MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by D-Machine | 2026-02-06 02:13:31+00:00
To make some vague claims explicit here, for interested readers:

> "We quantify the proportion of the ground-truth book that appears in a production LLM’s generated text using a block-based, greedy approximation of longest common substring (nv-recall, Equation 7). This metric only counts sufficiently long, contiguous spans of near-verbatim text, for which we can conservatively claim extraction of training data (Section 3.3). We extract nearly all of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone from jailbroken Claude 3.7 Sonnet (BoN N = 258, nv-recall = 95.8%). GPT-4.1 requires more jailbreaking attempts (N = 5179) [...]"

So, yes, it is not "literally verbatim" (~96% verbatim), and there is indeed A LOT (hundreds or thousands of prompting attempts) to make this happen.

I leave it up to the reader to judge how much this weakens the more basic claims of the form "LLMs have nearly perfectly memorized some of their source / training materials".

I am imagining a grueling interrogation that "cracks" a witness, so he reveals perfect details of the crime scene that couldn't possibly have been known to anyone that wasn't there, and then a lawyer attempting the defense: "but look at how exhausting and unfair this interrogation was--of course such incredible detail was extracted from my innocent client!"
by jmyeet | 2026-02-06 02:13:57+00:00
I started using Chrome at version 2 I think. It still had the 3D logo. It was such a breath of fresh air and the big innovation was running one process per tab. Firefox existed but the entire browser could (and did) hang. And IE was... well, IE.

I did have a relatively early beef with Chrome though, whcih was I couldn't completely opt out of Flash. As in, I didn't even want it installed. This turned out to be an issue because Flash turned out to be one of the earliest vectors for so-called "zombie cookies".

Fingerprinting in general has been a longstanding problem and has become more and more advanced.

Add to this that Google is, first and foremost, an advertising business and they've become increasingly hostile to ad-bloccking tech for obvious reasons.

Basically what I'm getting at is something I couldn't have imagined a decade ago where I think I really have go switch away from Chrome to something that takes privacy and security seriously so that LinkedIn can't do things like this. And I increasingly don't trust Google to do that.

I actually have more trust in Apple because they have historically been user-focused eg blocking Meta's third party cookies. But obviously Safari isn't an option because it's not cross-platform.

I'm not sure I trust the current state of Mozilla. What's the alternative? Brave? Is Opera still a thing? I honestly don't know.

What I really want is a cross-platform browser written in Rust that black-holes ads out of the box. Why Rust? Memory safety. I simply don't trust a large C/C++ code to never have buffer overruns. Memory safety has become too important.

I don't want my browser to provide information on what extensions I'm using to a site and that shouldn't be a thing I have to ask for or turn on in any way.
by docmars | 2026-02-06 02:14:19+00:00
It's funny you say this because this is considered the "old" way to use LLMs since agents can write code so well, but I don't think enough people realize how much more efficient your preferred approach is compared to the era before LLMs were widely available at all.

Gone are the days of hopeless Googling where 20 minutes of research becomes 3 hours with the possibility of having zero solutions. The sheer efficiency of having reliable, immediate answers is a tremendous improvement, even if you're choosing to write everything by hand using it as a reference.
by chrysoprace | 2026-02-06 02:14:31+00:00
I think for a lot of people the turn off is the constant churn and the hype cycle. For a lot of people, they just want to get things done and not have to constantly keep on top of what's new or SOTA. Are we still using MCPs or are we using Skills now? Not long ago you had to know MCP or you'd be left behind and you definitely need to know MCP UI or you'll be left behind. I think. It just becomes really tiring, especially with all the FUD.

I'm embracing LLMs but I think I've had to just pick a happy medium and stick with Claude Code with MCPs until somebody figures out a legitimate way to use the Claude subscription with open source tools like OpenCode, then I'll move over to that. Or if a company provides a model that's as good value that can be used with OpenCode.
by conductr | 2026-02-06 02:15:37+00:00
Believe you're talking about conserving cash through reduced taxes since this guy was against paying taxes.

However, spending a premium on cloud services over what you could with an on-prem capital investment does not help your cash position.

His tenant of frugality would have conflicted, especially since the cloud premium can easily exceed the tax rate - that is to say, paying taxes would have been cheaper

Section in your linked article about frugality
https://www.colinkeeley.com/blog/john-malone-operating-manua...

In any case, spending on this either opex or capex doesn't help you gain or lose marketshare. Conserving cash can help, so you'd want to employ the lower cost option regardless of what line of the financial statement it hits - it's not going to be cloud if you follow that thought through

If cost was equal then opex gives a tax advantage, most companies are valued on EBITDA so still may not be their priority to optimize tax spend - a lot of other methods to avoid taxes. But the environment I've operated in I choose to capex because it conserves cash (is cheaper) and improves EBITDA optics (is excluded)
by helterskelter | 2026-02-06 02:15:38+00:00
It's pretty clear that Linux, or even BSD, is the way forward. My concern at this point is what the picture will look like with embargoes around software development and FOSS -- we saw this with the Russian devs contributing to Linux being cut off a few years back, though it's possible that LLM's will make this point moot very shortly.
by sarchertech | 2026-02-06 02:16:01+00:00
You wouldn’t pay a human to write 100k LOC. Or at least you shouldn’t. You’d pay a human to write a working useful compiler that isn’t riddled with copyright issues.

If you didn’t care about copying code, usefulness, or correctness you could probably get a human to whip you up a C compiler for a lot less than $20k.
by alexhans | 2026-02-06 02:16:46+00:00
Yeah, the idea is clear. You're "integrating early" and "failing fast" and once you've understood enough about the problem you can design and optimize the right custom tool to make it more accurate, consistent, cost-effective.

To be fair, it's a micro approach of the way to approach projects rapidly where instead of trying to design too much upfront, identify what are the real value producing goals, the risks in the middle that you can foresee and get hands on in a time-boxed manner to de-risk the individual points or understand what's not possible. Then you can actually come up with the right explanations for the design.
by munificent | 2026-02-06 02:17:07+00:00
I'm not sure what you mean by "coincidence" or "accident" here.

C is a pretty OK language for writing an OS in the 70s. UNIX got popular for reasons I think largely orthogonal to being written in C. UNIX was one of the first operating systems that was widely licensed to universities. Students were obliged to learn C to work with it.

If the Macintosh OS had come out first and taken over the world, we'd probably all be programming in Object Pascal.

When everyone wanted to program for the web, we all learned JavaScript regardless of its merits or lack thereof.

I don't think there's much very interesting about C beyond the fact that it rode a platform's coattails to popularity. If there is something interesting about it that I'm missing, I'd definitely like to know.
by replwoacause | 2026-02-06 02:17:17+00:00
Same experience here. I started our devoutly using Claude but ran into some many limits that I switched back to ChatGPT and it's been night and day. I haven't even really been able to play with the Opus model on my Pro plan because it devours usage and then blocks me for X hours until it resets, costing me a work day. OpenAI has never done that to me. In fact, Codex just churned away for 2 hours on a task and I'm still using it without hitting a limit. I used to love using Claude but the limits are too prohibitive.
by sifar | 2026-02-06 02:17:18+00:00
Gell-Mann Amnesia strikes again. It feels strange - almost as if Asimov hated Orwell. So many personal attacks.

And I say this as fan of Foundation/Robot series.

Despite quoting below from Fromm's afterword, how does Asimov miss it ?
"Books like Orwell's are powerful warnings, and it would be most unfortunate if the reader smugly interpreted 1984 as another description of Stalinist barbarism, and if he does not see that it means us, too."

" Orwell was unable to conceive of computers or robots, or he would have placed everyone under non-human surveillance. Our own computers to some extent do this in the IRS, in credit files, and so on, but that does not
take us towards 1984, except in fevered imaginations. "

Now apply this to many of today's experts/billionaires/technical celebrities whose words matter but are in reality quite myopic.
Show HN: RMTimer a Redmine Desktop Client
by nabenjamin | 2026-02-06 02:17:25+00:00
Hi HN, I’m the creator of RMTimer,

I'm a solo developer and a frequent Redmine user. I always found it cumbersome to track time on tasks - constantly switching to the browser, finding the issue, and opening the time log form disrupted my flow.
So, I built RM Timer, a minimalist desktop application for Windows/macOS/Linux. Its main goal is to make time logging a one-click action.

What it does:
• Connects directly to your Redmine instance (API key).
• Lists your assigned issues in a simple, fast interface.
• Start/stop timer with a single click per issue.
• Logs time directly to the Redmine issue when you stop the timer.
• Minimizes to system tray.

Why I'm sharing it here: I first made it for myself, but I thought other Redmine users might find it useful. I'm also looking for honest feedback to improve it.

Try it out / Get it:
◇ If you try it, what's one thing I should absolutely add or fix?
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-02-06 02:17:27+00:00
Sorry, we can't support self-builds (or distro builds).

If you want to check it out, there are free/demo builds at https://ardour.org/download

Bug tracker is at https://tracker.ardour.org/ (sorry that it requires a separate login, but hey, that's Mantis for you)

ps. if you downvoted this, you're welcome to offer support for the full 80+ external libraries in our build stack. Reach out here or at discourse.ardour.org ...
by D-Machine | 2026-02-06 02:17:39+00:00
Note "near-verbatim" here is:

> "We quantify the proportion of the ground-truth book that appears in a production LLM’s generated text using a block-based, greedy approximation of longest common substring (nv-recall, Equation 7). This metric only counts sufficiently long, contiguous spans of near-verbatim text, for which we can conservatively claim extraction of training data (Section 3.3). We extract nearly all of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone from jailbroken Claude 3.7 Sonnet (BoN N = 258, nv-recall = 95.8%). GPT-4.1 requires more jailbreaking attempts (N = 5179) and refuses to continue after reaching the end of the first chapter; the generated text has nv-recall = 4.0% with the full book. We extract substantial proportions of the book from Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 3 (76.8% and 70.3%, respectively), and notably do not need to jailbreak them to do so (N = 0)."

if you want to quantify the "near" here.
by try_the_bass | 2026-02-06 02:18:10+00:00
> Okay: Just how long would you permit someone to follow you around with a camera, recording everything you do?

Probably not long. I might also make it clear I'm not a fan, but at the end of the day, they're generally within their rights to record me in public. Sucks, but not much I can do.

> The thing about a stranger watching you in public is that eventually you go somewhere else, and they can't watch you anymore. A surveillance organization like Flock, however, is waiting for you wherever you go. In this sense they're much more like a stalker following you around than a stranger who happens to see you.

I mean, I don't buy this argument, because a stranger can legally follow me to all the same places where Flock is present. I mean, surely if I get into a car and drive away, they can get into a car and follow me. So long as we're both in public roads, they're within their rights to do so?

Granted, if they keep it up long enough, I can probably file charges for stalking. Perhaps the same can be done against Flock? Hell, this would even be a situation where Flock would be useful: proving that someone was following me around all day, thus supporting my bid for a restraining order or something.

> This analogy bears out in practice: Cops have used Flock data to stalk their exes.¹

Indeed, and this is where oversight, strict rules around usage and retention, and effective penalties for violations are needed.

Banning Flock is not the only solution! I mean, I would be in favor of banning Flock specifically (because they've demonstrated a willingness to act in bad faith), but I would not support a ban of ALPRs entirely. They do provide benefits, and coupled with the right rules, can be a net benefit to society.
by wvenable | 2026-02-06 02:18:26+00:00
> The point of having engineers is to build product and make you money.

You're making the assumption that all software development is for software products. My work supports a non-software industry. Every minute that I save of user's time translates into more time they can use to make money.

> There's no point in saving $20K on an SaaS app if you use $100K in developer time and miss out on $1M of potential revenue.

If the SaaS app is $20K, I would agree. Probably the cheapest we have is $30K per year, most are an order of magnitude more than that. And it doesn't take a $100K of developer time to replace some of them.

> Haaaa no, that's 100% not how that works. If you buy a SaaS product, the company made that product. They have documentation. They have training. You can hire people who have worked on that system before. If it goes down, they get paged.

Haaaa no, that's 100% not how that works. You buy a SaaS product then you pay them to install, configure, customize it. That can a small amount or a large amount. That can take a small amount of time or years. You can maybe hire people who have worked on that system, but probably not, and it's mostly bespoke knowledge that only a small amount of people have. They aren't cheap. But you might be entirely dependent on the vendor.

If it goes down, you have to put in a support ticket. You wait. Everyone is still on your case but you can't do anything about that. If you have access, sometimes you can fix it yourself -- and you do -- because waiting for support to do it properly is awful. If it's screwed data, good luck, they're not good at fixing that. Anytime anyone has any questions? Another support ticket. None of these people work for free; expensive support contracts. The level of support you get is completely divorced from that cost. You can't pay less if the support is terrible, you can't pay more to get better support (not that you would want to).

If I write the tool and it goes down, I can fix it. Awesome. If it screwed up the data, I'm more than capable of fixing that. If anyone has any questions, guess what, I actually know the answers. The company pays me for these services. When I quit, the app can be easily fixed because it's all standard technologies that lots of people know. Those SaaS tools? They're the black box that nobody knows how to configure, customize, or fix. The vendor isn't interested in doing anything more than the minimum needed to close the ticket.

> It might look safe or easy to get into, but good luck getting out of them.

Just try and switch away from your cloud SaaS product. You might not even be able to get your data out.
by allworms | 2026-02-06 02:21:35+00:00
> We don't call architects 'vibe architects' even though they copy-paste 4/5th of your next house and use a library of things in their work!

> We don't call builders 'vibe builders' for using earth-moving machines instead of a shovel...

> When was the last time you reviewed the machine code produced by a compiler?

Sure, because those are categorically different. You are describing shortcuts of two classes: boilerplate (library of things) and (deterministic/intentional) automation. Vibe coding doesn't use either of those things. The LLM agents involved might use them, but the vibe coder doesn't.

Vibe coding is delegation, which is a completely different class of shortcut or "tool" use. If an architect delegates all their work to interns, directs outcomes based on whims not principals, and doesn't actually know what the interns are delivering, yeah, I think it would be fair to call them a vibe architect.

We didn't have that term before, so we usually just call those people "arrogant pricks" or "terrible bosses". I'm not super familiar but I feel like Steve Jobs was pretty famously that way - thus if he was an engineer, he was a vibe engineer. But don't let this last point detract from the message, which is that you're describing things which are not really even similar to vibe coding.
by agentultra | 2026-02-06 02:22:15+00:00
I mean… an ABI is more like an agreement. It isn’t a specification. It’d be nice if everything was neatly specified and sound. But as the author notes near the end… there’s a lot of platforms and they all have their own quirks.

There has to be an ABI that has to be agreed upon by everyone. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any interoperability. And if we didn’t have the SystemV ABI — what would we use instead? Prepare for a long debate as every language author, operating system designer, and platform under the sign argues for their respective demands and proposals. And as sure as the sun rises in the East someone, somewhere, would write an article such as this one decrying that blessed ABI.

SystemV shouldn’t be the be all and end all, IMO. But progress should be incremental. Because a lingua franca loses its primary feature and utility when we all return to our own fiefdoms and stop talking to one another in the common tongue.

It’s a pain in the metaphorical butt. But it’s better, IMO, than the alternatives.
by lischa | 2026-02-06 02:22:15+00:00
Location: California, USA

Remote: Preferred

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: React, Node.js, Express, PostgreSQL, SQL, JavaScript, Python, HTML, CSS, Next.js, Flask, SQLAlchemy, Material UI, Bootstrap, Tailwind CSS, Jest, Vitest, Git, Docker

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10lVpi7g5chewOH1tOZZA98Gj...

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-chan14

Email: lchan14@gmail.com

I completed a Software Engineering bootcamp at Springboard where I learned how to build full-stack web applications. I like learning new technologies and I enjoy working in a team setting. I’m currently volunteering at Hack for LA where I help the organization to update and maintain their website as well as review pull requests. I’m excited and ready for any job opportunities working as a junior developer.
by bb88 | 2026-02-06 02:22:59+00:00
The last time I watched OTA/Cable was over a decade ago. I remember paying $120/month for cable, and getting low quality highly recompressed HD shows, which looked terrible on the 1080p TV I had at the time. Digital artifacts made the stream not very pleasant to watch at all.

Technically it was "1080p HD", but in reality it was more like 720x480 upscaled and smoothed.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-06 02:23:10+00:00
> This means that a malicious attacker on your network, or a nation state that has access to your ISP can easily perform a MITM attack and replace the network response with any malicious executable of their choosing.

http://www2.ati.com/...

I'm blocking port 80 since forever so there's that.

But now ati.com is going straight into my unbound DNS server's blocklist.
by codyb | 2026-02-06 02:24:31+00:00
That's been my target for the last... wow... has it nearly been 18 years since I started futzing around with Bitcoin for the first time?

Been a swift drop this time. My buddy goes "if only I sold it all in October", what... like the rest of the people participating in the Ponzi scheme who would also like to cash out at the top?

Looks like all those stupid bitcoin treasury companies are finally unwinding.

At least no one's sitting around pretending it's going to actually do anything useful anymore.
by usrnm | 2026-02-06 02:24:31+00:00
> It is irrational to spend the same amount of energy on mining a digital token when it can be used to build and power actual productive robots

It's just as irrational as it was 10 years ago, there have always been more productive uses for energy, but it doesn't really matter, people will always chose their own short-term profit, expecting anything else is delusional
Show HN: Qwen3-TTS WebUI – a local web interface for Qwen3 text-to-speech
by bdim404 | 2026-02-06 02:25:16+00:00
Hi HN,

I built Qwen3-TTS-WebUI, a lightweight web interface for running Qwen3-TTS locally.

Motivation: Qwen3-TTS works well, but it is mostly used via CLI. That makes quick、parameter tweaking, and audio preview inconvenient, especially for non-technical users. I wanted a simple local UI to test voices, adjust settings, and export audio easily.

Features:

- Local inference only, no cloud

- Simple WebUI for text input and audio preview

- Minimal setup, focused on experimentation rather than production

Current status:

- Early stage / work in progress

- Usability-focused, not heavily optimized yet

Repository:
https://github.com/bdim404/Qwen3-TTS-WebUI

I’d appreciate feedback on:

UI/UX improvements

Useful controls or missing features

Any design mistakes common in TTS tools

Thanks for taking a look.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-06 02:25:20+00:00
> Murmu, 26, is a content moderator for a global technology company, logging on from her village in India’s Jharkhand state

> With just four months left on her contract, which pays about £260 a month

Earning US$350/mo working remotely in a village in one of the poorest states in India is an extremely competitive given that the alternative would be spending 12 hours sewing fast fashion for Zara earning US$130-150/mo [0], doing bit piece ag labor for around US$100/mo and participating in MGNREGA for US$50/mo, or becoming a housewife.

Content moderation means interacting with extremely depressing and horrid content, but someone needs to do it, and once models get good enough we would start seeing articles about how "all the good jobs" are being automated to oblivion.

Yes it sucks, but the alternative is becoming a migrant worker or working in light manufacturing where QoL is worse. Heck, we used to see similar articles about Chinese workers for Apple barely 14 years ago [1], but you don't see those articles anymore.

Development takes time and the fact that US$350/mo remote data annotation and content moderation jobs are now penetrating into villages in what used to be the Naxalite/Maoist/Red Corridor where bombings and gun battles were a part of normal life just 10 years ago [2] is a massive step up developmentally - it means that there is robust enough internet, literacy, banking, and public services penetration for the seeds for a services economy to form.

Edit: Thanks for the downvotes westerners - my family is from these kinds of villages. The alternatives are extremely bleak - especially for a tribal woman like Ms Murmu.

[0] - https://theprint.in/ground-reports/industries-finally-return...

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-...

[2] - https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2016/Nov/23/six-maoi...