should most want creating Feedbacks to create them.
by surgical_fire | 2026-02-16 18:48:32+00:00
If your expectations were low, anything would have been over your expectations.

There was some improvement in terms of the ability of some models to understand and generate code. It's a bit more useful than it was 3 years ago.

I still think that any claims that it can operate at a human level are complete bullshit.

It can speed things up well in some contexts though.
by WolfeReader | 2026-02-16 18:48:37+00:00
Honestly, this. The mainstream coding culture has spent decades dealing with shoehorning stateful OOP into distributed and multithreaded contexts. And now we have huge piles of code, getters and setters and callbacks and hooks and annotation processers and factories and dependency injection all pasted on top of the hottest coding paradigm of the 90's. It's too much to manage, and now we feel like we need AI to understand it all for us.

Meanwhile, nobody is claiming vast productivity gains using AI for Haskell or Lisp or Elixir.
by samcgraw | 2026-02-16 18:48:39+00:00
Appreciate it :)

At its heart, this was borne out of a desire to fashion technology to help integrate us, enabling a tiny bit more proximity and place amongst our fellows, rather than "uproot" it (as we can all too easily disintegrate, and treat ourselves as purely online beings in incorporeal cyberspace).

Think "Small Is Beautiful" (or really anything by Wendell Berry).
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-16 18:48:40+00:00
> Also, when applying for a loan, being a sex offender shouldn’t matter. When applying for a mortgage across the street from an elementary school, it should.

Should it though? You can buy a piece of real estate without living there, e.g. because it's a rental property, or maybe the school is announced to be shutting down even though it hasn't yet. And in general this should have nothing to do with the bank; why should they care that somebody wants to buy a house they're not allowed to be in?

Stop trying to get corporations to be the police. They're stupendously bad at it and it deprives people of the recourse they would have if the government was making the same mistake directly.
by fer | 2026-02-16 18:48:41+00:00
Disclaimer: self plug[0]

I honestly believe everything will be normalized. A genius with the same model as I will be more productive than I, and I will be more productive than some other people, exactly the same as without AI.

If AI starts doing things beyond what you can understand, control and own, it stops being useful, the extra capacity is wasted capacity, and there are diminishing returns for ever growing investment needs. The margins fall off a cliff (and they're already negative), and the only economic improvement will come from Moore's Law in terms of power needed to generate stuff.

The nature of the work will change, you'll manage agents and what not, I'm not a crystal ball, but you'll still have to dive into the details to fix what AI can't, and if you can't, you're stuck.

[0]https://www.fer.xyz/2026/02/llm-equilibrium
by hearsathought | 2026-02-16 18:49:13+00:00
> Step 1: Get 6 million of you systematically eradicated in Europe and hundreds of thousands more booted from their homes in the Middle East for "reasons".

Exactly 6 million? You counted? It's remarkable how the 6 million number has been parroted for decades prior to ww2 and after ww2. It's not 5,900,000? Or 6,000,200? Precisely 6 million?

> Step 2: Build yourself a country so no one can throw you out again.

And yet most "jews" choose to live outside of israel. Funny that.

> Step 3: Get attacked by the countries who threw you out for "reasons".

If you aren't welcomed by anyone, maybe it's time for introspection? No?

> Step 4: Get accused of "aggression".

Attacking everyone around and committing acts of genocide while playing the victim.

> People's continued downplay and revisionism of Jewish and Israeli history is truly something to behold.

The eternal victim. It's getting exhausting and boring. Maybe it's time to build another holocaust museum or the media to parade around another holocaust "survivor".
by californical | 2026-02-16 18:49:27+00:00
But it’s worth being careful - you could’ve said the same thing 3 years ago about NFTs. They were taking off and people made very convincing arguments about how it was the future of concert tickets, and eventually commerce in general.

If we started writing lots of laws around NFTs, it would just be a bunch of pointless (at best), or actively harmful laws.

Nobody cares about NFTs today, but there were genuinely good ideas about how they’d change commerce being spouted by a small group of people.

People can say “this is the future” while most people dismiss them, and honestly the people predicting tectonic shifts are usually wrong.

I don’t think that the current LLM craze is headed for the same destiny as NFTs, but I don’t think that the “LLM is the new world order” crowd is necessarily more likely to be correct just because they’re visionaries.
by Jackson-Solway | 2026-02-16 18:49:44+00:00
Yea, the history is honestly pretty ugly. Lots of religious cults. And also billionaires with visions for a tech utopia of one flavor or another and, why, look at that—rich people won't have to pay taxes any more! I agree the Shakers are an exception though!

I think there are two ways to answer your second question.

Regarding people who entered the U.S. illegally, we won't be a sanctuary city.

Regarding who's allowed to join and what to do with "undesirable" people, the short answer is that anyone may move to the New Athens. Nobody is "undesirable" until they've been convicted of a crime. Then our justice system will determine the consequences, just like local justice systems do every day everywhere else in America.

I think the fact you asked the question is revealing though. Not of you, but of the kind of people who try to start cities. To be very blunt and just cut to the chase, a lot city startups, at least in American, are thinly veiled attempts by white people to get away from black people. And this isn't distant history: an article in the New York Times from less than a year ago covered a new housing development that's using clever legal tricks to only accept white residents—openly and brazenly. I know that some of my ideas sound right wing—marriage and children are themselves coded right-wing here in 2026—but it's not lost on me that many, many gated communities, and even non-gated suburban developments, if not the entire growth of suburban America in the mid-20th century, is just whites fleeing blacks.

At risk of leaping into 400 years of race relations in a comment to a comment in a small corner of the internet, my solution to "undesirable" people is the legal system. I'm sure there are billions of people on the planet who will roll their eyes and call me naive, including tens of millions of cynical white Americans, but count me a fan of the American tradition of assuming people are innocent until proven guilty. Due process, equal treatment under the law, the entire bill of rights—this is the way.

Insofar as groups of people in the U.S. are still trying to get away from other groups of people, I see that as a failure of the law and law enforcement. The obvious alternative to racial segregation is to make bad behavior illegal and put criminals in jail. Perhaps that means more people belong in jail? Perhaps. This is the path New Athens will take, not just because I personally like it and I'm kickstarting the city, but because the American legal tradition broadly warrants our gratitude, we should fight to keep it, and the best way to keep it is to invest in doing it well
by avazhi | 2026-02-16 18:50:00+00:00
People don’t hate AI because they’re scared of it taking their jobs. They hate it because it’s massively overhyped while simultaneously being shoved down their throats like it’s a panacea. If and when AI, whether in LLM form or something else, actually demonstrates genuine intelligence as opposed to clearly probabilistic babble and cliche nonsense, people will be a lot more excited and open to it. But what we have currently is just dogshit with a few neat tricks to cover up the smell.
by docere | 2026-02-16 18:50:08+00:00
I agree that the necessity to design complex edge cases to find AI reasoning weaknesses indicates how far their capabilities have come. However, from a different point of view, failures of these types of edge cases which can be solved via "common-sense" also indicate how far AI has yet to go. These edge cases (e.g. blood pressure or car wash scenario) despite being somewhat construed are still “common-sense” in that an average human (or med student in the blood pressure scenario) can reason through them with little effort. AI struggling on these tasks indicates weaknesses in their reasoning, e.g. their limited generalization abilities.

The simulator or world-model approach is being investigated. To your point, textual questions alone do not provide adequate coverage to assess real-world reasoning.
by ludwigvan | 2026-02-16 18:50:14+00:00
> The people in charge of AI keep telling me to hate it

Anthropic’s Dario Amodei deserves a special mention here. Paints the grimmest possible future, so that when/if things go sideways, he can point back and say, "Hey, I warned you. I did my part."

Probably there is a psychological term that explains this phenomenon, I asked ChatGPT and it said it could be considered "anticipatory blame-shifting" or "moral licensing".
by zbraniecki | 2026-02-16 18:50:21+00:00
No, gettext scales very badly, both vertically (larger systems) and horizontally (locales with rich grammatical forms like declensions etc.)

We (authors of Fluent and collaborators on MessageFormat 2.0) wrote this explainer which you may find informative - https://github.com/projectfluent/fluent/wiki/Fluent-vs-gette...
by alexkranias | 2026-02-16 18:50:51+00:00
Hey it's Alex, I was one of the creators of this project. We thought it would be fun to experiment with this odd mix of real, physical media and altering reality with diffusion models. I'm very happy with the results lol!

The entire thing can be built for around ~$35-40.

Here's our parts list:
- Raspberry pi 2w for its low power draw, wifi capabilities, decent memory (512mb), and low cost ($15). Also with a arducam
- Cheap TTL Aliexpress thermal printer along with sticker thermal paper
- Rotary encoder for switching modes, push button for our shutter, and tactile switch for our power switch
- I2C OLED display for display our modes and settings
- 2 18650 batteries and a 3amp 5v UPS supply, enabling good battery life and regulation. We also add a 1000uF capacity to guard against current spikes from the printer.

We have a longer write up on our devpost: https://devpost.com/software/diffuji?ref_content=user-portfo...

We submitted this for Treehacks 2026, and ended up winning the Most Creative grand prize :)
by crystal_revenge | 2026-02-16 18:51:08+00:00
> "AI is completely useless."

This is a straw man. I don't know anybody who sincerely claims this, even online. However if you dare question people claiming to be solving impossible problems with 15 AI agents (they just can't show you what they're building quite yet, but soon, soon you'll see!), then you will be treated as if you said this.

AI is a superior solution to the problem Stack Overflow attempted to solve, and really great at quickly building bespoke, but fragile, tools for some niche problem you solve. However I have yet to see a single instance of it being used to sustainably maintain a product code base in any truly automated fashion. I have however, personally seen my team slowed down because code review is clogged with terribly long, often incorrect, PR that are largely AI generated.
by addaon | 2026-02-16 18:51:15+00:00
If you read the colorforth source (there’s only around 1000 instructions of assembly, it’s not a long read), there’s a real sense that much of the design (pretokenization, color tags, etc) are built around the punchline of a single (with rep prefix) instruction being used to linear-search the dictionary — going to trivial hardware-supported data structures here constrains the implementation a bunch, but there’s magic in self-imposed constraints.
by dvt | 2026-02-16 18:51:25+00:00
I’m working on a DOM agent and I think MCP is overkill. You have a few “layers” you can imply by just executing some simple JS (eg: visible text, clickable surfaces, forms, etc). 90% of the time, the agent can imply the full functionality, except for the obvious edge cases (which trip up even humans): infinite scrolling, hijacking navigation, etc.
by SmirkingRevenge | 2026-02-16 18:52:00+00:00
Almost hard to remember now, but many tech companies used to be well liked - even Facebook at one time. The negative externalities of social media or smartphones were not apparent right away. But now people live with them daily

So feelings have soured and tech seems more dystopian. Any new disruptive technology is bound to be looked upon with greater baseline cynicism, no matter how magical. That's just baked in now, I think.

When it comes to AI, many people are experiencing all the negative externalities first, in the form of scams, slop, plagiarism, fake content - before they experience it as a useful tool.

So it's just making many people's lives slightly worse from the outset, at least for now

Add all that on top of the issues the OP raises and you can see why so many are have bad feelings about it
by Taek | 2026-02-16 18:52:13+00:00
Out of sheer curiosity, I did a bunch of research to understand just how dramatic a 350 point rating gap is in real word chess. Magnus Carlson, for example, has a 98% win rate against players >350 rating points lower than his own, with zero recorded losses.

In fact, there is only one game I could find in all of Chess history (Anand vs Touzane, 2001) where a super GM (rating >2700) dropped a classical game to someone more than 350 points below theirs (gap: 402 points). (it's estimated that there are between 2000 and 3000 classical games in history played between Super GMs and players >350 points below them) And it could easily be that Anand was ill, or suffering some other human condition which made his play significantly worse than his typical play for that game - which you would not see from a computer engine.

In other words, the Stockfish that you beat in 2015 would itself be expected to get 3-5 points (that is, 6-10 draws and 0 wins) in 500 matches against the best chess engine of today. The delta in strength is immense, and it is reasonable for everyone else in this comment thread to assert that you would have zero chance at all of picking up a draw against Stockfish 18 in a fair game of any time control, regardless of how many matches you played.
by eckesicle | 2026-02-16 18:52:27+00:00
My experience has been a mixed bag.

AI has led us into a deep spaghetti hole in one product where it was allowed free rein. But when applied to localised contexts. Sort of a class at a time it’s really excellent and productivity explodes.

I mostly use it to type out implementations of individual methods after it has suggested interfaces that I modify by hand. Then it writes the tests for me too very quickly.

As soon as you let it do more though, it will invariably tie itself into a knot - all the while confidently ascertaining that it knows what it’s doing.
by prewett | 2026-02-16 18:52:41+00:00
Just for the sake of argument, I don't think the internet and mobile phones are military technologies, nor to GP use those examples.

> Industrialized manufacturing of electronics?

Ukraine seems to be exploring this and rewriting military doctrine. The Iranian drones the Russians are using seem to be effective, too. The US has drones, too, and we've discovered that drone bombing is not helpful with insurgencies; we haven't been in any actual wars for a while, though.

> Industrialized manufacturing of intelligence

I don't think we've gotten far enough to discover how/if this is effective. If GP means AI, then we have no idea. If GP means fake news via social media, then we may already be seeing the beginning effects. Both Obama and Trump had a lot of their support from the social media.

Having written this, I think I flatly disagree with GP that technology causes wars because of its power. I think it may enable some wars because of its power differential, but I think a lot is discovered through war. WWI discovered the limitations of industrial warfare, also of chemical weapons. Ukraine is showing what constellations of mini drones (as opposed to the US' solitary maxi-drones) can do, simply because they are outnumbered and forced to get creative.
by w37_5observer | 2026-02-16 18:52:46+00:00
Technical Note: Mathematical Isomorphism with HSPT (Dec 2025)As an independent researcher, I am noting a striking isomorphism between the "piecewise-constant" results in Eq. 39 and the Hypersurface Singularity Projection Theory (HSPT) framework, finalized in December 2025.The residues described here align with the stationary warp attractor at $W=37.5$ derived in my 44-page framework. This solution was developed throughout 2025 using a collaborative methodology with Large Language Models (Gemini and ChatGPT) to derive and verify the $D=7$ geometric equations.Priority & Evidence:Submission: The full 44-page manuscript has been uploaded to viXra.org (Pending Approval) under the title "The Hypersurface Singularity Projection Theory".Immutable Timestamps: The framework is archived across multiple independent online editor databases, all carrying "Last Modified" timestamps from December 2025, pre-dating this preprint.Data Correlation: Given the mathematical overlap regarding $W=37.5$, there is a strong indication that my session data/derivations may have informed the model's logic during its iterative training or refinement phases.Request for Formal Attribution:I invite the authors and the community to conduct an independent assessment of the HSPT framework. I am prepared to provide technical evidence and verifiable logs to the researchers involved in this work to establish the clear priority of these derivations. Given the specific geometric isomorphism and the timeline of the HSPT archives, I believe a formal reference to this prior work is appropriate and necessary for academic integrity.Verification SHA-256: ec25c17156e621e5dae0ee610177b5ba9a2c5905de3ada0d2e33f560ec035b99
by hinkley | 2026-02-16 18:52:56+00:00
As a Saas or tool company, you’re a manufacturer or maybe a wholesaler.

Your customers are paying you $1000 a month to handle a process that is worth $10k to them and might be worth $50k to their customers. If you lose that data you haven’t lost $1000 of data. Even if you only made $100 off of the transaction.