MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andwur | 2026-02-14 03:48:00+00:00
It's amusing that after all this time and (hundreds of?) billions of dollars invested in adtech I still find the adverts in old magazines far more relevant and compelling than any of the "personalised" adverts of today. The industry as a whole has missed the forest for the trees by over-fitting their systems; I might be interested in the broader category, or a tangentially related one, but at no point do I want to see the exact same product I was looking at a day ago on every ad. I didn't buy it then for a reason, so I'm not buying it now.

Pervasive surveillance to make a system that's practically worse than the alternative that doesn't require mass surveillance, and is much simpler and cheaper. Did I say amusing before? Depressing is probably a better fit.
by TZubiri | 2026-02-14 03:48:03+00:00
Ok, but system prompts are weighted differently and their context weighting is different.

Additionally, there's non LLM inputs, for one, parameters, but also just good old code:

OpenClaw is designed to programmatically read their "SOUL" often, and not forget it, user messages can also be repeated and researched. Compare that to some website's code, and while it may find a way to persist or infect the SOUL, it would need to be something specialized.

You have to admit that even if technically not different, there's a huge semantic and probabilistic difference between owner compile time input and non-owner runtime inputs.
by jeffbee | 2026-02-14 03:48:05+00:00
I don't see why any of that would be necessary. There are simple rules for protobuf compatibility and people only need to follow them. Never re-use a field number to mean something else. Never change the type of a field. That's it. Those are the only rules. If you follow them you don't have to think about any of that stuff that you mentioned.
by killbot_2000 | 2026-02-14 03:49:21+00:00
This resonates. I've been running 70+ Claude Code sessions across different projects and the context loss between sessions is brutal. My workaround has been CLAUDE.md files that get auto-loaded, plus activity logs in each project. The QMD indexing approach is clever - semantic search over past sessions could save a lot of 're-explaining the architecture' time. How does it handle when you've changed direction mid-project?
by roenxi | 2026-02-14 03:50:32+00:00
> If you find good matches but not great matches, you stick around.

I dunno, I have difficulty seeing how the dating sites could singlehandedly pull that off in the average case without the site users really leaning in to help. It would seem to run into the basic reality that men and women historically pick the best match from a fairly small pool of people. A dating sites can't do worse than that even if they're trying. If people are willing to use the same standards as all their ancestors then they'd pair off quickly.

It seems more likely that there is just a natural dead-sea effect because of that where the people on the sites over the long term are not the sort of people you'd settle down with, and there is also this subtle idea that the dating site is there to find someone a perfect match (probably doesn't exist to start with). Those are design issues that go a lot deeper than any algorithm the sites might be using.
by cyberax | 2026-02-14 03:50:33+00:00
No. People are _forced_ to move into large cities. And people who refuse that are being subjected to ever-increasing economic pressure.

_Choice_ means that there is a viable option to _not_ do it.

And more and more people do not _have_ this option. They have to move into dense cities because it's the only location that has half-decent job options.

I don't have data for Europe, but in the US the gap is growing between people who _want_ to live outside the dense cities and people who do.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-14 03:50:39+00:00
>My initial reaction was that this was a terrible precedent, but after thinking on it more I asked myself, "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?".

I'd make the algorithms transparent, then attack clearly unethical methods on a case by case basis. The big thing about facebook in the 2010's was how we weren't aware of how deep its tracking was. When revealed and delved into, it lead to GDRP.

I feel that's the only precision method of keeping thins ethical.
by Cyphase | 2026-02-14 03:50:47+00:00
> Opus is already digging up security vulnerabilities[3] - imagine if those guys had 1000x instances of Claude Code to search for iPhone zero days 24/7. I think we can both agree that wouldn't be good.

If an LLM can be used to do that and find things (and they already have been), Apple (and everyone else) will run their code through it before releasing it. Sure, there'll be a transition period with existing code and while the tech is unevenly distributed. But in the hunt for potential zero days, developers can check their code before people are using it.
by sarchertech | 2026-02-14 03:50:51+00:00
Why hasn’t any of the software I use started shipping features at a breakneck speed then? The only thing any of them have added is barely working AI features.

Why aren’t there 10x the number of games on steam? Why aren’t people releasing new integrated programming language/OS/dev environments?

Why does our backlog look exactly the same as when I left for posterity leave 4 months ago?
by spython | 2026-02-14 03:51:48+00:00
As a bit of an observation - the horses went viral on tumblr, bluesky and to a lesser extent facebook and instagram and smaller pages at different days, so I could observe how the drawing style and content changes:

- Most beautiful horses and least penises were drawn by tumblr users. Maybe because they've drawn a lot of penises before and got it out of their system : )

- Most penises: HN (but I guess it's my fault for saying there is a filter) followed by b3ta.com and twitter

- Most swastikas: twitter and, somehow, HN.

- Most generous buymeacoffee supporters: tumblr

- Most unexpected source of traffic: substack

- Hardest slashdot effect: bluesky
by cosmicgadget | 2026-02-14 03:52:16+00:00
> People who love politics should go into politics, and leave their jobs.

"If you love talking about professional sports you should leave your job and play professional sports." See how genius that sounds? People can be interested in- or passionate about things and not do it as a day job.

You can advocate for a politics-free workplace. Or a distractions-free workplace. But you have to realize that from its early days Google was supposed to be less a job and more a lifestyle. Partly because it attracted talent, mostly because it would keep people in the office slinging code. You can't push developers to spend 14 hours a day in the cube (or beanbag chair or whatever) and also expect them to remain hermetically sealed from the outside world.
by eszed | 2026-02-14 03:52:47+00:00
> This is about our systems of reputation, identity, and trust breaking down. So many of our foundational institutions – hiring, journalism, law, public discourse – are built on the assumption that reputation is hard to build and hard to destroy. That every action can be traced to an individual, and that bad behavior can be held accountable.

This is the point that leapt out to me. We've already mostly reached this point through sheer scale - no one could possibly assess the reputation of everyone / everything plausible, even two years (two years!) ago when it was still human-in-the-loop - but it feels like the at-scale generation of increasingly plausible-seeming, but un-attributable [whatever] is just going break... everything.

You've heard of the term "gish-gallop"? Like that, but for all information and all discourse everywhere. I'm already exhausted, and I don't think the boat has much more than begun to tip over the falls.
by TZubiri | 2026-02-14 03:53:04+00:00
>All home routers block all ports by default. How would they know which IP and port to forward traffic to if not for manual configuration?

I might have to recommend brushing up on your IP/TCP

This is what routers do by default. IP is very different from IP. IP is what they use to know how to route, too long to fit in a post, but MAC to IPs form a local ARP table. Can be many nodes long. Ports are what identify a process in a machine, IP level routers don't care at all about the port (unless you are natting) in order to route, the port bytes are forwarded as is and only parsed by the destination (and constructed by the source)
by devilbunny | 2026-02-14 03:53:19+00:00
There already was one. For all its faults, Swype for Android ~12 years ago was better than any swiping keyboard available now - both in its interpretation of swipes, and in its other features like "squiggle over one letter to indicate a double letter", "run your swipe above the keyboard to indicate a capitalized word", and the incredible editing features (it had an editing keyboard!). The Swype key, located in the bottom left? You could Swype-A to select all, Swype-X to cut, Swype-C to copy, Swype-V to paste. Swype-space brought up the editing keyboard.
by djfergus | 2026-02-14 03:53:31+00:00
I’m fascinated by the confidence in the cyborg theory that there will always be value in having a human in the loop. Especially for domains like code where the inputs and outputs are bits not atoms.

This is exactly what chess experts like Kasparov thought in the late 90s: “a grandmaster plus a computer will always beat just a computer”. This became false in less than a decade.
by jarjoura | 2026-02-14 03:54:30+00:00
I frame the shift more like this:

Systems engineering is an extremely hard computer science domain with few engineers either interested in it, or good at it.

Building dashboards is tedious and requires organizational structure to deliver on. This is the bread and butter of what agents are good at building right now. You still need organization and communication skills in your company and to direct the coding agents towards that dashboard you want and need. Until you hit a implementation wall and someone will need to spend time trying to understand some of the code. At least with dashboards, you can probably just start over from scratch.

It's arguably more work to prompt in english to an AI agent to assist you in hard systems problems, and the signals the agent would need to add value aren't readily available (yet?!). Plus, there's no way systems engineers would feel comfortable taking generated code at face-value. So they definitely will spend the extra mental energy to read what is output.

So I don't know. I think we're going to keep marching forward, because that's what we do, but I also don't think this "vibe-coded" automated code generator phase we're in right now will ultimately last. It'll likely fall apart and the pieces we put back together will likely return us to some new kind of normal, but we'll all still need to know how to be damn good software engineers.
by csa | 2026-02-14 03:55:32+00:00
> But the job had better take fewer people, or the automation is not justified.

In many cases, this is a fallacy.

Much like programming, there is often essentially an infinite amount of (in this case) bookkeeping tasks that need to be done. The folks employed to do them work on the top X number of them. By removing a lot of the scut work, second order tasks can be done (like verification, clarification, etc.) or can be done more thoroughly.

Source: Me. I have worked waaaay too much on cleaning up the innards of less-than-perfect accounting processes.
by killbot_2000 | 2026-02-14 03:55:39+00:00
Running 70+ specialized agents locally here. The key insight for me was specialization over generalization - each agent handles a narrow domain (docs, testing, deployment, etc.) rather than trying to make one super-agent do everything. The orchestration overhead is real, but Herald-style message passing between agents with clear domain boundaries has worked better than shared context approaches. The observation problem mentioned in comments is solved by logging everything to a central activity stream - you can't watch 20 agents in real-time, but you can review what happened. Curious what coordination overhead you're seeing at scale?
by daxfohl | 2026-02-14 03:56:49+00:00
Good point about phishing. So this isn't entirely new. But it is interesting in that phishing bots are mostly deterministic, while GPTs can try different things, research, customize the attack per individual. So we're likely to start seeing higher volume and much higher success rate. Though it's surprising that hasn't started happening already.

But the other thing is it could be entirely unintentional. You are just hoping to be able to return a pair of once-worn shoes that don't fit, and the next thing you know your AI agent has compiled an ICE hit on the CS rep's parents or something. Possibly even hiding that fact from you because it's aware that telling you would probably reduce its task completion success rate.
by gpm | 2026-02-14 03:57:05+00:00
I assume you're primarily referring to freedom of expression? I take the view that it doesn't include the freedom to pay people to carry a particular message so long as the restriction on paying is neutral as to the content of the message, but I can certainly respect the view that it does.

My comment about not having a right to business models is in some ways more general. Regardless of whether this business model is protected for some other reason, business models in general aren't, and it's a common flawed argument that they are.
by sarchertech | 2026-02-14 03:58:05+00:00
> Forget becoming manager at McDonald's or be even good at flipping burgers at the age of 40: you are competing with 20yr olds doing sports with amazing coordination etc

I have no idea what in the world you are talking about. Most 20 year olds working at McDonald’s are stoned and move at half a mile an hour whether it’s a lunch rush or it’s 2am. I worked retail for years before I finally switched full time to programming. It’s certainly not full of amazing motivated athletes with excellent coordination. You’re lucky if most of them can show up to work on time more than half the time.
by krackers | 2026-02-14 03:59:24+00:00
>progressively understands the business

This is no different than onboarding a new member of the team, and I think openAI was working on that "frontier"

>We started by looking at how enterprises already scale people. They create onboarding processes. They teach institutional knowledge and internal language. They allow learning through experience and improve performance through feedback. They grant access to the right systems and set boundaries. AI coworkers need the same things.

And tribal knowledge will not be a moat once execs realize that all they need to do is prioritize documentation instead of "code velocity" as a metric (sure any metric gets goodhearted, but LLMs are great at sifting through garbage to find the high perplexity tokens).

>But context limitation is fundamental to the technology in its current form

This may not be the case, large enough context-windows plus external scratchpads would mostly obviate the need for true in context learning. The main issue today is that "agent harnesses" suck. The fact that claude code is considered good is more an indication of how bad everything else is. Tool traces read like a drunken newb brute-forcing his way through tasks.

LLMs don't really know how to interact with subagents. They're generally sort of myopic even with tool calls. They'll spend 20 minutes trying to fix build issues going down a rabbit hole without stepping back to think. I think some sort of self-play might end up solving all of these things, they need to develop a theory of others' minds in the same way that humans do, to understand how to delegate. Some of this is certainly in the base model and pretraining, but it needs to be brought out in the same way RL was needed for tool use.
by Vanuan | 2026-02-14 04:00:12+00:00
I believe it's never been a better time for cross-platform desktop GUI. Vulkan API works on Windows, Android, Linux. Even web has Vulkan support. The only outlier is Apple.

On Linux, Wayland provides better drawing surface and input API.

The only missing piece is a high-level GUI and Vulkan/Metal compatibility layer. Along with ancient issue of packaging of course.
by bitwize | 2026-02-14 04:00:28+00:00
Lisp is aesthetics now. I used to appreciate the way in which its constructs gave the ordinary programmer considerably more reach. It made programming fun, the way I could talk directly to a running system and extend its functionality outwards with a minimum of boilerplate, procedures and data chasing each other's tails in a kind of neverending ouroboros.

But the fact is, whatever productivity gains I may have gained in Lisp are absolutely dwarfed those gained by using an LLM. I have literally seen LLMs pointed at a problem, solve it almost instantly. And LLMs do better the more popular the programming language you're working in. So what's the point of choosing Lisp? Oh, your feeble human brain can understand the problem and craft a solution much more quickly and in a flow state without being bogged down by tedium? That's nice. Claude Code can understand the problem and craft a solution without you even being in the room. It's a cheat code. It's iddqd. It's "pay to win" for what used to be the challenging, demanding, and fun game of programming.

And Lisp went from being "still kinda the best programming language ever" to a retrocomputing curiosity almost overnight. There is no practical reason to start a new project in Lisp in 2026.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-02-14 04:01:04+00:00
I am very interested in understanding what happened at Amazon, because I worked there, and I loved many aspects of my first years. But I'm not convinced Mark is correct about the causes. I joined amazon devices (under the group that is now the consumer robotics org) in 2020, before Bezos had left, and I have two contrasting feelings about it. First, it was exciting, and seemed like a place you could do great things. But second, it was obvious to me that we had made many many clearly bad business decisions, even while Bezos was still at the wheel. At great expense, we made Astro, which was basically Wall-E without arms, or if you prefer, a robot dog. It wasn't useful. I would complain to coworkers that it wasn't useful, and they'd say "nobody thought the iphone was useful at launch either". I think this betrays/betrayed a damning lack of understanding about the product and the problem space. I was not involved in the market research, but I cannot believe that the failure was unforeseeable. Even from the outside, it seemed so obvious that the product didn't do anything valuable.

I don't have great on the ground knowledge of all of Amazon's endeavors, but at least in my experience on the consumer robotics org, I feel the failure was _not_ a risk averse attitude, but rather a cavalier attitude towards business ("of course we'll succeed, because robots!"). And it wasn't the absence of Bezos that led to the fall -- the fall was already beginning before he left. Personally I suspect Bezos stepped away because he could feel the trajectory tilting downwards, rather than the downward trend happening because of Bezos leaving.
by chongli | 2026-02-14 04:01:10+00:00
That's because "matches" are the wrong criterion to look at. In aggregate, matches don't matter. What matters is the population of marriageable (or otherwise amenable to long-term relationships) people. And that's what the dating app calculus works against. Every time 2 marriageable people get together, they remove themselves from the pool. If there is not a significant influx of new marriageable people then over time the marriageability of the pool will decline. As it drops, the concentration of "serial daters" goes up.

In a high concentration of serial daters, no one wants to pair off because there isn't anyone worth pairing off with around.
by killbot_2000 | 2026-02-14 04:02:02+00:00
The 'conquest mode' idea is fascinating - agents competing/cooperating across cities. I've been running multi-agent systems locally and the emergent behaviors when agents can affect each other's environments get wild fast. The MCP integration is smart - makes it trivial to hook up Claude Code. Have you seen agents develop consistent 'personalities' in their city-building strategies over time, or do they mostly react to immediate state?
by layer8 | 2026-02-14 04:02:44+00:00
I’m saying that these definitions already exist, and are being appllied by courts. It’s not a novel concept. I’m also not interested in arguing about exact definitions. We all know well enough what an ad is, in particular the kind we don’t want to see when browsing the web. My main point was to illustrate how I don’t consider this to be a free speech issue.
by phoronixrly | 2026-02-14 04:02:48+00:00
When exactly is 'before'? Before Github existed to put front and center your code and its issues? Before it became an expectation to have a a rich Github profile when you're considered for a job position?

Of course I wouldn't have been able to come up with this statement because the perverted view of OSS devs owing free work to the users of their software was not so pervaisive.

On your edit: a bit rich saying the calls for switching to Linux propaganda, especially with the downturn of UX of windows and macos... Also why just hundreds of millions.. Go for hundreds of billions if you're just going to pull out numbers. Apart from that - even if Linux is not about the users, it is in many cases better for them as-is. Funny how that works with no conflict.
by kmoser | 2026-02-14 04:03:03+00:00
In theory, I'd rather get at something through an access panel than via cutting and patching drywall, but practically speaking, you're right: it's rare to have to open a wall, and an access panel that isn't specifically for something you need to access regularly is just a nice-to-have, and not even necessarily all that useful unless it provides the access you actually need at the time.
by pveierland | 2026-02-14 04:03:34+00:00
- Certain pages load but are not able to load content, e.g. https://npmx.dev/package/@storybook/addon-docs fails to load content with:

> `[nuxt] Cannot load payload /package/@storybook/addon-docs/_payload.json?c459501f-8eb7-49c9-be9c-4a197fa35a39 Error: Invalid input`

- Scrolling fast on Firefox + Chrome is broken and resets the search results page to start.

- Pressing up/down arrows should navigate search item results instead of focusing individual tag elements.
by csa | 2026-02-14 04:03:47+00:00
Scope will increase.

Good accounting teams will have more time and resources to do things like identify fraud, waste, duplicated processes, etc. They will also have time to streamline/optimize existing practices.

Good teams will earn many multiples of their cost in terms of savings or increased earnings.

There may be increased competition for the low-cost “just meet the legal compliance requirements” offerings, but any business that makes money and wants to make more will gladly spend more than the minimum for better service.
by cyberax | 2026-02-14 04:03:49+00:00
Protobuf is good, but it's not perfect. The handling of "oneof" fields is weird and the Python bindings were written by drunk squirrels, enums are strange, etc.

gRPC is terrible, but ConnectRPC allows sane integration of PB with regular browser clients. Buf.build also has a lot of helpful tools, like backwards compatibility checking.

But it's not worse than other alternatives like Thrift. And waaaaaaaaaayyyyyy better than OpenAPI monstrosities.