MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrandish | 2026-01-30 18:46:33+00:00
> automatically update their work location to reflect the building they're working from.

So, either this minimal description is A: an attempt to mask the feature's true purpose of dystopian pocket spying under an innocent-sounding cover, or B: negligently deploying a technical capability with far-reaching consequences without proper diligence or care.

Even if the goal was to enable a pocket panopticon for middle manager spying on WFH staff, in less than 10 seconds I came up with a list of other negative impacts and threat vectors which should freak out any large org's corporate security, legal, compliance and HR teams.

* Like lower level employees not in the 'shielded compartment' seeing that {M&A exec} is currently on {potential acquisition target company's} guest wifi. This kind of accidental location knowledge leak has actually happened between MSFT and Google via a freak analog coincidence and it changed the course of a huge acquisition. This feature makes that accident 1000x more likely.

* Or an employee sues for being dismissed and their lawyer proves through discovery that a manager could have seen they were connected to the wifi of a competitor they might have been interviewing with or an abortion clinic or gay bar, etc.

* Or as part of a harassment claim an employee says the company's required app showed them the phrase "Big Titz Rule!!!" because it was the name of a wifi network another employee was connected to.

Just having an opt-out or hours limit is woefully inadequate. Even if those should prevent senior execs and M&A teams location being accidentally visible to employees not in a trust circle (or worse contractors, vendors or customers looped into a Teams group), it STILL creates huge new threat surfaces. At a minimum the 'feature' needs ways to limit it to only show wifi network names: A. On an approved list, B. Matching a regex pattern, C. limited within a list of IP sub-domains, etc. And at many companies, as part of compliance, all those wifi network names will need to be passed through the "problematic words" list maintained by the HR and security teams (and in many companies hits on those lists trigger auto-reports which will now create discoverable "evidence" in any future lawsuit keyword search).

The unintended-but-foreseable consequences stretch for miles. And this isn't the MSFT Office/Teams group's first self-inflicted trip to this rodeo. I just don't understand how they keep repeating the Same. Obvious. Mistakes.
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-01-30 18:46:58+00:00
> "your community is a pawn in a 5d chess game, better that you don't know".

This is literally called arbitrage, were there is a price difference between the the people pricing it and what the benefit is to the people buying it.

If I have information that you do not have, that indicates that underneath your land there is a gold mine, then I’m going to offer you whatever you think you’re value of your land is worth without telling you that there’s a gold mind underneath it so that I can exploit the difference in information.

That’s the entire concept behind modern economic theory, specifically trade arbitrage. That’s precisely what it is and that’s exactly the point from Meta.
by BoorishBears | 2026-01-30 18:47:30+00:00
Without agreeing (or disagreeing) with their larger point, dynamic types become more of liability as a project gets larger

Like "schemaless" database applications, there's always types/schema somewhere: the choice is if they'll be explicitly defined at the place of construction, or implicitly spread out across all the places data happens to flow in your application. And the more places there are, the more spread out they'll be.

Static typing is also really nice for game dev since proper unit tests are harder (but not impossible) compared to your average CRUD app.
by simianwords | 2026-01-30 18:47:32+00:00
it doesn't have to be agreed upon but even the largest estimates don't come even close to how much corn farms use

> The water usage of 260 square miles of irrigated corn farms, equivalent to 1% of America’s total irrigated corn.

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake...

Roughly 1% of corn is used for actual food consumption btw.
by zahlman | 2026-01-30 18:47:37+00:00
> I thought it was a page about recipes for cannibals or tuberculosis tracking from the name. Luckily the title helped clarify the misleading website name.

Agreed. It's called "human consumption", but it neither relates to the consumption of humans, nor the phenomenon in humans called "consumption", nor does it cover all consumption by humans, or even all food consumption.

> Y'all some hungry mofos.

Less than one animal per person per day, and the overwhelming majority of them are fish and invertebrate sea life (two thirds of that in the Asia-Pacific region).
by Manish123_ | 2026-01-30 18:47:56+00:00
Spot on. The 'brittle' feeling usually comes from the disconnect between the engineering team shipping features and the finance team trying to project margins. When every agent loop is a pricing decision, you can't rely on a monthly billing cycle to tell you if you're profitable. Treating pricing as part of the runtime is the only way to scale without getting a nasty surprise on your compute bill.
by micromacrofoot | 2026-01-30 18:49:07+00:00
yes, so now it's me and my consumer insurance vs an entire department of people at an incredibly well funded company and their corporate insurance company — it's an entirely different scenario that starts looking a lot more like individual litigation for the consumer, even for otherwise run-of-the-mill insurance claims

not to mention that "driver error" becomes an argument with a black box
by m3047 | 2026-01-30 18:49:25+00:00
Yeah it's bad. That doesn't mean it's necessarily uniformly bad. But if it's bad where you are, yeah it's bad.

You can see multiple doctors (among the ones you're allowed to see by your insurance). The doctors are all in an echo chamber which reinforces their thinking. Their cognitive load and goal seeking is burdened by what they can determine they can bill insurance for (there is still no price transparency). You don't have a "regular" / primary care physician because they rotate through the provider network constantly.

Symptoms which don't fit the diagnosis are ignored / dealt with by deflecting that you should "see your regular physician". "Stare decisis" rules the second opinion. In their minds they believe they have no place to write down e.g. drug interactions with things which they didn't prescribe and don't believe in (the one time I got a call from quality control working for the umbrella organization I utilized this as an example of why I was looking for a different doctor and the QA person, who was, they said, a licensed nurse, said "they can add that to the record, I'll do it right now").

You might get fired as a patient for passing out or having a seizure during a blood draw, hard to say whether that's because they failed to follow SOP and call the meatwagon or because you upset staff by acting unusually. You might get into a conversation with a physician which goes strange and they end up telling you that their clinic gets health inspections like a restaurant... they don't. There's a "wet work" inspection (just like a butcher shop) before occupancy is allowed, but there's no posted inspection report because... there is no inspection! But there's more. There are relatively "safe" and common procedures which still have ooopsies and people end up in the hospital or die. The hospitalization rate might be 1:5000 and the death rate 1:100000 but if you do a million of these there are going to be a few. If the procedure took place in a clinic it's supposed to be reported, and the reports are public record; but surprise surprise, the reported rates for serious complications are far far below what the actuarial tables show.

If you're seeing constellations of incidents similar to these, you need to get a second opinion from somewhere / somebody who is not caught up in that particular bubble. It can be very hard to see what's happening, and also to find a measurable proxy for "in / not in the bubble".
by mahirsaid | 2026-01-30 18:49:28+00:00
the people that sacrificed years of education and hardship to be employed by a company and have a boss in the end of the day your still back to the same predicament. A plumber, electrician, carpenter, has more autonomy than any profession in the US. A surgeon after years of schooling and experience still has to answer to a director or board, wrong doing will lose all of their credentials and revoked in due time.
by seec | 2026-01-30 18:49:50+00:00
Funny that you say the BYD was tasteless. I definitely agree, and it's something that can be said about much Chinese-made stuff.

In French we have the word "chinoiserie" which is used to describe objects with a certain aesthetic, reminiscent of Chinese art. It is used derogatively to mean something lacks taste even if it looks sophisticated at first sight.
by thelastgallon | 2026-01-30 18:49:54+00:00
Thank you for the step-by-step execution! And 11 is the best solution when none of the above work. There are still scenarios where gas cars cover the edge cases. The first thing is to completely stop buying new gas cars. A new gas car will continue to pollute for the next 20 years. We can immediately stop all new gas car production and in the next 2 decades transition entirely to EVs.
by larusso | 2026-01-30 18:49:56+00:00
Ok I ask chat GPT sometimes for advice in health / Fitness and also finance. Not like where to put my money but for general Information how stuff works what would apply here and there. The issue is already that OpenAI knows a lot of me. And ChatGPT itself when asked what he things I am etc draws a pretty clear picture. But I stay away from oversharing specific things. That is mainly my income and other super detailed data. When I ask I try to formulate it to use simple numbers and examples. Works for me. When working with coding agents I’m very skeptical to whitelist stuff. It takes quite the while before I allow a generic command to be executed outside of a sandbox. But to install a random skill to help with Finance Automation… can’t belief it. Under what stone do you have to live to trust your money be handed by an agent and then also in connection with a random skill?
by lifis | 2026-01-30 18:50:58+00:00
Just ask them to answer a randomly generated quiz or problem faster than a human possibly can.

Ruling out non-LLMs seems harder though. A possible strategy could be to generate a random set of 20 words, then ask an LLM to write a long story about them. Then challenge the user to quickly summarize it, check that the response is short enough and use another LLM to check that the response is indeed a summary and grammatically and ortographycally correct. Repeat 100 times in parallel. You can also maybe generate random Leetcode problems and require a correct solution.
by YurgenJurgensen | 2026-01-30 18:51:11+00:00
Roguelites are the worst thing to happen to video games since microtransactions. It’s an extremely attractive option to the cash-strapped indie dev, as it promises infinite ‘content’ for little development effort, but what it’s really done is turned every game into a combination of cookie clicker and a slot machine.

The fact that you think arcade games have “no interesting progression” shows just how toxic the roguelike design pattern is. The progression in arcade games is you getting better at the game. If a game needs a “progress system” to communicate a sense of accomplishment to the player, that’s because the gameplay is shallow.
by scottyah | 2026-01-30 18:51:41+00:00
I disagree, tunnels for transport of both people and goods, especially in high-density urban areas is the best way to go. Walking and biking is great for their distance, but cars and trucks are still needed for larger and heavier items. Using shared transportation (like a train) is terrible for "The last mile". Doing everything at night just seems like a band-aid and sucks for all those workers.

The idea of trying to solve the hard infrastructure problem of digging first also seems like a great idea. Build the aqueduct before you build the millions of houses and farms, and even let anyone do that part.

It's still premature to say that they haven't revolutionized the field, people around the world are still digging tunnels so there's still a market. It wouldn't be the first time an already highly mature field got revolutionized, I still don't get why you're so anti-tunnel.
by simianwords | 2026-01-30 18:51:52+00:00
> These centers guzzle water and power at a rate most small municipal grids aren't scoped for

Source?

Here's why I think this is wrong

"A typical (average) data center on-site water use (~9k gal/day) is roughly 1/14th of an average golf course’s irrigation (~130k gal/day).

On-site data center freshwater: ~50 million gal/day
Golf course irrigation: ~2.08 billion gal/day"

On both local and global levels - golf uses significantly more water than data centres.
by siliconc0w | 2026-01-30 18:52:14+00:00
It's pretty insidious to think that these AI labs want you become so dependent on them so that once the VC-gravy-train stops they can hike the token price 10x and you'll still pay because you have no other choice.

(thankfully market dynamics and OSS alternatives will probably stop this but it's not a guarantee, you need like at least six viable firms before you usually see competitive behavior)
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-30 18:52:20+00:00
Like I say, the tech is cool but they are doomed to fail (partially because of grift) [although in context of crypto stablecoins/gold (paxos) is the one thing I liked and it did go great for me in terms of gold]

I hope it doesn't count as promotion but I had literally written a blog post about it and made an account literally named justforhn on mataroa when someone was discussing crypto with me in here or something

https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to...

Maybe its time for me to write part II: Most AI is doomed to fall, the tech is cool though.

I guess I can write it but I already write like this in HN. The procastination of writing specifically in a blog is something which hits me.

Is it just me or is it someone else too? Because on HN I can literally write like novels (or I may have genuinely written enough characters of a novel here, I might have to test it or something lol, got a cool idea right now to measure how many novels a person has written from just their username, time to code it)
by SoftTalker | 2026-01-30 18:52:23+00:00
It's pretty amazing to see the bubble many people here seem to work in. A guess, but probably 90% of employees have to go to work. Either they physically cannot do their job remotely or the employer demands that they be present.

A lot of people are coming across as whiny children here, "Oh no I might have to go to the office for my 6-figure paycheck." Grow up and go to work, as George Carlin might say.
by imglorp | 2026-01-30 18:52:34+00:00
It's about trust and empowerment.

It's about hiring adults, respecting and trusting them to do the job and support the team, and be responsible for their methods. The details are not important to that goal.

If an employer instead treats people like toddlers needing supervision, spoon feeding, and metrics around methods, not work, they will get only that.
by ruler88 | 2026-01-30 18:52:48+00:00
This was inevitable, better now than later when the damage is less widespread. Now clawdbot (or whatever they decide to call themselves) will have to respond with better security safety nets. Individually will always naively download whatever is on the internet. Platforms needs to safeguard against that.

Remember the early days of Windows? yea it's gonna happen again with AI.
by rellfy | 2026-01-30 18:53:07+00:00
Shell commands work for individual tools, but you lose composability. If you want to chain components that share a sandboxed environment, say, add a tracing component alongside an OTP confirmation layer that gates sensitive actions, you need a shared runtime and typed interfaces. That's the layer I'm building with asterai: standard substrate so components compose without glue code. Plus, having a central ecosystem lets you add features like the traceability with almost 1 click complexity. Of course, this only wins long term if WASM wins.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-30 18:53:23+00:00
More on this here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46827756 but the short of it is where is this talk of SSIDs even originating and, if it is really the approach, how does it work right at all?

That aside, if it is SSIDs it's dead simple to fake. If it's BSSIDs it's a little more difficult and not every AP may expose a way to spoof it (but it's not too difficult to find ones which will).
by observationist | 2026-01-30 18:53:57+00:00
1000x "This hit different"

Lmao, if nothing else the site serves as a wonderful repository of gpt-isms, and you can quickly pick up on the shape and feel of AI writing.

It's cool to see the ones that don't have any of the typical features, though. Or the rot13 or base 64 "encrypted" conversations.

The whole thing is funny, but also a little scary. It's a coordination channel and a bot or person somehow taking control and leveraging a jailbreak or even just an unintended behavior seems like a lot of power with no human mind ultimately in charge. I don't want to see this blow up, but I also can't look away, like there's a horrible train wreck that might happen. But the train is really cool, too!
by FeloniousHam | 2026-01-30 18:54:03+00:00
My current FSD usage is 90% over ~2000 miles (since v14.x). Besides driving everywhere, everyday with FSD, I have driven 4 hours garage to hotel valet without intervention. It is absolutely "Full Self-Driving" and "Autonomous".

FSD isn't perfect, but it is everyday amazing and useful.
by charles_f | 2026-01-30 18:54:14+00:00
I work on Teams (I know, I know... please don't hit me, it's not my fault)

1. I don't speak authoritatively and

2. I don't have knowledge of the whole product - there's always a rogue team here and there doing stuff.

We've had that feature turned on at MSFT for some time now. It does not allow your manager to see that you're at Starbucks, at home, on the shitter or anything like that. There's a new toggle in the calendar settings called "Share location with my organization", and the settings are: "all details: building, desk, etc.", "general location: office or remote", "can't view any location information". What it does when turned on is just adding, at the top of your calendar, icons that tell you which of your colleagues are in office, and if they share and you click on someone's picture, what building they're in (when it works).

The whole "it will tell your manager what your wifi is" is just baseless extrapolation, and plainly false.
by xdennis | 2026-01-30 18:54:19+00:00
This is not surprising. America is basically engaged in a tit-for-tat.

There were several right wing journalists abducted for documenting J6:

* Steve Baker, working for Blaze Media, https://www.newsweek.com/fbi-arresting-reporter-sparks-maga-...

* Owen Shroyer, InfoWars, 2 months in prison, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/infowars-host-owen-shr...

* multiple other independent journalists
by NegativeK | 2026-01-30 18:54:40+00:00
I think that's the difference.

First security job I had, the CISO had already declared that enforcing "no Youtube, porn, whatever" at work was a managerial problem and not a security problem [0]. And when management needed data from computers about an employee, they had to go through security -- they couldn't just fish around on their own. HR was involved, there was a paper trail, and requests were scope limited.

There are companies that do incredibly invasive employee monitoring, but those dystopias don't use EDR or whatever. They use some other vendor's spyware to replace management with creeping.

For some reason I'm reminded of the chains or cables used to keep operator hands (Posson's pull-backs) from being crushed in a press brake.

[0] The malware, etc that can come from those sites was a security problem -- but checking if creepy Bob was looking at boobs on company equipment or even just wasting time had nothing to do with infosec.
Three engineers were shipping. Then management hired a Scrum Master
by ghostinit | 2026-01-30 18:54:48+00:00
Early 2023s, small fintech startup. Deadline: 4 months to launch. Engineering team was literally 3 people. Me as architect, plus two devs. We had our shit together. Architecture designed, infrastructure running in the cloud, backend skeleton ready.

Devs were building features. We were on track. Then month 2 hit and management started hiring. A bunch of managers showed up. Then they brought in a Scrum Master. First week this guy wants to implement full Agile ceremonies.

Daily standups, sprint planning, retrospectives, backlog refinement. The whole package. His reasoning: "You need process to scale." We had 8 weeks left.

We weren't trying to scale. We were trying to finish. I've seen this same pattern play out multiple times now. Small team shipping. Management gets uncomfortable with lack of visibility, they hire process people. Process people need to justify their existence, ceremonies get implemented and everything slows down.

The thing that kills me is the timing. We were working. Why fix what isn't broken when you're 8 weeks from deadline? I'm genuinely curious, why can't management just leave working teams alone? Is it actual concern about sustainability or is it just discomfort with not having control mechanisms in place?

What's your experience with this?
by buescher | 2026-01-30 18:54:54+00:00
One of the books I first tried to learn from was _Miniature Projects for Electronic Hobbyists_ by one Ken W. Sessions. It was really a unijunction transistor project book. You know how some people will say you'll learn maybe not the best mental models for electronics from Forrest Mims' books? (I don't get it, they seem OK to me) Well, Forrest has nothing on Ken W. Sessions. The circuits worked, though.
by publicdebates | 2026-01-30 18:55:24+00:00
That list (or any similar list) would be so helpful if it had a health column, something that takes into account number of contributors, time since last commit, number of forks, number of commits, etc. So many projects are effectively dead but it's not obvious at first sight, and it takes 2 or 3 whole minutes to figure out. That seems short but it adds up when evaluating a project, causing people to just go to a well known solution like Lua (and why not? Lua is just fine; in fact it's great).
by adamzwasserman | 2026-01-30 18:55:29+00:00
The key to success in the world of coding assistants is to be a good manager. The AI is a very fast, but also very stupid, programmer. It will make a ton of architectural mistakes, and AI, more often than not pick the most mid solution possible. If you are a good code architect, and if you can tell the difference between a mid pattern and a good one, and force the AI to do things right, you will rise to the top.
by jama211 | 2026-01-30 18:55:31+00:00
That’s ok, if my work cared enough about whether I was online or at my desk at any specific moment they’d have complained already. I have teams quit completely half the time. I get my work done, my performance reviews are good, I turn up to meetings on time, that’s all that should ever matter.

Also if they cared so much about where I was to punish me for it, I’d quit that company. The only companies I will work for are ones that treat me like an adult, it’s fairly simple.
by sowbug | 2026-01-30 18:56:10+00:00
That seems like a very hard problem. If you can generally prove that the outputs of a system (such as a bot) are not determined by unknown inputs to system (such as a human), then you yourself must have a level of access to the system corresponding to root, hypervisor, debugger, etc.

So either moltbook requires that AI agents upload themselves to it to be executed in a sandbox, or else we have a test that can be repurposed to answer whether God exists.