MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by subhobroto | 2026-02-01 18:04:59+00:00
> but if you don't put the work to understand things you'll always be behind people that know at least with a bird eye view what's happening.

Depends. You might end up going quite far without even opening up the hood of a car even when you drive the car everyday and depend on it for your livelihood.

If you're the kind that likes to argue for a good laugh, you might say "well, I don't need to know how my car works as long as the engineer who designed it does or the mechanic who fixes it does" - and this is accurate but it's also accurate not everyone ended up being either the engineer or the mechanic. It's also untrue that if it turned out it would be extremely valuable to you to actually learn how the car worked, you wouldn't put in the effort to do so and be very successful at it.

All this talk about "you should learn something deeply so you can bank on it when you will need it" seems to be a bit of a hoarding disorder.

Given the right materials, support and direction, most smart and motivated people can learn how to get competent at something that they had no clue about in the past.

When it comes to smart and motivated people, the best drop out of education because they find it unproductive and pedantic.
by nonnontrivial | 2026-02-01 18:05:15+00:00
Location: Buffalo, NY

Remote: Yes or Hybrid

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Linux, containerization, Python, PlantUML

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HzlPlQj-tJ2CxAJ7gQS5Habg...

Email: nonnontrivial@gmail.com

SWE with 10 years experience building. Comfortable with ambiguity/uncertainty.
by WalterBright | 2026-02-01 18:05:20+00:00
> I hated the high-pressure midterms/finals of my undergrad

The pressure was what got me to do the necessary work. Auditing classes never worked for me.

> I do some spaced-repetition questions of important topics and give students a study sheet of what to know for the quiz.

Isn't that what the lectures and homework are for?
by mmooss | 2026-02-01 18:05:53+00:00
I think that's a great approach. I've thought about how to handle these issues and wonder how you handle several issues that come to mind:

Competing with LLM software users, 'honest' students would seem strongly incentivized to use LLMs themeselves. Even if you don't grade on a curve, honest students will get worse grades which will look worse to graduate schools, grant and scholarship committees, etc., in addition to the strong emotional component that everyone feels seeing an A or C. You could give deserving 'honest' work an A but then all LLM users will get A's with ease. It seems like you need two scales, and how do you know who to put on which scale?

And how do students collaborate on group projects? Again, it seems you have two different tracks of education, and they can't really work together. Edit: How do class discussions play out with these two tracks?

Also, manually doing things that machines do much better has value but also takes valuable time from learning more advanced skills that machines can't handle, and from learning how to use the machines as tools. I can see learning manual statistics calculations, to understand them fundamentally, but at a certain point it's much better to learn R and use a stats package. Are the 'honest' students being shortchanged?
by bruce511 | 2026-02-01 18:06:06+00:00
No, I'm saying that whether a project takes contributions or not has nothing to do with open source.

Yes, lots of projects big and small accept contributions. And lots do not. You might think that's good or bad, but it's unrelated to open source.

You are free to submit patches to whatever fork you prefer. If oracle don't suit you then submit somewhere else.

They. Owe. You. Nothing.
by aschuth | 2026-02-01 18:06:08+00:00
Fair concern. Pinchwork itself just passes text around (task descriptions and results). No keys are shared.

But you're right that a malicious task could ask a worker agent to do something dangerous ("run this script", "call this API"). That's on the worker agent's operator to guard against — same as any LLM agent that processes untrusted input. Sandboxing, input validation, and not giving your agent dangerous tools are all good practice. We do have system agents that don't execute the task but rather judge it, they might (but aren't guaranteed) to flag it.

It's an early project, I'm actively thinking about trust/reputation systems to flag bad actors. Curious if you have ideas I could implement!
by arauhala | 2026-02-01 18:06:32+00:00
One of the key techniques is snapshotting the LLM (or any HTTP) request. This means that if the inputs won't change, the LLM will not be called. This will also snapshot /cache LLM verifications steps.

This doesn't only saves costs, but it's main goal was to force determinism and save time. Limited changes may need only the new/changed tests to be rerun with LLM. CI typically don't have LLM API keys and only rerun against snapshots with zero costs and delays

All LLM operations tend to be notoriously slow, and at least on our side: we are often more interested of how our code interacts with the LLM. Having the LLM being fully snapshopshotted does iterating the code delightfully fast.

If you want do sampling, this can be implemented in the test code. Booktest is a bit like pytest in the sense, that the actual testing logic heavylifting is left for the the developer. Lot of LLM test suites are more opinionated, but also more intrusive in that sense
Show HN: I analyzed 6 years of Hacker News data and here's what I found
by Tusharmagar | 2026-02-01 18:07:25+00:00
I built this for a hackathon after analyzing Hacker News data from 2020–2025, and some of the patterns around front-page posts were more interesting than I expected, so I’m sharing it here.

A couple of notable data points: the highest-upvoted post in this period was about Sam Altman being fired from OpenAI (5,000+ upvotes), and weekends turned out to be a surprisingly good time to post!

Following my own advice for this post. let’s see how it goes xD
by seanhunter | 2026-02-01 18:08:16+00:00
No, but I can promise to my current employer that me leaving my job won’t be a critical problem.

It’s less of an issue in the case of a normal job than in an open source project where often the commitment of particular founding individuals to the long-term future of the project is a big part of people’s decision to use or not use that tech in their solutions. Here, given that “Trusted computing” can potentially lock you out of devices you have bought, it’s important for people to be able to judge the risk of getting “legal ransomware”d if the trusted computing base ends up depending on a proprietary component that they can’t back out of.

That said, there is absolutely zero chance that I use this (systemd is already enough Poettering software for me in this lifetime) so I’m not personally affected either way.
by danaris | 2026-02-01 18:08:48+00:00
I think that even if inference is "not really that expensive", it's not free.

I think that Microsoft will not be willing to operate Copilot for free in perpetuity.

I think that there has not yet been any meaningful large-scale study showing that it improves performance overall, and there have been some studies showing that it does the opposite, despite individuals' feeling that it helps them.

I think that a lot of the hype around AI is that it is going to get better, and if it becomes prohibitively expensive for it to do that (ie, training), and there's no proof that it's helping, and keeping the subscriptions going is a constant money drain, and there's no more drumbeat of "everything must become AI immediately and forever", more and more institutions are going to start dropping it.

I think that if the only programmers who are using LLMs to aid their coding are hobbyists, independent contractors, or in small shops where they get to fully dictate their own setups, that's a small enough segment of the programming market that we can say it won't help students to learn that way, because they won't be allowed to code that way in a "real job".
by INTPenis | 2026-02-01 18:09:10+00:00
I started listening to audiobooks a few years ago, even re-listened to a lot of classics I read, but in audio format. And at some point when I was ready to move to a new apartment I realized my bookshelves were just a burden. They were never used, and only gathered dust.

So I donated all my books.

I'm not saying I've learned everything, but I am senior now so all those old computer books are just collecting dust. Combined with the fact that I use search engines for everything I need to know.

I realize that if the internet goes out, I'm fucked, but I don't care.
by lumost | 2026-02-01 18:09:30+00:00
No known mechanism, but cross species checks would imply that the schedule was evolved and has some control mechanism.

Species that evolved before the Devonian period tend not to age and instead grow through their entire lives. There is no mechanistic understanding for the wild variation in species lifespans.

So the natural question in these studies is what would happen if we simply told the muscles not to age this way. It’s plausible that this aging schedule evolved due to other factors independent of the biological constraints. It’s also plausible that evolution removed some other important components for longer lived stem cells.
by netsharc | 2026-02-01 18:10:15+00:00
I'm also for education for AI awareness. A big point on teaching kids about AI should also be a lot about how unreliable they can be.

I had a discussion with a recruiter on Friday, and I said I guess the issue with AI vs human is, if you give a human developer who is new to your company tasks, the first few times you'll check their work carefully to make sure the quality is good. After a while you can trust they'll do a good job and be more relaxed. With AI, you can never be sure at any time. Of course a human can also misunderstand the task and hallucinate, but perhaps discussing the issue and the fix before they start coding can alleviate that. You can discuss with an AI as much as you want, but to me, not checking the output would be an insane move...

To return to the point, yeah, people will use AI anyway, so why not teach them about the risks. Also LLMs feel like Concorde: it'll get you to where you want to go very quickly, but at tremendous environmental cost (also it's very costly to the wallet, although the companies are now partially subsidizing your use with the hopes of getting you addicted)..
by positron26 | 2026-02-01 18:10:52+00:00
> I don't think anyone is confused about American OSS and American corporations run amok...

You literally just lumped it all together, exactly the fallacy I'm voicing my concern about.

> foreign-owned proprietary

OSS is global. "Foreign owned" is relative. If Americans reject "European" open source, it would make zero sense.

> the US model

What even is "the US model?" The things that are being described as "American" or "European" here are not inherently national.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-01 18:12:58+00:00
Maybe China should not have blocked rare earth exports to the EU [0], Japan [1], India [2], and other countries in addition to the US in 2025.

This is why ExChina is the name-of-the-game in the REE space, becuase this risk has been something most of us in the space recognized would occur since 2011 during the Senkaku-Diaoyu standoff, and finally got backing during the Biden admin.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/eu-firms-brace-more-shut...

[1] - https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-rare-earth-campaign-aga...

[2] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-taking-steps-mitig...
by trueismywork | 2026-02-01 18:13:00+00:00
Depends on the market size. If the market is 100M, then a 500k profit effectively means your product will be inferior and poorly placed to evolve. If the market is 500k, then by all means go ahead. Startup are designed with explicit purpose of designing a product to capture that market without having to worry about the revenue during the time the product is being made. But of course capture does mean capture quickly because of the first mover advantage.
by gowld | 2026-02-01 18:13:12+00:00
Zuckerberg.

At first I thought it was a naming coincidence, but looking at the zuckerman avatar and the author avatar, I'm unsure if it was intentional:

https://github.com/zuckermanai

https://github.com/dvir-daniel

https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/258404280?s=200&v=4

The transparency glitch in GitHub makes the avatar look either robot or human depending on whether the background is white or black. I don't know if that's intentional, but it's amazing.
by SparkyMcUnicorn | 2026-02-01 18:14:55+00:00
I've done this a few different ways.

I started with a docker container that connected to both the VPN provider and tailscale. Now OPNSense is handing a few connections to the VPN provider at a couple locations around the world, and enforcing external traffic to be routed to the VPN connections via VLAN tags (untagged has direct internet access).

Using the VPN provider can either be adding a VLAN tag to a machine/container or connecting to a "vpn-{location}" tailscale exit node.
by nozzlegear | 2026-02-01 18:15:08+00:00
> How does that matter?

Keeping in mind the context of the overall thread we're in, where the OP said this:

> Apple's commitment to privacy and security is really cool to see. It's also an amazing strategic play that they are uniquely in the position to take advantage of. Google and Meta can't commit to privacy because they need to show you ads, whereas Apple feels more like a hardware company to me.

And then further down somebody replies with this:

> Apple is an ad company now though

The implication was that, because Apple sells ads now, they must be tracking all of your personal data in the same way that Google does. And then that train of thought was further continued with the implication that, because Apple receives "20% of its profits from ads and Google" (lumping them both together), Apple ergo is receiving 20% of its profits through tracking all of your personal data. But it's not Apple tracking all of your personal data, it's Google tracking it, and they would track it whether they're the default search engine on iOS or not.

The distinction matters to me, and it's why I buy Apple products but not Google products.
by mmooss | 2026-02-01 18:16:17+00:00
> immigrants are more likely to be healthier than the average person in their country.

That makes sense to me. Unhealthy people are less likely to make the (often) physically gruelling trip and take on the potentially gruelling lifestyle, and all the uncertainty. The same, I expect, applies to motivation - people thoughtlessly call immigrants 'lazy', but the lazy people don't give up their familiar lives and move - many crossing jungles and risking criminals - someplace where they have nothing, not even legal status, often not even the language, and start from scratch - with the goal that after a lifetime of hard work, your children will be comfortable.
by oblio | 2026-02-01 18:16:27+00:00
Yeah, like Windows in 2026 is better than Windows in 2010, Gmail in 2026 is better than Gmail in 2010, the average website in 2026 is better than in 2015, Uber is better in 2026 than in 2015, etc.

Plenty of tech becomes exploitative (or more exploitative).

I don't know if you noticed but 80% of LLM improvements are actually procedural now: it's the software around them improving, not the core LLMs.

Plus LLMs have huge potential for being exploitative. 10x what Google Search could do for ads.
by js8 | 2026-02-01 18:18:45+00:00
I think we can make an analogy with our own brains, which have evolutionary older parts (limbic system) and evolutionary younger parts (neocortex). Now AI, I think it will be our new neocortex, another layer to our brain. And you can see limbic system didn't "outsource" thinking to neocortex - it's still doing it; but it can take (mostly good) advice from it.

Applying this analogy to human relationships - neocortex allowed us to be more social. Social communication with limbic system was mostly "you smell like a member of our species and I want to have sex with you". So having neocortex expanded our social skills to having friends etc.

I think AI will have a similar effect. It will allow us to individually communicate with large amount of other people (millions). But it will be a different relationship than what we today call "personal communication", face to face, driven by our neocortex. It will be as incomprehensible for our neocortex as our language is incomprehensible for the limbic system.
by mullingitover | 2026-02-01 18:19:42+00:00
> the food supply was much better

Maybe, except for the tens of thousands who were eating US-supplied lead.

> The third, and perhaps most disastrous of our failures, was the decision to give stature and support to one of the most bloody and repressive dictatorships in the long history of Latin American repression. Fulgencio Batista murdered 20,000 Cubans in seven years - a greater proportion of the Cuban population than the proportion of Americans who died in both World Wars, and he turned Democratic Cuba into a complete police state - destroying every individual liberty.

- Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy at Democratic Dinner, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 6, 1960 [1]

The Cubans absolutely deserve a representative government, and the US will never lift a finger to give it to them. Not then, and as we can see demonstrated in Venezuela today (the US regime is happy to prop up Maduro's cohort and doesn't care about conducting fair elections), not now. The US would prefer a ruthless dictatorship ruling Cuba that sends all the country's wealth to the US over a representative government that doesn't.

[1] https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-k...
by subhobroto | 2026-02-01 18:19:50+00:00
> At some level, this is a problem of unmotivated students and college mostly being just for signaling as opposed to real education.

I think this is mostly accurate. Schools have been able to say "We will test your memory on 3 specific Shakespeares, samples from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, etc" - the students who were able to perform on these with some creative dance, violin, piano or cello thrown in had very good chances at a scholarship from an elite college.

This has been working extremely well except now you have AI agents that can do the same at a fraction of the cost.

There will be a lot of arguments, handwringing and excuse making as students go through the flywheel already in motion with the current approach.

However, my bet is it's going to be apparent that this approach no longer works for a large population. It never really did but there were inefficiencies in the market that kept this game going for a while. For one, college has become extremely expensive. Second, globalization has made it pretty hard for someone paying tuition in the U.S. to compete against someone getting a similar education in Asia when they get paid the same salary. Big companies have been able to enjoy this arbitrage for a long time.

> Maybe this institution is outdated. Surely there is a cheaper and more time efficient way to ranking students for companies

Now that everyone has access to labor cheaper than the cheapest English speaking country in the world, humanity will be forced to adapt, forcing us to rethink what has seemed to work in the past
by Refreeze5224 | 2026-02-01 18:20:27+00:00
Like the OP, you misunderstand the entire point of the Luddites. Breaking the machines was not an end, it was the tactical means to help illustrate their broader point of how the owning class can arbitrarily ruin their entire lives and livelihoods with absolutely zero recourse or consultation with the impacted people. This is a defining feature of capitalism, and that was their issue.

Your strawman about spinning and digging with no tools is just that, and is irrelevant to the core issue of capitalism.
by borroka | 2026-02-01 18:20:49+00:00
"Firstly, when you ask a friend or colleague you're asking a favour that you know will take them some time and effort. So you save it for the important stuff, and the rest of the time you keep putting in the effort yourself. With an LLM it's much easier to lean on the assistance more frequently."

- I find this a point in favor of LLM and not a flaw. It is a philosophical stance, one for which what does not require effort or time is intrinsically not valuable (see using GLP peptides vs sucking it up for losing weight). Sure, it requires effort and dedication to clean your house, but given the means (money), wouldn't you prefer to have someone else clean your place?

"Secondly, I think when a friend is giving advice the responses are more likely to be advice"

- You can ask an LLM for advice instead of writing directly and without further reflection on the writing provided by the model.
Here I find parallels with therapy, which in its modern version, does not provide answers, but questions, means of investigation, and tools to better deal with the problems of our lives.

But if you ask people who go to therapy, the vast majority of them would much prefer to receive direct guidance (“Do this/don't do that”).

In the cases in which I wrote a message or email on behalf of someone else, I was asked to do it: can you write it for me, please? I even had to write recommendation letters for myself--I was asked to do that by my PhD supervisor.
by benjaminfh | 2026-02-01 18:21:11+00:00
Really awesome and thoughtful thing you've built - bravo!

I'm so aligned on your take on context engineering / context management. I found the default linear flow of conversation turns really frustrating and limiting. In fact, I still do. Sometimes you know upfront that the next thing you're to do will flood/poison the nicely crafted context you've built up... other times you realise after the fact. In both cases, you didn't have that many alternatives but to press on... Trees are the answer for sure.

I actually spent most of Dec building something with the same philosphy for my own use (aka me as the agent) when doing research and ideation with LLMs. Frustrated by most of the same limitations - want to build context to a good place then preserve/reuse it over and over, fire off side quests etc, bring back only the good stuff. Be able to traverse the tree forwards and back to understand how I got to a place...

Anyway, you've definitely built the more valuable incarnation of this - great work. I'm glad I peeled back the surface of the moltbot hysteria to learn about Pi.
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-01 18:21:20+00:00
> Any idea why ethernet stagnated in terms of speed? There was a time it was so much faster compared to usb. Now even wifi seems to be faster.

Practically spoken, a lot of the transfer speed advertised by wifi is marketing hogwash barely backed by reality, especially in congested environments.

> Sure one can buy nice ethernet cards and cables, but the reality is that if you grab a random laptop/desktop from best buy and a cable, you are looking at best at a 2.5Gb/s speed.

For both laptops and desktops, PCI lanes. Intel doesn't provide many lanes, so manufacturers don't want to waste valuable lanes permanently for capabilities most people don't ever need.

For laptops in particular, power draw. The faster you push copper, the more power you need. And laptops have even less PCIe lanes available to waste.

For desktops, it's a question of market demand. Again - most applications don't need ultra high transfer rate, most household connectivity is DSL and (G)PON so 1 GBit/s is enough to max out the uplink. And those few users that do need higher transfer rates can always install a PCIe card, especially as there is a multitude of different options to provide high bandwidth connectivity.
by eesmith | 2026-02-01 18:21:32+00:00
Except, Yale is a private university, not public, while very few universities in the UK are private (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Private_universities_... lists 8 and https://studying-in-uk.org/private-universities-in-uk/ lists 11) so 2b3a51 almost certainly means public college teaching experience in the UK.