MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by its-kostya | 2026-02-04 16:02:18+00:00
> skipping the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned

Most comments in the thread are missing that critical point. Yes you are achieving the end goal, perhaps faster. And yes, built projects (perhaps worse quality) are still better than not built projects.

But take the home cooking vs ordering at restaurant example:

At a restaurant you can prompt for exactly what you want to eat and it will be made for you without you actually having to do it. When the food comes out you can taste it and notice it is missing some flavor. Problem is, you don't know what is missing. If you are knowledgeable about the dish, you can prompt for additional spices or flavours.

When I cook, I try all the ingredients before I add them and then taste the result so I know how an addition changes the final result.

I am now a much better cook because of this because I can make substitutions on the fly. Dish missing sweetness? Carrots, baby red peppers, beets etc can all substitute - never even reach for sugar. Already added a lot of salt but still feels like more needed? Add sour flavours like lemon juice.

Sure, reliance on AI will end up with more things built but you'll have a generation of "cooks" that don't know why you add a bay leaf or two to soup, except that it's always in recipes.
by Roark66 | 2026-02-04 16:02:21+00:00
Cloudflare is ridiculous. I can't even open it using Cromite (privacy enhanced, but not over the top, android browser).

I get:

blog.adafruit.com
Verifying you are human. This may take a few seconds.

blog.adafruit.com needs to review the security of your connection before proceeding.

And this hangs forever. What difference does it make if I access this site using a browser (blocked anyway) or I asked my LLM to fetch the content? I bet my LLM coukd get it anyway as I'm using basic local scraping with firecrawl for backup. So my LLM if it fails to retrieve using my basic local crawl4ai will use my paid firecrawl api and those guys can scrape EVERYTHING.

I do not understand why do you (as a site owner) care? Are these bots generating so much traffic? Can you set it up to serve text only version to them then?
by adleyjulian | 2026-02-04 16:02:30+00:00
The line of reasoning is more like this: if you make and sell safe-cracking tools then it would not be unreasonable for the government to regulate it so only registered locksmiths could buy it. You don't want people profiting from the support of criminal acts.

The government could similarly argue that if a company provides communication as a service, they should be able to provide access to the government given they have a warrant.

If you explicitly create a service to circumvent this then you're trying to profit from and aid those with criminal intent. Silkroad/drug sales and child sexual content are more common, but terrorism would also be on the list.

I disagree with this logic, but those are the well-known, often cited concerns.

There is a trade-off in personal privacy versus police ability to investigate and enforce laws.
by jackyinger | 2026-02-04 16:02:38+00:00
Cultivating optimism is the first step. Optimism is irrational, you can just choose to have it (of course thinking about good things that have happened helps). Optimism is the precondition for doing good.

So what if there’s a low collective will at the moment. Do your part to be part to grow the collective will to good. Go volunteer for a good cause (food bank, community organizations, etc.), donate to good causes, just be friendly to other people you see.
by gunsle | 2026-02-04 16:02:45+00:00
I mean in my case, I never even considered drugs until I started smoking weed in college. So it was definitely a gateway drug for me. At first glance, weed has little to no noticeable downsides. This made me think that the other drugs must be the same way. It led me into a drug abuse phase of my life that I still struggle with. Prior to that, I barely did drugs at all and had no real inclination to do so.

I think part of it is the crowd you end up in when you smoke weed. Unsurprisingly, drug use lends itself to putting you in situations with other drug users. These users often completely ignore, leave out, or outright lie about the downsides of these drugs, from chronic weed use to LSD.
by originalvichy | 2026-02-04 16:02:51+00:00
Maybe they know more than we do. It may be possible to tamper with files at a deeper level. I wonder if it is also possible to use some sort of tampered compression algorithm that could mark images much like printers do with paper.

Another guess is that perhaps the step is a part of a multi-step sanitation process, and the last step(s) perform the bitmap operation.
by dmje | 2026-02-04 16:03:37+00:00
What strikes me here is the extreme noise. I mean, I’m 50+ so you know, but even so, this shit doesn’t make sense. To be living a life where you’re checking messaging groups for 100+ messages a day, needing some kind of bot to manage your (obviously extremely traffic’d) texts incoming, to be watching tens of prices of stocks, products, meeting, what, tens of people a day (as an introvert…)…

Holy shit, fuck that. Slow the bejesus down and live a little. Go look at the sky.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-02-04 16:03:54+00:00
"I always felt that deep prolonged thinking was my superpower. I might not be as fast or naturally gifted as the top 1%, but given enough time, I was confident I could solve anything. I felt a deep satisfaction in that process."

In psychological terms, he's saying he has a need to solve hard problems in order to validate his identity and make himself feel good. At some point in his past he experienced some psychological trauma, and this hard-problem-defeating became his coping mechanism.

"That satisfaction is why software engineering was initially so gratifying."

He became a software engineer to gratify his need to solve hard problems, to validate his identity, and make himself feel good. If he stops needing to engineer difficult software, there goes his identity, his self-worth, his good feeling.

"But recently, the number of times I truly ponder a problem for more than a couple of hours has decreased tremendously. Yes, I blame AI for this."

When he runs up against something that takes away this thing that validates him, he feels de-valued. Rather than recognize that AI is making his life easier, freeing him up from mental labor, he's experiencing it as a loss, almost an attack.

"If I can get a solution that is “close enough” in a fraction of the time and effort, it is irrational not to take the AI route. And that is the real problem: I cannot simply turn off my pragmatism."

Now this link of hard work with his identity is becoming a problem. He's going to feel bad because he doesn't know how to deal with his life being easier now. This is a reason to address it head on with therapy, and a re-evaluation of what gives him value as a person, so that having an easier life doesn't feel bad.
by ls612 | 2026-02-04 16:04:11+00:00
Living through all of the events of 2020 in Minneapolis of all places led me to the conclusion that when push comes to shove there is no law, only hard power and the will to use it.

If you want examples of events that could be reasonably interpreted as “this sort of thing”, the son of the guy who tried to assassinate Trump the second time was mysteriously arrested for possession of CSAM a week after his dad was arrested. I’m inclined to believe that the base rate of people being into that stuff is reasonably low so whenever I hear about someone being charged with it in relation to a completely unrelated major news story it gets my spidey sense tingling.
by areddyfd | 2026-02-04 16:04:13+00:00
The hard part about analyzing data isn’t generating a a series of analysis steps, it’s proving it’s correct.

Our current approach:
- Sandboxed / sample runs on smaller datasets before full execution
- Step-level transparency: summaries, intermediate tables, and generated code are all visible
- Parallel and sequential test-time execution to surface inconsistencies
- dbt-style pipelines for reproducibility and explicit dependencies
- Decomposing analyses into small, verifiable steps to avoid error compounding (similar to MAKER-style approaches)
- Online validation checks on intermediate and final outputs that trigger re-analysis when assumptions are violated
- A gradually evolving semantic layer to improve consistency and governance over time

Curious how others think about this: what would make you trust an AI-driven data platform?
by tornadofart | 2026-02-04 16:04:44+00:00
I thought "Dominate or be dominated" was the problem you saw in democracy?

Well, then I guess Germany's example is not too bad.

"CDU/CSU + SPD coalition won a majority" ... well, no. That's not how it works at all.

CDU and SPD did not win a majority together, since they were opponents in the election, and fought tooth and nail over, for example, immigration issues. They did not, at all, campaign together.

They both failed to win over half of the parliament seats. In simplified terms, they both lost. Everyone lost, if you will, because the system is not designed for anyone to easily win over half of the parliament seats.

That's why they had compromise and form a coalition. Thus no-one rules completely over the other and, in theory, the compromises of coalitions have a better societal outcome than the extreme views one party or the other might hold on a certain issue.

I'm not sure why the popular vote is an issue here. Every democracy has a system for aggregating votes to parliament seats and the transmission is never 1:1.

In this case:
Votes for parties that don’t enter the Bundestag (e.g., those below the 5 % threshold) are not counted in seat allocation, making the share of seats for CDU + SPD higher than their raw vote share. Seats are redistributed proportionally among the parties that did enter parliament.

I don't see much of a problem.
The claim that a fragmented territory with a multitude of small democracies is a good thing is a libertarian pipe dream. This view is quite frankly absurd considering that every government task is subject to economies of scale: defense, police, health insurance, social security, pension systems, roads, you name it. This is a scenario for winner-takes-all situations between nations, which is a much much worse outcome than even a winner-takes-all situation between political parties.
by gadders | 2026-02-04 16:04:46+00:00
This blog post has some sliders you can tweak to see if you can make the numbers make sense: https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters

"So here's what I did. I built a simple model that reduces the debate to one parameter: cost per watt of usable power for compute. The infographic below lets you change the assumptions directly. If you disagree with the inputs, great. Move the sliders. But at least we'll be arguing over numbers that map to reality.

The model is deliberately boring. No secret sauce. Just publicly available numbers and first-principles physics: solar flux, cell efficiency, radiator performance, launch cost, hardware mass, and a terrestrial benchmark that represents the real alternative: a tilt-wall datacenter sitting on top of cheap power. "

"Here's the headline result: it's not obviously stupid, and it's not a sure thing. It's actually more reasonable than my intuition thought! If you run the numbers honestly, the physics doesn't immediately kill it, but the economics are savage. It only gets within striking distance under aggressive assumptions, and the list of organizations positioned to even try that is basically one."
by alcazar | 2026-02-04 16:04:52+00:00
It really comes down to the burglar's expectations. If most crypto holders used geographically separated multi-sig, these attacks wouldn't be worth the effort anymore.

It’s the same logic as iPhones bricking themselves after being stolen. Even if your specific phone isn't an iPhone, the fact that most phones are now useless to thieves discourages the crime across the board.
by bazzargh | 2026-02-04 16:04:59+00:00
I think maybe https://oeis.org/A263499

You can shorten the candidates list quite a bit: https://oeis.org/search?q=author%3A%22Chai+Wah+Wu%22+2015+Pr...

The article says "Spring 2015" but in fact the magazine was published December 29, 2015. In the text it mentions https://oeis.org/history?seq=A250001 so the interview could not have been earlier than October 2015; Wu's sequence is "recent".

There's a few sequences that jump out, this one, and the prime palindromes of 0's and 1s whose squares are palindromes; but that was August and seems too early.
by 6510 | 2026-02-04 16:05:25+00:00
There is this abundance of real things in the real world (haha) you cant help but have thoughts attacking real problems. I will come up with software idea in areas where the state of the art is pathetic. Browsing online you won't run into things that didn't get enough love.

It does seem to be possible to flip out your phone in the field and write a solution on the spot but the main drawback I think is that you cant properly pronounce something like for(i=1;i<42;i++){ and typing it on an onscreen keyboard might even be worse. I remember writing code in a textarea one time then pulling the screen down refreshing the page. I've been wondering eversince if blanking input areas on reload is ever what the user wants. I put so much work into those 10 lines.

The medium seems more fit for a "language" of dragging around elements in flowcharts. Then again, how would you begin to pronounce that?

Maybe a simplistic DSL without symbols to [say] only make crud apps?

Perhaps start out with something like:

HAVE A FORM WITH USERNAME AND PASSWORD.
IF USERNAME AND PASSWORD MATCH A DATABASE ENTRY
REMEMBER THE USERNAME AND SET A SESSION COOKIE.

And work towards:

HAVE A REGISTRATION FORM.

With some default database structure. If there is no DB make it, if there is no table make it. Have 3rd party account providers baked into the language.

It seems LLM's would be really good at strictly defined English.
by garciansmith | 2026-02-04 16:05:34+00:00
Thanks for making this, I look at Sanborns all the time doing historic preservation-related work.

Is there a way to quickly search for a specific address or select a point and then see the relevant map? Larger cities have Sanborns covering many volumes, and I see I can use sliders to turn them on and off to find the relevant one, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing a quicker way of finding a specific address.
by muzani | 2026-02-04 16:06:00+00:00
Async really turns FE into a nightmare. Simple concept: user logs in, get userID, get feed associated with ID, get posts on feed, get reacts on post.

Sometimes the tech debt is that BE can't pass this data all at once yet. Fine. Let's fetch it.

But then FE gets creative. We can reduce nesting. We can chain it. We can preload stuff before the data loads. Instead of polling, let's do observers. Actually these aren't thread safe. And you know what, nothing should be in the UI thread because they'll cause delays. And this code isn't clean, one function should do only one thing.

Actually why are these screens even connected? We should use global variables and go to any screen from anywhere. Actually everything can be global. But global is an anti-pattern. So let's call it DI and single page application and have everything shared but everything must also be a singleton because shared immutability is bad too.
by aaronmdjones | 2026-02-04 16:06:05+00:00
It also has various options to adjust the behaviour, from no blocks at all, to not even being able to charge the phone (or use the phone to charge something else) -- even when unlocked. Changing the mode of operation requires the device PIN, just as changing the device PIN does.

Note that it behaves subtly differently to how you described in case it was connected to something before being locked. In that case data access will remain -- even though the phone is now locked -- until the device is disconnected.
Show HN: CuaBot – Co-op computer-use for any coding agent
by frabonacci | 2026-02-04 16:06:21+00:00
Hey HN, CuaBot gives you co-op computer-use for any AI coding agent.

What this is: CuaBot is a TUI to launch any CLI agent (Claude Code, OpenClaw, Codex, etc.) or GUI app inside a sandbox with computer-use. Agent windows appear natively on your desktop with a colored border. Your agent interacts with them through its own cursor, without any mouse/focus hijacking or invasive full-desktop screenshots.

This enables co-op mode: you and your agent work in the same windows with separate cursors.

What you can do:

$ npx cuabot claude
> "Write a 2-player tic-tac-toe game, then let's play. I'll go first"

Claude Code will open the game in a sandboxed window on your desktop. When ready, you click your move through the native window while the agent watches and waits to click its move. The agent can see your cursor and its windows while keeping your full desktop isolated.

# Run agents in parallel:

$ npx cuabot -n research openclaw

$ npx cuabot -n coding codex

# Or script the CLI:

$ npx cuabot libreoffice --writer &

$ npx cuabot --click 150 48

$ npx cuabot --type “I Cua!”

Right now my cuabot agent is exploring mobile/desktop apps to turn into cuabench RL environments. I watch the windows appear, intervene when it gets stuck, and let it continue until it opens the completed GUI gym for me to interact with.

Why we built this:

We built Cua (https://github.com/trycua/cua), our open-source SDK for building and benchmarking computer-use systems with GUI sandboxes. We kept seeing two common patterns:

1. Agent screenshots your desktop and controls your mouse – Works with your data, but unsafe and locks you out

2. Agent runs in a sandbox with an external VNC desktop – Safer (our default), but clunky to monitor, hard to interact with, and tedious for data transfer

General computer-use should be frictionless. Asking your agent to debug a GUI app shouldn't require opening an entire desktop stream. The GUI app should just appear alongside your windows, sandboxed and ready.

How it works:

cuabot [command] launches cuabotd, which manages a Ubuntu + Xpra Docker container, a multi-cursor overlay, an Xpra computer-use MCP server, and an Xpra seamless client. It auto-configures your agent (Claude, Aider, etc.) to connect to the computer-use MCP, then pipes terminal I/O through WebSocket. The Xpra client automatically detects and streams windows launched in the container, with H.264 encoding, audio, and customizable clipboard sharing.

Since the computer-use MCP interacts through an Xpra client, the agent only sees the windows it needs, sparing it from your desktop clutter!

GitHub: https://github.com/trycua/cua (monorepo; libs/cuabot directory)

Docs: https://cua.ai/docs

npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/cuabot

We'll be here to answer questions!
by jacquesm | 2026-02-04 16:06:33+00:00
Technically, not in person ;)

I know lots of people that smoke heavily and I've watched their trajectory over decades. It's a sad story really. I'm pretty sure if you manage it responsibly the benefits may well outweigh the downsides but over the long term it really adds up.

Of course, everybody ages, and people are not usually as sharp as they were in their twenties or earlier. But given that I also have access to a sizeable control group where I don't see that effect I figure it has to have some factual basis too large to be just handwaved away.

Feel free to correct the fact that we haven't met in person by the way, you & yours are always welcome here.
by gunsle | 2026-02-04 16:06:38+00:00
I think weed is actually far more insidious than most drugs, because it’s incredibly easy to be a functional stoner. The downsides don’t start to appear until you’re years down the road, and often the marijuana haze keeps you from fully evaluating just how detrimental those downsides have been on you. At that point, you’re legitimately addicted, and your brain begins to sweet talk any attempt at rationality.

For me, the downsides manifest as drarticlsly increased anxiety (I naturally have next to none), extremely poor sleep - I sleep but the sleep is so low quality it begins to feel like my brain barely works right, and the obvious one, the effects on your motivation. I naturally tend towards ADHD style dopamine chasing, and weed makes that about 100x worse. Instead of getting my work done, I will procrastinate with any number of cheap dopamine hits such as video games, internet sleuthing, etc.
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-04 16:06:43+00:00
Though it is not like management roles have ever appreciated the creative aspects of the job, including problem solving. Management has always wished to just describe the desired outcome and get magic back. They don't like acknowledging that problems and complications exist in the first place. Management likes to think that they are the true creatives for company vision and don't like software developers finding solutions bottom up. Management likes to have a single "architect" and maybe a single "designer" for the creative side that they like and are a "rising" political force (in either the Peter Principle or Gervais Principle senses) rather than deal with a committee of creative people. It's easier for them to pretend software developers are blue collar cogs in the system rather than white collar problem solvers with complex creative specialties. LLMs are only accelerating those mechanics and beliefs.
by parineum | 2026-02-04 16:06:43+00:00
I know it seems like an incredibly dubious claim but the "I forgot" defense actually works here.

It's not really that useful for a safe since they aren't _that_ difficult to open and, if you haven't committed a crime, it's probably better to open your safe for them than have them destroy it so you need a new one. For a mathematically impossible to break cipher though, very useful.
by bugeats | 2026-02-04 16:07:05+00:00
Consider what you might choose to do for the public good with the 30% of your income that is taken from you in the name of the public good.

Philanthropy is a predictable outcome of an individual having met the basic needs of Maslow’s hierarchy. Consider how many more philanthropists would be created by returning this 30% back to individual discernment.
by steveBK123 | 2026-02-04 16:07:14+00:00
> Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make

Isn't this also an overstatement, and the problem is worse. That is - the code being handed back is a great prototype, needs polishing/finishing, and is ignorant of obvious implicit edge cases unless you explicitly innumerate all of them in your prompts??

For me, the state of things reminds me of a bad job I had years ago.

Worked with a well-regarded long tenured but truculent senior engineer who was immune to feedback due to his seniority. He committed code that either didn't run, didn't past tests, or implemented only the most obvious happy path robotically literal interpretation of requirements.

He was however, very very fast... underbidding teammates on time estimates by 10x.

He would hand back the broken prototype and we'd then spend the 10x time making his code actually something you can run in production.

Management kept pushing this because he had a great reputation, promised great things, and every once in a while did actually deliver stuff fast. It took years for management to come around to the fact that this was not working.