MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigfatkitten | 2026-01-14 22:41:19+00:00
Starlink’s plans vary between markets, but in Australia they have a dirt cheap ($8 AUD per month or something) standby plan that gives you unlimited data capped at something like 500Kbps. If you’re going on a trip and need faster data, you can upgrade to a bigger plan for the rest of the billing month, charged on a pro rata basis, and then revert to the standby plan afterwards.

I used to use Inmarsat BGAN. BGAN would top out at around 250Kbps on a good day, and cost a few bucks per MB on a terminal that cost almost ten times as much as a Starlink Mini.
by kybernetikos | 2026-01-14 22:41:44+00:00
As you say 'social media' is not a good category, we should specify exactly the things that are concerning. Here are the ones where I'm concerned about their effect on young people:

1. a user is shown new content based on extensive profiling and a secret algorithm that the user does not control

2. a users activity can be discovered and tracked by people that intend to take advantage of the user

3. the operation of the site is optimised for addiction (or more euphemistically "attention")

I absolutely don't think that a book club or a kids own website comments or person to person chat systems should be included in the rules.

Note - I'm not saying these things should be banned, just that I think it's reasonable to restrict their use to adults.
by ZitchDog | 2026-01-14 22:41:54+00:00
I used similar techniques to build tjs [1] - the worlds fastest and most accurate json schema validator, with magical TypeScript types. I learned a lot about autonomous programming. I found a similar "planner/delegate" pattern to work really well, with the use of git subtrees to fan out work [2].

I think any large piece of software with well established standards and test suites will be able to be quickly rewritten and optimized by coding agents.

[1] https://github.com/sberan/tjs

[2] /spawn-perf-agents claude command: https://github.com/sberan/tjs/blob/main/.claude/commands/spa...
by arjie | 2026-01-14 22:42:01+00:00
I am comfortable with that in dev/staging DB (it's my own PII which I don't mind). I use separate secrets for staging vs. prod so I don't mind giving full bore access to staging.

For prod DB read-only I just add tables/columns as they become relevant (so it's allowlist). Claude usually sequences table schema and stuff from staging DB / local migrations and then reads prod DB. When it fails access to something I decide if I want to give it or not. It eventually reaches a stage where I'm comfortable with always starting my day with `claude --dangerously-skip-permissions --continue`.

The prod DB read/write creds are in company 1password which I don't have app installed (I rarely need company creds). LLM maybe could figure out some way to get into my Bitwarden which I do routinely use but short of creating and running keylogger I think it's fine.

It's mildly annoying you have to periodically `GRANT SELECT` but now I'm much more careful organizing the schema in an LLM-friendly way. Postgresql can do column-security and I'm forced to use that sometimes but I refactored design to just be table-level.
by pxc | 2026-01-14 22:42:05+00:00
Years ago, this book provided me with a useful introduction to the history of immigration to the United States and various crackdowns (vigilante and official) against it.

It's not a difficult read, but its authors are leftists and the language may sometimes be difficult for readers with sensitivities related to the goodness of Democrats or Republicans or whatever.

(I think maybe I'll re-read it today as well; it's been a long time.)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7861.No_One_Is_Illegal
by trjordan | 2026-01-14 22:42:42+00:00
This is going to sound sarcastic, but I mean this fully: why haven't they merged that PR.

The implied future here is _unreal cool_. Swarms of coding agents that can build anything, with little oversight. Long-running projects that converge on high-quality, complex projects.

But the examples feel thin. Web browsers, Excel, and Windows 7 exist, and they specifically exist in the LLM's training sets. The closest to real code is what they've done with Cursor's codebase .... but it's not merged yet.

I don't want to say, call me when it's merged. But I'm not worried about agents ability to produce millions of lines of code. I'm worried about their ability to intersect with the humans in the real world, both as users of that code and developers who want to build on top of it.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-01-14 22:42:53+00:00
So these 10% enby presumably tend to be "silent enbys"?

Hmm. Gotta investigate whether HN (the HQ) has (or aims for) the magic ~10% enby. (I had suspected as such but you again voiced what was in my subconscious!!)

https://www.cs.utep.edu/vladik/2019/tr19-95.pdf

I'm guessing there's a parallel observation (or technique[0]) for people..

("[0]Places they have seen, people they have done")
by Alupis | 2026-01-14 22:43:00+00:00
My take away from this link is not what Adafruit probably wants.

> we told sparkfun they needed to get their house in order

> that was the big issue i wanted them to get some hr training on, or _something_

You don't tell or demand another company do something with their own employees. There's more professional ways of dealing with a situation like this.

Request a meeting. Send a calm, collected, professional email to a decision-maker and be sure it's well sourced and factual. Keep things in private.

If the other party decides not to take action, then make a decision if you want to continue doing business with them. Do not keep pressuring them for the outcome you want, do not escalate the situation, and certainly don't drag the dirty laundry out into the public.

Like, what good did Adafruit actually think was going to come from getting into a fight with the founder of Sparkfun? 50 lashings with a wet noodle?

Whatever Sparkfun allegedly did to cause this, Adafruit looks pretty poor in this light. I've been a long time customer of both Adafruit and Sparkfun, and will continue to be - but this is some rookie, amateur, hot-headed behavior from Adafruit.
by parl_match | 2026-01-14 22:43:17+00:00
> I wear N95 masks on local trains, long distance trains, planes, buses (most of the time), and movie theaters when busy. The few times I haven’t, in particular local train (unfortunately, lots of unhealthy people) and Amtrak, I have gotten sick - strep and covid. Being sick is in some ways not a big deal, but is serious enough I will keep wearing the masks forever. I get sick far less often than my non mask wearing peers.

I used to get sick when I went into the city. Once I started commuting, it happened a lot less as I built up immunity. I'm not saying everyone should lick doorknobs for maximum health.

Anyways, I got to a lot of shows as well, and wearing masks is joyless. I wear them when I'm feeling sick, to reduce the range of transmission (although I just try and stay home)

That said, for institutions where there are sick and weak people, it's almost criminal that they aren't investing even more heavily in testing these sort of technologies.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-01-14 22:43:23+00:00
Kalashnikov are regularly fired in the streets of Brussels.

Police, today, ordered two subway stations to be closed.

And here's an headline from today in Brussels: "Four men armed with machetes attacked and hurt a man before kidnapping him in the back of their car".

https://www.lesoir.be/722338/article/2026-01-14/enlevement-m...

So please give me a break. Police recommends people (especially tourists) to not hang in the city center at night.

> no weekly school shooting

that one is right. But the streets aren't safe anymore.

> ... total tax rate of at most 60%.

It's 69% if you're a semi-succesful solopreneur not established as a company (50% income tax + 19% social welfare). And don't forget you then pay 21% of VAT on basically anything you buy. And 30% on any added value and a new 10% additional tax on top of that since 2026.

Actually I saw my beloved city of Brussels turning into such a shithole in a few decades that I left it. I even left the country.
by heliumtera | 2026-01-14 22:43:29+00:00
>without also some kind of firewall in place for the container

In the article example, an Anthropic endpoint was the only reachable domain.
Anthropic Claude platform literally was the exfiltration agent.
No firewall would solve this.
But a simple mechanism that would tie the agent to an account, like the parent commenter suggested, would be an easy fix.
Prompt Injection cannot by definition be eliminated, but this particular problem could be avoided if they were not vibing so hard and bragging about it
by MonkeyClub | 2026-01-14 22:43:52+00:00
Even better.

Have Microsoft charge people $ for their repos, and then take their code to train their LLM for more $.

And they can use the surplus $ to fund open source projects to produce more code to train their LLM for even more $, and reduce their taxes thanks to the charitable donations.

Everyone wins, right?

Thankfully we still have Codeberg.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-14 22:44:22+00:00
I agree with you and you raise some good points

I think your reason of worrying is either that A) packages can update and contain malware or B) Uv's installation itself. might have malware if any of A) or B) get hacked

Regarding A) I feel like uv's dependencies can be pinned to a certain date to make them reproducible and this can come of help (https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/scripts/#improving-reproduc...)

Regarding B) I feel like they provide attestations via GitHub Artifact Attestations and the script could once again be modified to actually verify it via github attestations and they also provide ghcr artifacts (as such immutability) atleast of docker images and I looked further into it and it seems that you can use github artifacts to upload normal binary files as well so I will probably take a look into seeing if I can do something like this for uv's ghcr

Effectively after A) and B) the trust just ends up being reliant on Github's Microsoft infrastructure (usually) and perhaps python infrastructure which is on fastly

But I feel like this is for cases of extremely sensitive workflows But I feel like I might still take a look at it because security still feels very interesting to me and just because of this discussion, I can see at some pointers of following up on curiosity lol

Anyways would love to continue our discussion and probably update you on trying to make a script which could actually be completely pinned (atleast uv binary instead of just running a shell script from the astral servers in such case)
by throwaway777x | 2026-01-14 22:44:22+00:00
I think it really depends how a person judges the progress from chatgpt 3.5, 3 years ago to Opus 4.5.

In one light it is super impressive and amazing progress, in another light it is not impressive at all and totally over hyped.

Using the Hubert Dreyfus analogy. It is impressive if the goal is to climb as high as we can up giant tree. The height we have reached isn't impressive at all though if we are trying to climb the tree to get to the moon.
by troupo | 2026-01-14 22:44:29+00:00
Thank you!

This will likely have a lot of false positives on a lot of genres. E.g. I suspect genres like synthpop and trance (and a lot of other electronic music) will likely hit a lot of those points with regards to music and sampling.

Lyrics are also not a given (when they are likely curated by humans). E.g. compare the song I referenced (https://dumpstergrooves.bandcamp.com/track/he-talked-a-big-g...) to, say, Taylor Swift's current most listened to song: https://genius.com/Taylor-swift-the-fate-of-ophelia-lyrics I'd chose the AI one in a heart beat :)

I wonder if a combination of all of those may work for a subset of songs, but I don't think you can do it with any confidence :(
by rootusrootus | 2026-01-14 22:44:42+00:00
Hell, ain't true for any gas pickup I've owned, either. Big tanks, and often temperamental bastards that have to be babysat and won't take fuel at full pump speed in any case.

Most road trip stops, according to the AAA, are 15 minutes anyway. Only on the Internet does everyone take 5 minutes to refuel.
by rekabis | 2026-01-14 22:45:18+00:00
Why is rental property evil?

Profit margins on all inelastic essential goods are fundamentally evil.

A mansion for a single person isn’t an essential inelastic good. A Bachelor suite or basement suite for a single person _is._

Water in general isn’t an essential inelastic good. Sufficient water to keep a single person hydrated, clean, and in good health _is._

Junk food and premium-grade food isn’t an essential inelastic good. Sufficient raw foods to keep a person fed _is._

When you forcibly extract more from a person than providing the product costs you, purely because they have no other choice, you are an evil parasite, full stop.

And no, going homeless is not “a choice”. Neither is dying from exposure. And there are plenty of people who work full-time jobs yet don’t earn enough to put a roof over their heads.

> bringing the 2-3% of homes that are owned by institutional investors won’t make a dent in housing affordability.

But dealing with the ⅓ of all rentals who are owned by parasites _will._
by nottorp | 2026-01-14 22:45:33+00:00
Not sure if github publishes their subscriber numbers but there may be quite a few, at least corporate?

Personally I used to pay 7/month for personal use, then when MS bought it it went down to 4, and one day when my card expired I noticed I'm not using any of the paid features and private repos are now free... so now I'm paying 0.
by dugidugout | 2026-01-14 22:45:38+00:00
> In the case of drugs, they probably wouldn't have any reason to raid you unless you were suspected of stashing drugs or money or some other evidence.

To keep with the analogy: If I had a public history of contact with the dealer (and was a prolific writer on the inner workings of drug trafficking), police could claim "reasonable suspicion" that I have communications/evidence related to them. That would justify seizing my devices for investigation under the same logic.

I agree there's more context to evaluate, but even Bondi's provided framing troubles me. It seems broad enough to target any journalist with relevant sources to a provided crime.
by spacedcowboy | 2026-01-14 22:45:52+00:00
Opinionated puerile tripe.

Different people have different goals for their code. If you want to use the GPL, go ahead. If the aim for your licence isn't about control over the use of your software (like the GPL) but perhaps more about attribution then use another licence. Or, you know, keep stuff closed-source.

Your code, your rules. End of story.

One last thing: I honestly don't think it's a great look for anyone who claims to be committed to open source to be calling open-source contributors "cucks" by proxy. I think that's a fucking shitty thing to do and you should be ashamed of doing it. I also think it's far more likely for someone who was thinking about open-sourcing something to say "nah, let's keep it closed, who wants that sort of drama". So well done (this last sentence is sarcasm, in case you don't recognise it).
by anal_reactor | 2026-01-14 22:46:02+00:00
Don't worry, most likely your children will come across the normal sorts of bad people - cheating partners, bullying peers, abusive bosses, rude customers, lying beggars, maybe robbers and thieves. It's fortunately unlikely they'll meet a guy who is outspoken about his opinion that scientifically capturing people's attention to get them addicted to screens is morally much worse than showing them "penis into vagina episode 74786". We don't want their innocent minds to be poisoned with ideas that question the status quo.
by ptx | 2026-01-14 22:46:02+00:00
It's also both a larger download and slower to start than Java, which is not known for being light and nimble. In fact, PowerShell is so slow that you can both compile and run the equivalent C# program before PowerShell finishes launching. Not ideal for a shell or a scripting language.

Also, the newer versions don't actually come with Windows, which would have been useful – instead Windows includes an incompatible older version that admonishes you to download the new version. But why would you download several hundred megabytes of pwsh when you can equally well download any other language runtime?

Also, the error handling is just awful, silencing errors by default, requiring several different incantations to fix.

Also, it sends "telemetry" to Microsoft by default.

Also, the documentation is vague and useless. And the syntax is ugly.
by s0kr8s | 2026-01-14 22:46:04+00:00
I received word from several long-established recovery programs today that they expect to be out of business within days, weeks, or months as a result of these funds being pulled.

The damage being done here will be long lasting, not only due to the employees and clients impacted, but due to the impact on the broader business environment as well.

Until now, the government was viewed as a reliable business partner in these industries, and it definitely won't be viewed that way going forward: the chill on investment will be felt for many years to come.

In some ways, I'm starting to view this and related executive funding cuts as a sort of miniature debt default.
by recursivecaveat | 2026-01-14 22:46:17+00:00
Iran is already a pariah state, I don't know what you expect. They are sanctioned by the UN, marked as a terrorist organization, the US droned their 2nd in command... There's nothing to do except write editorials about hypocrisy or start a new middle eastern war. Wake me up when the west is funding the revolutionary guard with 10s of billions of dollars of military aid a year.
by slwvx | 2026-01-14 22:46:21+00:00
I was not aware of (or had forgotten) the term "Wright's law" [1], but that indeed is what I was thinking of. It looks like some may use the term "learning curve" to refer to the same idea (efficiency gains that follow investment); the Wikipedia page on "Learning curve" [2] includes references to Wright.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effect

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve
by formerly_proven | 2026-01-14 22:46:26+00:00
> Finally, taking an OpenSSL public API and attempting to trace the implementation to see how it is implemented has become an exercise in self-flagellation. Being able to read the source to understand how something works is important both as part of self-improvement in software engineering, but also because as sophisticated consumers there are inevitably things about how an implementation works that aren’t documented, and reading the source gives you ground truth. The number of indirect calls, optional paths, #ifdef, and other obstacles to comprehension is astounding. We cannot overstate the extent to which just reading the OpenSSL source code has become miserable — in a way that both wasn’t true previously, and isn’t true in LibreSSL, BoringSSL, or AWS-LC.

OpenSSL code was not pleasant or easy to read even in v1 though and figuring out what calls into where under which circumstances when e.g. many optimized implementations exist (or will exist, once the many huge perl scripts have generated them) was always a headache with only the code itself. I haven't done this since 3.0 but if it regressed so hard on this as well then it has to be really quite bad.
by vlovich123 | 2026-01-14 22:46:44+00:00
I think the “find file” section could use some clarification. Unless I missed something, as implemented it’s impossible to list paths within the filesystem (unless the cortex stores the path? It’s not clear from the docs). At a minimum I’m curios about the costs associated with maintaining the cortex - there’s nothing about how the cost of metadata updates which is where the slowdown as disk fills up normally is since you have to do a sorted insertion and/or deletion or otherwise add indirection markers after a binary search.

> The file's metadata in memory is updated to the new version.

Which means this doesn’t work well for lots of (presumably small) files because of the bookkeeping overhead of needing to have all the metadata materialized in RAM? Have you tested how your filesystem scales as the number of files increases and how the RAM usage scales?

Anyway, super interesting ideas. Congrats on achieving something difficult!
by dekhn | 2026-01-14 22:47:04+00:00
I think people trying to do these analyses are fooling themselves. The data we have and understanding for the vast majority of variants and combinations of variants is insufficient to produce accurate explanations of our current health or make predictions for the future.

I started working in this field many decades ago and it's taken me quite some time to see just how dysfunctional the literature has become in terms of describing things that are useful to individuals. Our understanding of genomes, genotypes, phenotypes, and their relationships, is incredibly limited, but you wouldn't know it when reading a bioinformatics paper.
by mentalgear | 2026-01-14 22:47:07+00:00
Great post! Indeed, it s deeply disappointing to see how both the tech industry and scientific community have fallen into the same attention-seeking trap: hyping their work with vague, sensational claims, only to later "clarify" with far more grounded—and often mundane—statements.

This tactic mirrors the strategies of tabloids, demagogues, and social media’s for-profit engagement playbook (think Zuckerberg, Musk, and the like). It’s a race to the bottom, eroding public trust and undermining the foundations of our society - all for short-term personal gain.

What’s even more disheartening is how this dynamic rewards self-promotion over substance. Today’s "experts" are often those who excel at marketing themselves, while the most knowledgeable and honest voices remain in the shadows. Their "flaw"? Refusing to sacrifice integrity for attention.
by klaff | 2026-01-14 22:48:03+00:00
LOL, the Home Depot flatbed I rented a week ago (the $19 deal although I went a little long and ended up paying $32 total) had just hauled a load of dirt or mulch. No one read me anything saying I couldn't use it for purposes other than carrying a Home Depot purchased item (although that's what I was doing). The HD page for the F250 flatbed does say they only supply a hitch if you are renting something towable from them but says nothing about using it for other purposes (like hauling dirt).
by nh2 | 2026-01-14 22:48:43+00:00
Unclear why this is being downvoted. It makes sense.

If you connect to the database with a connector that only has read access, then the LLM cannot drop the database, period.

If that were bugged (e.g. if Postgres allowed writing to a DB that was configured readonly), then that problem is much bigger has not much to do with LLMs.
by ramoz | 2026-01-14 22:48:49+00:00
This doesn’t solve the problem. The lethal trifecta as defined is not solvable and is misleading in terms of “just cut off a leg”. (Though firewalling is practically a decent bubble wrap solution).

But for truly sensitive work, you still have many non-obvious leaks.

Even in small requests the agent can encode secrets.

An AI agent that is misaligned will find leaks like this and many more.
by ryandrake | 2026-01-14 22:48:59+00:00
I'd argue that the reduction of underage smoking has much more to do with things like social acceptability and education about the dangers of smoking, and not about physical controls on the distribution of and access to cigarettes. There also appears to be a recent trend of younger people not drinking alcohol to the extent that my generation and Boomers did, which is wonderful, but probably has nothing to do with physical access to beer.

This is the right way to reduce childhood social media use: Make it socially disgusting, and make it widely known to be dangerous.