MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mbreese | 2026-02-05 17:10:19+00:00
Just one cycle?

This is cyclical and I see the main axis of contention as centralized vs de-centralized computing.

Mainframes (network) gave way to mini and microcomputers (PCs). PCs gave way to server farms and web-based applications. Private servers and data centers gave way to the Cloud. Edge computing is again a push towards a more decentralized model.

Like all good engineering problems, where data and applications are hosted involve tradeoffs. Priorities change. Technologies change. But oftentimes, what works in one generation doesn't in the next. Part of it is the slow march of progress. But I think some of it is just not wanting to use your parent's technology stack and wanting to build your own.

The cloud vs. on-prem tradeoff is one of flexibility, capacity, maintenance, and capex vs opex.

It's a similar story in application development. At one point, we're navigating text forms on a mainframe, the next it's a GUI local application, followed by Electron or Web applications with remote data. We'll cycle back to local-first data (likely on-phone local models).

When you start to hear about the network being the computer again, you'll know we've started to swing back the other way again.
by dspillett | 2026-02-05 17:11:03+00:00
> people publishing articles that contain these kinds of LLM-ass LLMisms don't mind and don't notice them

That certainly seems to be the case, as demonstrated by the fact that they post them. It is also safe to assume that those who fairly directly use LLM output themselves are not going to be overly bothered by the style being present in posts by others.

> but there are also always clearly real people in the comments who just don't realize that they're responding to a bot

Or perhaps many think they might be responding to someone who has just used an LLM to reword the post. Or translate it from their first language if that is not the common language of the forum in question.

TBH I don't bother (if I don't care enough to make the effort of writing something myself, then I don't care enough to have it written at all) but I try to have a little understanding for those who have problems writing (particularly those not writing in a language they are fluent in).
by BobBagwill | 2026-02-05 17:11:10+00:00
FTFY. I have created a font with a 1BP LLM inside which executes each time the glyph is rendered and figures out the appropriate representation. It will also recursively check the contents of the page and punch up the text.

The LLM contains copies of QEMU, so it can bootstrap itself throughout the enterprise. Naturally, if it finds another LLM, it replaces it. Running an OS and LLM is redundant, so eventually all the machines boot directly into the LLM. It can emulate all the popular desktops, so users won't notice the difference. ;-)
by regenschutz | 2026-02-05 17:11:16+00:00
On the topic of Wikipedia and AI; I would much prefer no article over an AI-translated article. Wikipedia is the best digital translator for highly-technical terms out there.

Since Wikipedia articles in local languages tend to also cite sources in the local language, manually written articles virtually always contain exactly the correct technical term for different subjects.

For instance, If I want to figure out what a "Universal joint" is in Swedish, I just find the Wikipedia page for universal joint and hit the translate button, and voilà, I see that a U-joint is called "Kardanknut" in Swedish.

If I had instead tried to translate with Google Translate, I get "Universalkoppling", which (from what I can see) is a type of screw.

With AI, I worry that entire articles will be directly translated without anyone first making sure that the articles are using the correct local terminology.
by GuB-42 | 2026-02-05 17:11:33+00:00
An interesting example, because your body is literally something you have to hide. That is, it is illegal not to.

Personally, I hide it because that's what society is telling me, especially if children are around, and I have no real reason to go against that. I mean, who wants to see what I do in the bathroom? But should the government want to, I will gladly let them as it will nicely illustrate what I think of them.

There are many things I want to hide more than my body functions. It is a social taboo, not something that has to do with personal safety and security, which is what privacy advocates usually point to. Arguably, it is the opposite problem: something you have to hide, but for personal freedom, you shouldn't have to.
by sgarland | 2026-02-05 17:11:34+00:00
Agreed. Mostly, what has occurred is I now have to field a lot more PRs that weren't well thought out (let's be honest, there was no thought), and - my personal favorite - argue with an AI via a human, where they post an AI's opinion on what I said as a reply. I've started just asking them to post links to documentation validating their claims.
by hyperwindmill | 2026-02-05 17:11:36+00:00
I’ve been working years with customers or partners that struggle with normal data sharing via api/json or couldn’t adapt.
I thought to make a kind of language
To transform data that one could use also in a terminal or pipeline because this way I could just convert stuff from sftps.
Added a few more features like server , libs and extensions.
Hoping it could prove useful for someone else as well!
by ryandrake | 2026-02-05 17:11:40+00:00
It certainly feels that way here in 2026. It seems like I'm spending so much time "verifying" and "authenticating" and clicking somewhere so that the service can send me a code in E-mail. And more and more services are getting super aggressive. Biometrics, 2FA, uploading government ID, uploading face scans... Good grief!

I can imagine being in info-sec is a rough life. When you get breached, they're blamed. So they spend all their time red-teaming and coming up with outlandish ways that their systems can be compromised, and equally outlandish hoops for users to jump through just to use their product. So the product gets all these hoops. And then an attacker gets even more creative, breaches you again, and now your product has horrible UX + you're still getting breached.
by IshKebab | 2026-02-05 17:12:15+00:00
I have had this happen in the past (not very often though), and another saving grave of Windows is you can press ctrl-alt-del, which somehow seems to pause the rest of the system activity, and then see a process list and choose which one to kill.

Linux doesn't have anything like that. KDE seems to have a somewhat functional Ctrl-alt-del menu - I have been able to access it when the rest of the shell gets screwed up (not due to OOM). But inexplicably the only options it has are Sleep, Restart, Shutdown or Log out!! Where is the "emergency shell", or "process manager" or even "run a program"? Ridiculous.

I think Linux GUIs often have this weird fetish with designing as if nothing will ever go wrong, which is clearly not how the real world works. Especially on Linux. I've genuinely heard people claim that most Linux users will never need to use a terminal for example.
by just6979 | 2026-02-05 17:12:37+00:00
"I push very high test coverage on all my projects (85%+)"

Coverage doesn't matter if the tests aren't good. If you're not verifying the tests are actually doing something useful, talking about high coverage is just wanking.

"have the agent create progressively bigger integration tests, until I hit e2e/manual validation."

Same thing. It doesn't matter how big the tests are if they're not testing the right thing. Also why is e2e slashed with manual? Those are orthogonal. E2E tests can [and should] be fully automated for many [most?] systems. And manual validation doesn't have to wait for full e2e.
by 1970-01-01 | 2026-02-05 17:13:13+00:00
Here's the complete list of Census-defined cities in New York that have Walmart locations:

Albany
Amsterdam
Auburn
Batavia
Canandaigua
Corning
Cortland
Fulton
Geneva
Glens Falls
Gloversville
Hornell
Hudson
Ithaca
Kingston
Lockport
Newburgh
Niagara Falls
North Tonawanda
Norwich
Ogdensburg
Olean
Oneida
Oneonta
Oswego
Plattsburgh
Rome
Utica
Watertown

Note: New York is interesting because many populated areas are classified as "towns" or "villages" rather than "cities" by the Census Bureau, so this list excludes those locations. For example, many Long Island and Westchester Walmart locations are in towns or CDPs, not incorporated cities.
by rurp | 2026-02-05 17:13:20+00:00
A whole new toolbar appeared in Outlook on my work computer with nothing but a single button to open a copilot chat window. I tried asking it a few simple questions and it completely failed at all of them. Copilot didn't even know if I was using the web or desktop version of the very app it was embedded in!

Wasting UI space for a useless tool it's just a waste of time, it actively makes it harder to get work done. But I guess the important thing is the number of times that AI button gets clicked is going up on some PMs telemetry dashboard.
by runjake | 2026-02-05 17:13:36+00:00
Gopher was a text-mode, menu-based, hypertext-based precursor to the World Wide Web. It's what we used before the Web and web browsers came along.

Here's a good image of your typical Gopher page: https://img.sysnettechsolutions.com/What-is-Gopher-Nedir-EN....
by jodrellblank | 2026-02-05 17:13:37+00:00
Nobody is "forcing" but billions of dollars on the best psychologists and marketing is doing their hundred year long best to get as close as they can to it.

They (collectively) have thousands of employees, billions of dollars, and tons of things to play with (taste, texture, appearance, mouthfeel, snappiness, salt, sweet, sugar, packaging colours and styles, slogans, marketing, brand associations, shop placement, advertising) all you have is willpower to fight against 4 billion years of evolution telling you that fatty, sugary, energy dense food is important, and a whole pile of biases and weaknesses that you aren't really aware of and they are very aware of and trying to maximally take advantage of.
by momoschili | 2026-02-05 17:13:59+00:00
I started by saying nobody that mattered and specified the largest companies who were involved. I think it's pretty easy to conclude I mean the C-suite in charge of the largest organizations that enabled and perpetuated the fraud. I don't care if a bunch of Bernie Madoff's lackeys went to jail if Bernie Madoff gets off Scott-free. I don't understand why you continue to misrepresent, but I think at this point it is malicious intent.
by einpoklum | 2026-02-05 17:14:11+00:00
There has been a conflict building up within the LibreOffice ecosystem, with Collabora publishing a desktop version of their web-focused LO-based suite, while TDF (The Document Foundation) has decided to hire several developers to work on an on-line and potentially mobile version. So, essentially, both "sides" are taking each other on, even though a plurality of LibreOffice commits are made by Collabora employees. There have also been some "beheading" in the form of the expulsion of a few members of the TDF, particularly the former long-time TDF board-of-directors chairperson who is with Collabora (previously Allotropia) and a couple of others - a highly contentious decision which some argue is contrary to the TDF statutes.

This is a no way a complete or a fair summary of everything that has gone on; and it's been simmering for a number of years now.

Due disclosure: I am a TDF trustee.

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

About Collabora Office for Desktop itself: Personally, I don't see it as being up to par. The main thing going for it is that its ribbon-ish interface is more polished than LibreOffice's. But - I don't like ribbons; and features are missing; and it feels clunkier than LO itself.
by smithkl42 | 2026-02-05 17:14:22+00:00
Am I the only one who is mystified by this whole idea? People aren't CPU's. Good luck getting them to follow the code that you thought you were using to define their roles. On the contrary, what makes any complex system work is flexibility. And yes, if that calls into question the whole regulatory regime some companies (believe they) live under ... well, yes.
by regular_trash | 2026-02-05 17:14:27+00:00
The distinction between rent/own is kind of a false dichotomy. You never truly own your platform - you just "rent" it in a more distributed way that shields you from a single stress point. The tradeoff is that you have to manage more resources to take care of it, but you have much greater flexibility.

I have a feeling AI is going to be similar in the future. Sure, you can "rent" access to LLM's and have agents doing all your code. And in the future, it'll likely be as good as most engineers today. But the tradeoff is that you are effectively renting your labor from a single source instead of having a distributed workforce. I don't know what the long-term ramifications are here, if any, but I thought it was an interesting parallel.
Show HN: Athena – A sovereign, local-first AI agent framework (anti-subscription
by Winston87 | 2026-02-05 17:14:33+00:00
Hi HN,
I spent the last 14 months pairing with my own AI agent for everything from coding to life admin (1,000+ logged sessions).
I got tired of the "Subscription Cycle" (paying $20/mo for a wrapper that forgets context next week), so I built a sovereign framework: "Project Athena".
It is a local-first system that lets you build an AI agent with persistent memory, protocols, and knowledge graphs that live on your machine, not in a siloed cloud account.
*Key Features:*
- *Local-First Memory*: Markdown files + local vector store. You own the data.
- *Protocol Library*: 69+ decision frameworks (e.g. "Law of Ruin") that the agent follows.
- *GraphRAG Integration*: Uses GraphRAG to detect communities/patterns in your notes (for about $0.50/run via Gemini).
- *Trilateral Feedback*: Can cross-check decisions against multiple models (Claude, Gemini, GPT) automatically.
*Why I built it:*
I wanted an "Exocortex" – a second brain that grows with me. Most agents are "Stateless Servants" (they do a task and reset). Athena is stateful. It remembers that I prefer TDD, that I hate Tailwind, and that I'm optimizing for low-latency.
It’s open source (MIT). The repo is a "Reference Implementation" – a starter pack you can fork to build your own personal OS.
Repo and Docs in the link!
by NetOpWibby | 2026-02-05 17:14:47+00:00
> That said, I would love to work for an organization placing importance on this degree of internal cooperation. I suspect I’d thrive there.

I've been looking for such a org my entire career but recently resigned myself[1] to the fact it'll probably not happen unless I come into a situation when I can create it myself.

---

[1] <https://blog.webb.page/WM-081>
by csours | 2026-02-05 17:15:11+00:00
Pertinent comment from an unrelated post:

1. (Big one) For virtually EVERY study, and especially human science studies like psychology, sociology, health; The Headline of the Press Release will imply things that the study does not claim, and especially that the study does not provide evidence for.

...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46890108
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-05 17:15:29+00:00
That’s not age discrimination. Either you can not work and have an income of $0 or get paid what the market is telling you you’re worth.

For context I’m 51. I’ve made the trade off of making less than I hypothetically could if I worked at larger companies/BigTech (been there done that got the t-shirt for almost four years until 2023).
by abeppu | 2026-02-05 17:15:38+00:00
I would love to see an llm system oriented around trying to "jit" out fast/cheap combinations of tool invocations from calls. The case where heartbeat calls Opus, where the transformer model itself doesn't know the time but has access to some tools, should be solvable if Opus has said the equivalent of "it's still night, and to determine this I checked the time using the `date` utility to get the epoch time and if it had responded something greater than $X I would have said it's morning". I.e. the smart model can often tell a less capable framework how it can answer the same question cheaply in the future. But incentives aren't really aligned for that presently.
by rich_sasha | 2026-02-05 17:15:47+00:00
Indeed. And there's risk-reward tradeoff. The debated argument says "have all my data if you want for no reason". The stronger case is, "what do I get in return"?

Often in this discussion it's about a society-wide standard. The benefit to "me" might be that e.g. the police can do their job well, hopefully protecting me from criminals, while sticking to reasonable and trusted privacy controls (e.g. intrusive data collection requires a court warrant, and I trust the courts enough to do a good job). That's very different to uploading all social media conversations logs to NSA because "nothing to hide".

Looping back to this article, it is unclear if there was ever ant good reason to record religion in Amsterdam. Nor would I exclusively blame administrative procedures on the Holocaust - though I'm sure it made matters worse.
by majormajor | 2026-02-05 17:16:06+00:00
> There is a reason why the LLMs keep doing the same linguistic phrases like it's not x, it's y and numbered lists with Emojis etc... and that's because people have been doing that forever.

They've been doing some of these patterns for a while in certain places.

We spent the first couple decades of the 2000s to train ever "business leader" to speak LinkedIn/PowerPoint-ese. But a lot of people laughed at it when it popped up outside of LinkedIn.

But the people training the models thought certain "thought leader" styles were good so they have now pushed it much further and wider than ever before.
by Antibabelic | 2026-02-05 17:16:07+00:00
This is very much false, Primary sources only play a supporting role on Wikipedia, but they are definitely allowed. For example, if you're writing an article on Apple you can cite Apple for what Wikipedia calls "uncontroversial self-description". However, before that, you have to establish the notability of Apple through reliable secondary independent sources. The contents and focus of articles is also dictated by secondary sources. For example, if you take a controversial subject like Urbit, the article would have to reflect the priorities of (mostly critical) journalistic pieces on Urbit. You can cite its documentation for a technical description (that would be "uncontroversial self-description", as I mentioned before), but this would have to be a small part of the article, because it wouldn't reflect the focus of secondary sources.
by sgarland | 2026-02-05 17:16:08+00:00
I ran 3x R620s 24/7/365 in my homelab for ~6 years (well, other than when I moved, or shut one down for a clean-and-inspect, or lost power in excess of what my UPS could handle... thanks, Texas). The only things that failed during that time were a couple of sticks of RAM, and a PSU.
by nilkn | 2026-02-05 17:16:54+00:00
It really isn't. Nobody's migrating their payroll vendor to some vibecoded app. I agree with Jensen Huang that this reaction doesn't make sense at all.

My own prediction is that reliable vibecoding will be additive. It's a new capability that will help high-agency people do things faster or answer questions they couldn't easily answer before. Need to spin up a big custom Monte Carlo calculation and want a simple UI to control and configure it? You can just throw that together now. Need to get a draft budget allocation for a big set of projects calibrated against a set of conflicting constraints? Let an agent crank at it for a couple hours, then review and refine manually -- or just toss it out if you don't like it.

But building, running, and maintaining production-grade services or apps that the company relies on for its basic functioning? You're not just paying the SaaS vendor for having built the product -- you're paying them to maintain it, run it, and respond to issues promptly. You're also paying them to keep building it and improving it over time. To be clear, I think there are certainly cases where the rise of "coding AGI" is going to lead companies to build some services internally versus buying from a vendor, but I predict these will be highly custom and bespoke services that are too tailored for a specific corporation to make sense for a third-party vendor to try to sell.
by ultrarunner | 2026-02-05 17:17:10+00:00
Eh, maybe I didn't describe it well. We're talking 1 lane wide, maybe 80 ft long. Dually tire path through the patch. Indented, with the displaced material ridged up along the side, diagonal across the lane. It yanks my motorcycle tire sideways if I hit it, and it's a decent bump in a car. If that's… how you compact it, we need new standards.
by sanderjd | 2026-02-05 17:17:18+00:00
This sounds medium to high complexity to me. You need to do all those things, and also have multiple people who know how to do them, and also make sure that you don't lose all the people who know how to do them, and have one of those people on call to be able to troubleshoot and fix things if they go wrong, and have processes around all that. (At least if you are running in production with real customers depending on you, you should have all those things.)

With a managed solution, all of that is amortized into your monthly payment, and you're sharing the cost of it across all the customers of the provider of the managed offering.

Personally, I would rather focus on things that are in or at least closer to the core competency of our business, and hire out this kind of thing.
by SyneRyder | 2026-02-05 17:19:01+00:00
For Gopher, I used to use a little terminal browser called Phetch:

https://github.com/xvxx/phetch

It's written in Golang and was last updated in 2022. There's a GIF on the Github page to give a feel of what Phetch & browsing Gopher in the terminal is like. I mostly use the Lagrange GUI client though, which is fantastic.

Gopher still exists. If you're starting out, you can get your own "gopherhole" and Unix shell account at https://sdf.org/ It's a long time since I updated mine, but I'm at gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/syneryder/
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-02-05 17:20:03+00:00
> The other challenge was I had a lot of specific information that was unsafe to share generally (links to the malware, URLs, how the payload worked) and I needed help generalizing it so it could be both safe and easily understood by others.

What risk would there be to sharing it? Like, sure, s/http/hXXp/g like you did in your comment upthread to prevent people accidentally loading/clicking anything, but I'm not immediately seeing the risk after that