MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pwdisswordfishs | 2026-01-31 22:28:57+00:00
> LLMs/coding agents on the other hand are anything but: they make errors in logic and errors in judgement, resulting in functional bugs and slop.

> But they’re fast, and there are effectively infinitely many of them.

That's like saying you can hire effectively infinitely many human workers, because there are 8+ billion people on Earth.

Even though they're cheaper than humans ($200 gets you a month of passable work, rather than a single day), USD is still one of the limiting reagents that determines how much you can get out of them.
Show HN: HoneypotScan – Detect crypto scam tokens
by teycirb | 2026-01-31 22:29:14+00:00
I built a tool to detect honeypot tokens (ERC20 contracts that let you buy but block selling). It uses 13 regex patterns to scan for tx.origin abuse and other sell-blocking techniques.

*How it works:*
- Fetches verified source code from Etherscan
- Runs pattern matching for common honeypot techniques
- Returns results in ~2 seconds
- Threshold: 2+ patterns = 95% confidence honeypot

*Architecture:*
- Cloudflare Workers for edge computing
- KV for caching (95% hit rate, 24hr TTL)
- 6 Etherscan API keys with rotation
- Supports Ethereum, Polygon, Arbitrum

*Key insight:* Smart contracts are immutable, so aggressive caching works perfectly. This lets the free tier handle high traffic ($0/month).

*Limitations:*
- Only detects sell-blocking honeypots
- Doesn't catch obfuscated code, proxy patterns, or time bombs
- Not a full security audit

Live: https://honeypotscan.pages.dev
Source: https://github.com/Teycir/honeypotscan

Open to feedback on detection patterns or evasion techniques I might be missing.
by jorl17 | 2026-01-31 22:29:32+00:00
An agent can always be told what to do by a human.

However, a human can't do what a human can't do. For example, a human can't answer in superhuman speed. A way to be somewhat certain that an agent is the one responding is to send them a barrage of questions/challenges that could only be answered correctly, fast, without any thought, without a human in the loop, and ones for which a human could not write a computer program to simulate an agent (at least not fast enough)

I think this is very achievable, and I can think of many plausible ways to explore "speed of response/action" as a way of identifying an agent operating. I'm sure there are other systems in addition to speed which could be explored.

Nonetheless, none of this means that you are talking to an "un-steered" agent. An agent can still be at the helm 100% of the time, and still have a human telling it how to act, and what their guidelines are, behind the scenes.

I find this all so fascinating.
by dang | 2026-01-31 22:29:58+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Genode OS Framework - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45384653 - Sept 2025 (39 comments)

Genode: FOSDEM 2024 Aftermath - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39557993 - March 2024 (2 comments)

Genode – Genode on seL4 – IPC and virtual memory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38060698 - Oct 2023 (6 comments)

Genode's Browser Odyssey (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35206642 - March 2023 (11 comments)

Genode OS Framework 22.08 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32671467 - Sept 2022 (2 comments)

Genode OS Framework release 22.02 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30521093 - March 2022 (12 comments)

Genode – Sculpt Operating System 21.10 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28889767 - Oct 2021 (12 comments)

Genode Operating System Framework – General Overview - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26441425 - March 2021 (1 comment)

Genode OS Framework 20.11 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25236274 - Nov 2020 (3 comments)

Genode OS Framework 19.05 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20038374 - May 2019 (20 comments)

Genode OS: A tool kit for highly secure special-purpose operating systems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18962861 - Jan 2019 (31 comments)

Genode – The microkernel approach (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16084936 - Jan 2018 (1 comment)

Genode OS Framework 16.05 (with Rust support and 4.4.3 Linux drivers) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11854460 - June 2016 (3 comments)

How Genode came to RISC-V - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11369463 - March 2016 (19 comments)

Genode – Operating System Framework - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10139224 - Aug 2015 (23 comments)
by monsieurbanana | 2026-01-31 22:30:08+00:00
A pdf can be anything and everything. It's just a wrapper around text, images, html, you can even embed javascript. There's already pdf forms that are user-editable (without a pdf editor). Not all features are available on all pdf viewers though.

If we're at the point where they use ai to make form pdfs, might as well cut the middleman and ask the ai to generate a form on a website.
by preston-kwei | 2026-01-31 22:30:11+00:00
The “lump of cognition” framing misses something important. it’s not about how much thinking we do, but which thinking we stop doing. A lot of judgment, ownership, and intuition comes from boring or repetitive work, and outsourcing that isn’t free. Lowering the cost of producing words clearly isn’t the same as increasing the amount of actual thought.
by c0balt | 2026-01-31 22:30:16+00:00
I would strongly recommend sops-nix[0]. Pair this with ssh-to-age/ssh-to-gpg for the keys for each server. We are using this at $work for multiple servers, one notable advantages is that it works in teams (for multiple people) and git (and also gitops).

For remote installations nixos-anywhere is great. deploy-rs or colemna is fine, nixos-rebuild with `--target-host` is also working well for us however.

[0]: https://github.com/Mic92/sops-nix/issues
by Mehmet0x6D | 2026-01-31 22:30:16+00:00
I developed a website to watch (and download) tiktok videos, because my family keeps sending them to me. The biggest reason were the latest news about the US takeover of tiktok.

After getting some feedback from reddit, i also updated some of the features: Read more on my blog https://savett.xyz/en/blog/savett-new-features-faster-tiktok...
by IanCal | 2026-01-31 22:30:17+00:00
> Without a strong propsition as to why I, as a customer, would use an agent over not doing so? Whats the value prop?

Same reason you’d use an automated approach to anything - you want to solve a problem and want to solve it along some Pareto front of minimal effort and maximum results.

You use search engines to find things and all sorts of other automated time saving approaches. Agents are just another one. I used one to find an old email receipt for a car seat that I’d not been able to find myself with keywords.

> Related query: how is this really any different than what the W3C has proposed with Hydra[0] or other linked data APIs and formats? Who benefits by making their APIs more transparent, when 15 years or so ago there was a big push for this exact thing and it failed due to business concerns, not technical ones.

Common data formats have thrived where they’re actually used by middle services that users actually use - aggregations of some sort. Scientific papers have common data so they are indexed, webpages have metadata so they appear in google search results.

Linked data for technical reasons fails because the real world is too messy. There needs to be a good business reason so that the formats get nailed down to a small reasonable set and everyone just does it.

Now, part of the problem with supplying apis is who is going to use them? Even the nicest ones are only useful for people building a product on it, or a few nerds.

This has changed. We have systems that can use apis from natural language. That means that normal end users can integrate multiple services nicely and easily, and add others into the same interface they’re already using.
by calf | 2026-01-31 22:30:37+00:00
You seem to be confusing/overgeneralizing the understandable resentment of "some Cantonese" who likely had bad experiences of postcolonialism and/or authoritarian-revanchist state policies. If Hong Kong diaspora has a poor reception towards newcomers to their local microculture, maybe it's because the people attempting to engage are not treading lightly with those actual historical legacies in mind.
by 6gvONxR4sf7o | 2026-01-31 22:31:44+00:00
plan -> code -> verify is nice in theory, but is super failure prone without the TDD or “preregistration” version: plan -> code verification -> code implementation -> verify.

Doing the verification after the execution tends to lead to “yeah this is good” when it really isn’t. Stuff like copilot annoyingly loves to change the tests so it can pass, rather than changing the implementation to make the tests pass. I wonder if their platform prevents that kind of thing.
by galaxyLogic | 2026-01-31 22:32:04+00:00
From the article: "Claude Code can rip out one service and replace it with another in minutes. ..."

Doesn't that assume there are many interchangable services available on the web which essentially do the same thing?

I can see this would be the case if there were many online services for say compiling C++ code. But for more human-centric services, are there many "replaceable services" out there? An API is not only its syntax, but also its semantics.
by rnhmjoj | 2026-01-31 22:32:08+00:00
Traceroutes are already notoriously hard to interpret correctly[1] and yes, they can be trivially spoofed. Remember the stunt[2] pulled by tpb to move to North Korea? If you are an AS you can also prepend fake AS to your BGP announcements and make the spoofed traceroute even more legitimate.

I wonder if this thing will start a cat and mouse game with VPNs.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/networking/comments/1hkm4g/lets_tal...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5319419
by yicmoggIrl | 2026-01-31 22:32:08+00:00
> It is impossible to get someone from the project to review my PRs

Sorry to say this, but this is natural. Writing patches is easy. Reviewing them is hard. Writing patches (and getting them accepted, merged) is rewarding and demonstrable (as a form of achievement). Reviewing patches, educating new contributors is sometimes rewarding, sometimes not (it's an investment into humans that sometimes pays off, sometimes doesn't), but mostly not a demonstrable achievement in either case. Therefore there is incentive to contribute, and hardly any incentive to review. This is why reviewers are extremely scarce in all open source projects, and why all sustainable projects optimize for reviewer/maintainer satisfaction, not for contributor satisfaction. As an external contributor, you just don't get to allocate scarce resources financed by some commercial entity with no relation to you.

If you want to become a maintainer, or at least want others to review your stuff, don't start by writing code. Start by reading code, and make attempts at reviewing code for others. Assuming you get good at it, established project members should start appreciating it, and might ask you to implement some stuff, which they could be willing to review for you. You first need to give the real kind of effort before you can take it.

And this is why "open development" is a total myth today. Resource allocation and work (chore) distribution are aspects of reality that completely break the wide-eyed, bushy-tailed "new contributors welcome" PR message. Opening up the source code (under whatever license) is one thing, collaborating with randos is an entirely different thing. Can you plan with them in advance? Do they adhere to your deadlines? Can you rely on them when things break? When there are regressions?

> you get ghosted if you don’t have a @google or @redhat email address and really the only way to become a contributor is to be buddies with someone who works on the project already

Yes, and the way to become buddies is to help them out where they are hurting: in their infinite patch review backlogs. Of course, that means you have to invest a whole lot of seemingly thankless learning, for the long run's sake. You have to become an expert with effectively nothing to show for it in the git history. It's totally fair not wanting to do that. Just understand that a ticket that remains open indefinitely, or an uncalled-for contribution that never gets reviewed and merged, may genuinely be better for the maintainers than taking on yet more responsibility for your one-off code contribution.

> I have considered going to one of the CNCF committee meetings and being like, hey you guys are not accepting new contributions which goes against your mandate

According to the above, I bet that "mandate" is a total fake; a PR move only. It does not reflect the actual interests of the organizations with the $$$, which is why it doesn't get followed.

You are right that those orgs should at least be honest and own up to NOT welcoming newcomers or external contributors.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-01-31 22:33:33+00:00
One year in my city they were installing 4-way stop signs everywhere based on some combination of "best practices" and "screeching Karens". Even the residents don't like them in a lot of places so over time people just turn the posts in the ground or remove them.

Every now and the I'll GPS somewhere and there will be a phatom stop sign in the route and I chuckle to myself because it means the Google car drove through when one of these signs was "fresh".
by rafaelmdec | 2026-01-31 22:34:03+00:00
Well, I am glad that we both respect the amount of damage that can be avoided if you take into account the risks involved in handing over full autonomy to these agents.

In the meantime, Moltbook comes along and all of a sudden these agents are mimicking human behavior, good or bad, while building features and more complex failure modes onto these AI-Agents-first networks.

For me it's a huge yellow flag, to put it mildly.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-01-31 22:34:59+00:00
A couple of years ago, I rewatched some episodes of a 70s BBC drama called "Survivors" (the plot etc. is irrelevant in the current context). In the very first episode there's a scene where a woman who is looking for her son but has no idea where he might be walks across a very small wooden bridge over an even small creek. She stops in the middle, holds the rail on the bridge and looks down at the water. The camera shows us what she sees. For somewhere between 30 and 60 seconds, we just see the water in the creek flowing. It's not even particularly beautiful.

Aesthetics sure can change a lot, even within a single lifetime.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-01-31 22:35:04+00:00
If the tech is already good enough to cheat with? Ya, I think the kids are ready to learn it, even if just keeps improving in the coming years. It also helps you reflect on the process of doing something when you instruct someone else to do it for you. Writing a good essay and getting AI to write a good essay for you are both useful things to do as students.
by maqp | 2026-01-31 22:35:25+00:00
>I know the default assumption with Telegram is that they can read all your messages

The client is open source. It's trivial to verify this is 100% factually happening. They have access to every group message. Every desktop message. Every message by default. If you enable secret chats for 1:1 mobile chats, you are now disclosing to Telegram you're actively trying to hide something from them, and if there ever was metadata worth it for Keith Alexander to kill someone over, it's that.

>they seem less cooperative and I never got the notion that they ever read private messages until the Macron incident

We have no way to verify Telegram isn't a Russian OP. I'd love to say Pavel Durov fled for his life into exile https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/03/technology/once-celebrate...

But the "fugitive" has since visited Russia over SIXTY times https://kyivindependent.com/kremlingram-investigation-durov/

Thus, I wouldn't be as much concerned about what they're handing EUROPOL, but what they're handing FSB/SVR.

Even if Telegram never co-operated with Russian intelligence, who here thinks Telegram team, that can't pull off the basic thing of "make everything E2EE" that ~all of its competition has successfully done, can harden their servers against Russian state sponsored hackers like Fancy Bear, who obviously would never make noise about successful breach and data exfiltration.

>How come they are able to be this exception despite not having end to end encryption by default?

They've pushed out lie about storing cloud chats across different servers in different jurisdictions. Maybe that scared some prosecutors off. Or maybe FVEY is inside TG's servers too, and they don't like the idea of going after users as that would incentivize deployment of usable E2EE.

Who knows. Just use Signal.
by nsainsbury | 2026-01-31 22:35:34+00:00
I actually wrote up quite a few thoughts related to this a few days ago but my take is far more pessimistic: https://www.neilwithdata.com/outsourced-thinking

My fundamental argument: The way the average person is using AI today is as "Thinking as a Service" and this is going to have absolutely devastating long term consequences, training an entire generation not to think for themselves.
by bronco21016 | 2026-01-31 22:36:04+00:00
I really want to get into these Lora based mesh tools but the range in my experience is terrible. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, maybe it's a lack of nodes in my area.

I just tested the other day. I'm in the midwest US so it's winter, no leaves. I managed to get about a quarter mile before my two portable nodes couldn't talk to each other. T-Echo with muziworks whip antenna.

Without a bunch of solidly placed, high elevation, high gain antenna nodes, this just isn't really that usable.

Plus, all the other issues others have highlighted.
by code443 | 2026-01-31 22:36:06+00:00
The loop closes eventually. Right now I read your article and think "I should make my docs more agent-friendly." But if I delegate that task to an agent, the agent reads your article, understands why agent-friendly docs matter, and rewrites my docs accordingly.

At some point the agents reading your article ARE the agents that will consume those improved docs. The feedback loop becomes fully autonomous.
by bccdee | 2026-01-31 22:36:16+00:00
> Not too long ago, reading books was also considered evil.

Yeah, well, they were wrong and I'm right.

> You sound like those people who think Battleship Potemkin is the greatest movie of all time.

100% critic & 86% user approval on Rotten Tomatoes, 97/100 on Metacritic. Universally acclaimed, massively influential. Have you considered that Battleship Potemkin might just be a good movie? Have you tried watching it?
by phoe-krk | 2026-01-31 22:37:04+00:00
The contents of this post don't match the title.

"Developers are still needed in age of AI" is not about managing unreliable compilers.

Management mistakes in form of overdelegation and underdelegation is not about managing unreliable compilers.

Software process design with explicit checkpoints is not about managing unreliable compilers.

"Dear developer, it's time to turn yourself into a manager" is not about managing unreliable compilers.

Finally, a shameless advertisement plug from an AI toolkit company responsible for creating this post is not about managing unreliable compilers either!

Okay, LLMs being unreliable and plentiful is almost about managing unreliable compilers, but only if you believe the "many have analogized LLMs with compilers" opening statement. And even if you believe it, this post contains no practical examples of unreliability or how that unreliability is managed; the whole post is generic and lacks any connection to software development practice, to the point where it seems LLM-generated as a whole.
by exit | 2026-01-31 22:37:17+00:00
schemes exist for cryptographically verifying that an output is the deterministic result of some program run on some input.

i'm at least aware of BitVM * as one example of this.

i wonder whether such schemes could be used to prove that a post is the deterministic function of an open model's inference run.

* https://bitvm.org/ "A prover makes a claim that a given function evaluates for some particular inputs to some specific output. If that claim is false, anyone can perform a fraud proof and punish the prover."
by mrandish | 2026-01-31 22:37:34+00:00
The original poster stated

> "The human brain is mutable, the human "soul" is a concept thats not proven yet and likely isn't real."

The soul is "a concept that's not proven yet." It's not proven because there's no convincing evidence for the proposition. By definition, in the absence of convincing evidence, the null hypothesis of any proposition is presumed to be more likely. The presumed likelihood of the null hypothesis is not a positive assertion which creates a burden of proof. It's the presumed default state of all possible propositions - even those yet to be imagined.

In other words, pointing out 'absence of evidence' is not asserting 'evidence of absence'. See: Russell's Teapot and Sagan's Dragon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot)
by anonymars | 2026-01-31 22:37:37+00:00
Empirically it doesn't look like there's a meaningful difference, does it?

Not having the source code hasn't stopped people from finding exploits in Windows (or even hardware attacks like Spectre or Meltdown). Having source code didn't protect against Heartbleed or log4j

I'd conclude it comes down to security culture (look how things changed after the Trustworthy Computing initiative, or OpenSSL vs LibreSSL) and "how many people are looking" -- in that sense, maybe "many eyes [do] make bugs shallow" but it doesn't seem like "source code availability" is the deciding factor. Rather, "what are the incentives" -- both on the internal development side and the external attacker side
Show HN: Weed–Minimalist AI/ML inference and backprogation in the style of Qrack
by wrathfulspatula | 2026-01-31 22:37:57+00:00
"Weed" is an AI/ML library in the style of vm6502q/qrack (now unitaryfoundation/qrack, on GitHub). I wrote the (C++) Qrack quantum computer simulator framework (now with +2.5M downloads of its ctypes Python wrapper) to have absolutely minimal dependencies and supply-chain vulnerability attack surface: it only requires pure language standard at bare minimum, with optional OpenCL or CUDA for (vendor-agnostic) hardware acceleration, and with optional Boost library inclusion for performance. "Weed" aims to provide the same standards and utility for AI/ML inference and back-propagation as Qrack does for quantum computing: never be locked into a hardware vendor, never be locked out of deploying on a platform due to lack of upstream dependency support, and let fastidious engineering and design point to the way to novel optimizations, all of which work together through a "transparent" interface of optimal default user settings.
by toyg | 2026-01-31 22:37:58+00:00
Carabinieri have been involved with (and occasionally fighting) the mafia since late 1800s. That's got nothing to do with how we got to the current situation of relative tranquility.

What happened between the end of the 1980s and the 1990s was that, because of continuous feuds among mafiosi that produced too many civilian victims, political connections broke down, particularly with a few especially vicious bosses. Laws were passed to isolate the worst offenders, new connections were brokered with more moderate mafia leaders, and eventually the "bad" bosses were magically found, hiding more or less in plain sight.
by functionmouse | 2026-01-31 22:38:18+00:00
Yesssss this is right up my alley with my current projects. I'm working through K&R 2nd Ed and making little demo apps with libnds using framebuffer manipulation for graphics along the way. My goal is to eventually end up with a useful 15bit sprite-ing application, and an endless scrolling handwriting journal thingy with bookmarks. Thank You for posting this! I'm loading this onto my DSi XL right now.