MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mikeyouse | 2026-02-04 07:42:06+00:00
The safe harbor provisions largely protect X from the content that the users post (within reason). Suddenly Grok/X were actually producing the objectionable content. Users were making gross requests and then an LLM owned by X, using X servers and X code would generate the illegal material and then post it to the website. The entity responsible is no longer done user but instead the company itself.
by russellbeattie | 2026-02-04 07:42:37+00:00
Widgets always seems like a cool idea. Tons of helpful little utility apps that are quick and easy for users to view or access and developers to create. Seems great, right?

Then everyone realizes there are only a handful of things that are actually useful and worth the screen space. Clock, calendar, weather, stocks. Maybe one or two more like todo list, post-it note, battery level, search bar, alerts, messages. That's about all I can think of.

From DOS PCs to smart phones, the idea is resurrected again every few years. A company will decide widgets are an awesome idea, create an over-developed "open" widget platform, excitedly add it to their UI, only to later decide that maintaining it isn't worth the effort and it quietly goes away. Then a few years later the cycle starts again with better widgets this time! And so it goes.

At this point it seems like it needs to be some sort of fundamental law of computing: Any device with a GUI will inevitably have some sort of widget capability that is added, removed, redesigned and added again at least once during its lifetime.
by pingou | 2026-02-04 07:43:19+00:00
Pretty cool, although it's polluting so hopefully it wouldn't become too popular (probably not).

"And because such diminutive payloads don’t pose a danger to aircraft" even though they are small and wouldn't make a plane crash, I can imagine they would cause some damage if they ever enter a jet engine, although that would be unlucky as they would mostly fly higher than aircraft. I also wouldn't like it to fall on my head, but with the solar panels as depicted and the small weight I suppose it could somewhat glide.
by marcus_holmes | 2026-02-04 07:43:23+00:00
I think it's just another abstraction layer, and moves the thinking process from "how do I solve this problem in code?" to "how do I solve this problem in orchestration?".

I recently used the analogy of when compilers were invented. Old-school coders wrote machine code, and handled the intricacies of memory and storage and everything themselves. Then compilers took over, we all moved up an abstraction layer and started using high-level languages to code in. There was a generation of programmers who hated compilers because they wrote bad, inelegant, inefficient, programs. And for years they were right.

The hard problems now are "how can I get a set of non-deterministic, fault-prone, LLM agents to build this feature or product with as few errors as possible, with as little oversight as possible?". There's a few generic solutions, a few good approaches coming out, but plenty of scope for some hard thought in there. And a generic approach may not work for your specific project.
by palata | 2026-02-04 07:43:25+00:00
I think that the problem is that "open source" in itself is not volunteering.

Just like "masonry" is not volunteering, even though a mason could volunteer by building an orphanage pro bono. But when they build their own house, it's not volunteering.

I don't even think that being paid for building an orphanage counts as volunteering... does it?
by sshadmand | 2026-02-04 07:44:21+00:00
like with most agentic dev I do these days, I go between "I need this" to "I used to need this when humans were involved but is it just vestigial" a lot. In this case, why am I documenting at all if the agent is pretty good at understanding things quickly via the context and indexes it creates from the code itself.

...on the other hand... since we still have humans using the features and interacting with them, knowing what is going on and why it made a decisions (for better or worst) doesn't seem like something to let go of.
by skissane | 2026-02-04 07:44:28+00:00
> 90 mm floppy disks. https://jdebp.uk/FGA/floppy-discs-are-90mm-not-3-and-a-half-...

That page is part right and part wrong.

It is right in claiming that "3.5-inch" floppies are actually 90 mm.

It is wrong in claiming that the earlier "5.25-inch" floppies weren't metric

"5.25-inch" floppies are actually 130 mm as standardised in ECMA-78 [0]

"8-inch" floppies are actually 200 mm as standardised in ECMA-69 [1]

Actually there's a few different ECMA standards for 130 and 200 mm floppies – the physical dimensions are the same, but using different recording mechanisms (FM vs MFM–those of a certain age may remember MFM as "double density", and those even older may remember FM as "single density"), and single-sided versus double-sided.

[0] ECMA-78: Data interchange on 130 mm flexible disk cartridges using MFM recording at 7 958 ftprad on 80 tracks on each side), June 1986: https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...

[1] ECMA-69: Data interchange on 200 mm flexible disk cartridges using MFM recording at 13 262 ftprad on both sides, January 1981: https://ecma-international.org/publications-and-standards/st...
by lelanthran | 2026-02-04 07:44:47+00:00
> Which as a tendency threatens ALL clumsy big ERP service providers selling you SAAS.

Wait, what?

The big ERP vendors aren't under any threat, the small ones are.

No business is going to switch from a system that has armies of low-paid consultants to in house AI developed system that has effectively zero consultants who can come in and perform the deployment with tested integrations to their accounting system, their 200 suppliers, their customer systems and their 3rd party auditing systems.

But, small businesses who were going with a 12m contract for 5 consultants, and who dont have any need for integrations to suppliers, customers and 3rd party systems can do their own systems.

It sounds like you are very far removed from ERP and business systems in general.

All magnetic coding is going to do is further entrench existing large systems because new systems, whether AI generated or not, will be too numerous for any one of them to gain traction.
by internet_points | 2026-02-04 07:45:00+00:00
what are the minimal server requirements? jitsi says prefer 8G ram (4G for small meetings) and 4 dedicated cpu cores https://jitsi.github.io/handbook/docs/devops-guide/devops-gu...

The chat seems extremely basic, so not really an alternative if you need chat with e.g. message edit/delete/formatting/pictures as well as video/audio.
by jtrn | 2026-02-04 07:45:29+00:00
Spot on. It’s the lumberjack mourning the axe while holding a chainsaw. The work is still hard. it’s just different.
The friction comes from developers who prioritize the 'craft' of syntax over delivering value. It results in massive motivated reasoning. We see people suddenly becoming activists about energy usage or copyright solely to justify not using a tool they dislike. They will hunt for a single AI syntax error while ignoring the history of bugs caused by human fatigue. It's not about the tech. it's about the loss of the old way of working.

And it's also somewhat egotistical it seems to me. I sense a pattern that many developers care more about doing what they want instead of providing value to others.
by mightymosquito | 2026-02-04 07:46:55+00:00
While I see where you are coming from but I think what has really gone for a toss is the utility of thinking hard.

Thinking hard has never been easier.

I think AI for an autodidact is a boon. Now I suddenly have a teacher who is always accessible and will teach me whatever I want for as long as I want exactly the way I want and I don;t have to worry about my social anxiety kicking in.

Learn advanced cryptography? AI, figure out formal verification - AI etc.
by rvz | 2026-02-04 07:47:22+00:00
> We're all Linus Torvalds now. We review, we merge, we send back. And if you had no idea what you were doing before, you'll still have no idea what you're doing today. You just fat-finger less typos today than ever before.

Except Linus understands the code that is being reviewed / merged in since he already built the kernel and git by hand. You only see him vibe-coding toys but not vibe-coding in the kernel.

Today, we are going to see a gradual skill atrophy with developers over-relying on AI and once something like Claude goes down, they can't do any work at all.

The most accurate representation is that AI is going to rapidly make lots of so-called 'senior engineers' who are over-reliant and unable to detect bad AI code like juniors and interns.
by bsder | 2026-02-04 07:47:46+00:00
> I don't even understand how a title transfer could happen without verifying ownership.

Centralized vs decentralized isn't relevant.

The issue is that nobody wants to have one of the icky humans in the loop because they have the temerity to ask to be paid a salary.

Consequently, everybody tries to set up systems where everything can be done online with no in-person interactions ever required. This works, sorta, until the fraudsters start figuring out the seams.

But because you would have to give some icky human cash, everybody is fighting tooth and nail to revert back to having any humans moderating the problems.

The correct solution is to call this kind of thing what it is--fraud--and treat it as such. And the proper point for the liability are the companies and agencies that do nothing to prevent the fraud and not all the poor slobs.

A couple of nice big payouts where banks or agencies have to cough up to make everybody whole due to their negligence and suddenly all the systems will get much more stringent.
by Markoff | 2026-02-04 07:48:00+00:00
it's hard to argue why it is not a hoax if last man on the Moon was supposed to be there in 1972, now it's 2026, it's 54 years since allegedly someone landed on the Moon, surely technology advanced to put there at least one man in those 50 years

so I'm looking forward to China putting man on the Moon finally, bonus points if it will be first woman ever, since as we discussed yesterday with my daughter I had to tell her woman was not yet on the Moon because fighter jet pilots were only men those 50 years ago when they were supposed to land on the Moon
by utopiah | 2026-02-04 07:48:25+00:00
I fail to see the use case where it's useful. I understand how it works and what it might enable but typically I want to cherry pick my API because I trust the source and their pricing (as here we are covering only paid for services).

What situations do you imagine where one :

- changes frequently and/or covers a LOT of APIs

- requires little to no budget oversight

- requires little to no quality oversight

?
by gostsamo | 2026-02-04 07:48:41+00:00
AI in space makes no sense because the data center will be distributed and half of the time your processors will be waiting for data (if you are lucky). When they are working, you need to cool them down. When they finally heed the call of gravity, your vibe coders can see the vapor of their work in the sky and you throw the entire unit as a loss (might be a net positive for tax purposes).

This is BS, everyone knows that this is BS, but because this is Elon, there are still people who don't call out the BS.

It might be distraction, he might be delusional, he might be asking his investors to stop asking for profit by giving them shares from SpaceX, but this is not him discovering new physics.
by pbowyer | 2026-02-04 07:48:51+00:00
This reminds me of a SaaS that existed 15+ years ago for PCI-DSS compliance. It did exactly that: you had it tokenize and store the sensitive data, and then you proxied your requests via it, and it inserted them into the request. It was a very neat way to get around storing data yourself.

I cannot remember what the platform was called, let me know if you do.
by Fire-Dragon-DoL | 2026-02-04 07:49:13+00:00
I think my message is doing a disservice to explaining what actually happened because a lot of it happens in my head.

1. I received the ticket, as soon as I read it I had a hunch it was related to some querying ignoring a field that should be filtered by every query (thinking)
2. I give this hunch to the AI which goes search in the codebase in the areas I suggested the problem could be and that's when it find the issue and provide a fix
3. I think the problem could be spread given there is a method that removes the query filter, it could have been used in multiple places, so I ask AI to find other usages of it (thinking, this is my definition of "steering" in this context)
4. AI reports 3 more occurrences and suggests that 2 have the same bug, but one is ok
5. I go in, review the code and understand it and I agree, it doesn't have the bug (thinking)
6. AI provide the fix for all the right spots, but I said "wait, something is fishy here, there is a commit that explicitly say it was added to remove the filter, why is that?" (thinking), so I ask AI to figure out why the commit says that
7. AI proceeds to run a bunch of git-history related commands, finds some commit and then does some correlation to find another commit. This other commit introduced the change at the same time to defend from a bug in a different place
8. I understand what's going on now, I'm happy with the fix, the history suggests I am not breaking stuff. I ask AI to write a commit with detailed information about the bug and the fix based on the conversation

There is a lot of thinking involved. What's reduced is search tooling. I can be way more fuzzy, rather than `rg 'whatever'` I now say "find this and similar patterns"
by signal11 | 2026-02-04 07:49:15+00:00
I’ve been using em-dashes since high school — publishing the school paper and everything. I remain slightly bemused by people discovering em-dashes for the first time thanks to LLMs.

Also, “em-dashes are something only LLMs use” comes perilously close to “huh, proper grammar, must’ve run this by a grammar checker”.
by Captain32zxz | 2026-02-04 07:49:21+00:00
Nice question! We did spend a lot of time considering the issue of data consistency.

In the MySQL replication, GTID is crucial for ensuring that no transaction is missed or replayed repeatedly. We handle this in two scenarios (depending on whether binlog is enabled):

- log_bin is OFF: We ensure that transaction in DuckDB are committed before the GTID is written to disk (in the mysql.gtid_executed table). Furthermore, after a crash recovery, we perform idempotent writes to DuckDB for a period of time (the principle is similar to upsert or delete+insert). Therefore, at any given moment after a crash recovery, we can guarantee that the data in DuckDB is consistent with the primary database.
- log_bin is ON: Unlike the previous scenario, we no longer rely on the `mysql.gtid_executed` table; we directly use the Binlog for GTID persistence. However, a new problem arises: Binlog persistence occurs before the Storage Engine commits. Therefore, we created a table in DuckDB to record the valid Binlog position. If the DuckDB transaction fails to commit, the Binlog will be truncated to the last valid position. This ensures that the data in DuckDB is consistent with the contents of the Binlog.

Therefore, if the `gtid_executed` on the replica server matches that of the primary database, then the data in DuckDB will also be consistent with the primary database.
by dlcarrier | 2026-02-04 07:49:34+00:00
If sugar alcohols are causing bowel irritation, it may be worth avoiding all fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. These are known as FODMAPs and are common in may fruits and vegetables which are all healthy foods for those who are able to digest them without issue.

Keeping a healthy diet while avoiding them is extremely difficult, so if they are not causing irritation, avoiding them will likely do more harm than good. Excessive amounts, or a sudden increase in intake, can cause issues for anyone, so changes in diet, especially from an unhealthy diet to one high in fresh fruits and vegetables, may be best done gradually.
by mrighele | 2026-02-04 07:49:36+00:00
There are a few things that could be done to improve the electoral process in USA.

An easy one would be to have people vote on weekends instead of Tuesday.

The second would be to have more polling station so that people don't have to wait hours to be able to vote (alas this seems to be by design).

Since we are there, but unrelated to the amount of people voting, fix the vote counting process so that you can get the result the following day.

The stuff above is not rocket science and is what most of the other civilized countries do.

If people still don't go out and vote, probably is because both candidates suck, or they don't look so much different one from the other. Fixing this would require changing the electoral system, which is not something I see done anytime soon in the USA
by wavefunction | 2026-02-04 07:50:09+00:00
In my experience in Texas, the right-wingers have this system set up where votes that were legally cast can be denied validity by some sort of "citizens election integrity board." I had no issue voting in Travis County but when I moved to a more conservative suburban county address I ran into this. There's a multitude of ways for anti-democratic forces in the US to deny citizens their rights. And it really hardened my opinion of these sorts of people that would do that to me and others. If they say my rights aren't valid how valid are their own, certainly nothing I should respect given their treatment of myself and others. That's why I have no tolerance for the right-wing I've seen their real face.
by codethief | 2026-02-04 07:50:24+00:00
> Imagine distributing a firm's revenues directly to shareholders in real-time.

1) You surely wouldn't want to distribute the revenue but the profit. 2) You still wouldn't want to distribute the profit in "real-time" (whatever that means exactly). Part of the profit usually gets re-invested or put in a reserve, and so the company leadership must actively make a decision how to use the profits vs. what part to distribute. You can't make those decisions on a continuous "real-time" (say, daily or weekly) basis, though. This needs analysis, planning, etc.
by notrab | 2026-02-04 07:51:51+00:00
turso deprecated their edge replica offering when they went all-in on rewriting sqlite so bunny fills a nice void here. while turso didn't pull the plug for existing customers, new customers were left looking for alternatives with edge replica (that couldn't replicate on-device), and bunny does a nice job here.

turso also made it so your primary had to be in one location, but bunny will move it around based on latency on next boot.
by sensecall | 2026-02-04 07:52:05+00:00
https://spud.recipes

A tiny web app for busy weeknight cooking.

You tap in what ingredients you’ve got, add a time limit + a couple of preferences, and it gives you 3 genuinely doable dinner ideas with step-by-step recipes (no “manage your pantry”, no endless scrolling).

It’s early, but people seem to like the “use up what you’ve got” angle. Feedback very welcome.
by tokyobreakfast | 2026-02-04 07:52:06+00:00
For all the complaining about tariffs and all the woes of manufacturing in China—much of this could have been avoided by manufacturing in the US. Or even Canada or Mexico. There is literally nothing here that requires Chinese supply chain magic, it's just penny shaving. This isn't Apple where you need 80 million bespoke screws manufactured for your device overnight, which can only be done by slave labor supply chain in any reasonable time and quantity. This is really basic mechanical and electrical engineering and could be built anywhere.

Cost is not an issue because anyone willing to pay $1200 for a god damn floor lamp would surely pay $1500 (and have the satisfaction of keeping your fellow neighbors employed).

Anyone that has ever manufactured anything in China—or India for that matter—knows unless you spec every little detail and dimension and tolerance it WILL be ignored and violated. Whereas in the US & Canada there is a different level of workmanship and culture where you might get a phone call instead of a box of weldments bent 30deg in the wrong direction because the drawing didn't say it couldn't. And you probably could have visited the factories a half dozen time before starting production (did you really not plan on building prototypes?)
by marcus_holmes | 2026-02-04 07:53:38+00:00
Totally agree. I can spend an afternoon trying out an approach to a problem or product (usually while taking meetings and writing emails as well). If it doesn't work, then that's a useful result from my time. If it does work, I can then double-down on review, tests, quality, security, etc and make sure it's all tickety-boo.
by palata | 2026-02-04 07:53:38+00:00
> I don't think the thing holding back Europe's tech market is that the US encourages allies to not allow backdooring proprietary software

"Encouraging allies" is a pretty damn generous interpretation of it.

Regarding what's "holding back Europe's tech market", I think that Europe has a different culture. Not having big monopolies is a feature, not a bug. In that sense, the regulations don't fail.

But it is very difficult to compete with monopolies unless you become one and lock your position. If the regulations prevent that (and again, that's a feature), then it becomes impossible.

Trying an analogy:

If we impose strict animal welfare rules on our own chicken farmers, that's a feature. But if we then allow unlimited imports of cheaper chicken raised with no such rules, it becomes unfair to our farmers, doesn't it?
by rozumem | 2026-02-04 07:53:45+00:00
I can relate to this. Coding satisifies my urge to build and ship and have an impact on the world. But it doesn't make me think hard. Two things which I've recently gravitated to outside of coding which make me think: blogging and playing chess.

Maybe I subconsciously picked these up because my Thinker side was starved for attention. Nice post.
by signal11 | 2026-02-04 07:53:55+00:00
If you work with macOS or iOS users, you won’t be super surprised to see lots of “curly quotes”. They’re part of base macOS, no extra software required (I cannot remember if they need to be switched on or they’re on by default), and of course mass-market software like Word will create “smart” quotes on Mac and Windows.

I ended up implementing smart quotes on an internal blogging platform because I couldn’t bear "straight quotes". It’s just a few lines of code and makes my inner typography nerd twitch less.
by nunez | 2026-02-04 07:54:17+00:00
This is exactly the right analogy here.

FSD is very very good most of the time. It's so good (well, v14 is, anyway), it makes it easy to get lulled into thinking that it works all the time. So you check your watch here, check your phone there, and attend to other things, and it's all good until the car decides to turn into a curb (which almost happened to me the other day) or swerve hard into a tree (which happened to someone else).

Funny enough, much like AI, Tesla is shoving FSD down people's throats by gating Autopilot 2, a lane keeping solution that worked extremely well and is much friendlier to people who want limited autonomy here and there, behind the $99/mo FSD sub (and removing the option to pay for the package out of pocket).
by bsder | 2026-02-04 07:54:28+00:00
> Linux people are very resistant to this, but the future is going to be sandboxed iOS style apps.

Linux people are NOT resistant to this. Atomic desktops are picking up momentum and people are screaming for it. Snaps, flatpaks, appimages, etc. are all moving in that direction.

As for plain development, sadly, the OS developers are simply ignoring the people asking. See:

https://github.com/containers/toolbox/issues/183

https://github.com/containers/toolbox/issues/348

https://github.com/containers/toolbox/issues/1470

I'll leave it up to you to speculate why.

Perhaps getting a bit of black eye and some negative attention from the Great Orange Website(tm) can light a fire under some folks.