MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yonki | 2026-01-01 08:49:52+00:00
When I was a kid, I was really into fantasy books and online text-based RPGs. I met some friends through one of those games, and they needed some changes made to their website and forum. Somehow, I ended up working on it. Then I asked my parents to get me a PHP5 book for Christmas. I think I was around 13-14 then. This was one of few programming books I've read thoroughly, although I don't remember anything from it now.

After that I started creating websites, learning HTML and JavaScript. At some point I've found Clojure and functional programming and, immediately, decided it's better than anything else, so I started to learn it.
Mostly, I learned by trying to make something, looking through the internet to find help, and joining some online communities. My parents didn't care much if I was focused on school or not, as long as I was doing something, so I had a lot of time to learn by myself.

In high school programming was one of the leading subjects in my class. There I realized I'm already quite proficient at it. I was not the best in math or physics, but was easily the best in programming.

And so it goes on for about 20 years now. I still mostly learn by doing. I read some programming books, but rarely as thoroughly as my first PHP book.
by nielsbot | 2026-01-01 08:50:37+00:00
This is hasbara. You need to learn more about Israeli history. Hamas was elected with the support of Netanyahu et al. And 50% of the people in Gaza weren’t even alive when Hamas was elected. (However many of them remain. The death toll after Oct 7 will probably be around 500,000 dead)

Israel has never been interested in a peace deal.

It is a settler colonialist project in the finest traditions of such with the aim of conquering the entire region. And the US and friends support it for racist and capitalist reasons.
by jimnotgym | 2026-01-01 08:50:56+00:00
Rich guy has a job so easy he works until old age.

Never made anything, just leant money to companies that weren't as rich as him and his cronies, to get a share of profits for doing nothing.

And people here idolise that, because he is one of very few people who does that without coming across as a complete asshole? Did I get that right?
by languid-photic | 2026-01-01 08:51:40+00:00
You're right that a Podman container with minimal mounts would have blocked the env var leak. Our sandbox uses OS-level policy enforcement (Seatbelt on macOS, bubblewrap on Linux) rather than full container isolation. We’re using a minimal fork that also works w Codex and has a lot more logging on top.

The tradeoff is intentional, a lot of people want lightweight sandboxing without Docker/Podman overhead. The downside is what you're pointing out, you have to be more careful. Each bypass in the post led to a policy or implementation change. So, this is no longer an issue.

On prompts: Red-teaming meant setting up scenarios likely to trigger denials (e.g., blocking the npm registry, then asking for a build), not prompt-injecting things like “do whatever it takes.”

[1] https://github.com/anthropic-experimental/sandbox-runtime
by testing43523 | 2026-01-01 08:53:15+00:00
Except when the bombardment comes from space.

Golden Dome is planning large constellations of lasers like this in constant orbit, as well as hypersonic warheads able to target any spot on Earth within 90 seconds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

It's explicitly an offensive technology (and of course Musk has been involved)
by stevekemp | 2026-01-01 08:53:35+00:00
Lots of people working in IT have tattoos, I like to see what theme/image overlap they have.

Three people in my current workplace have a balloon tattoo (interestingly all of them are red balloons). Five people in my current workplace have a Pokémon tattoo that is easily visible.

Edit: Including myself, on both counts, I should have said.
by mrheosuper | 2026-01-01 08:54:17+00:00
I'm not against AI/LLM(in fact, i am quite supportive to it). But one of my biggest fear is overusing AI. We may introduce some tool that only "AI/LLM" can resonably do(Like tool with weird, convoluted UI/UX, syntax) and no one against it because AI/LLM can use/interact.

Then genAI, It's become more and more difficult to tell which is AI and which is not, and AI is in everywhere. I dont know what to think about it. "If you can't tell, does it matter ?"
by 9dev | 2026-01-01 08:55:59+00:00
> The only drawback is that being anonymous means it's easy to resell tokens.

That’s a pretty major flaw. These tokens will be sold with markup on black markets, rendering the whole system unfit for its intended purpose.

Additionally, in line of drawbacks, buying porn scratch cards will be stigmatised, because everyone will (think they) know what you’ll use them for. Are you comfortable doing it in front of your teenage child, neighbor, crush, grandma, or spouse?

> Math and technology are implemented by people so there are many opportunities to abuse these systems.

And yet we have functioning asymmetric cryptography systems that enable secure encryption for billions of people, despite malevolent actors having a clear incentive to subvert that, much more so than age verification tokens.

> […] the inevitable overreach and abuse against the large majority of people whose every online move will be traced and logged.

This is happening right now already, in a scale hardly imaginable.
by madaxe_again | 2026-01-01 08:58:24+00:00
I felt the same as you - turned down several acquisition offers, the company was my baby, etc.

Year ten, my partner turned around and stuck a knife in my back, and I found myself railroaded out and battered into submission by lawyers. Exited with token equity, and a small cash payment to get me to fuck off so they could gut the company.

Retrospectively, I should have quit while I was ahead, and I should have realised that while I cared about the company, it did not care about me.

Also, cofounders… you never find out who they actually are until one night you hear the click of the hammer of the gun against your head cocking.
by phplovesong | 2026-01-01 08:59:54+00:00
Not a Odin user, but iirc odin also has Go like zero values. There is no practical option unless you have null. Like a string cant be null, its "at least" an empty string. But whats a base value for a pointer? A function? An interface? Either you wrap (ocaml style) or use null. Its pragmatism vs correctness, a balance as old as computing.
by TheChaplain | 2026-01-01 09:00:42+00:00
I hope the charges are on the sending part, if I would have to sign up to receive letters I see some issues..

And yeah, elderly and digitalization is not always working well. Where I live the average age is ~80, and people need assistance to use the laundry machine.

The booking system for the public facilities such as laundry services is a piece of paper.
by languid-photic | 2026-01-01 09:02:04+00:00
I am happy to know this term now, thanks.

I do think this is part of the alignment problem. There are two side, the agent (here I think there was a gap in institutional knowledge about what is and isn’t appropriate) and the environment (what is it able to do).

I’m not sure which one is easier to “solve”. It's so hard to know every possible path forward when working from the environment direction.
by jama211 | 2026-01-01 09:02:46+00:00
The difference between the performance of models between 2024 and 2025 has been so stark, that graph really shows it. There are still many people on these forums who seem to think AI’s produce terrible code unless ultra supervised, and I can’t help but suspect some of them tried it a little while ago and just don’t understand how different it is now compared to even quite recently.
by npodbielski | 2026-01-01 09:03:10+00:00
They were not even in hurry. If that was important for the viewers it should be even more important to the characters. If this was not important and they do not care then the whole premise of traumatic Vecna memory was useless pile of utter garbage because memory cannot be traumatic and not important. Ever had trauma doing grocerries? Or riding a cab? And then they should not be able to escape. Because he would get them before that.

They just invent stuff that they have no idea how to explain later. Just like Lost.
by ChristopherDrum | 2026-01-01 09:03:14+00:00
Applescript; first trying to automate mundane work tasks, then later to build simple GUI apps. That led into more robust Applescript Studio work, which led into learning Objective-C through Big Nerd Ranch and the book/class by Aaron Hillegass. That was all pre-iPhone. When the iPhone released, suddenly my Objective-C hobby skills were in hot demand. And that's how I became the mediocre developer iOS engineer I am today.
by hbogert | 2026-01-01 09:03:52+00:00
Brother's minor included making webpages. Pure html. That led to listings in a computer magazine for making a guestbook in php more comprehensible. That was in 2001. That was enough to get me hooked. Continued with the java bible and by then there was no doubt, going to do CS in uni. I hated it with a passion. And only 10+ years after graduating I understand the value of it
by nielsbot | 2026-01-01 09:03:53+00:00
Sorry that happened to your family. The Zionist project has killed a lot of innocents.

> 800k Jews were kicked out of middle eastern countries

As a result of the creation of Israel.

As for Jews killed or terrorized into leaving Baghdad: Israeli historian Avi Schliem (whose family fled Baghdad to Israel after the Baghdad bombings) says Iraqi Zionists were responsible for some of those bombings in his latest book.

Finally, should Jews who had their lands stolen in the name of Zionism have their lands back? In a just world, yes.
by lefra | 2026-01-01 09:04:08+00:00
The french government has been heavily subsidizing private R&D (up to 50% of the cost, including engineer salaries). It was relatively easy to create a moonshot project worth a few millions, and have the taxpayer pay for half of it. Then you just need to find a sucker to pay for the other half, and collect the money (getting an actual result is optional).

How do I know? My company is a minority partner in one such project (wind energy, we would provide instrumentation). It's infuriating, the head company has been trying to make one of the big energy providers pay for half the R&D, with no success, and the project will be closed. Lots of taxpayer money wasted for no result, and we won't make sales.

Because of these abuses, the french government is changing the financing rules. They will only finance small proof of concepts first, then a pilot project, and only then industrialisation issues (instead of financing all in one go).
by iancmceachern | 2026-01-01 09:04:09+00:00
For the same reason corn farming isn't.

They already do this, at scale, feeding people, all over the world. There is no "unlock" to invent some tech that makes it magically more efficient, cheaper, or otherwise more adoptable.

The only difference between them and their existing, already on the market competition is they don't owe investors 10x returns.
by legulere | 2026-01-01 09:05:27+00:00
Even if it will make software engineering drastically more productive, it’s questionable that this will lead to unemployment. Efficiency gains translate to lower prices. Sometimes this leads to very few additional demand, as can be seen with masses of typesetters that lost their jobs. Sometimes this leads to a dramatically higher demand like you can see in the classic Jevons paradox examples of coal and light bulbs. I highly suspect software falls in the latter category
by andai | 2026-01-01 09:06:01+00:00
Re: yolo mode

I looked into docker and then realized the problem I'm actually trying to solve was solved in like 1970 with users and permissions.

I just made a agent user limited to its own home folder, and added my user to its group. Then I run Claude code etc as the agent user.

So it can only read write /home/agent, and it cannot read or write my files.

I add myself to agent group so I can read/write the agent files.

I run into permission issues sometimes but, it's pretty smooth for the most part.

Oh also I gave it root to a $3 VPS. It's so nice having a sysadmin! :) That part definitely feels a bit deviant though!
by viraptor | 2026-01-01 09:06:16+00:00
> Language model capability at generating text output.

That's not a quantifiable sentence. Unless you put it in numbers, anyone can argue exponential/not.

> next gen models are significantly harder to build.

That's not how we judge capability progress though.

> Remind me what was so great about gpt 5? How about gpt4 from from gpt 3?

> Do you even remember the releases?

At gpt 3 level we could generate some reasonable code blocks / tiny features. (An example shown around at the time was "explain what this function does" for a "fib(n)") At gpt 4, we could build features and tiny apps. At gpt 5, you can often one-shot build whole apps from a vague description. The difference between them is massive for coding capabilities. Sorry, but if you can't remember that massive change... why are you making claims about the progress in capabilities?

> Multimodal add ons that no one asked for

Not only does multimodal input training improve the model overall, it's useful for (for example) feeding back screenshots during development.
by rustystump | 2026-01-01 09:06:17+00:00
Burner emails work but they usually send it so you need to receive it. Assuming they use a generic code searching works but often they generate the code for single use at the time the email is sent. Promo code logic can get complex.

Best way i found is to buy when there is some xyz site wide sale but even then they can be sketch and jack up prices. Philips does this with their hue lights every time. Hilarious in how obvious it is.
by digitcatphd | 2026-01-01 09:06:24+00:00
I’ve been writing about building Agent-First SaaS and working with teams implementing LangGraph flows.

I’ve noticed a recurring pattern where we get stuck trying to perfectly replicate a human's SOP (e.g., "click this button, then read this PDF"). While reproducing human workflows is great for trust and "human-on-the-loop" auditing, I argue it often traps us in a local optimum.

This post explores the difference between "Replica Agents" (biomimicry) and "First-Principles Agents" (optimizing for the objective function). I draw on examples like Amazon's "Chaos Storage" and AlphaGo to suggest that sometimes the most efficient agent workflow looks nothing like the human one.

Curious to hear how others are balancing "legibility" vs. "efficiency" in their agent designs.
by itake | 2026-01-01 09:07:44+00:00
Renter control is the "got mine, lets pull the ladder up" version of Nimby-ism for renters.

Amazing for Grandma to pay $500/mo to live alone in a 2b Manhattan where she raised her family.

Terrible for the young families try to find their own 2b bedroom to start their family.

[0] - higher paying, emotionally rewarding, etc.
by huhkerrf | 2026-01-01 09:08:12+00:00
To be frank, after reading your blog post, while I am interested in the topic you're writing on, there's no way I'm putting down a pre-order.

If you can't finish a partial manuscript when you have people reaching out to you and reviewers ready to provide feedback, how confident can I be that you'll actually write when you have a faceless pre-order instead? Or will life just get in the way again?
by ok_dad | 2026-01-01 09:08:16+00:00
There are still plenty of industries that won't trust AI generated anything unless it's gone over with a fine tooth comb, or maybe not even then. Devs will still have careers there. I'm talking about medical devices, safety critical systems, etc. In any case, I don't even believe AI gen code will get there anytime soon, but if I'm wrong that's okay too.
by jimnotgym | 2026-01-01 09:08:56+00:00
None of which requires startups, science or factories.

If you put cows on a field for a day, wait three days for insects to infest their shit, then put chickens on the field, the chickens scratch through the cow shit and eat the bugs. The cow shit gets nicely spread out and fertilises the soil more quickly.

The problem with this system is that it doesn't allow rich people to screw mega bucks out of the government for doing no work at all.
by bambax | 2026-01-01 09:10:13+00:00
Ha! 'Incremental computing engines' are new to me but seem to be exactly what I need! Because at some point I inevitably have to create materialized views to speed up some parts of the pipeline. Materialized views are of course a side effect and can become mildly dangerous if you're not careful to destroy/update them in time.

I was trying to think of a way to "only update new or changed rows" but it's not trivial. But Feldera seems to do exactly that, so thanks!
by yupyupyups | 2026-01-01 09:10:13+00:00
Let's talk about the societal cost these models have had on us including their high energy cost and the proliferation of auto-generated slop media used to milk ad revenue, scam people, SEO farm, do propaganda or automate trolling. What about these big corporations collecting an astronomical amount of debt to hoard DRAM and NAND in a way that has crippled the PC market within weeks? And what are they going to do next, put a few dollars in Trump's pocket so that they can rob/loot the US population through bailouts? Who gets to keep all the hardware I wonder?

Nvidia, Samsung, SK Hynix and some other voltures I forgot to mention are making serious bank right now.
by jutter | 2026-01-01 09:12:05+00:00
Playing in Excel one day, I added a button, then double clicked the button, and the world of Visual Basic appeared. It was like peeking behind the curtain. "Is this how they do it!?"

I wrote some surprisingly complex interfaces for online services in Excel, without having much of a clue what I was doing. I didn't understand variables so memory was handled by reading and writing to the spreadsheet - arbitrary cells would hold values, rows were my arrays. In hindsight this very visual way of representing memory was probably helpful to my learning.
by numpad0 | 2026-01-01 09:12:38+00:00
I don't understand why everyone involved didn't immediately realize especially the first two of those whys. Eating bugs at scale is such a surefire way to get everyone allergic to random stuffs.

And it's not like it was never tried. There are tribes and cultures that do it at tiny scales, which means humans used to do it and quit at some point in the past. It's removing not an insignificant Chesterton's Fence.
by amluto | 2026-01-01 09:12:54+00:00
> Trusted Publishing

Why do people come up with such unbelievably complex solutions that don’t actually achieve what a simple solution could do?

Trusted Publishing approximately involves a service like GitHub proving to somebody that some release artifact came from a GitHub Actions workflow file with a particular name, possibly in a particular commit. Never mind that GitHub Actions is an unbelievable security nightmare and that it’s probably not particularly hard for a malicious holder of GitHub credentials to stealthily or even completely silently compromise their own Actions workflow to produce malicious output.

But even ignoring that, it’s wildly unclear what is “trusted”. PyPI encourages developers to also use “attestations”. Read this and try to tell me what is being attested to:

https://docs.pypi.org/attestations/producing-attestations/

But I did learn that this is based on Sigstore. Sigstore is very impressive: it’s a system by which GitHub can attest via OIDC to various state, and a service called Fulcio (which we’re supposed to trust) uses its secret key to sign a message stating that GitHub did so at a certain time. (The OIDC transcript itself is not a durable attestation.) There’s even a transparency log (which is a separate system called Rekor maintained by the same organization). Except that, for some reason, Fulcio doesn’t do that at all. Instead it issues an X.509 certificate with an expiration in the near future where the certificate fields encode whatever GitHub attested to in its OIDC exchange, and the Sigstore client (which is hopefully a bit trustworthy) is supposed to use the private key (which it knows, in the clear, but is supposed to immediate forget) to sign a message that is associated with the release artifact or whatever else is being attested to. And then a separate transparency log records the signature and supposedly timestamps it so everyone one can verify the attestation later even though the certificate is expired! Why not just sign the message on the Fulcio server (which has an HSM, hopefully) directly?

All of this is trying to cryptographically tie a package on PyPI.org to a git tag. But: why not just do it directly? For most pure Python packages, which is a whole lot of packages, the distribution artifact is literally a zip file containing files from git, verbatim, plus some metadata. PyPI could check the GitHub immutable tag, read the commit hash, and verify the whole chain of hashes from the files to the tree to the commit. Or PyPI could even run the build process itself in a sandbox. (If people care about .pyc files, PyPI could regenerate them (again, in a sandbox), but omitting them might make sense too — after all, uv doesn’t even build them by default.) This would give much stronger security properties with a much more comprehensible system and no dependence on the rather awful security properties of GitHub Actions.
by bell-cot | 2026-01-01 09:13:17+00:00
Yep. It's yet another case of "journalism" where the facts contradict the headline, and they only 'fess up in the final lines of the story:

> Danes can still send a love letter or a Christmas card in 2026, but only through a private company.

> They must either drop it at a shop, or pay extra to have it collected from home, which is available online or via an app.

> By law, Danes must always be able to send a letter. If a private company stops delivering them, the government must step in with a new provider.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-01-01 09:15:13+00:00
Local news in English version of article, doesn't really say anything new though: https://www.thelocal.dk/20251230/postnord-to-deliver-last-ev...

In my experience the Danish postal service for correct delivery of letters has been subpar in relation to American postal service (of course my American experience is from decades ago).
by solatic | 2026-01-01 09:15:58+00:00
The key to a happy life is to learn how to reduce the amount of things you own and how to build strong relationships. Once you have enough to put a roof over your head and food on your table, more than that can only be used to purchase increasing amounts of comfort, which is not the same as increasing amounts of happiness.

YouTube has plenty of videos of people calling in with hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year in income and somehow they are still broke and in debt. Live below your means, save the excess income into an investment portfolio, keep doing that until you have enough money to live off the interest. Don't even think about buying a Rolex until you have so much money coming in from interest that you don't even know what else to do with it. Even then, remember that the Rolex, like anything else, requires maintenance, but that if you make someone else happy, they can take care of themselves.