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OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

https://openciv3.org/
631•klaussilveira•12h ago•187 comments

Start all of your commands with a comma

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
18•theblazehen•2d ago•0 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
930•xnx•18h ago•547 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
34•helloplanets•4d ago•26 comments

How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
110•matheusalmeida•1d ago•28 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
43•videotopia•4d ago•1 comments

Jeffrey Snover: "Welcome to the Room"

https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/02/01/welcome-to-the-room/
10•kaonwarb•3d ago•9 comments

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
222•isitcontent•13h ago•25 comments

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
213•dmpetrov•13h ago•103 comments

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

https://vecti.com
323•vecti•15h ago•142 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
372•ostacke•19h ago•94 comments

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
359•aktau•19h ago•181 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
478•todsacerdoti•21h ago•234 comments

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
275•eljojo•15h ago•164 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
404•lstoll•19h ago•273 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
85•quibono•4d ago•21 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

https://mirageos.org/blog/delimcc-vs-lwt
25•romes•4d ago•3 comments

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
56•kmm•5d ago•3 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
16•jesperordrup•3h ago•9 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
244•i5heu•16h ago•189 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01122
13•bikenaga•3d ago•2 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
53•gfortaine•10h ago•22 comments

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

https://infisical.com/blog/devops-to-solutions-engineering
141•vmatsiiako•18h ago•64 comments

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
281•surprisetalk•3d ago•37 comments

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

https://kirkville.com/i-now-assume-that-all-ads-on-apple-news-are-scams/
1060•cdrnsf•22h ago•435 comments

Why I Joined OpenAI

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2026-02-07/why-i-joined-openai.html
133•SerCe•9h ago•118 comments

Learning from context is harder than we thought

https://hy.tencent.com/research/100025?langVersion=en
177•limoce•3d ago•96 comments

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

https://github.com/phreda4/r3
70•phreda4•12h ago•14 comments

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/female-asian-elephant-calf-born-smithsonians-national-zoo-an...
28•gmays•8h ago•11 comments

FORTH? Really!?

https://rescrv.net/w/2026/02/06/associative
63•rescrv•20h ago•23 comments
Open in hackernews

Insurance for AI: Easier Said Than Done

https://loeber.substack.com/p/24-insurance-for-ai-easier-said-than
48•sebg•8mo ago

Comments

baobun•8mo ago
> "can you really trust accounting software not to make mistakes? Won’t there be edge-cases in mortgage underwriting that software might miss, but an experienced underwriter would catch?" The proof is in the pudding: the world runs on software now.

Indeed.

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

janice1999•8mo ago
See also the Australia Robodebt scheme, which also claimed many lives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
jlarocco•8mo ago
Wow, those two articles are as Kafka-esque as it gets. What a nightmare it must have been for the people caught up in them.
doctorpangloss•8mo ago
Why did they defend Horizon though? The Wiki article offers a POV from someone who was functionally powerless:

> We have to be careful, that we are not creating a cottage industry that damages the brand and makes clients like the DWP and the DVLA think twice. The DWP would not have re-awarded the Post Office card account contract, which pays out £18 billion a year, in the last month if they thought for a minute that this computer system was not reliable

I know that's something that someone said, but is it true? So what if a lot of people say that? Nobody knows who or what leads to sales or not sales. If sales were all that mattered, they wouldn't do the IT upgrade at all.

People use shitty software all the time.

> The new Horizon project became the largest non-military IT contract in Europe.

Also... really doubt that is true.

The Horizon IT report's first volume "will focus on redress (compensation) and the human impact of the Horizon scandal." Okay. But why did people feel so strongly about the technology in the first place? Who gives a fuck about bugs?

idopmstuff•8mo ago
I worked as a PM for a startup that makes software to help review appraisals, and there's absolutely no question that stuff gets missed by humans in appraisal review as well as the rest of the underwriting process.

Every organization is built around tradeoffs between time (which is very much money here) and quality. You route appraisals to people of different skill levels depending on the likelihood of issues and the likelihood that those issues matter. With appraisals, for example, if buyer's putting down 40% where only 20% is required, you check only the super critical stuff, because even if you're meaningfully off on the appraised value it doesn't actually matter that much.

There are a ton of these tradeoffs of whether you should review something as well as whether you should have your most senior people review it. On top of that, reviewers are judged on speed, so naturally they're making tradeoffs of accuracy vs. time themselves on each review.

Using AI means you're able to review things that wouldn't even have been looked at otherwise, because there's no longer a tradeoff of time/cost vs. accuracy. Even the world's best reviewer can't catch things they're not looking at.

doctorpangloss•8mo ago
I don't know. Lots of words to say, "Tort reform for everyone is the right answer, but it hurts my bottom line, so I can't say the intellectually honest and obvious thing."
blitzar•8mo ago
Real-time bidding a la online ad impressions.

{Task, model, coverage} --> bid.

It can be circular Ai with insurer Ai doing the evaluation and bidding.

WJW•8mo ago
It wouldn't be too hard to set up a marketplace like that, but how do you know your bot is good enough to not accidentally bankrupt the business it's bidding on behalf of? Ads have this wonderful property that individual ads are pretty cheap. If you mis-bid to show an ad to someone not interested it won't cost you very much. Don't do it too often of course, but a few mistakes here and there are fine. In addition, they are bid on and delivered within a second or so at most.

Insurance is very different. Nobody is looking to insure the unit test they vibe coded late Friday afternoon, rather it would be the multi million dollar "we replaced all our accountants with a chatGPT based system" decisions. Getting one of those decisions wrong will absolutely be a problem for your AI-insurance company. In addition, in most cases you won't even know if you were right or wrong until many years later so you have to keep reserves locked up for much much longer.

financetechbro•8mo ago
This would add exponential complexity to the already difficult challenge of insuring AI
AndrewKemendo•8mo ago
Ultimately this will be like everything else in law (insurance is law by other means) and will be a product of court rulings which means it’s a whack-a-mole game for lenient jurisdictions (like money laundering).

The jurisdiction that hears the case in whatever “justice” system hears it, will set the precedent for all others to reference, based on their alignment with the jurisdiction that uses state power to enforce a resolution.

I expect people will host or make remotely available systems which fall outside of the acceptable limits for whatever regional jurisdiction has their laws.

As usual, pirates and the powerful will steer around those.

0xWTF•8mo ago
Gave a Waymo engineer a ride in my FSD Tesla around the Bay recently. The conversation was very illuminating. It seems to me there should be pretty clear corollaries in more traditional engineering markets. Does Black and Veatch take out E&O insurance? Did John McShain take out E&O for the Pentagon? Did Tishman take out E&O on the World Trade Center? Did the University of California take out E&O on the Manhattan Project? Does Boeing or Lockheed take out E&O on aircraft?
ckcheng•8mo ago
> Did the University of California take out E&O on the Manhattan Project?

Interestingly, see [1] for

“a teletype from General Groves to Oppenheimer from February 1944, instructing the latter as to what to tell Underhill [UC’s secretary and finance officer] about the hazards to be insured against at an unspecified site”

[1]: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/03/28/weekly-document-i...

8note•8mo ago
> The conversation was very illuminating

this sounds very interesting! any more details?

bcoates•8mo ago
I don't think the adverse selection problem is anywhere near as serious as the author seems to think--insurance companies aren't selling superior knowledge of their client's situation--they're selling against their client's massively different risk appetite.

I expect home insurance to cost more than it pays out (both in median and mean terms) but I take the negative-value deal to protect against rare financially ruinous outcomes.

Quality underwriting and minimizing adverse selection gives an insurance company a massive advantage over competitor insurance companies but it doesn't make or break the market its own.

I'm also not sold on model provider diversity being the measure of risk diversity-surely most of the risk is coming from application errors and not failures of "safety" tuning of models (which are mostly about preventing LLMs from saying things you wouldn't want in the newspaper--I assume AI E&O isn't interested in ensuring reputation risk)

BrenBarn•8mo ago
The fact that the tech E&O insurance market is small just says to me that we're not doing enough to police and punish harmful behavior by tech companies. The risk for companies is low because we're not willing to make things more dangerous for them.
noqc•8mo ago
>Another classic detail of insurance markets is that insurers need to diversify the risks that they underwrite: for example, if you provide flood insurance, then you wouldn’t want to write all your policies in a single town by the river: when one house gets flooded by a storm, chances are that all the houses get flooded, and you go out of business. That’s concentration of risk, and insurers strive to avoid it.

If I have insured a whole population by the river, then I'm heavily incentivized to sell an additional insurance policy to someone else by that same river, after all, if there is a flood, I cannot become more bankrupt, and in the other case, I collect one more premium.

phonon•8mo ago
Not really. Insurance is heavily regulated. The insurer would be required to buy more reinsurance to cover that additional risk, until the regulator was satisfied.
noqc•8mo ago
>insurers strive to avoid it.

This is not true, and nothing you have said contradicts my argument to that effect.

we_needit•8mo ago
What a coincidence for those two people who were involved in this.