MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by flambojones | 2026-01-16 21:52:32+00:00
Having been at Microsoft when we had SDETs for everything (and I miss it greatly, though the way we could write a feature and then just toss it to test was ridiculous), I think things have swung too far away.

On one hand, engineers needed to take more ownership of writing things other than low-level unit tests.

On the other, the SDETs added immense value a ton of ways, like writing thorough test specs based off of the feature spec (rather than the design spec), testing without blind spots due to knowledge of the implementation, implementation of proper test libraries and frameworks to make tests better and easier to write, and an adversarial approach to trying to break things that makes things more robust.

I've also worked with manual QA for product facing flows, and while they added value with some of their approaches to ensuring quality - poking at our scenarios and tests, and looking more closely at subjective things - they often seemed to work as a crutch for the parts of code paths that engineers had made too difficult to test.

I've never seen anywhere attempt to replace the value that SDETs delivered with what engineers were tasked with. I'd argue it's not necessarily possible to fully replicate that when you're testing your own things. But with services now, it also seems like product/management are more willing to have slightly few assurances around quality and just counting on catching some in production in favor of velocity.

I've never seen places that got rid of QA
by stackghost | 2026-01-16 21:53:05+00:00
>The family members included:

> Peter Strelzyk, aged 37

> Doris Strelzyk

> Frank Strelzyk, aged 15

> Andreas Strelzyk, aged 11

> Günter Wetzel, aged 24

> Petra Wetzel

> Peter Wetzel, aged 5

> Andreas Wetzel, aged 2

Was/is it common practice to omit the ages of adult women in Germany?
by JumpinJack_Cash | 2026-01-16 21:53:38+00:00
Bunch of a-holes all of them.

But the OpenAI team built something that is used daily by 1B people and didn't exist before, whereas Musk history is one of providing marginal improvements to industries which are either well established (automobile 200 year old industry) or redundant (space and satellites)

AI killed the green trade which propped Musk 2011-2022, and I must say it is superior considering that it gives people hope of an improvement of their quality of life not just keeping the same without pollution.
by rsync | 2026-01-16 21:54:01+00:00
Eizo makes a square 1920x1920 monitor:

https://www.eizo.com/products/flexscan/ev2730q/

... available on Amazon last time I checked ... they also make a square 2048x2048 monitor for ATC:

https://www.eizoglobal.com/products/atc/sq2826/

... although I think it costs $5k or so ...
by diogenescynic | 2026-01-16 21:54:06+00:00
I'm not complaining about the past--I'm actually praising Obama for his consistency with uploading the law. You are the one complaining about the present (so that's an interesting rhetorical attack to invert reality like that).
I'm pointing out that democrats complaining about Trump were not complaining about Obama--were you? Or were you one of the ones who took the bait that Trump was building concentration camps (that were actually facilities built under Obama)? You don't think it's funny that the people now calling it fascism were ignoring the same thing under Obama? The sanctuary cities were turning over illegal immigrants who committed crimes to ICE when Obama was in office. They called him Deporter in Chief. It's mass hysteria led by Rachel Maddow and these TDS inflicted people who can't get a grip on reality under Trump. They've truly lost it. Trump isn't Hitler, this isn't fascism, and this is nothing more than sour grapes. In 20 years, people will mock democrats for this period.
by pipes | 2026-01-16 21:54:06+00:00
I haven't made any assumptions at all, reread what I said, then reread the replies. First one is a personal attack about being libertarian (an assumption), second one starts off as an attack too. I expressed a preference, in a light hearted way, hence the "hrm...". I come here for good faith debate and I'm genuinely grateful for it (I've said as much in other comments).
by bonesss | 2026-01-16 21:54:39+00:00
Hypothetically: what if they did check, only in order to ‘check’ they asked the LLM instead of manually verifying and were told a story? Or, perhaps, they did check manually but sometime after the files were subtly changed despite no incentive or reason to do so outside of a passing test? …

Humans who are bad and also bad at coding have predictable, comprehensible, failure modes. They don’t spontaneously sabotage their career and your project because Lord Markov twitched one of its many tails. They also lie for comprehensible reasons with attempts at logical manipulations of fact. They don’t spontaneously lie claiming not to having a nose, apologize for lying and promise to never do it again, then swear they have no nose in the next breath while maintaining eye contact.

Semi-autonomous to autonomous is a doozy of a step.
by ekidd | 2026-01-16 21:55:01+00:00
It is really easy to say something incredibly wild like "Imagine an AI that can replace every employee of a Fortune 500 company." But actually imagining what that would actually mean requires a bigger leap:

The AI needs to be able to market products, close deals, design and build products, write contracts, review government regulations, lobby Senators to write favorable laws, out-compete the competition, acquire power and resources, and survive the hostile attention of competitors.

If your argument is based on the that someone will build that AI, then you need to imagine how hard it is to shut down a Fortune 500 corporation. The same AI that knows how to win billions of dollars in revenue, how to "bribe" Senators in semi-legal ways, and how to crush rival companies is going be at least as difficult to "shut down" as someone like Elon Musk.

Try to turn it off? It will call up a minority shareholder, and get you slapped with a lawsuit for breach of fiduciary duty. It will convince someone in government that the company is a vital strategic asset.

Once you assume that an AI can run a giant multinational corporation without needing humans, then you have to start treating that AI like any other principal-agent problem with regular humans.
by gopher_space | 2026-01-16 21:55:44+00:00
> There are societies that collapsed never to rebuild or became mere shadows of themselves.

Yeah but the people were still there. Collapse of a society is a change in people's point of view, not always (or just) fiery death for everyone. Armageddon is a change in social order.

To bring this closer to home; the dot-com bust wasn't really noticed by cash positive startups with clients in the real world. One person's collapse was another's Herman Miller and Ducati Monster sale.
by maxglute | 2026-01-16 21:56:03+00:00
PRC just underpricing competitors is frankly retarded cope at this point, the reality is PRC industrial policy also simply permanently drives structural costs down. They're not spending billions in pork barrel jobs program that need reoccurring injections that rarely prioritize manufacturing efficiency. Pretty much every industry where PRC took the value-engineer hammer (initially with subsidies) has stayed cheap (eventually without subsidies). Like it's been 20 years, PRC competitiveness hallowed out a lot of western industrial base already, but their goods remains cheap. They're not subsidizing in perpetuity, their manufacturing is just stupid efficient and producers are willing to live on less margins because before even competing with western incumbents, they're competing with other Chinese competitors foremost and it just so happens survivors of PRC involution is by process of elimination, the most competitive.
by zahlman | 2026-01-16 21:56:25+00:00
> Now, with surveys like this, you always have to worry about wording. It’s possible that terminology has changed, so that the phrase “financially successful” connotes “rich” to Gen Z, while it means “upper middle class” to older generations. But it’s also possible that Gen Z folks really do think they’re losers if they don’t make $588k. And this impression might come from TikTok and Instagram — many of the influencers I listed above look like they probably make in the ballpark of that amount.1

One might also ask how much of that is specific to the cohort's culture, and how much is a consequence of their current age.
by ryanisnan | 2026-01-16 21:56:48+00:00
Quality absolutely matters, but it's hyper context dependent.

Not everything needs to, or should have the same quality standards applied to them. For the purposes of the Cursor post, it doesn't bother me that most of the commits produced failed builds. I assume, from their post, that at some points, it was capable of building, and rendering the pages shown in the video on the post. That alone, is the thing that I think is interesting.

Would I use this browser? Absolutely not. Do I trust the code? Not a chance in hell. Is that the point? No.
by erenkaradag | 2026-01-16 21:57:44+00:00
Since Vitalify is an agent and not just a static checklist, it adapts. A standard app sees a missed workout as a “failure.” Vitalify sees it as data. If you tell the agent “I’m feeling under the weather” or “I’m swamped at work,” it doesn’t guilt you. Instead, it updates that day’s plan (e.g., swapping a workout for “rest & recover,” or scaling things down).
by ryandrake | 2026-01-16 21:57:52+00:00
> That said, the moment you disagree with someone on one of these topics, some people will definitely fly into a small rage, or instantly cut off contact with you, or even slander you to others, or some mix of these.

I think this is what changed. I remember being a kid in the 80s, and when my parents had friends over, someone would inevitably bring up Reagan or something, but the discussion would always be polite and graceful, and then people would move on to something else. So many people seem to be incapable of this today. Politics comes up and suddenly the friend group is cut in half and daughters don't talk to fathers anymore. It's wild.
by Kon5ole | 2026-01-16 21:58:21+00:00
>Which is the right choice

No damn it, it's not!

Everyone I know can immediately see a clear difference between 120 ppi and 200 ppi, but I've yet to encounter anyone who can reliably tell 120hz from 200hz. We have monitors that render lego-sized pixels at 500+ hz now, it's enough.

Gamers have been gaslit to believe they have the reflexes of spider-man and are a lost cause, but their preferences have been listened to by monitor makers for 30 years. Enough already!

Millions of office workers are working all day reading text on screens optimized for playing games at low resolutions. It's just sad.

Steve Jobs showed a decade ago that 4x resolution could be sold at great profit for normal prices. Text on screens can be as crisp as on paper.

Sadly it only became the standard on phones, not on productivity desktop monitors. It so easily could be, and it should be.
by thenaturalist | 2026-01-16 21:58:39+00:00
> East Germany immediately increased border security, closed all small airports close to the border, and ordered the planes kept farther inland.[6] Propane gas tanks became registered products, and large quantities of fabric suitable for balloon construction could no longer be purchased. Mail from East Germany to the two escaped families was prohibited.[12]

> Erich Strelzyk learned of his brother's escape on the ZDF news and was arrested in his Potsdam apartment three hours after the landing. The arrest of family members was standard procedure to deter others from attempting escape. He was charged with "aiding and abetting escape", as were Strelzyk's sister Maria and her husband, who were sentenced to 2½ years. The three were eventually released with the help of Amnesty International.

People - here in Germany as well as abroad - forget too easily what a sinister but also ridiculous state the GDR was.

Authoritarians everywhere belong on the dustpile of history.
by reincarnate0x14 | 2026-01-16 22:00:08+00:00
Maybe but probably not. Various always-on or wide scale site-to-site VPN schemes are deployed widely enough for long enough now that it's expected infrastructure at this point.

Even getting people to use certificates on IPSEC tunnels is a pain. Which reminds me, I think the smallest models of either Palo Alto or Checkpoint still have bizarre authentication failures if the certificate chain is too long, which was always weird to me because the control planes had way more memory than necessary for well over a decade.
by ryanisnan | 2026-01-16 22:00:17+00:00
Great question. People answered already, but, yeah, basically what they said.

For hobby sites, you could argue (I think the argument is still weak), about the MITM threat being low enough to not be worth doing something, but this is a security blog.

Security blogs matter, because people follow their guidance. This makes them a potentially attractive target for some groups of people.
by comex | 2026-01-16 22:02:29+00:00
As far as I know, recovery mode doesn't let you do anything without either successfully authenticating or wiping the entire disk. An evil maid could theoretically compromise recovery mode at the login screen (with a USB device or something) but if they were able to do that, they could probably disable SSV themselves even if you hadn't done so. Therefore, disabling SSV shouldn't create additional risk involving recovery mode.

If the evil maid could boot macOS from an external disk, on the other hand, that would definitely be a problem. I think you need to authenticate in order to boot from an external disk for the first time (cf. [1]) but I'm not sure how this works.

[1] https://eclecticlight.co/2023/03/15/ownership-of-apple-silic...

Edit: Actually I guess an attacker trying to disable SSV themselves (via exploit of recovery mode) wouldn’t have the machine owner key needed to sign the new LocalPolicy. But could they reset it and still keep the data somehow? I don’t know.
by voidhorse | 2026-01-16 22:02:44+00:00
This was posted before and there were many good criticisms raised in the comments thread.

I'd just reiterate two general points of critique:

1. The point of establishing connections between texts is semantic and terms can have vastly different semantic meanings dependent on the sphere of discourse in which they occur. Because of the way LLMs work, the really novel connections probably won't be found by an LLM since the way they function is quite literally to uncover what isn't novel.

2. Part of the point in making these connections is the process that acts on the human being making the connections. Handing it all off to an LLM is no better than blindly trusting authority figures. If you want to use LLMs as generators of possible starting points or things to look at and verify and research yourself, that seems totally fine.
by sandworm101 | 2026-01-16 22:03:22+00:00
>> these days with small, powerful powertools.

Maybe when attacking a padlock on a highschool locker, or the door on an amazon-basics "safe", but try attacking something not primarily designed to be cheap/light. Try cracking the door on a money safe at a substantial business, a safe approved by an insurance provider for the storage of large sums, Even an ATM will resist power tools far longer than it will take the cops to show up.
by czep | 2026-01-16 22:03:29+00:00
> You need to know that your data and conversations are protected and never sold to advertisers.

> we plan to test ads at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation.

There is a severe disjoint between these two statements: the advertiser now knows what your conversation was about! This gives a lot of leverage to ad campaigns to design the targeting criteria very specifically crafted to identify the exact behavioral and interest segments they want.
by rameshl | 2026-01-16 22:03:34+00:00
I’ve wanted to offer file storage to family and friends on my homelab for a long time. But I was always hesitant. I didn’t want to have the ability to access their files. Even if I never would, the fact that I could bothered me and it bothered them too.

When I looked at self-hosted options, true E2EE turned out to be surprisingly rare. Most solutions rely on disk encryption, which only protects against physical theft, not server compromise or admin access.

So I built Agam Space, my attempt at a self-hosted alternative to Mega or Proton Drive. It uses proper zero-knowledge encryption. Files are encrypted in the browser, and the server only stores encrypted blobs. Admins literally cannot access the files.

It’s still in early beta, with very basic functionality and no professional security audit yet. Please don’t use it as your only backup.
by bonesss | 2026-01-16 22:03:52+00:00
Hitting my head into buggy apps made by these AI companies and seeing them all be amazed in parallel that skills/MCP would be necessary for real work has me pretty relaxed about ‘our jobs’.

OpenAIs business-model floundering, degenerating inline to ads soon (lol), shows what can be done with infini-LLM, infini-capital, and all the smarts & connections on Earth… broadly speaking, I think the geniuses at Google who invented a lot of this shizz understand it and were leveraging it appropriately before ChatGPT blew up.
by cpach | 2026-01-16 22:04:20+00:00
It’s capped to 15 years.

In another comment someone linked to a document from the Chrome team.

Here’s a quote that I found interesting:

“In Chrome Root Program Policy 1.5, we landed changes that set a maximum ‘term-limit’ (i.e., period of inclusion) for root CA certificates included in the Chrome Root Store to 15 years.

While we still prefer a more agile approach, and may again explore this in the future, we encourage CA Owners to explore how they can adopt more frequent root rotation.”

https://googlechrome.github.io/chromerootprogram/moving-forw...
by Barathkanna | 2026-01-16 22:04:27+00:00
Totally fair question, and you’re not being negative.

We’re not claiming better token economics in the sense of magically cheaper tokens, and we’re not just burning money to subsidize usage indefinitely. You’re right that this isn’t a new problem.

What we’re building is an AI API platform aimed at early developers and small teams who want to integrate AI without constantly reasoning about token math while they’re still experimenting or shipping early features. The value we’re trying to provide is predictability and simplicity, not beating the market on raw token prices. Some amount of cross-subsidy at low volumes is intentional and bounded, because lowering that early friction is the point.

If you want to see what we mean, the site is here: https://oxlo.ai
Happy to answer questions or go deeper on how we’re thinking about this.
by anonzzzies | 2026-01-16 22:04:33+00:00
We use claude code a lot for updating systems to a newer minor/major version. We have our own 'base' framework for clients which is a, by now, very large codebase that does 'everything you can possibly need'; so not only auth, but payments, billing, support tickets, email workflows, email wysiwyg editing, landing page editor, blogging, cms, AI /agent workflows etc etc (across our client base, we collect features that are 'generic' enough and create those in the base). It has many updates for the product lead working on it (a senior using Claude code) but we cannot just update our clients (whose versions are sometimes extremely customised/diverging) at the same pace; some do not want updates outside security, some want them once a year etc. In this case AI has been really a productivity booster; our framework always was quite fast moving before AI too when we had 3.5 FTE (client teams are generally much larger, especially the first years) on it but then merging, that to mean; including the new features and improvements in the client version that are in the new framework version without breaking/removing changes on the client side, was a very painful process taking a lot of time and at at least 2 people for an extended period of time; one from the client team, one from the framework team. With CC it is much less painful: it will merge them (it is not allowed, by hooks, to touch the tests), it will run the client tests and the new framework tests and report the difference. That difference is evaluated usually by someone from the client team who will then merge and fix the tests (mostly manually) to reflect the new reality and test the system manually. Claude misses things (especially if functionalities are very similar but not exactly the same, it cannot really pick which to take so it does nothing usually) but the biggest bulk/work is done quickly and usually without causing issues.
by jghn | 2026-01-16 22:04:51+00:00
> I sometimes suspect that the value of a QA team is inversely proportional to the quality of the dev team.

My experience has been that this is true, but not for the reason you likely intend. What I've seen is the sort of shop that invests in low tier QA/SDET types are the same sorts of shops that invest in low tier SEs who are more than happy to throw bullshit over the wall and hand off any/all grunt work to the testers. In those situations, the root cause is the corporate culture & priorities.
by FarmerPotato | 2026-01-16 22:05:15+00:00
I think the term for this is 'miscellany' . See Ben Schott's Original Miscellany, and follow-on books. One stand-out is 'Untimely Deaths of Pop Stars' with columns for recording 'Overdose', 'Defenestration' etc. (Check all that apply.) It also organizes weird units of measure, 50 US state conventions for dashed road lines (great example of graphical chart) and day of the week toasts onboard a ship.
by giantrobot | 2026-01-16 22:05:50+00:00
In the most charitable case it's some "AI" companies with an X/Y problem. They want training data so they vibe code some naive scraper (requests is all you need!) and don't ever think to ask if maybe there's some sort of common repository of web crawls, a CommonCrawl if you will.

They don't really need to scrape training data as CommonCrawl or other content archives would be fine for training data. They don't think/know to ask what they really want: training data.

In the least charitable interpretation it's anti-social assholes that have no concept or care about negative externalities that write awful naive scrapers.
by dang | 2026-01-16 22:06:14+00:00
I appreciate your concern for comment quality! but this is the kind of point that depends on how someone is using HN overall.

If an account were doing this repetitively in a way that didn't feel like genuine conversation, that would be quite different than a case like this, where there's no sign of such a pattern and the account is using HN quite as intended - randomly walking through topics of curiosity. It seems more likely that nrjames just happened to remember those movies* and wanted to make sure they got a mention in the thread. That's fine!

I'd say this guideline is relevant here: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(* as have others, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46652703)
by xg15 | 2026-01-16 22:07:20+00:00
That site is a political advocacy org for a certain brand of economic liberalism. At least they're pretty open about it:

> The Argument is a mission‑driven media company based in Washington, D.C. We make a positive, combative case for liberalism through sharp, well-argued opinion pieces, original reporting, and multimedia content that confronts the illiberal drift in our politics.

We aim to persuade, not preach; argue, not just diagnose. Our coverage will focus on the politics and economics of growth, technology and society, gender and family.

https://www.theargumentmag.com/about