MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CJefferson | 2026-01-21 06:49:38+00:00
I had a fairly big custom Python 2 static website generator ( github.com/csplib/csplib ), which I'd about given up transfering to Python 3, after a couple of aborted attempts. My main issue was that the libraries I was using didn't have Python 3 versions.

AN AI managed to do basically the whole transfer. One big help is I said "The website output of the current version should be identical", so I had an easy way to test for correctness (assuming it didn't try cheating by saving the website of course, but that's easy for me to check for)
by miki123211 | 2026-01-21 06:50:00+00:00
I suspect this is partially legal CYA.

There's more to employees than their raw ability to go below some performance threshold. If somebody passes the test, but lives in an US sanctioned country with no plans to move, is well known for using the n-word on social media or has previously broken an NDA, Anthropic probably doesn't want to interview them.
by machomaster | 2026-01-21 06:50:26+00:00
At least during the Great Depression you had independent markets like the USSR. Good luck investing, though. :-) The point about the higher independence of markets still stands. Great Depression was named as such by Americans (just like World Series, etc), but wasn't as global as the name implies.

Nowadays the world's economy operates in even more globalized way and when the biggest players get hit, everyone suffers (1998, dotcom, 2008, covid). That's why the tariff war was such a counter-productive idea; even if you theoretically end up on top, everyone will still lose, including you.
by iso1631 | 2026-01-21 06:50:28+00:00
NAT is a trivial feature on top of a connection tracking firewall. It also provides a large number of benefits - the ability to route traffic via different routes with PBR, without having BGP upstream, to keep routing decisions in the router rather than on each device, to not have to renumber internal IP addessing when the ISP changes, to have consistent view of what happens at a network level
by languid-photic | 2026-01-21 06:50:41+00:00
Naively tested a set of agents on this task.

Each ran the same spec headlessly in their native harness (one shot).

Results:

Agent Cycles Time
─────────────────────────────────────────────
gpt-5-2 2,124 16m
claude-opus-4-5-20251101 4,973 1h 2m
gpt-5-1-codex-max-xhigh 5,402 34m
gpt-5-codex 5,486 7m
gpt-5-1-codex 12,453 8m
gpt-5-2-codex 12,905 6m
gpt-5-1-codex-mini 17,480 7m
claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929 21,054 10m
claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 147,734 9m
gemini-3-pro-preview 147,734 3m
gpt-5-2-codex-xhigh 147,734 25m
gpt-5-2-xhigh 147,734 34m

Clearly none beat Anthropic's target, but gpt-5-2 did slightly better in much less time than "Claude Opus 4 after many hours in the test-time compute harness".
by d0100 | 2026-01-21 06:50:53+00:00
My gf manages to get paid using Cursor/Copilot, despite not being able to branch herself out of a loop

In my experience Copilots work expertly at CRUD'ing inside a well structured project, and for MVPs in languages you aren't an expert on (Rust, C/C++ in my case)

The biggest demerit is that agents are increasingly trying to be "smart" and using powershell search/replace or writing scripts to skimp on tokens, with results that make me unreasonably angry

I tried adding i18n to an old react project, and copilot used all my credits + 10 USD because it kept shitting everything up with its maddening, idiotic use if search replace

If it had simply ingested each file and modified them only once, it would have been cheaper

As you can tell, I am still salty about it
by jochem9 | 2026-01-21 06:51:55+00:00
The US is considered to be a flawed democracy for about 10 years now[1]. Europe, especially the powerful west, has the most healthy democracies.

It's absolutely not a given that the European democracies will survive, people here need to step up in strengthening it against illiberal forces as well, but it's in a much better starting position.

Example: in the Netherlands there was a government with an illiberal far right party (Wilder's PVV). They didn't achieve much, but there was a year of stagnation and the far right talking points have become even more normalized. Other democratic institutions, like judges had to be more on the defense. However, nothing fundamental is broken.

1. https://cpsblog.isr.umich.edu/?p=3417
by sargstuff | 2026-01-21 06:52:39+00:00
Yup. Technically, just one external reference outside of the sandbox environment from within the sandbox environment ("software stargate portal address to alternate environment" / one evaluated part of the s-expression using a system() reference).

Running software is insecure the moment the electrical switch is on. Although, reverse shrodingers cat might be more accurate. aka can escape the box if someone peaks from outside the box.
by s1artibartfast | 2026-01-21 06:52:42+00:00
What are the economic death tolls of wars? It seems like those should be included.

Moreover, it's kind of consequentialist morality ignores the distinction of active harm versus failure to Aid.

This should play a role when one considers something an attack or weapon.

Is less than maximal charity an attack?

Is it an attack when someone refuses to sleep with someone else?

Norms around choice versus entitlement distinguish the two.
by fdr | 2026-01-21 06:52:53+00:00
For those of you with this handy technology, the mobile phone, in the United States: you have an IPv6 address without NAT. Some of you even exist on a network using 464XLAT to tunnel IPv4 in IPV6, because it's a pure IPV6 network (T-Mobile). These mobile phone providers do not let the gazillion consumer smartphones act as servers for obvious reasons.

This is all to underscore the author's point: NAT may necessitate stateful tracking, but firewalls without translation has been deployed at massive scale for one of the most numerous types of device in existence.
by aidenn0 | 2026-01-21 06:53:17+00:00
When we say "NAT" we are specifically talking about stateful one-to-many NAT implementations as found in consumer IPv4 hardware. Such a NAT is largely isomorphic to a firewall with default-deny semantics for incoming connections and default-allow semantics for outgoing connections.

There are other possible NAT implementations that are much less like a firewall, but saying that a NAT does not provide security is a misunderstanding of the terms as they are used.

Not you specifically, but others in other threads have pointet to UPnP as proof that NATs don't provide security. If the existence of UPnP means that NATs don't provide security, then the existence of PCP means that Firewalls also don't provide security.
by mannyv | 2026-01-21 06:53:34+00:00
You are wrong because you are being overly pedantic.

NAT provides security because normally it disallows external actors on the outside from accessing resources on the inside side.

A firewall is not required for NAT to work, although many firewalls have NAT built-in. And indeed, if a firewall is off NAT can still function (if NAT is separate).

Your definition of security is too narrow.

And saying that NAT is broken all the time, implying that NAT is not security, is ridiculous. SSH is 'broken' all the time. TLS is broken all the time.

Here's the end point: NAT effectively reduces the attack surface for a home network to the router. That is security, practically speaking.
by defatigable | 2026-01-21 06:54:03+00:00
How can I tell? Yes, the code looks quite a bit more polished. I'm not expert enough in JS to, e.g., know the cleanest method to inspect and modify the DOM, but I can look at code that does and tell if the approach it's using is sensible or not. Surely you've had the experience of a domain where you can evaluate the quality of the end product, even if you can't create a high quality product on your own?

Concretely in this case, I'd implemented an approach that used jQuery listeners to listen for DOM updates. Antigravity rewrote it to an approach that avoided the jQuery dependency entirely, using native MutationObservers. The code is sensible. It's noticeably more performant than the approach I crafted by hand. Antigravity allowed me to easily add a number of new features to my extension that I would have found tricky to add by hand. The UI looks quite a bit nicer than before I did it. Would these enhancements have been hard for an expert in Chrome Extensions to implement? Probably not. But I'm not that expert, and AI coding tools allowed me to do them.

That was not actually the main thrust of my post, it's just a nice side benefit I've experienced. In the main domain where I use coding tools, at work, I work in languages where I'm quite a bit more proficient (Golang/Python). There, the quality of code that the AI tools generate is not better than I write by hand. The initial revisions are generally worse. But they're quite a bit faster than I write by hand, and if I iterate with the coding tools I can get to implementations that are as good as I would write by hand, and a lot faster.

I understand the bias towards skepticism. I have no particular dog in this fight, it doesn't bother me if you don't use these tools. But OP asked for peoples' experiences so I thought I'd share.
by roenxi | 2026-01-21 06:54:44+00:00
Are you suggesting that LeMay or Kissinger believed that invasions promoted regional stability? On what basis? When Kissenger wanted stability he famously promoted détente with Russia and negotiating with the Chinese.

Kissinger did a lot of evil stuff, but a big part of his thinking was when he wanted an area wrecked he sent in an army, and when he wanted stability he negotiated.
by iso1631 | 2026-01-21 06:54:59+00:00
The nat is a belt and braces approach - especially when combined with rpf. How will your packet reach 192.168.0.1 from the internet without having a nat rule to translate the packet, even if there is a firewall rule allowing all traffic

(If you control the next hop and the router doesn't have rpf checks on the wan interfaces you can forge a packet with a destination of 192.168.0.1 and route it via the public IP of 40.50.60.70)
by saghm | 2026-01-21 06:55:03+00:00
I get the point you're trying to make, but it's worth pointing out that the entire point is that it's not people getting branded but nebulous online entities that may or may not be people. It's a valid criticism that the accuracy of these claims is not measurable, but I think it's equally true that we no longer are in a world where we can be be sure that no content like this is from an LLM either. It's not at all obvious to me that the assumption that everything is from a human is more accurate than the aggregate set of claims of LLMs, so describing it as "branding people" seems like it's jumping to co me conclusions in the same way.
by cpk26 | 2026-01-21 06:55:52+00:00
Hi HN, we’re Conrad and Thomas.

We've been working on making Gaussian Splatting scenes searchable. A common approach embeds high-dimensional semantic features directly into the model points, increasing training complexity and memory usage.

We tried a simpler post-process approach:
- Index the source 2D imagery with embeddings
- Use an LMM to localize the queried object in the source frames
- Use known camera poses to raycast and project those 2D detections into 3D space

This allows for "Ctrl+F" style search on standard 3DGS models without modifying the training pipeline. If you search for a list of items, it’s possible to auto-tag an entire scene in parallel.

There is a demo linked in the post if you want to try it out. Happy to answer questions about the implementation!
by compounding_it | 2026-01-21 06:56:56+00:00
NAT is just one slice of IPv4. Granted your private IP is not routable (with CGNAT now your gateway is also no longer routable), but think of other features of IPv6 that are congruent:

SLAAC basically means your routable IPv6 address changes so many times in a day (and there are multiple of those at any given instant) that even if the attackers know your prefix, its going to be very difficult to do anything meaningful. the address space is too big.

And we are assuming here that there is no firewall.

Note : macOS firewall on a new install is disabled iirc.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-01-21 06:58:11+00:00
I'm no expert here, but more missile bases positioned more closely to your targets seems better, no?

If your enemy is China, Greenland is in the wrong direction. If your enemy is Russia, you can probably put them in Ukraine or Poland for free. If you want less detectable missiles, then you fund that directly. If you just want missiles as close as possible, there are subs.

There's a million different strategies with different tradeoffs here. I'm asking what set of plausible reasons point to Greenland as a local optimum.

re: ships, the two leading countries for arctic ship design (excluding Russia) are Finland and Canada.
by dlcarrier | 2026-01-21 06:59:24+00:00
An entry fee that is reimbursed if the bug turns out to matter would stop this, real quick.

Then again, I once submitted a bug report to my bank, because the login method could be switched from password+pin to pin only, when not logged in, and they closed it as "works as intended", because they had decided that an optional password was more convenient than a required password. (And that's not even getting into the difference between real two-factor authentication the some-factor one-and-a-half-times they had implemented by adding a PIN to a password login.) I've since learned that anything heavily regulated like hospitals and banks will have security procedures catering to compliance, not actual security.

Assuming the host of the bug bounty program is operating in good faith, adding some kind of barrier to entry will weed out submitters acting in bad faith.
by iso1631 | 2026-01-21 06:59:25+00:00
Ipv6 also creates real world problems that NAT solves -- multi upstream WAN with path selection for example

Dual stack introduces security problems (you now have two things to secure). There are still devices which will fail to run on an ipv6 network -- even with a 64 gateway (software which communicates to a specific IP address for example - e.g. a device which "checks internet connectivity" by pinging 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8, yes it's terrible, and yes it happens)
by measurablefunc | 2026-01-21 07:00:43+00:00
Claims require evidence & if you are unwilling to present it then admit you do not have any evidence to support your claims. It's not complicated. Either RL works & you have evidence or you do not know & can not claim that it works w/o first doing the required due diligence which (shockingly) actually requires work instead of empty theory crafting & hand waving.
by allarm | 2026-01-21 07:01:32+00:00
> To me the kinds of people using these editors are the kinds of people that love making everything more complex to seem smart.

"I don't understand something and instead of asking nicely I decide to throw a tantrum and offend people". Why do you think it's appropriate to say things like this? Did I or any other vim/emacs/whatever user forced you to convert to their editor of choice?
by kortilla | 2026-01-21 07:01:54+00:00
> Since there's no way for anyone on the Internet to know which machine on the corporate network is using a Class C address at any given time, it's impossible to establish a telnet or FTP session with any particular device.

This is a security feature ad, nothing else. And it’s 100% because of NAT, not anything else in the PIX feature set.
by defatigable | 2026-01-21 07:03:06+00:00
Yep. I have plenty of experience in languages that use C-style syntax, enough to easily understand code written in other languages that occur nearby in the syntactical family tree. I'm not steeped in JS enough to know the weird gotchas of the type system, or know the standard library well, etc. But I can read the code fine.

If I'd asked an AI coding tool to write something up for me in Haskell, I would have no idea if it had done a good job.
by toast0 | 2026-01-21 07:04:52+00:00
Verizon around the Nexus 5 still had a lot of CDMA and you needed to have a phone activated.

Now that networks are pretty much LTE and 5G only, if your phone takes a SIM, take the SIM out of the old phone and put it in the new phone. Some carriers still play games with allowlists for VoLTE though.

But you might have better luck (and better pricing) with a MVNO or the prepaid side of your preferred carrier.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-01-21 07:04:55+00:00
This is a terrible argument. First, NAT doesn't provide the security behavior users want. The firewall on their router is doing that, not the address translation. Second, that firewall is on by default, blocking inbound traffic by default, so why on earth would you conjecture that router manufacturers will suddenly stop doing that if NAT isn't on by default? Third, it's not remotely likely that a user will misconfigure their firewall to not secure them any more. Non-technical users won't even try to get in there, and technical users will know better because it's extremely easy to set up the basics of a default deny config. There is no security regression here, just bad arguments.
by nottorp | 2026-01-21 07:04:56+00:00
No one's complaining that IPV6 is insecure. It may as well be very secure, but no one bothers to understand it if they're not paid to do that.

Of course you can have default drop in your IPV6 firewall, but it's far easier to keep in your head that internal NATed IPs aren't accessible and "real" IPs are.
by apparent | 2026-01-21 07:04:56+00:00
> The "free" phones cost significantly more than a full price phone

I buy phones at full price, but in general the free/subsidized versions don't cost more. You just pay over time. For many people, it would even be worth it to pay somewhat more if they don't have the money to pay up front.

One downside though is that you're more likely to upgrade to features you don't need because "it's only an extra $5/6/10 per month". Gotta always consider the total cost.
by defatigable | 2026-01-21 07:05:34+00:00
Great idea! That's actually the very next improvement I was planning on making to my coding flow: building a sub agent that is purely designed to study the codebase and create a structured implementation plan. Every large project I work on has the same basic initial steps (study the codebase, discuss the plan with me, etc) so it makes sense to formalize this in an agent I specialize for the purpose.
by gwern | 2026-01-21 07:06:12+00:00
It makes no sense because it's some degree of AI slop: https://reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1qi64pr/i_got_into_...

Note that he doesn't quite say, when asked pointblank how much AI he used in his erroneous microbenchmarking, that he didn't use AI: https://reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1qi64pr/i_got_into_...

Which explains all of it.

Kudos to /u/teraflop, for having infinitely more patience with this than I would.
by saghm | 2026-01-21 07:06:17+00:00
There have been a few times I've had interactions with people on other sites that have been clearly from LLMs. At least one of the times, it turned out to be a non-native English speaker who needed the help to be able to converse with me, and it turned out to be a worthwhile conversation that I don't think would have been possible otherwise. Sometimes the utility of the conversation can outweigh the awkwardness of how it's conveyed.

That can said, I do think it would be better to be up front about this sort of thing, and that means that it's not really suitable for use on a site like HN where it's against the rules.
by miki123211 | 2026-01-21 07:06:50+00:00
Don't forget the journalists.

Facebook made journalists a lot less relevant, so anything that hurts Meta (and hence anything that hurts tech in general) is a good story that helps journalists get revenge and revenue.

"Think of the children", as much as it is hated on HN, is a great way to get the population riled up. If there's something that happens which involves a tech company and a child, even if this is an anecdote that should have no bearing on policy, the media goes into a frenzy. As we all know, the media (and their consumers) love anecdotes and hate statistics, and because of how many users most tech products have, there are plenty of anecdotes to go around, no matter how good the company's intentions.

Politicians still read the NY Times, who had reporters admit on record that they were explicitly asked to put tech in an unfavorable light[1], so if the NYT says something is a problem, legislators will try to legislate that problem away, no matter how harebrained, ineffective and ultimately harmful the solution is.

[1] https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1588231892792328192?lang=en
by VorpalWay | 2026-01-21 07:07:05+00:00
> However the big difference (in most languages) is that functions can take arbitrarily long. Array access either succeeds or fails quickly.

For some definition of quick. Modern CPUs are usually bottlenecked by memory bandwidth and cache size. So a function that recomputes the value can often be quicker than a look up table, at least outside of microbenchmarks (since in microbenchmarks you won't have to compete with the rest of the code base about cache usage).

Of course this depends heavily of how expensive the function is, but it is worth having in mind that memory is not necessarily quicker than computing again. If you need to go to main memory, you have something on the order of a hundred ns that you could be recomputing the value in instead. Which at 2 GHz would translate to 200 clock cycles. What that means in terms of number of instructions depends on the instruction and number of execution units you can saturated in the CPU, if the CPU can predict and prefetch memory, branch prediction, etc. But RAM is really slow. Even with cache you are talking single digit ns to tens of ns (depending on if it is L1, L2 or L3).
by globular-toast | 2026-01-21 07:07:25+00:00
Unfortunately I think one of the problems with v6 is people are just unable to apply intuition to numbers this big. The minimum number of /64s an ISP will have is around 4 billion. They generally give subscribers a /56 which is 256 /64s. It's all simple power-of-2 arithmetic. Computer people used to get how big 2^64 is.
by Sateeshm | 2026-01-21 07:07:53+00:00
>Disturbing for those of us who identify as SWEs, but no less true.

>That's not to say SWEs don't have work to do, but writing syntax directly is not it.

Why would this be disturbing for SWEs? Writing syntax was never the end goal. It was just a core we couldn't without. It was always about the intent of the code.