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Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/commands-with-comma/
269•theblazehen•2d ago•90 comments

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

https://www.spritely.institute/hoot/
31•AlexeyBrin•1h ago•5 comments

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

https://openciv3.org/
709•klaussilveira•16h ago•211 comments

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.12501
12•onurkanbkrc•1h ago•1 comments

The Waymo World Model

https://waymo.com/blog/2026/02/the-waymo-world-model-a-new-frontier-for-autonomous-driving-simula...
976•xnx•21h ago•559 comments

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

https://jesperordrup.github.io/vocal-guide/
87•jesperordrup•6h ago•33 comments

Software Engineering Is Back

https://blog.alaindichiappari.dev/p/software-engineering-is-back
3•alainrk•49m ago•2 comments

Omarchy First Impressions

https://brianlovin.com/writing/omarchy-first-impressions-CEEstJk
3•tosh•1h ago•1 comments

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

https://floedb.ai/blog/how-we-made-geo-joins-400-faster-with-h3-indexes
136•matheusalmeida•2d ago•35 comments

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

https://arcadeblogger.com/2026/02/02/unseen-footage-of-atari-battlezone-cabinet-production/
69•videotopia•4d ago•10 comments

Ga68, a GNU Algol 68 Compiler

https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/PEXRTN-ga68-intro/
15•matt_d•3d ago•4 comments

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

https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo
241•isitcontent•16h ago•26 comments

What Is Ruliology?

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliology/
45•helloplanets•4d ago•46 comments

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

https://github.com/pydantic/monty
242•dmpetrov•16h ago•128 comments

Cross-Region MSK Replication: K2K vs. MirrorMaker2

https://medium.com/lensesio/cross-region-msk-replication-a-comprehensive-performance-comparison-o...
4•andmarios•4d ago•1 comments

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

https://vecti.com
343•vecti•18h ago•153 comments

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

https://hackers-1995.vercel.app/
508•todsacerdoti•1d ago•248 comments

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

https://www.sheldonbrown.com/
393•ostacke•22h ago•100 comments

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

https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
307•eljojo•19h ago•190 comments

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

https://github.com/microsoft/litebox
361•aktau•22h ago•187 comments

An Update on Heroku

https://www.heroku.com/blog/an-update-on-heroku/
435•lstoll•22h ago•284 comments

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

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

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

https://martypc.blogspot.com/2024/09/pc-floppy-copy-protection-vault-prolok.html
72•kmm•5d ago•10 comments

Dark Alley Mathematics

https://blog.szczepan.org/blog/three-points/
98•quibono•4d ago•22 comments

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/07/ai-spending-economy-shortages/
27•1vuio0pswjnm7•2h ago•24 comments

How to effectively write quality code with AI

https://heidenstedt.org/posts/2026/how-to-effectively-write-quality-code-with-ai/
274•i5heu•19h ago•223 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/
1083•cdrnsf•1d ago•466 comments

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

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

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

https://visualrambling.space/neural-network/
309•surprisetalk•3d ago•45 comments

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

https://developers.googleblog.com/introducing-the-developer-knowledge-api-and-mcp-server/
66•gfortaine•13h ago•30 comments
Open in hackernews

OpenAI updates terms to forbid usage for medical and legal advice

https://openai.com/policies/usage-policies/
26•piskov•3mo ago

Comments

_wire_•3mo ago
Haha! What a joke

"You can't believe how smart and capable this thing is, ready to take over and run the world"

(Not suitable for any particular purpose - Use at your own risk - See warnings - User is responsible for safe operation...)

(Pan from home robot clumsily depositing clean dishes into an empty dishwasher to a man in VR goggles in next room making all the motions of placing objects in a box)

Check all services you wish to subscribe ($1000 per service per month): - Put laundry in washing machine - Microwave mac & cheese dinner - Change and feed baby - Get granny to toilet - Fix Windows software update error on PC - Reboot wifi router to restore internet connection

SoftTalker•3mo ago
Standard cop-out that software companies always try to include. They disclaim any warranty of merchantibility and fitness for a particular purpose. So if you try to claim that the software doesn't do what it's supposed to do, they take no responsibility for that.
piskov•3mo ago
Unless the following excludes (which it shouldn’t) personal use vs batch one:

Empower people. People should be able to make decisions about their lives and their communities. So we don’t allow our services to be used to manipulate or deceive people, to interfere with their exercise of human rights, to exploit people’s vulnerabilities, or to interfere with their ability to get an education or access critical services, including any use for:

…

automation of high-stakes decisions in sensitive areas without human review:

- critical infrastructure

- education

- housing

- employment

- financial activities and credit insurance

- legal ===

- medical ===

- essential government services

- product safety components

- national security

- migration

- law enforcement

SilverElfin•3mo ago
Wouldn’t this affect many prominent startups? Why wouldn’t they move to a competitor? Is OpenAI assuming to just be for consumers?
piskov•3mo ago
What stops others to do the same (if they haven’t already)?

It’s a safe bet: we don’t allow you to ask for medical advice so we are not liable if you do and drink mercury or what have you based on our advice.

MrCoffee7•3mo ago
You can still ask questions for medical advice. You just need to phrase the question more like a hypothetical one instead of making it obvious that you are asking for yourself.
geor9e•3mo ago
HN Headline is categorically false.

"you cannot use our services for: provision of tailored advice that requires a license, such as legal or medical advice, without appropriate involvement by a licensed professional"

So, they didn't add any handrails, filters, or blocks to the software. This is just boilerplate "consult your doctor too!" to cover their ass.

unyttigfjelltol•3mo ago
Doesn’t prohibit brainstorming what to ask your doctor, or which professional consultation to prioritize.

Does prohibit, for illustration, LLM-powered surgical device.

Everything else is “gray area”?

geor9e•3mo ago
Prohibits in the "I'm a sign, not a cop" sense.

There is no way for them to even remotely verify if you are "without appropriate involvement by a licensed professional" in the room, so to a rebellious outlaw, these prohibitions might as well not exist.

SoftTalker•3mo ago
> brainstorming what to ask your doctor

Generally a bad idea. If you want to be a doctor, go to medical school.

ralph84•3mo ago
I don’t want to be a doctor, I just want to fix what ails me. You don’t need an MD to research symptoms.
OutOfHere•3mo ago
GPT saved me yesterday. It helped me identify and verify a rare three-way undocumented medicine interaction that was causing anguish. The interaction was hypomagnesia and serious arrhythmia caused by a combination of berberine, famotidine, and vonoprazan. This was despite magnesium supplementation.

Two months ago it helped me accurately identify a gastrointestinal diverticulitis-type issue, find the right medication for it (metronidazole), which fixed the issue for good. It also guided me on identifying the cause, and also on pausing and restoring fiber intake appropriately.

Granted, it is very easy for people to make serious mistakes in using LLMs, but granted how many mistakes doctors make, it is better to take some self-responsibility first. The road to making a useful diagnosis can be windy, but with sufficient exploration, GPT will get you there.

OutOfHere•3mo ago
The bad idea is to live and die in ignorance. The good idea is to use GPT to find ideas and references that one can then verify. If it were up to the medical establishment, they would block the public from accessing medical research altogether, and they already do this by paywalling much research.
CGamesPlay•3mo ago
Did the headline get changed? It 100% matches what you're calling out: "OpenAI updates terms to forbid usage..."
piskov•3mo ago
It hasn’t been changed
geor9e•3mo ago
They didn't forbid it.

Does "US law forbids driving without a seatbelt" mean the same as "US law forbids driving"?

dangus•3mo ago
While you are correct, the question now becomes whether the disclaimer can ever be removed.

If the AI isn’t smart enough to replace a licensed expert even given unlimited access to everything a doctor would learn in medical, where is the value in the AI?

dragonwriter•3mo ago
Plenty of other automation supports licensed experts without replacing them and has value, so if even AI supports licensed efforts but can never replace them, it could still have value in that application.
dangus•3mo ago
But this isn’t what was advertised by the AI companies themselves. They’ve been telling us AGI is imminent.

Now we are moving the goalposts to “it’ll be a nice tool to use like SaaS software.”

dragonwriter•3mo ago
> But this isn’t what was advertised by the AI companies themselves. They’ve been telling us AGI is imminent.

Other than OpenAI, I don’t think that’s actually true of what the companies have been advertising.

But, in any case, things can have value and still fall short of what those with a financial interest in the public overestimating the imminent significance of an industry promote. The claim here was about what was necessary for AI to have value, not what was necessary to meet the picture that the most enthusiastic, biased proponents were painting. Those are very different questions, and, if you don’t like moving goalposts, you shouldn’t move them from the former to the latter.

dangus•3mo ago
When I originally said “where’s the value in the AI?” in my first comment the implied situation relates to how vastly more expensive it is than traditional SaaS to deliver.

AI is undoubtedly useful, but at its current infrastructure cost it’s not going to be worth selling unless it can actually put people out of work so that enterprise customers are motivated to spend salary-level money on it. That’s the only way to make the numbers black with the kind of deficits the industry has.

Making existing employees 5-20% more productive isn’t enough. You can already get that kind of improvement for very cheap. That’s the kind of improvement you get by buying your employees catered lunch or a SaaS license for a CRUD app.

My company is paying less money for AI subscriptions per seat than some pretty low impact tools like password managers.

You’d think that CoPilot might charge us $100 instead of $10 if they really thought it was that valuable.

There’s no goalpost being moved on my end.

dragonwriter•3mo ago
> AI is undoubtedly useful, but at its current infrastructure cost it’s not going to be worth selling unless it can actually put people out of work

This doesn't even make sense unless you make the false assumption that the work to do is fixed: things that increase productivity increase employment (they increase the value delivered by each unit of labor, which at a fixed cost of labor increases the range of applications at which it is profitable to apply the same labor or, holding employment level fixed, increases market-clearing pay, the usual result of which is that both employment and pay go up in the field whose priductivity was increased, but less than you would expect in each case if the other was fixed.)

dangus•3mo ago
It makes sense in that there’s already a dollar value companies are willing to pay to help employees work faster or better or what have you.

I can pay X company $N dollars to make my employees work Z amount faster, or maybe make my work compliant with Z regulation while avoiding Y amount of work to achieve it.

AI tools are basically “they might make your employees faster or slower or make mistakes or maybe not.” That’s why they only cost $10-100 a month per seat.

They don’t directly solve a problem like the most expensive enterprise software.

Like I said AI is cheaper than really boring stuff like basic PAM tools or password managers. Why is AI so cheap when it’s so expensive to deliver and supposedly delivers revolutionary productivity gains?

This is why I said that until AI is actually replacing whole humans, the infrastructure cost is too insane. Alternatively, they can suddenly reduce costs by a crazy amount somehow.

dangus•3mo ago
https://www.brethorsting.com/blog/2025/10/the-data-center-bu...
OutOfHere•3mo ago
OpenAI already blocked public access to custom GPTs that gave medical advice. I had multiple such custom GPTs get blocked from their previously functional shared access.
jitbit•3mo ago
Why is this flagged? This is pretty significant actually.

So stories like this are no longer possible? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45734582

whatpeoplewant•3mo ago
This update pushes LLMs away from direct advice toward decision-support, which is where multi-agent/agentic patterns help. An agentic LLM can orchestrate retrieval of clinical/legal guidelines, run structured checklists, and escalate to licensed humans, while parallel agents cross-check citations, calibrate uncertainty, and enforce refusal policies. A distributed agentic AI with provenance and audit trails won’t remove liability, but it’s a more defensible architecture than a single end-to-end chatbot for high-risk domains.