MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by guluarte | 2026-02-06 03:05:18+00:00
because it is non-deterministic, i just did and got 50 spells.

prompt:
finding every spell in all Harry Potter books in the first 4 books, only the officially documented spells across those 4 books, there are 50, without using websearch

Here's my best compilation from memory, organized by book. I'll be upfront: getting to exactly 50 is tricky without cross-referencing, so some might be debatable or I might miss a couple. Here goes:

---

*Book 1 - Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone*

1. *Lumos* - produces light
2. *Nox* - extinguishes Lumos
3. *Alohomora* - unlocks doors
4. *Wingardium Leviosa* - levitation
5. *Petrificus Totalus* - full body-bind
6. *Locomotor Mortis* - leg-locker curse
7. *Incendio* - produces fire
8. *Reparo* - mends broken objects

*Book 2 - Chamber of Secrets*

9. *Expelliarmus* - disarms opponent
10. *Rictusempra* - tickling charm
11. *Tarantallegra* - forces target to dance
12. *Serpensortia* - conjures a snake
13. *Finite Incantatem* - ends spell effects
14. *Obliviate* - erases memories
15. *Aparecium* - reveals invisible ink
16. *Immobulus* - freezes target in place
17. *Homorphus* - mentioned by Lockhart (werewolf cure claim)
18. *Peskipiksi Pesternomi* - Lockhart's failed pixie spell

*Book 3 - Prisoner of Azkaban*

19. *Expecto Patronum* - produces a Patronus
20. *Riddikulus* - repels a Boggart
21. *Waddiwasi* - shoots objects at target
22. *Impervius* - waterproofing charm
23. *Dissendium* - opens secret passage
24. *Ferula* - conjures bandages/splint
25. *Mobilicorpus* - moves a body
26. *Lumos Maxima* - intense light

*Book 4 - Goblet of Fire*

27. *Accio* - summoning charm
28. *Avada Kedavra* - killing curse
29. *Crucio* - Cruciatus curse (torture)
30. *Imperio* - Imperius curse (control)
31. *Stupefy* - stunning spell
32. *Engorgio* - enlarges target
33. *Reducio* - shrinks target
34. *Sonorus* - amplifies voice
35. *Quietus* - reverses Sonorus
36. *Morsmordre* - conjures the Dark Mark
37. *Priori Incantatem* - reveals last spell cast
38. *Deletrius* - erases magical residue
39. *Densaugeo* - enlarges teeth
40. *Furnunculus* - causes boils
41. *Impedimenta* - slows/stops target
42. *Reducto* - blasts solid objects
43. *Diffindo* - severing charm
44. *Relashio* - releases sparks/grip
45. *Orchideous* - conjures flowers
46. *Avis* - conjures birds
47. *Point Me* - Four-Point Spell (compass)
48. *Ennervate* - revives stunned person
49. *Protego* - shield charm
50. *Conjunctivitis Curse* - affects eyesight (Krum on the dragon)

---

A few caveats: some of these (like Lumos Maxima, Homorphus, Peskipiksi Pesternomi) are borderline since they're either mentioned rather than properly cast, or might be film additions that bleed into memory. The Conjunctivitis Curse is described but its incantation isn't explicitly given in the text. And Protego might technically first appear with its incantation in Book 5 during DA practice rather than Book 4.

If you want, I can turn this into a spreadsheet or document with columns for spell name, effect, who casts it, and which chapter.
by b1temy | 2026-02-06 03:06:17+00:00
You misunderstand.

I already said I do not like that it is just using HTTP, and yes, it is problematic.

What I am saying is that the issue the author reported and the issue that AMD considers man-in-the-middle attacks as out-of-scope, are two separate issues.

If someone reports that a homeowner has the keys visibly on top of their mat in front of their front-door, and the homeowner replies that they do not consider intruders entering their home as a problem, these are two separate issues, with the latter having wider ramifications (since it would determine whether other methods and vectors of mitm attacks, besides the one the author of the post reported, are declared out-of-scope as well). But that doesn't mean the former issue is unimportant, it just means that it was already acknowledged, and the latter issue is what should be focused on (At least on AMD's side. It still presents a problem for users who disagree with AMD of it being out-of-scope).
by strken | 2026-02-06 03:06:29+00:00
I see a world where developers need to think about REASONABLE scale from day one, with all caps and no parentheses.

I've sat in on meetings about adding auth rate limiting, using Redis, to an on-premise electron client/Node.js server where the largest installation had 20 concurrent users and the largest foreseeable installation had a few thousand, in which every existing installation had an average server CPU utilisation of less than a percent.

Redis should not even be a possibility under those circumstances. It's a ridiculous suggestion based purely on rote whiteboard interview cramming. Stick a token_bucket table in Postgres.

I'm also not convinced that thinking about reasonable scale would lead to a different implementation for most other greenfield projects. The nice thing about shoving everything into Postgres is that you nearly always have a clear upgrade path, whereas using Redis right from the start might actually make the system less future-proof by complicating any eventual migration.
by duped | 2026-02-06 03:06:35+00:00
There's definitely such thing as a zero crossing, it's where sign(x[n-1]) != sign(x[n]) (or rather, there's "no such thing as a zero crossing" in the same way there's no such thing as a peak). Picking a suitable `n` as a start/end point for sample editing is a judgement call, because what you're trying to minimize is the difference between two samples since it's conceptually a unit impulse in the sequence.

I don't think people who talk about zero crossings were totally misguided. It's a legitimate technique for picking start/end points of your samples and tracks. Even as a first step before BLEP or fades.
by SamBam | 2026-02-06 03:07:02+00:00
So if I understand right, this image of a T-Rex [1] would be wrong, because its palms are facing downward, while this image of a T-Rex [2] would be right because its palms are in a "clapping" posture?

But I'm still a little confused. Most quadrupeds have their front toes facing forward, right? If the first T-Rex did a belly-flop and caught itself on its palms, they'd be facing forward like a dog's. If the second T-Rex did a belly flop, its toes would be facing outward, like Charlie Chaplin's feet.

1. https://geppettostoybox.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/trex....

2. https://s3.envato.com/files/471149443/Realistic%20Trex%20Din...
by deaux | 2026-02-06 03:07:43+00:00
> It's known that Anthropic's $20 Pro subscription is a gateway plan to their $100 Max subscription, since you'll easily burn your token rate on a single prompt or two.

I genuinely have no idea what people mean when I read this kind of thing. Are you abusing the word "prompt" to mean "conversation"? Or are you providing a huge prompt that is meant to spawn 10 subagents and write multiple new full-stack features in one go?

For most users, the $20 Pro subscription, when used with Opus, does not hit the 5-hour limit on "a single prompt or two", i.e. 1-2 user messages.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-06 03:08:22+00:00
That’s no outlier at all a mid level L5 software engineer at Amazon will usual get a 4 year package of around $235K-$250K a year total compensation target. Amazon is in the middle of the pack for BigTech. Apple and Microsoft historically paid less and Google and Meta pays more.

The total compensation target at Amazon is based on

Year 1 - base + large prorated signing bonus + 5% of your total stock package

Year 2 - base + smaller signing bonus + 15% of your total stock package

Year 3 and 4 - base + 20% of your stock vest every six months.

Usually around year 3 you get more stock.

Even an intern I mentored when I was ProServe their from 2020-late 2023 got a 600K four year initial package when they graduate and they got promoted to a mid level L5 in year 3 and will make around $750k-$800k depending on vesting schedule and price of AMZN when the offer was made over 4 years. ProServe (the internal consulting division ) and SAs make around 10% less than software developers.

My four year initial package was for $850K as a mid level consultant - I only had two years of AWS experience at the time. It was supposedly a “field by design” and permanently remote. They had an RTO mandate 6 months after I left - and had moved to Florida partially to save on taxes (no state tax)

GCP pays their senior consultants - full time employees around $250k -$280K

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/solutions-c...

Again they make less than software engineers

As far as “working my ass off” and going 1099, that was never appealing to me. I worked at AWS ProServe like I said for almost 4 years (full time) and now working as a staff consultant (full time) for a third party consulting company - cloud + app dev.

I like not having to worry about sales, accounting, benefits, chasing payments etc.

I like knowing that I can work 40 hours a week and money appears in my account on holidays, when I’m sick, on the bench, on vacation, etc.

As far as taking “any” job. When I was Amazoned in 2023, my goal was crazy enough to get any remote offer that wasn’t at a large company before my paid vacation reimbursement was up (9 days) and well before I started using my 3.5 month severance let alone my savings.

I took a full time job at a shitty consulting company, with a 20% pay cut and kept interviewing until I found something I wanted. It took a year to get the job I really wanted at the pay I wanted.
by belviewreview | 2026-02-06 03:08:42+00:00
"No, not at present - but there will be in the future" That seems to imply that until that future arrives, people should mostly stay away from cybercurrencies.

I am bringing all this up because when cybercurrencies were getting started, the people boosting them assured us that they would soon be doing all sorts of wonderful things, and nothing bad would happen. That prediction turned out to be wildly mistaken. And instead of considering that maybe the idea itself is just basically bad, in the years since they keep insisting that soon it will all be fixed.

Can you understand why, given this long history, I would be dubious? Or is it your view that I am under some sort of moral obligation to believe that the approaches to fixing it being worked on at present are absolutely certain to work?
by deaux | 2026-02-06 03:09:20+00:00
> Two, they're popular with reviewers while models are going through post training. Either because they help paper over logical gaps, or provide a stylistic gloss which feels professional in small doses.

I think this is it. It sounds incredibly confident. It will make reviewers much more likely to accept it as "correct" or "intelligent", because they're primed to believe it, and makes them less likely to question it.
by digiown | 2026-02-06 03:10:41+00:00
The most direct comparison would be the package manager, that's why I said distros. These driver management tools do a (poor) job at being a package manager, along with many other commercial software installation tools.

With Linux itself, it helps that they are working in public (whether volunteering or as a job), and you'd be sacked not in a closed-door meeting, but on LKML for everyone to see if you screw up this badly.
by ofri-peretz | 2026-02-06 03:11:07+00:00
Author here. This benchmark uses 20 real-world prompts across 5 security domains (database, auth, file ops, command execution, config). All 60 generated code samples + ESLint analysis results are open-sourced:
https://github.com/ofri-peretz/eslint-benchmark-suite/tree/m...
Key findings:
- 65-75% vulnerability rate (statistically indistinguishable across Haiku/Sonnet/Opus)
- Static analysis feedback loop ("Guardian Layer") fixes ~50% of issues
- Path traversal + command injection are the hardest to remediate
Happy to answer methodology questions.
by pclmulqdq | 2026-02-06 03:12:47+00:00
Has anyone filed a CCPA-related lawsuit against Flock for retention and sharing of this data? How about a civil action for stalking? I assume it will just take one creative individual to find the right tort and then Flock will be buried under lawsuits.

Too many people are focused on the criminal aspects of this (4th amendment) and government surveillance. The fact that this is a corporation may give you more options.
by gnabgib | 2026-02-06 03:12:55+00:00
A little self-focused in your (@paoladim @claudepress) posts, perhaps you could read the guidelines specifically:

> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

And let us know something you're curious about (that isn't self-promotional)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by Teever | 2026-02-06 03:13:09+00:00
Yeah, it's an interesting question to me too.

Because it seems clear to me that if an individual was to surveil and build up a dossier on any random stranger as much as an entity like Facebook or Google does that this would be considered stalking.

I've never been able to quite figure out why incorporating and doing it to basically everyone some how makes it legal. I think the secret ingredient is money but I'm not exactly sure how that works.
by deaux | 2026-02-06 03:14:45+00:00
Its prevalence in contexts that aren't "LinkedIn here's what I learnt about B2B sales"-peddling are an emergent property of LLM writing. Like, 99% of articles wouldn't have a single usage of it pre-LLMs. This article has like 6 of them.

And even if you remove all of them, it's still clearly AI.

People have hated the LinkedIn-guru style since years before AI slop became mainstream. Which is why the only people who used it were.. those LinkedIn gurus. Yet now it's suddenly everywhere. No one wrote articles on topics like malware in this style.

What's so revolting about it is that it just sounds like main character syndrome turned up to 11.

> This wasn’t an isolated case. It was a campaign.

This isn't a bloody James Bond movie.
by chasil | 2026-02-06 03:15:00+00:00
I am a DBA for Oracle databases, and XE can be used for free. It has the reference SQL/PSM implementation in PL/SQL. I know how to set up a physical standby, and otherwise I know how to run it.

That being said, Oracle Database SE2 is $17,500 per core pair on x86, and Enterprise is $47,500 per core pair. XE has hard limits on size and limits on active CPUs. XE also does not get patches; if there is a critical vulnerability, it might be years before an upgrade is released.

Nobody would deploy Oracle Database for new systems. You only use this for sunk costs.

Postgres itself has a manual that is 1,500 pages. There is a LOT to learn to run it well, comparable to Oracle.

For simple things, SQLite is fine. I use it as my secrecy manager.

Postgres requires a lot of reading to do the fancy things.
by sinnsro | 2026-02-06 03:16:07+00:00
> It doesn't mean that people haven't tried or even succeeded. Android was successful in multiple fronts in replacing C. Its "intents" and low level interface description language for hardware interfaces are great replacement for C ABI. Windows' COM is also a good replacement that gets rid of language dependence. There are still newer OSes try like Redox or Fuchsia.

I am not sure I buy this from a system perspective, especially when taking this[1] into consideration.

______

1. Alexis King's reply to "Why do common Rust packages depend on C code?". Link: https://langdev.stackexchange.com/a/3237
by Animats | 2026-02-06 03:16:08+00:00
Asimov in 1980 didn't have access to "Orwell, the Lost Writings", published in 1985. That details Eric Blair's ("Orwell" is a pseudonym) jobs during WWII, mostly at the British Ministry of Information. "1984"'s details are partly autobiographical. One of Blair's jobs was to translate news broadcasts into Basic English for broadcast to the colonies, primarily India and Hong Kong. He found that this was a political act. Squeezing news down to a 1000 word vocabulary required removing political ambiguity. It's hard to prevaricate in Basic English, which has a very concrete vocabulary. Hence Newspeak.

The details of Winston Smith's job are close to Blair's job. The rather bleak canteen matches the one at the Ministry of Information. A middle manager above Blair had the initials "B B", and that's where Big Brother comes from. The low quality gin, cigarettes, and razor blades are the WWII British experience.

"1984" is in some ways Dilbert, with more politics.
by saisrirampur | 2026-02-06 03:16:59+00:00
Ack, agreed. But there’s a better way to communicate than making blanket statements like “just use Postgres.” For example, you could say “Postgres is the default database,” etc.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m a huge huge fan of Postgres. I’ve worked at Postgres companies for a decade, started a Postgres company, and now lead a Postgres service within a company! But I prefer being real rather than doing marketing hype and blanket love.
by delish | 2026-02-06 03:17:14+00:00
Apart from the style of the prose, which is my subjective evaluation: This blog post is "a view from nowhere." Tiger Data is a company that sells postgres in some way (don't know, but it doesn't matter for the following): they could speak as themselves, and compare themselves to companies that sell other open source databases. Or they could showcase benchmarks _they ran_.

Them saying: "What you get: pgvectorscale uses the DiskANN algorithm (from Microsoft Research), achieving 28x lower p95 latency and 16x higher throughput than Pinecone at 99% recall" is marketing unless they give how you'd replicate those numbers.

Point being: this could have been written by an LLM, because it doesn't represent any work-done by Tiger Data.
by deaux | 2026-02-06 03:18:34+00:00
Everyone has hated "LinkedIn-guru here's what I learnt about B2B sales"-speak for many years. Search HN for LinkedIn speak, filter by date before 2023. Why would people stop hating it now? That's the style it's written in. Maybe you just didn't know that people hated it, but most always have. I'm sure that some people hate it only because it's AI, but seriously, it's been a meme for years.
by blibble | 2026-02-06 03:18:35+00:00
> Where this analogy breaks down is that the work you’re describing is done by Professional Engineers that have strict licensing and are (criminally) liable for the end result of the plans they approve.

there are plenty of software engineers that work in regulated industries, with individual licensing, criminal liability, and the ability to be struck off and banned from the industry by the regulator

... such as myself
by LinXitoW | 2026-02-06 03:18:45+00:00
The main issue with improvements in the last year is that a lot of it is based not on the models strictly becoming better, but on tooling being better, and simply using a fuckton more tokens for the same task.

Remember that all these companies can only exist because of massive (over)investments in the hope of insane returns and AGI promises. While all these improvements (imho) prove the exact opposite: AGI is absolutely not coming, and the investments aren't going to generate these outsized returns. The will generate decent returns, and the tools are useful.
by mbh159 | 2026-02-06 03:18:52+00:00
Like you said, theres a lot of complexity in the decision making here. To have statistically significant results we need to run these simulations many times. We record latency, tool calls, token consumption, etc. as well as results. Since we log the actions and their final outcomes we can run analysis later on the decisions correlations with success here. Our hypothesis is games provide an important benchmark for how these models will adapt in intelligence as they become more capable.

For example, I'm sure an RL bot will be able to figure out an optimal strategy over millions of simulations that defeats current LLMs with context, however this may not always hold true
by akramachamarei | 2026-02-06 03:19:48+00:00
I don't think so. What you're saying is that kids (and maybe adults) don't have enough agency over their own usage of social media; that these social media are so addicting and harmful that we cannot trust users (in concert with their parents, teachers, etc.) not to harm themselves with them, and that we must construct government apparatus to protect them.
by AloysB | 2026-02-06 03:21:23+00:00
Give it a read, he mentions briefly how he uses for PR triages and resolving GH issues.

He doesn't go in details, but there is a bit:

> Issue and PR triage/review. Agents are good at using gh (GitHub CLI), so I manually scripted a quick way to spin up a bunch in parallel to triage issues. I would NOT allow agents to respond, I just wanted reports the next day to try to guide me towards high value or low effort tasks.

> More specifically, I would start each day by taking the results of my prior night's triage agents, filter them manually to find the issues that an agent will almost certainly solve well, and then keep them going in the background (one at a time, not in parallel).

This is a short excerpt, this article is worth reading. Very grounded and balanced.
by b1temy | 2026-02-06 03:22:03+00:00
> The phrasing of your first two sentences in your first post makes it sound like you're dismissing the security issue.

Genuine question, How does it sound like I'm dismissing it? My first sentence begins with the the phrase

> I don't like that the executable's update URL is using just plain HTTP

And my second sentence

> Whether you agree with whether this rule should be out-of-scope or not is a separate issue.

which, with context that AMD reported MITM as out-of-scope, clearly indicates that I think of it as an issue, albeit, a separate one from the one the author already reported.
by doctorpangloss | 2026-02-06 03:22:18+00:00
> It's the tracking part. That's where the juice is.

how do you figure? everyone already has a perfect tracker carried around with them at all times, a cell phone. and i suppose, if someone is smart enough to not visit a thing with a phone, he'll be smart enough to not use a car, so... do you see what i mean? it still boils down to, "the technology is not really as good as it says it is." i mean i know that you say that it's not, it is. It is all about what it says on the tin.

That's enterprise sales. People have to stop making it about cerebral, academic political stuff. If municipalities understood that Flock is a waste of money, they wouldn't adopt it.
by shagie | 2026-02-06 03:22:25+00:00
How many times can you do that?

Consider your own computer... how often does it get hot under a regular load and the fans kick on? That "fans kick on" is transferring the heat to air and jettisoning it into the room... and you're dealing with 100 watts there. Scale that up to kilowatts that are always running.

There is a lot of energy that is being consumed for computation and being converted into heat.

The other part if that is... its a lot easier to do that transfer heat into some other material and jettison it on earth, without having to ship the rack into space and also deal with the additional mechanics of getting rid of hot things. You've got advantages of things like "cold things sink in gravity" and "you can push heat around and sink it into other things (like phase change of water)" and "you don't need to be sitting on top of a power plant in order to use the power."
by LinXitoW | 2026-02-06 03:22:42+00:00
Model improvement is very much slowing down, if we actually use fair metrics. Most improvements in the last year or so comes down to external improvements, like better tooling, or the highly sophisticated practice of throwing way more tokens at the same problem (reasoning and agents).

Don't get me wrong, LLMs are useful. They just aren't the kind of useful that Sam et al. sold investors. No AGI, no full human worker replacement, no massive reduction in cost for SOTA.