MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1123581321 | 2026-01-24 17:20:58+00:00
That is unusual. I’ve encountered a couple people like this. They also refuse get-togethers in people’s homes and potlucks. One said he would be willing to come to a potluck if he could inspect everyone’s kitchens first; he wasn’t joking! It’s a blend of germaphobia and social distrust, I suppose.

That said, if someone was grieving and they couldn’t handle more than receiving delivered takeout, I’d happily send it, just as I’d accommodate another dietary preference when preparing a real meal.
by wasabi991011 | 2026-01-24 17:21:13+00:00
> It's closer to 90% accurate at detecting human writing.

I know that's what they wrote, but I heavily disagree. It got 28/30 (93%) correct, but out of the two it got "wrong":

- one was just straight up not rated because the file format was odd or something

- the other got rated as 11% AI-written, which imo is very low. I think teachers would consider this as "human-written", as when I was being evaluated with Turnitin that percentage of "plagiarism" detected would have simply been ignored.
by gaigalas | 2026-01-24 17:21:47+00:00
The mistake here was the expectation that LLM code would not be junk.

It's the same junk produced by fast-growing startups. It was always here, now there's more of it.

I'm convinced that people will continue to use it. Therefore, I need to be able to deal with it, maybe even leverage it somehow (there should be coding skills that I possess that people in that realm of fast-growing startups do not bother to learn).
by Etherlord87 | 2026-01-24 17:21:50+00:00
- AI can grow corn

- Yes it can

- Prove it

- AI, tell me instructions to grow corn

- Go buy seeds, plant them, water the field and once you gather the corn report back

- I'm back with the corn, proving AI can grow corn!

This is the experiment here, with nuance added to it. The thing is, though, if you "orchestrate" other people, you might as well do it with a single sentence as I described. Or you can manage more thoroughly. Some decisions you make may actually be detrimental to the end result.

So the only meaningful experiment would be to test a bot against a human being: who earns more money orchestrating the corn farm, a bot or a human? Consider also the expenses which is electricity/water for a bot and also food, medicine etc. for a human being.
by nullorempty | 2026-01-24 17:21:56+00:00
At a company I work for we get b-day cards promptly. They all get sent by workday :)
What I found upsets me the most is companies paying no respect to my private time.

They all want me to be on-call and carry my laptop with me. Hiking, on a beach, at a restaurant, sleeping at night – i am expected to be reachable and get on it right away.

Some international companies don't even try to schedule support according to time-zone sighting on-call efficiency and knowledge segregation.

And yet, they fücking refuse every effort developers make to focus on fixing issues leading to incidents.

They fücking need to fix their act.
by iamthad | 2026-01-24 17:22:18+00:00
Wasn't copying from disk to memory found to be infringing in the Glider lawsuit? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzar....

> Citing the prior Ninth Circuit case of MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc., 991 F.2d 511, 518-19 (9th Cir. 1993), the district court held that RAM copying constituted "copying" under 17 U.S.C. § 106.
by throwaway89201 | 2026-01-24 17:22:39+00:00
Thanks for the link to https://news.ycombinator.com/active; didn't know that one.

As for the existence of "censors" that don't "allow" you to see anything. That's not how this site works, and your lack of carefulness stating that leads me to downvote that.

As much as I hate that anything regarding the rise of fascism in the US get's insta-flagged (by a community, not a "censor"), it's still very easy to find such posts, for example on an aggregator [1] and on the /active subpage you just mentioned.

It will also be broadly shared on regular (social) media, which is an oft stated reason this kind of stories get flagged by the community, although I think there are many other reasons.

[1] https://hckrnews.com
by xp84 | 2026-01-24 17:23:27+00:00
> tradeoff between security and convenience they'd certainly have far fewer customers

What? Most people, thinking through the tradeoff, would 100% not choose to be in charge of safeguarding their own key, because they're more worried about losing everything on their PC, than they are about going to jail. Because most people aren't planning on doing crime. Yes, I know people can be wrongly accused and stuff, but overall most people aren't thinking of that as their main worry.
by fragmede | 2026-01-24 17:23:39+00:00
On the other hand, how do you know what they're prompting? For all you know, the AI proposed the hacky 10 line fix and tour coworker was all hey let's fix this problem better.

Before AI, "now" was seen as the wrong place for a refactor because of the time and effort involved, but if the hacky patch of a fix is roughly the same amount of wall clock time as a 500 line proper fix that makes the problem go away forever, what's the argument that the 10 line hack is actually better?
by catlifeonmars | 2026-01-24 17:23:59+00:00
Curious what was the validation/diff size?

Was it 3 paragraphs to change a line of code?

I agree the tools are amazing, if you sit back and think about it it’s insane that you can generate code from conversation.

But so far I haven’t found the tools to be amazingly productive for me for small things like that. It’s usually faster for me to just write the thing directly than to have a conversation, and maybe iterate once or twice. Something that takes 5 minutes just turns into 15 minutes and I still need to be in the loop. If I still need to read the code anyway it’s not effective use of my time.

Now what I have found incredibly productive is LLM assisted code completions in read-eval-print loop. That and helping to generate inline documentation.
by B1FIDO | 2026-01-24 17:24:09+00:00
I don't think y'all understand why I have separate Google accounts.

I use them for different purposes. They are "role accounts" for projects I am doing, such as geneaology and astronomy.

In order to use YouTube sanely, and store different stuff in Drive, I separate them into unique accounts. I use those accounts for specific things, and my YouTube subscriptions, playlists, etc. are tailored for each role, for example.

This is not about email at all. Obviously, I can access all those email accounts through the one app on my smartphone or the one PWA on my Chromebook. They are easily manageable but separate.

I also run 3 Outlook/Microsoft accounts, and for the same reason. (One of them is my academic account from community college, and the other two are personal.)

I don't need to give out email addresses for the "role accounts" except where I "Sign In With Google" to various services. So I don't really send/receive email from them at all, except where I'm sharing links or documents with myself (the best way to do this cross-account is still by using email, oftentimes.)
by notepad0x90 | 2026-01-24 17:24:41+00:00
it's usually the balance and middle that is most beneficial. you can't deny the value LLM code generation and research provides. But the extreme of using only LLMs or mostly LLMs. or not using LLMs at all is self-harming.

So far, LLM generated code hasn't lived up to my standards. I'll use it for things that aren't critical as-is, but mostly I use it as a reference, an example, a starting point. Essentially, where in the past I'd find a code base that does things and I'd try to do something similar, now I let the LLM generate the code base. There are to questions it helps me answer:

1) What are the possible ways of solving problems?

2) What are the pros and cons of each approach?

That said, there are people successfully deploying apps that are entirely vibe coded. How many fail or succeed, that I don't know. But there are enough, and you can't deny the evidence.
by gus_massa | 2026-01-24 17:24:59+00:00
Posting the same site every day, will make people flag your posts, and write angry email to dang/tomhow that may ban your account and site. Try a different angle.

Some ideas: Sometimes it's better to write a blog post about your project or better about an interesting problem you solved with your project, or an interesting problem you have to solve to advance your project. Sometimes it work, but it must be interesting.

Is there a sample project to read a sample without registering? Some popular project like Linux, but perhaps it's too big or perhaps only report the last day activity.

> Webhooks only. We never clone repos or access source code.

I expected this to work only in public repos. What permission is it asking?
by zozbot234 | 2026-01-24 17:25:01+00:00
There's plenty of commercially exploitable value in knowing that something was hand-crafted or even just endorsed by someone famous and impressive, and is not just a second-rate, mass-market knockoff. AI doesn't change that in any way. If it means that celebrated artists can now create even better art on an even broader scale, that's a commercial win for them. Plagiarism would not be an issue at all.
by VLM | 2026-01-24 17:25:08+00:00
Social issues make gitlab better although there are also social downsides.

The people who submit fake/AI issues and PRs for resume purposes seem to exclusively use github and this is a substantial expense for the real users (see the recent Curl discussion). Gitlab doesn't have those people (or at least its a wildly smaller problem).

One social downside is noobs will insist a project does not exist if its not on github, even if you send them the gitlab URL. Almost have to physically cut and paste the gitlab URL into their browser for them before they will believe. You can either do nothing which filters them, not a bad idea, or create a clone or placeholder on GH that basically links back to the real repo on GL. I don't know if that is allowed in the ToS for GH but people certainly do it a lot.
by xp84 | 2026-01-24 17:25:12+00:00
> The alternative is just not having FDE on by default

yes, it would be. So, the current way, 99% of people are benefitting from knowing their data is secure when very common thefts occur, and 1% of people have the same outcome as if their disk was unencrypted: When they're arrested and their computers seized, the cops have their crime secrets. What's wrong?
by jsnell | 2026-01-24 17:25:16+00:00
Tagging users like that is not a site function. If you want to get in touch with the moderators, send email with the contact link in the page footer.

"flagged" always means that users flagged it, not moderator action.

And there are a lot of readers who will flag all submissions about US politics, no matter the polarity of the article.
by phil21 | 2026-01-24 17:25:31+00:00
Love these! My wife gifted me a Chicago CTA map for a birthday gift a few years ago and it makes great wall art.

I found an in-box rated USB-C hardwired power adapter, and ran an additional outlet above an existing one. Then used a couple screwed together brass motherboard standoffs I drilled holes into the drywall for. To my surprise just some standard superglue in the holes have held these far more securely than needed.

Looks like a great piece of “90s retro art” and gets a lot comments from guest!
by morshu9001 | 2026-01-24 17:25:33+00:00
Google Authenticator used to be disconnected from reality like this. Users were asking how to copy the codes to another phone, and they said "you can't, WAI, should add the other phone as a second auth method on every site." Like how people say you shouldn't copy SSH privkeys. I figured out an undocumented way to do it on iPhone by taking an encrypted iTunes backup though.

Eventually they yielded on this, but their later updates had other usability traps. Because Google Auth was the household name for TOTP apps, this ruined TOTP's entire reputation.
by spicyusername | 2026-01-24 17:25:59+00:00
Only to have a machine ingest, compress, and reiterate your work indefinitely without attribution.

Further facilitating millions, or even billions, of other people to discover new ideas and create new things. It's not hard to see the benefit of that.

I get that the purpose of IP laws are psychological, rather than moral. A culture where people feel as though they can personally benefit from their work is going to have higher technological and scientific output, which is certainly good, even if the means of producing that good are sort of artificial and selfish.

It's not hard to imagine, or maybe dream of, a world where the motivation for research and development is not just personal gain. But we have to work with the world we have, not the world we want, don't we...

Nobody will starve themselves, even if doing so will feed hundreds of others.
by jesse_dot_id | 2026-01-24 17:26:28+00:00
Artisanal engineering is the only true way to code. No autocomplete. No linting. No prettifying. No colored brackets, braces, or nesting lines. If you're not instinctually converting your Rust to assembler in your head as you insert it into vi, can you even really call yourself a real developer?

I posted this comment using only curl by the way. Don't bother replying because I only engage in bidirectional conversation via SSH tunnel and netcat. I doubt that you could figure it out.
by otoolep | 2026-01-24 17:26:35+00:00
rqlite creator here, happy to answer any questions.

As for reliability - it's a fault-tolerant, highly available system. Reliability is the reason it exists. :-) If you're asking about quality and test coverage, you might like to check out these resources:

- https://rqlite.io/docs/design/

- https://rqlite.io/docs/design/#blog-posts

- https://philipotoole.com/how-is-rqlite-tested/
by Eggpants | 2026-01-24 17:27:01+00:00
Young me remembers fondly poking and peeking system memory locations to see what happens. The manual, if I remember right, had a table of memory locations to system settings. Things like font and background colors.

I made a “punch out like” boxing game in basic where the background color blocks was the opponent and the font lines was your character via poking memory locations.

It was slow but I was just a kid at the time. It definitely told me what I wanted to do for a living at an early age.
by yelabbassi | 2026-01-24 17:27:04+00:00
a Web-based dashboard for real-time brain–computer interface research.
It connects to a backend via WebSocket, streams neural data (142 channels @ 40Hz), runs decoders (JavaScript or TensorFlow.js), and visualizes ground truth vs predictions live.

The goal is to make it easy to prototype and compare neural decoders with immediate feedback.
You can bring your own decoders, or even generate one directly in the app via a prompt.

Demo: https://phantomloop.elabbassi.com

Repo: https://github.com/yelabb/PhantomLoop

Still experimental / WIP
by Lwrless | 2026-01-24 17:27:07+00:00
I'd heard of the "monkey" metaphor from my friend before, but I never really used it in my day-to-day work. When a report came my way with a technical problem they couldn't solve, my first reaction was always, "Okay, I'll take a look," instead of guiding them to take ownership and figure it out on their own.

Looking back, I wish I hadn't let those monkeys jump back onto my back so often. It ended up causing a growing backlog and a lot of pressure for me. It also made it hard for team growth.

This piece really speaks to me, and I'm curious how others here have experienced this in work.
by lateforwork | 2026-01-24 17:27:08+00:00
> Java has so few features that there's not much to ban

Exactly. Simplicity was an explicit design goal of Java.

Most items in your list are fine actually, including raw types and inner classes.

Regarding checked exceptions, it is unfortunate that people don't fully understand it, see here:
https://mckoder.medium.com/the-achilles-heel-of-c-why-its-ex...
by binaryturtle | 2026-01-24 17:27:11+00:00
If I squeeze the eyes I can read the "MAZE". :)

Sadly neither version works here with an older clang on OS X. Both variants build fine with 9 warnings each. But the old variant dies with a "Bus Error: 10", and the new variant with "Segmentation fault: 11". Same with gcc (albeit only 8 warnings.)

/edit

OK, just wrong user input. You gotta feed it a number, and not a "foobar" or another random string.
by simonw | 2026-01-24 17:27:38+00:00
Yeah I agree entirely.

Current coding agents are not up to the task of producing a production-quality web browser.

I genuinely can't imagine a better example of a sophisticated software project than a browser. Chrome, Firefox and WebKit each represent a billion-plus dollars of engineering salaries paid out to expert developers over multiple decades.

Browsers have to deal with a bewildering array of specifications - and handle websites that don't conform fully to those specifications.

They have extreme performance targets.

They operate in the most hostile environment imaginable - executing arbitrary code from the web! - so security is diabolically difficult as well.

I expect there's not a human on earth who could single-handedly architect a production grade new browser, it requires too much specialist knowledge across too many different disciplines.

On the basis, I should reconsider my 2029 prediction. I was imagining something that looked like FastRender but maybe a little more advanced - working JavaScript, for example.

A much more interesting question is when we might see a production grade browser built mostly by coding agents.

I do think we couldsee that by 2029, but if we did it would be a very different shape from the FastRender project:

- a team of human experts driving the coding agents

- in development for at least a year

- built with the goal of "production ready Chrome competitor", not as a research project

The question then becomes who would fund such a thing - even a small team of experts doesn't come cheap, and I expect that LLM prices in 209 will still measure in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for this, if not more.

Hard for me to definitely predict that someone will step up to fund such a project - great open source browser engines exist already, why would someone fund one from scratch?
by pregnenolone | 2026-01-24 17:27:43+00:00
> This is by far one of the best advertisements for LUKS/VeraCrypt I've ever seen.

LUKS isn't all rainbows and butterflies either [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708174]. This vulnerability has been known for years, and despite this, nothing has been done to address it.

Furthermore, if you believe that Microsoft products are inherently compromised and backdoored, running VeraCrypt instead of BitLocker on Windows likely won’t significantly improve your security. Implementing a VeraCrypt backdoor would be trivial for Microsoft.
by darth_avocado | 2026-01-24 17:28:19+00:00
Whether people like to admit it or not, very rarely do people work for anything but money and career advancement. You can claim you work for passion, the love of the game or whatever 100 other reasons people tend to give out. All it takes is 2 years of no raises and a couple of promotions for colleagues for you to start not wanting to work for whatever reason you convinced yourself you were working for.
by IncreasePosts | 2026-01-24 17:28:28+00:00
The best response is to stop doing heroin over time, but that doesn't mean the best method for them doing that is saying "heroin is bad for you".

Millions of people have been addicted to heroin and got off it. And I'm fairly sure about 0 of the people who got off it did so when one kind soul came up to them and said "you should stop doing heroin it's bad for you"
by bsoles | 2026-01-24 17:28:30+00:00
Ever heard of Big Dig in Boston, for example? Or the Joint Strike Fighter?

Estimations in government contracts are as ridiculous as in software. They just pretend to be able to estimate when things will be done, when, in fact, the contractors are as clueless.

Not being able to say "it is impossible to estimate", does not mean your estimate will be correct. That estimation is usually a lie.
by mig39 | 2026-01-24 17:28:42+00:00
I take suspicious student papers and feed them to Turnitin, as well as the popular LLMs. Hey ChatGTP, give me a report on the likelihood that this paper was generated by an LLM. Do that with Gemini, Claude, etc.

Then if there's a high probability, I look through the references in the paper. Do they say what the student attributes to them?

Finally, if I still think it's AI-generated, I have the student in and ask questions about the paper. "You said this here in this paragraph -- what do you mean by that?"

AI detectors are a first-pass, but I think a human really needs to be in the loop to evaluate whether it's cheating, or just using something to clean up grammar and spelling.
by lance_ewing | 2026-01-24 17:28:48+00:00
In what way did it crash? What browser and device did you try running it on? - There might be an issue where its possible to start typing before the program load sequence has finished, e.g. where it has queued a "RUN" command for when the disk load has finished, but if you start typing before that, it might interfere with that RUN. I have an idea on how to fix that, if this is the issue. Just need to ignore key presses until all program load commands have been processed.
by theglenn88_ | 2026-01-24 17:29:05+00:00
My stance is that it's similar to hand tools vs power tools.

You need to pick and choose when to use them, it largely depends on the task.

I use AI a lot now for programming and spend more time code reviewing, sometimes though, I use my hands.

My nimber one rule is, don't try to do too much in one prompt.
by njhnjhnjh | 2026-01-24 17:29:29+00:00
I'm sorry but Claude Code is AGI.

You're gonna be out of work in the next month or two if you don't jump on this train immediately.

With the power of Claude one engineer can do the work it used to take 30-40 employees to do.

Artisanal engineering is dead.

Human Language is the new code.
by vacuity | 2026-01-24 17:29:50+00:00
The optimal decision in the Prisoner's Dilemma is to defect, but in the iterated version, where multiple Dilemmas occur and people remember previous results, Tit-For-Tat is optimal. The real world is even less reminiscent of the Dilemma, so it's not at all clear that the Dilemma's conclusion applies.

(Tit-For-Tat: Prefer cooperating, but if the other person defected on the previous turn, defect on the current turn.)