MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DanMcInerney | 2026-02-08 13:58:59+00:00
Sandboxing is a great security step for agents. Just like using guardrails is a great security step. I can't help but feel like it's all soft defense though. The real danger comes from the agent being able to read 3rd party data, be prompt injected, and then change or exfiltrate sensitive data. A sandbox does not prevent an email-reading agent from reading a malicious email, being prompt injected, and then sending an email to a malicious email address with the contents of your inbox. It does help in implementing network-layer controls though, like apply a policy that says this linux-based sandbox is only allowed to visit [whitelisted] urls. This kind of architectural whitelisting is the only hard defense we have for agents at the moment. Unfortunately it will also hamper their utility if used to the greatest extent possible.
by roysting | 2026-02-08 13:59:08+00:00
I’m not even really sure it’s a cult of personality per se. It seems more like yet another form of mental illness that affects so many Americans in different ways, where they live delusional, parasocial, vicarious lives based on a fantastical world that they’ve put in place of reality they rejected. It’s really no different than all the people in America today who will expend immense amounts of money and resources on caring about “my team” in the performance called the Super Bowl. “My team” this and “my team” that, they say as they cheer and lament “my team” that they don’t have any actual connection to in any form other than having been manipulated and groomed all their life into being in that form of cult.

Is not really limited to Trump at all, even though the consequential and public nature of Trump takes everyone’s attention … ironically, with its opponents only feeding that loop in how they oppose it.

It’s a core characteristic of narcissism people rarely understand. Narcissism (individual or system) utterly depends on conflict for its “narcissistic supply”. When you “oppose it”, you are in fact only fueling that which you believe you are opposing. It’s a paradox that people have an impossible time understanding, especially all the people who see “Nazis” everywhere, while openly and violently “protesting” in this supposed “Nazi” regime they’re opposing. Narcissistic control needs that for its manipulation. That is precisely the kind of fuel narcissists love and need and relish with glee as you oppose them, because it means they have you exactly where they want you, emotional and easily manipulated and controlled.

You think the Super Bowl would happen if people stopped living the delusion of “my team” conflict with “not my team”? When you see that stadium full of people, realize that every single one of those thousands of people, will have spent on avg. ~$15,000 per person. It takes manipulation into a state of mental illness to do that. No different than Trump supporters or Nazi fighters or all the other kind of fantasy LARPing that is so pervasive in America, living a life of delusion created for them because it is profitable and makes people easily manipulated.
by rubenflamshep | 2026-02-08 13:59:58+00:00
> That said, the main issue I find with agentic is my mental model getting desynchronized. No matter how fast the models get, it takes a fixed amount of time for me to catch up and understand what they've done.

This is why I'm so skeptical of anyone running 6+ Claude sessions at a time. I've gotten to 5 but really that was across 3 sessions with 2 standing by just to commit stuff. And even with just 3 sessions I constantly lost where I was and wasted time re-orienting myself, doing work in the wrong session, etc.

>The most enjoyable way I've found of staying synced is to stay in the driver's seat, and to command many small rapid edits manually.

Same, there's a fantastic flow state/momentum I can get in a single session just knocking off features. I don't mind switching between two sessions in this state but the experience is better when it's two different projects vs two different features on the same project. The complete context switch lets be re-orient more easily
by bstar77 | 2026-02-08 14:00:19+00:00
Part of it is that the data pipelines in the Mac are far more efficient with its soldered memory and enhanced buses. You would have to use something like Halo Strix on the PC side see similar performance upticks at a somewhat affordable price bracket. Things like Samba/VPN mounting should not matter much (unless your mac network interface is significantly better), but you might see a general snappiness improvement. Heavy compute tasks will be a give and take with modern PC hardware, but Apple is still the king of efficiency.

I still use an M1 MB Air for work mostly docked... the machine is insane for what it can still do, it sips power and has a perfect stability track record for me. I also have a Halo Strix machine that is the first machine that I can run linux and feel like I'm getting a "mac like" experience with virtually no compromises.
by leejoramo | 2026-02-08 14:01:19+00:00
I remember Le Guin speaking at my university around 1990. She was amazingly open about her writing process. While she did not directly answer questions about the “meaning” of her writing, she did facilitate the discussion about her work’s meaning, and asked the audience challenging questions.

Of all my time at uni, I wish I had a recording of this event.

I understood from students who had attended a writing workshop with her earlier in the day, that she was gifted teacher.
Show HN: Verification-first workflow plugin for Claude Code
by doodledood | 2026-02-08 14:01:37+00:00
I built a set of open-source Claude Code plugins that add a structured define → execute → verify loop to agentic coding workflows.

*The problem*: Claude Code is capable, but on non-trivial tasks the default workflow is iterative — you prompt, review output, correct, re-prompt. Each cycle costs time and tokens, and the failure mode is accepting "looks right" code that breaks in edge cases you didn't think to check.

*What this does*: You run two commands:

- `/define` — Converts a task description into concrete acceptance criteria and invariants before any code is written. The agent explores the codebase, identifies constraints, and produces a manifest of what "done" means.
- `/do` — Executes against the manifest, tracking progress per criterion. Verification runs automatically at the end — each acceptance criterion is checked as a separate pass/fail gate. If something fails, it fixes and re-verifies before declaring done.

That's it. Define what you want, then execute. The verification loop is built in.

*How it differs from Plan mode*: Claude Code's built-in Plan mode lets you review a plan before execution. But the plan is unstructured text — there's no formal criteria, no verification after execution, and no way to know if the output actually matches what you planned. This adds structured acceptance criteria that get verified automatically, so "done" means "all criteria passed," not "the agent stopped."

*How it differs from manual prompting*: Writing good prompts helps. But prompts describe intent — they don't verify outcomes. This separates the "what do I want" step from the "did I get it" step, with explicit checks for each.

Built with Claude Code's plugin system (agents, skills, hooks). No external dependencies.
by ajross | 2026-02-08 14:01:42+00:00
> you'd think tax cuts would create more jobs, less unemployment

Again, that idea is rhetoric, not policy. In fact no one ever thought this, it's a zero-sum/microeconomic intuition (to wit: that there is only so much money available) that doesn't hold at the macro level.

Economic growth happens naturally via finance. Growing companies and interests that want more money to build stuff just borrow, that's literally what banks are for. No one needs to go the government for a handout to make that happen.

At the extremes, sure. Tax corporate profits at 100% and you'll just train them to offshore. Drop taxation to zero and the government won't be able to repay bonds and kill its own finance spigot. But in the middle, where real governments live? No meaningful effect.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2026-02-08 14:01:51+00:00
I would say that in the list 'Protection of the integrity of the individual citizen' is something that a NHS would serve. Individually, people want to know that if they get injured or sick they can be taken care when they can't for themselves. Everyone is at risk of these things. Society as an organism also benefits from having resources dedicated to repair of its components in the same as it does in defense of external threats. 'Protection of the territory of the state' also can be served by an NHS because of the damage and danger of highly infectious diseases.
by shinycode | 2026-02-08 14:02:01+00:00
Having a team of 8 people producing code is manageable. Having an AI with 8 people agents that write code all day long is not the same volume it can generate more code in a day that one person can review in a week.
What you say is that, product teams will prompt what they want to a framework, the framework will take care of spec analysis, development, reviews, compliance with spec. Product teams with QA will make sure the delivery is functionally correct.
No humans need to make sure of anything code related.
by simonw | 2026-02-08 14:03:37+00:00
Measuring productivity in software development is notoriously hard, but the demos I saw them give when the team of three people had been working together for three months showed more work then I would ever expect from a team of that size over that amount of time.

They already had their own custom agent harness and digital twin imitations of Jira and Slack and Okta and a bunch of other custom tooling.

It looked to me like way more than a 2x or 4x thing.
by rmunn | 2026-02-08 14:03:38+00:00
Around 30 to 35, don't remember which year it was exactly.

And the thing that was largest in making me go, "Yeah, this isn't good for me, I need to quit" was that it was consuming my thoughts all the time. When I wasn't in front of the computer gaming, I was thinking about the game and planning the strategy for my next move. (I usually played turn-based games rather than action games). Which is fine in small doses, but it was taking over my mind when I was at church wanting to focus on worshiping God, when I was at work (and distracting me from getting work done), when I was trying to read...

Basically, I realized that it was an unhealthy focus for me, and taking over way too much of my attention that I wanted to be able to spend on a much wider variety of things. So I quit. First year was the hardest, second and third years were hard too, but by now I've gotten used to reaching for a book to read rather than a game. And the book, I can put down anytime I need to, without feeling that empty-ish feeling that says "Awww, I want to get back into the game..." That letdown when I exited the game was another clue, BTW: it matched how I'd heard drug addicts (specifically, former addicts who had kicked their habit) describe the feeling of coming down off a high. I've never used drugs myself so I can't compare it directly, but it was similar enough to the descriptions I'd heard from them that I said "okay, that's probably not a good sign either."
by kpinkerman | 2026-02-08 14:04:13+00:00
My wife and I have spent the last few years building the Native of Nowhere universe, and as we hit the 300,000-word mark, we realized the industry was hitting a breaking point.

We’re seeing a flood of 'AI Slop' in digital stores, but as an indie team, the pressure to 'scale' is real. This post is our manifesto on why we’ve chosen to 'air-gap' our creative process. While we use a private RAG system as a 'Lore Auditor' (essentially a linter for our world-bible to catch logic and physics errors), we’ve banned generative AI from the prose itself.

We believe that in 2026, the 'human soul' of a story isn't just a philosophical choice—it’s a competitive moat. I’d love to hear how other creators here are balancing technical automation with creative authenticity.

Also, if you'd like to discuss our tech stack on keeping the authenticity alive and immersive, please reach out! There's a lot of Sci that isn't Fi in our system!
by Philip-J-Fry | 2026-02-08 14:05:02+00:00
This was the same for me. M4 Pro is my first Macbook ever and it's actually incredible how much I prefer the daily driving experience versus my brand new 9800x3d/RTX 5080 desktop, or my work HP ZBook with 13th Gen intel i9. The battery lasts forever without ANY thought. On previous Windows laptops I had to keep an eye on the battery, or make sure it's in power saving mode, or make sure all the background processes aren't running or whatever. My Macbook just lasts forever.

My work laptop will literally struggle to last 2 hours doing any actual work. That involves running IDEs, compiling code, browsing the web, etc. I've done the same on my Macbook on a personal level and it barely makes a dent in the battery.

I feel like the battery performance is definitely down to the hardware. Apple Silicon is an incredible innovation. But the general responsiveness of the OS has to be down to Windows being god-awful. I don't understand how a top of the line desktop can still feel sluggish versus even an M1 Macbook. When I'm running intensive applications like games or compiling code on my desktop, it's rapid. But it never actual feels fast doing day to day things. I feel like that's half the problem. Windows just FEELS so slow all the time. There's no polish.
by drob518 | 2026-02-08 14:05:42+00:00
For laptops at least, I appreciate not having fans that sound like a helicopter. I guess for Mac Mini and Mac Studio having more fan noise is acceptable (maybe a switch would be nice). One of the things that I love about my Air is there is zero fan noise all the time. Yes, it throttles, and 99% of the time I don’t notice and don’t care. Yes, I know there are workloads where it would be very noticeable and I would care, but I don’t personally run too many CPU bound tasks.
by ReptileMan | 2026-02-08 14:05:57+00:00
Meh. Slop is not danger. Because in software lines of code quantity does not have quality on its own. Or if it has it is not a good quality. And bad software costs money. The problem with temu for the west is not that the things sold there are bad. The real problem rose in the last 2-3 years when they become good.
by wazHFsRy | 2026-02-08 14:06:31+00:00
> Why not have an agent create a perfect “review plan” for human consumption? Split the review up in parts that can be individually (or independently) reviewed and then fixed by the coding agent. Have a proper ordering in files (GitHub shows files in a commit alphabetically, which is suboptimal), and hide boring details like function implementations that can be easily unit tested.

Yes exactly! I have been using this to create a comment on the PR, showing suggested review order and a diagram of how changes relate to each other. And even this super simple addition has been very helpful for code review so far!

(more on this: https://www.dev-log.me/pr_review_navigator_for_claude/)
by ksec | 2026-02-08 14:08:06+00:00
>If you use an Apple silicon Mac I’m sure you have been impressed by its performance.

This article couldn't have come at a better time. Because frankly speaking I am not that impressed after I tested Omarchy Linux. Everything was snappy. It is like back to DOS or Windows 3.11 era. ( Not quite but close ) It makes me wonder why Mac couldn't be like that.

Apple Silicon is fast, no doubt about it. It isn't some benchmarks but even under emulation, compiling or other workload it is fast if not the fastest. So there are plenty of evidence it isn't benchmark specific which some people claims Apple is only fast on Geekbench. The problem is macOS is slow. And for whatever reason haven't improved much. I am hoping dropping support for x86 in next macOS meant they have time and excuses to do a lot of work on macOS under the hood. Especially with OOM and Paging.
by graphpilled | 2026-02-08 14:08:24+00:00
Not yet, but both are on the roadmap. Manual node editing is the next priority—letting you tweak branches or add your own directions.

The script evaluation idea is interesting—you're not the first to suggest it. The extraction pipeline already identifies structural elements like scene mirroring and character arc inversions, so exposing that as an analysis tool isn't a huge leap. Definitely something I want to explore.
by voxleone | 2026-02-08 14:08:28+00:00
One thing I think the “LLM as new high-level language” framing misses is the role of structure and discipline. LLMs are great at filling in patterns, but they struggle with ambiguity, the exact thing we tolerate in human languages.

A practical way to get better results is to stop prompting with prose and start providing explicit models of what we want. In that sense, UML-like notations can act as a bridge between human intent and machine output. Instead of:

“Write a function to do X…”

we give:

“Here’s a class diagram + state machine; generate safe C/C++/Rust code that implements it.”

UML is already a formal, standardized DSL for software structure. LLMs have no trouble consuming textual forms (PlantUML, Mermaid, etc.) and generating disciplined code from them. The value isn’t diagrams for humans but constraining the model’s degrees of freedom.
by pegasus | 2026-02-08 14:09:17+00:00
Mathematics is indeed one of those rare fields where intimate knowledge of human nature is not paramount. But even there, I don't expect LLMs to replace top-level researchers. The same evolutionary "baggage" which makes simulating and automating humans away impossible is also what enables (some of) us to have the deep insight into the most abstract regions of maths. In the end it all relies on the same skills developed through millions of years of tuning into the subtleties of 3D geometry, physics, psychology and so on.
by voidhorse | 2026-02-08 14:10:06+00:00
Probabilities are a philosophical rat's nest of sorts. When it comes to statistics, it's generally agreed that we're working with a frequentist interpretation of the meaning of probabilities, but you are right that a person with no prior background could well have a completely different understanding here (subjectivist probability, degrees of belief).

I also think stating presuppositions and limitations around observation and prior knowledge is monumentally important as soon as you begin talking in terms of probabilities, if you really want your statements to be clear, but most people don't do this. There are some ways in which I think the casual use of probabilities can actually be more harmful than encouraging a simple binary boolean dichotomy of "I know" or "I don't know" and need more information.
Teaching Computers to Laugh
by denkern | 2026-02-08 14:10:25+00:00
Teaching computers to laugh
(Enlil vs Enki dilemma – Fire to the people)

This is the very concatenated brief on how to teach computers to laugh.
Definitions:
Amtsschimmel: Iteration exceeds task solving and produces tool self serving behaviour (see admin)
Complex – iterative integrity is given.
Complicated – iterative integrity is compromised by another ordering protocol.
F-act: Clothes itself as a fact. I.e an OP_n^x that produces a datum = a Fixed Act.
Ordering Protocol (OP_n^x) – the simple rule set, applied iteratively to a data set to solve a task. Its iteration builds complex tools. It develops order for evaluation but does not change the data set.
Paradox: Two rule sets (truths) arriving at the same point.
RALP-H: Recursive Algorithm for soLving Problems, including the use of Heuristics. Is used to maintain, correct and check for integral iteration of OP_n, i.e. complexity.
Reality: Any given data set
Truth: Only ever lives within a rule set. Two rule sets – two truths,
Worklihood: Evaluative result produced from applying OP_n^x to Reality (= work)
Alternative Worklihood: Created with a differing OP_n^x from the same reality.
Dimension: Iterated Potential (^x)

Math: is a definition. It cannot prove anything.
OP_math :: +1= (very simple, very powerful, not the only tool to produce a worklihood)
OP_electricalcircuit :: power source, wire, switch, load
OP_computer :: OP_electricalcircuit^(10^10^10).

The science of our time is data centric. All importance is given to the generated datum. What it is ignoring is the infrastructure that brings about this datum.

The infrastructure builds from the iterated (^x) application of OP_n, which extracts any given order (the f-act) from a data set. The build of the infrastructure is imbedded within the rule set OP_n and will produce a datum, i.e. the fact.
Several OP_n can be applied to the same data set and will produce different facts.

Why do we, as humans, laugh?
We laugh when we recognize that two (or more) different infrastructure paths have been used to arrive at a fact. The same thing can be seen in two or more different ways.

This handling also gives an exit from any pre-determined path with a logical outcome.

As this has been mapped, it can be programmed. Wherefore computers can learn to laugh.
by 6stringmerc | 2026-02-08 14:10:45+00:00
In the US, my experience correlates with the rise of TNT and cable television - Ted Turner bought the rights to show certain films on his new cable channels and “Shawshank” got heavy rotation. It was akin to “background noise” sometimes. Others can probably recall the frequency.

Based on a Stephen King short story, I’m a fan. Never did catch “The Majestic” and no interest. Ebert was a national treasure, great share.
by jqpabc123 | 2026-02-08 14:10:56+00:00
The myth that bitcoin is an effective store of value (aka "digital gold") has just died. The proof is available in your crypto wallet.

Real gold bullion has now been fully "digitized". You can buy and hold real bullion without taking delivery, without transactions fees and without dealing with tbe schenanigans of unregulated markets and manipulators.

Over the past year of unprecedented marketplace turmoil and upheaval, "real gold" has risen just as dramatically as "digital gold" has fallen.

Only one myth left standing in the way of bitcoin's total demise --- the idea that PoW is a reasonable and effective basis for financial markets/transactions. Are you willing to put real money on it?
by fragmede | 2026-02-08 14:11:00+00:00
We can (and should) provide for those among us who aren't able to provide for themselves, without also firing everyone in the welfare department. UBI is shit. People need to do something in order to recieve money, even if the something is begging on the side of the freeway or going into the welfare office to claim benefits. Magic money from the sky is not the answer.