MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RansomStark | 2026-02-04 10:23:00+00:00
Yeah, its almost as if the knives aren't the problem. The gang memebrs will use whatever gives them an advantage, guns, knives, acid, bats, bricks. We can't ban everything, we should possibly tackle the cause instead of the symptom...

But don't worry, in the mean time they're coming for our regular knives.

The BBC has already rolled out Idris Ebla to explain that kitchen knives shouldnt have points[0]. Yes this has been picked up by politicians with the minister for policing at the time calling it an interesting idea [1].

[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1j...

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/...

Sorry about the amp links
by jurgenaut23 | 2026-02-04 10:23:02+00:00
Something that people underestimate a lot is that we aren’t “brains in a jar” and the elevated states of consciousness, such as “flow”, require a deep involvement of the body. As such manual coding is much more likely to bring you into the zone than irregular interactions with an LLM.

I actually believe that there are much better ways to incorporate AI into software development than any of the mechanisms we’ve seen so far. For instance, it would make a lot more sense that you actually write the software manually and get the usual autocomplete suggestions, along with some on the fly reviews, an extension proposals, such as writing the body of a function that you’re calling from the core function you’re writing now.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-02-04 10:23:56+00:00
> What I don't understand is the concept of NATO or the EU: why would a group of countries willingly band together as "happy vassals

NATO: Russia is a threat to both Europe and the US, lets band together to make sure we can fight them.

EU: Europe keeps fighting wars, lets make our economies more inter-dependent so that doesn't happen as much.

For NATO, I can see the happy vassals thing (and that's what the Belgian PM was referring to), but can you explain who is the overlord in the EU example?
by defrost | 2026-02-04 10:24:26+00:00
Hmm, having double checked, I can read it if referred via HN, I can read it direct via my ISP, and I can read it direct via a VPN in a couple of global geolocations.

That doesn't help you directly, but perhaps that might help tracing your issue.

Unless you were running a Ceci n'est pas une pipebomb bit that flew over my addled head ...
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-04 10:24:28+00:00
> A country can ban guns and allow rope, even though both can kill.

That's actually a good argument. And that's how the UK ending up banning not just guns, but all sorts of swords, machetes and knives, meanwhile the violent crime rates have not dropped.

So maybe dangerous knives are not the problem, but the people using them to kill other people. So then where do we draw the line between lethal weapons and crime correlation. At which cutting/shooting instruments?

Same with software tools, that keep getting more powerful with time lowering the bar to entry for generating nudes of people. Where do we draw the line on which tools are responsible for that instead of the humans using them for it?
by palata | 2026-02-04 10:25:08+00:00
That's exactly my point! It's not as simple as "it is open source, therefore it is gemeinnützig". It depends on the project.

Therefore it doesn't make sense to recognise "open source" as "volunteering". What makes sense is to consider "volunteering projects" as "volunteering projects", and the way one decides that is by looking at the project. Open source or not.

But I assume that's already how it works: to qualify as "volunteering", someone in charge has to look at your activity and confirm that it does, indeed, qualify.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-04 10:25:40+00:00
> I'm using LLMs to code and I'm still thinking hard. I'm not doing it wrong: I think about design choices: risks, constraints, technical debt, alternatives, possibilities... I'm thinking as hard as I've ever done.

Okay, for you that is new - post-LLM.

For me, pre-LLM I thought about all those things as well as the code itself.

IOW, I thought about even more things. Now you (if I understand your claim correctly) think only about those higher level things, unecumbered by stuff like implementation misalignments, etc. By definition alone, you are thinking less hard.

------------------------

[1] Many times the thinking about code itself acted as a feedback mechanism for all those things. If thinking about the code itself never acted as a feedback mechanism to your higher thought processes then ... well, maybe you weren't doing it the way I was.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-02-04 10:26:01+00:00
> From the outside it looks like the field is an intellectual circular firing squad that produces little of tangible value.

The biggest value of economists is that they provide stories around the accumulation and destruction of capital.

It's always been odd to me that we took just one social science (with a massive case of physics envy) and use it to explain the world. Like, what would the world look like if we'd picked sociology instead?
by iso1631 | 2026-02-04 10:27:10+00:00
> jurisdiction

This is the big thing, but Elon's child porn generator in orbit will be subject to US jurisdiction, just as much as if they were in Alaska. I guess he can avoid state law.

If jurisdiction is key, you can float a DC in international waters on a barge flying the flag of Panama or similar flag of convenience which you can pretty much buy at this scale. Pick a tin-pot country, fling a few million to the dictator, and you're set - with far less jurisdiction problems than a US, Russia, France launched satellite.
by vidarh | 2026-02-04 10:27:13+00:00
Income. Wealth.

The point is that the unspent income has significant value.

I earn a multiple of the UK median. Above a lower multiple of the median, the primary increased value I got out of earning more was the freedom to stop thinking about what an increasing subset of things cost. I still need to think about what my housing cost, but I don't know what most groceries cost, because it doesn't matter to me.

The mental cost of detail budgeting, planning, and saving for most smaller costs, as well as the associated anxiety, is something I never want to pay again.
by sunshine-o | 2026-02-04 10:27:42+00:00
> No platform ever should allow CSAM content.

> And the fact that they didn’t even care and haven’t want to spend money for implementing guardrails or moderation is deeply concerning.

In the 90s, the principal of a prominent school in my city was arrested for CSAM on his computer downloaded from the Internet.

As the story made the news most people were trying to wrap their head around this "Internet" thing and how it could produce CSAM material. Remember, in the 90s the "Internet" was a bit like quantum computing for most people, hard to understand how it works and only a few actually played with it.

I have no idea how that school principal downloaded the CSAM. UUCP, FTP, Usenet or maybe the brand new "World Wide Web"?
But I guess the justice system had to figure out how that stuff works to prosecute him.

So the society and the state knew for at least 30 years the Internet is full of that stuff. The question is why are they so motivated to do something about it only now?

Could it be because the "web of rich and powerful pedos" is getting exposed through the Epstein affair in the last few years?

So maybe they need to pretend to crack down on the "web of poor pedos"?
by nevmstas | 2026-02-04 10:28:08+00:00
Location: Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, React, Next.js, React Native, GraphQL, Expo, Docker, SQL, NoSql, AWS, LLMs, Monorepo, Solidity,, Agent Development Kit

Resume/CV: https://nevmstas.github.io

Email: nevmyvakastas@gmail.com

Senior Software Engineer with 6+ years of experience building web and mobile applications. Specialized in React/React Native ecosystems with strong expertise in monorepo architecture, real-time applications, and AI-powered features. Recently built production-ready open-source avatar system with in-browser AI prediction. Open to frontend/full-stack roles.
by Cuervo_ | 2026-02-04 10:28:58+00:00
I personally have found success with an approach that's the inverse of how agents are being used generally.

I don't allow my agent to write any code. I ask it for guidance on algorithms, and to supply the domain knowledge that I might be missing. When using it for game dev for example, I ask it to explain in general terms how to apply noise algorithms for procedural generation, how to do UV mapping etc, but the actual implementation in my language of choice is all by hand.

Honestly, I think this is a sweet spot. The amount of time I save getting explanations of concepts that would otherwise get a bit of digging to get is huge, but I'm still entirely in control of my codebase.
by Gud | 2026-02-04 10:29:19+00:00
Sweden has not had a “fairly high crime rate”, this is a totally bogus statement.

And yes, 2nd generation immigrants are clearly over represented when it comes to crime, in Sweden and every wheee else.

In Sweden these issues are pronounced because of a ridiculous taboo that existed 1995-2020 to even discuss this problem.

But it turns out, if you import >1 million people from dysfunctional societies with entirely different cultures, while sticking your head in the sand, you will faces issues…

FWIW I am from Sweden, was born in 1986. These problems were obvious to me.
by aurareturn | 2026-02-04 10:29:29+00:00
A spokesperson for Pinterest said: “Two engineers wrote custom scripts improperly accessing confidential company information to identify the locations and names of all dismissed employees and then shared it more broadly. This was a clear violation of Pinterest policy and of their former colleagues’ privacy.”

That's terrible. If I'm fired, I don't want the entire company to find out through a script.
by lambdaone | 2026-02-04 10:30:30+00:00
Right now vibe coding is more like training cats. You are constantly pushing against the model's tendency to produce its default outputs regardless of your directions. When those default outputs are what you want - which they are in many simple cases of effectively English-to-code translation with memorized lookup - it's great. When they are not, you might as well write the code yourself and at least be able to understand the code you've generated.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-02-04 10:30:48+00:00
In fact, "free" markets are downstream of them. Political stability and rule of law are important everywhere, whereas a fetish for free markets is something that's only important in some places.

We rarely get better results from healthcare or education (or infrastructure) from a free market system, and yet those are fundamental ingredients towards most human development (which can, but does not require free markets).

And anyway, what does a free market mean? Do regulations make markets less free or just shape them?
by anonnon | 2026-02-04 10:30:49+00:00
> In one email on Feb. 19, 2016, titled “confirmed,” Dr. Attia wrote to Mr. Epstein: “Pussy is, indeed, low carb. Still awaiting results on gluten content, though.”

Biggest hit to his reputation has been the revelation that the business in NYC that drew him away from his infant son, hospitalized in the ICU, who eventually went into cardiac arrest (he describes this "shameful" episode in his book), was actually a meeting with Epstein.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-02-04 10:31:14+00:00
You are confusing engineering challenges with show stoppers. Cooling in space is a well studied problem with a few possible solutions. They all boil down to needing a lot of mass to radiate heat out to the universe and ways to conduct heat. We've been doing that at small scale for decades. SpaceX is already operating a fleet of many thousands of satellites that they built and engineered. They'd be well familiar with this challenge.

Once you have solutions, it turns into a cost problem. And if that cost is too high (for whatever arbitrary threshold you use for that) it becomes an optimization problem.

This whole thread reads like a lot of "but ... but ... but ...". It all boils down to people assuming things about what is too much or too hard. And it's all meaningless unless you actually bother to articulate those assumptions. What exactly is too hard here? What would it take to address those issues? What would the cost be? Put some numbers on it. There are also all sorts of assumptions about what is valuable and what isn't. You can't say something is too hard or too costly without making assertions about what is worth paying for and what isn't.

The answers are going to be boring. We need X amounts of giga tons launched to orbit at Y amount of dollars. OK great. What happens if launch cost drops by 1 or 2 orders of magnitude? What happens if the amount of mass needed drops because of some engineering innovation? Massively dropping launch cost is roughly what SpaceX is proposing to do with Star Ship. Is it still "too hard"? You can't have that debate until you put numbers on your assertions.

There's a bit of back of the envelope math involved here but we're roughly talking about a million satellites. In the order of ~2.5 million tonnes of mass (at 2.5 ton per satellite). Tens of thousands of Star Ship launches basically. It's definitely a big project. We're talking about 1-2 order magnitude increase of the scale of operations for SpaceX going from lower hundreds to thousands of launches per year spread over maybe 10-15 years to work up to a million satellites.

I'm more worried about what all that mass is going to do when it burns up in the atmosphere / drops in the oceans. At that scale it's no longer just a drop in the ocean.
by darkwater | 2026-02-04 10:32:00+00:00
No. It just means the harsh reality: what's really soul crushing in outsourced work is having endless meetings to pass down / get back information, having to wait days/weeks/months to get some "deliverable" back on which iterate etc.
Yes, outsourced human workers are totally capable of creative thinking that makes sense, but their incentive will always be throughput over quality, since their bosses usually give closed prices (at least in what I lived personally).

If you are outsourcing to an LLM in this case YOU are still in charge of the creative thought. You can just judge the output and tune the prompts or go deep in more technical details and tradeoffs. You are "just" not writing the actual code anymore, because another layer of abstraction has been added.
by mortarion | 2026-02-04 10:32:47+00:00
This is the actual law (Brottsbalken 16:10a)

https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/sven...

A person who

1. depicts a child in a pornographic image,

2. disseminates, transfers, provides, exhibits, or otherwise makes such an image of a child available to another person,

3. acquires or offers such an image of a child,

4. facilitates contacts between buyers and sellers of such images of children or takes any other similar measure intended to promote trade in such images, or

5. possesses such an image of a child or views such an image to which he or she has gained access

shall be sentenced for a child pornography offense to imprisonment for at most two years.

Then there's Proposition 2009/10:70, which is a clarifying document on how the law should be interpreted:

https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-och-lagar/dokument/prop...

Let me quote (translated):

"To depict a child in a pornographic image entails the production of such an image of a child. An image can be produced in various ways, e.g., by photographing, filming, or drawing a real child. Through various techniques, more or less artificial images can also be created. For criminal liability, it is not required that the image depicts a real child; images of fictitious children are also covered. New productions can also be created by reproducing or manipulating already existing depictions, for example, by editing film sequences together in a different order or by splicing an image of a child’s head onto an image of another child’s body."
by vah7id | 2026-02-04 10:33:18+00:00
This is a side project where I experimented with combining speech activity detection and scene changes to automatically extract short clips from long videos.

The goal was to avoid purely “viral score” models and instead generate clean, context-preserving clips that editors can tweak and find real highlights not just random cuts.

It’s free, no signup, and still very much a work in progress.

Would appreciate BRUTAL feedback from people working with video pipelines or ML-heavy media tools.
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-04 10:33:29+00:00
Hmm yeah but their adversaries did achieve their goal by pushing it away from the mainstream sites. Now we're into this situation of "how much do I trust this vague Russian site with my browsing activity".

At least the addon declares the sites it's for and ignores the rest but still I'm a lot less comfortable with it. It's more something I'd install in a container now, limiting its usefulness :(

In practice I just use archive.today now.
by longtermop | 2026-02-04 10:33:39+00:00
This is a thoughtful architecture. A few critiques and observations from implementing similar patterns:

*On the cryptographic challenge-response (Section 5.2):*

The HMAC-based verification is sound, but the "key in system prompt" vulnerability you acknowledge is the crux problem. Even per-session rotation doesn't fully help - a prompt injection that fires during the session can still exfiltrate. TEE storage is the right direction, but for most deployments that's overkill.

A practical middle ground: don't put the secret in the agent at all. Instead, have the Guardian inject a unique token into the Worker's output schema that the Worker must echo back verbatim. The Worker never "knows" the token - it just passes through whatever the Guardian told it to include. Compromised behavior shows up as missing/modified tokens without the agent having any secret to leak.

*On the cost analysis (Section 7):*

Your 5-15% escalation estimate seems optimistic for adversarial environments. In practice, behavioral fingerprinting produces significant false positives initially. Budget for ~30% escalation during tuning, dropping to 10-15% after pattern database matures.

*On what's missing:*

The architecture assumes synchronous request-response patterns. Modern coding agents do multi-turn tool use with persistent state across calls. Your "ephemeral workers reset state per task" model (Section 6.2) doesn't map cleanly to agentic loops where context accumulates.

Consider: the Worker processes user input → calls a tool → gets tool output → continues reasoning. Where do you reset? Per-turn resets lose necessary context; per-task resets still expose multi-turn attacks within a task.

Would be interested to see this tested against the HackAPrompt corpus as you mention. Happy to collaborate on that.
by vidarh | 2026-02-04 10:34:03+00:00
That is effectively how sub-agents are implemented at least conceptually, and yes, if you build your own coding agent, you can trivially implement sub-agents by having your coding agent recursively spawn itself.

Claude Code and others have some extras, such as the ability for the main agent to put them in the background, spawn them in parallel, and use tool calls to check on the status of them, but "poor mans sub-agents" only requires the ability for the coding agent to run an executable the equivalent of e.g. "claude --print <someprompt" (the --print option is real, and enables headless use; in practise you'd also want --stream-json, set allowed tools, and specify a conversation id so you can resume the sub-agents conversation)
by alkonaut | 2026-02-04 10:35:29+00:00
Well as I said, I consider myself compensated with intellectual challenge/stimulus as part of my compensation. It's _why_ I do the work to begin with. Or to put it another way: it's either done in a way I like, or it's probably not done at all.

I'm replaceable after all. If there is someone who is better and more effective at solving problems in some objectively good way - they should have my job. The only reason I still have it is because it seems this is hard to find. Employers are stuck with people who solve problems in the way they like for varying personal reasons and not the objectively best way of solving problems.

The hard part in keeping employees happy is that you can't just throw more money at them to make them effective. Keeping them stimulated is the difficult part. Some times you must accept that you must perhaps solve a problem that isn't the most critical one to address, or perhaps a bad call business wise, to keep employees happy, or keep them at all. I think a lot of the "Big rewrites" are in this category, for example. Not really a good idea compared to maintenance/improvement, but if the alternative is maintaining the old one _and_ lose the staff who could do that?
by enthus1ast_ | 2026-02-04 10:35:46+00:00
When I wrote nimja's template inheritance.
I thought about it multiple days, until, during a train commute, it made click and I had to get out my notebook and write it, directly in the train.
Then some month later I found out, I had the same bug that jinja2 had fixed years ago. So I felt kinda like a brothers in hard thinking :)
by jen20 | 2026-02-04 10:35:51+00:00
> meanwhile the violent crime rates have not dropped.

The rate of school shootings has dropped from one (before the implementation of recommendations from the Cullen report) to zero (subsequently). Zero in 29 years - success by any measure.

If you choose to look at _other_ types of violent crime, why would banning handguns have any effect?

> Where do we draw the line on which tools are responsible for that instead of the humans using them for it?

You can ban tools which enable bad outcomes without sufficient upside, while also holding the people who use them to account.
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-04 10:35:57+00:00
>You are the only one commenting in bad faith

For disagreeing on the injection of offtopic hypothetical scenarios as an argument derailing the main topic?

>It should not be possible to create nudes of minors via Grok.

I agree with THIS part, I don't agree with the part where the main blame is on the AI, instead of on the people using it. That's not a bad faith argument, it's just My PoV.

If Grok disappears tomorrow, there will be other AIs from other parts of the world outside of US/EU jurisdiction, that will do the same since the cat is out of the bag and the technical barrier to entry is dropping fast.

Do you keep trying to whack-a-mole the AI tools for this, or the humans actually making and distributing fake nudes of real people?
by romperstomper | 2026-02-04 10:36:37+00:00
All modern AI tools tend to put `from __future__ import annotations` line into Python code which isn't required by recent Python versions.

I guess this is because they all are trained on an intermediate code bases when this was required some times (even at that time the real usage was quite rare).

And now this line is parroting everywhere like a junk DNA :)
by pjc50 | 2026-02-04 10:37:21+00:00
Enforcement of anti-CSAM law has been a significant thing for a long time. It's in no way "only now". Even the "free speech" platforms banned it because they knew they would get raided otherwise. There are long standing tools for dealing with it, such as a database of known hashes of material. There's even a little box you can tick in Cloudflare to automatically check outgoing material from your own site against that database - because this is a strict liability offence, and you are liable if other people upload it to you where it can be re-downloaded.

What's new is that X automated the production of obscene or sexualised images by providing grok. This was also done in a way that confronted everyone; it's very different from a black market, this is basically a harassment tool for use against women and girls.