MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by why_at | 2026-02-04 23:24:38+00:00
I don't really follow. I've lost touch and reconnected with people since the invention of cell phones, the internet, and social media. Sometimes you just don't talk to someone for years even if you know how to reach them.

I guess it's easier to find people now, especially if they have an online presence, but I think the experience of losing touch is still pretty much the same.
by straydusk | 2026-02-04 23:24:55+00:00
I actually think this is fair to wonder about.

My overall stance on this is that it's better to lean into the models & the tools around them improving. Even in the last 3-4 months, the tools have come an incredible distance.

I bet some AI-generated code will need to be thrown away. But that's true of all code. The real questions to me are - are the velocity gains be worth it? Will the models be so much better in a year that they can fix those problems themselves, or re-write it?

I feel like time will validate that.
by johanvts | 2026-02-04 23:25:22+00:00
As i understand it, all the lightning transactions happen off chain and the results are then published afterwards. So you are back to trusting a payment processor to avoid double spend. And, if you can do that, you don’t need BTC to begin with. Its just integrating bitcoin with another system that is actually able to do transactions. BTC alone remains horrible at that.
by TapamN | 2026-02-04 23:25:39+00:00
The Galaksija computer used it's Z80 to help generate the video signal. I'm not sure how its implementation compares to your link.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaksija_(computer)

https://media.ccc.de/v/29c3-5178-en-the_ultimate_galaksija_t...
by jonlong | 2026-02-04 23:25:53+00:00
The etymology and physical metaphor of "The Singularity" are a bit confused here, and I think it muddles the overall point.

> the singularity is a term borrowed from physics to describe a cataclysmic threshold in a black hole

In his article which popularized the idea of The Singularity, Vinge quotes Ulam paraphrasing von Neumann, and states, "Von Neumann even uses the term singularity". As von Neumann surely knew, "singularity" was a term widely used in mathematics well before the idea of black holes (etymonline dates first use to 1893). Vinge does not say anything about black holes.

> an object is pulled into the center [of] gravity of a black hole [until] it passes a point beyond which nothing about it, including information, can escape. [...] This disruption on the way to infinity is called a singular event – a singularity.

The point at which "nothing" can escape a black hole is the event horizon, not the singularity. What exactly happens to information and what exactly happens when crossing the event horizon are subjects of debate (see "black hole information paradox" and "AMPS/firewall paradox"); however, it's probably fair to say that the most orthodox/consensus views are that information is conserved through black-hole evaporation and that nothing dramatic happens to an observer passing through the event horizon.

> the singularity became a black hole, an impenetrable veil hiding our future from us. Ray Kurzweil, a legendary inventor and computer scientist, seized on this metaphor

While I'm not prepared to go into my personal views in this comment, it's worth noting that the idea that "exponential curves look the same from every point" is not foreign to, e.g., the Kurzweilian view of The Singularity; nevertheless, fitting dramatic, industrial-revolution-sized progress into the fixed scale of a (contemporary) human lifetime would surely be a big deal. This idea, (whether you believe it will happen or not), is obscured by the spurious black hole metaphor.
by culi | 2026-02-04 23:25:56+00:00
There was a post on here about a project in stylometry that analyzed HN users comment history. The tool helped find accounts that had an extremely similar writing style to a given account. The site was soon removed due to privacy concerns but many users with multiple account attested to its accuracy

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

It turns out stylometry is actually a pretty well-developed field. It makes me wanna write an AI browser assistant that can take my comments and stylize them randomly to make it harder to use these sorts of forensics against me
by asah | 2026-02-04 23:26:15+00:00
(when it was released, adults/press/etc. found SLTS famously incomprehensible and then they realized that the kids didn't understand the lyrics either, and Weird Al nailed it with his classic, Smells Like Nirvana: https://www.google.com/search?q=Smells+Like+Nirvana )
by ryukafalz | 2026-02-04 23:26:27+00:00
I've been an excited user of Goblins for several years now. So far only outside of $dayjob, which has limited the amount of time I've been able to spend with it, but it's very fun to work with if you like the actor model.

I think my brain naturally wants to think about things in terms of sending messages between smaller components of a program, so Goblins fits the way I think very well. It's also what introduced me to object-capability security, which is a lot more brain-bendy when you're first trying to understand it, but after a lot of reading and playing with Goblins I find myself wishing many more things used ocaps. :)
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-02-04 23:26:30+00:00
That's true. Never let the AI know about the code it wrote when writing the test for sure. Write multiple tests, have an arbitrator (also AI) figure out if implementation or tests are wrong when tests fail. Have the AI heavily comment code and heavily comment tests in the language of your spec so you can manually verify if the scenarios/parts of the implementations make sense when it matters.

etc...etc...

> In other words, if “the ai is checking as well” no one is.

"I tried nothing, and nothing at all worked!"
by askonomm | 2026-02-04 23:26:31+00:00
It's difficult to describe just how many people are using Windows not because they choose to, but because they have to. Whether it is because the corporations they work at only give them Windows PC's or because whatever software that they need only runs on Windows. Being able to choose your operating system that you also do work with is largely a luxury of software engineers, I think, but for your average Joe you get what you get, even if it sucks.

Microsoft has an amazing sales team forcing vendor lock-in at corporations, schools and governments all over the world, no wonder they get tons of users.
by araes | 2026-02-04 23:27:02+00:00
Thanks for the very informative post on airline engine testing. One of the quickest upvotes ever. Never knew the details on the range of birds fired and actual damage allowables.

Couple follow on questions. What are the test conditions like? Is the test basically a static air test with a fixed engine and a 500 mph duck / goose carcass striking an operating engine? Or do they put it in a wind tunnel to simulate high speed wind forces also?

Also, what's the method of actually firing and accelerating a duck / goose carcass up to airline speeds for impact. Did this a bit for NASA impact testing, and we tended to use peel away sabot rounds to throw bricks at objects.

Also, borders a bit on a Monty Python joke, yet is there a regulation duck / goose? They can vary pretty wildly in size / weight. 5lb, 10lb, 20lb? Are they firing all the way up airline cruise speeds (500-600 mph? or just take off / landing runway issues?

Finally, being in the industry, any idea on what's been going on with the engines peeling off airplane wings, like that Louisville, Kentucky cargo plane? That seems like a rather drastic failure mode, since apparently there were cracks in the mounting and people just weren't checking?
by transcriptase | 2026-02-04 23:27:49+00:00
As it stands you only need a few friends or likeminded journalists at a few major publications to repeat the same falsehood, and it becomes a properly cited fact on Wikipedia and in the public eye for as long as you need it to be. If it’s later proven to be a falsehood and the underlying sources quietly issue retractions it doesn’t matter.

How many people out there still believe the Hunter Biden laptop story, and all the politically damaging material on it was Russian misinformation?
by straydusk | 2026-02-04 23:28:49+00:00
I'm glad you wrote this comment because I completely agree with it. I don't think that there is not a need for software engineers to deeply consider architecture; who can fully understand the truly critical systems that exist at most software companies; who can help dream up the harness capabilities to make these agents work better.

I just am describing what I'm doing now, and what I'm seeing at the leading edge of using these tools. It's a different approach - but I think it'll become the most common way of producing software.
by omnimus | 2026-02-04 23:29:09+00:00
Also their software projects are quite amazing. It has to be someone living just on the edge of sanity. Schizo rollercoaster life of being at the same time smartest person in the room while completely missing forrest for the trees.

How can someone be starting occupy wall street and few years later fully embrace the moldbugs CEO corporate monarchy. Brilliant and dumb and scary. It's truly wild.
by quickthrowman | 2026-02-04 23:29:48+00:00
> An asphalt roofing shingle company just closed in Minneapolis due to the city's new CO2 tax. The local environmental group held a little press conference crowing about it.

For what it’s worth, Owens Corning operates an asphalt shingle plant in North Minneapolis (1701 49th Ave N) and they have no intentions of closing it down.

The commercial roof material you’re referring to is called EPDM rubber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPDM_rubber
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-04 23:29:58+00:00
> Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.

Their incentives are to juice their stock grants or other economic gains from pushing AI. If people aren't paying for it, it has limited value. In the case of Microsoft Copilot, only ~3% of the M365 user base is willing to pay for it. Whether enough value is derived for users to continue to pay for what they're paying for, and for enterprise valuation expectations to be met (which is mostly driven by exuberance at this point), remains to be seen.

Their goal is not to be right; their goal is to be wealthy. You do not need to be right to be wealthy, only well positioned and on time. Adam Neumann of WeWork is worth ~$2B following the same strategy, for example. Right place, right time, right exposure during that hype cycle.

Only 3.3% of Microsoft 365 users pay for Copilot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46871172 - February 2026

This is very much like the dot com bubble for those who were around to experience it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1g78sgf/...

> In the late 90s and early 00s a business could get a lot of investors simply by being “on the internet” as a core business model.

> They weren’t actually good business that made money…..but they were using a new emergent technology

> Eventually it became apparent these business weren’t profitable or “good” and having a .com in your name or online store didn’t mean instant success. And the companies shut down and their stocks tanked

> Hype severely overtook reality; eventually hype died

("Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" -- Charlie Munger)
by B1FF_PSUVM | 2026-02-04 23:30:25+00:00
Back in the peak-paper days - when the Sunday newspaper was for the man "smart enough to read it and strong enough to carry it", and the Computer Shopper magazine vied with phone directories for thickness - you could go into a gas station and pick up a paperback copy of the CIA World Factbook, usually from a shelf also sporting the Rand McNally road maps.

Tears in rain, sic transit, etc.
by profsummergig | 2026-02-04 23:30:32+00:00
Also Teams and OneNote.

If you're on Windows 11, search for "Startup Apps" and disable CoPilot, Teams and OneNote (if you don't use them). It'll speed up your system.

CoPilot is a great name. But Microsoft being Microsoft even messed that up. Apparently there's a Github CoPilot and a Windows CoPilot, and they're different.
by dzonga | 2026-02-04 23:30:41+00:00
& the counter-argument is those SAAS apps being killed by A.I are growing revenue 20%+ YOY

people who write this BS - one never don't understand SAAS fundamentals, they only see what's on the screen and forget the complexity that lives on the backend - forget the costs of running such a SAAS

before it was low-code will kill SAAS, then Visual UI builders, now its A.I

just like it was before that crypto will kill Trad-Fi

people who say these things - have tied their identity into it so they whole-heartedly believe the bullshit they say even though reality doesn't match

to anyone curious read the 10k (Annual Report) of any public SAAS - Salesforce | Workday etc - people should admire these companies for the machines / ecosystem they built - and also learn the good & mistakes to avoid i.e the bad

those annual reports tell you how the revenue generation machine works, how much revenue is expected 2+ / 3+ years from now - their weaknesses | headwinds and also tailwinds - how those companies grow and continue to grow etc
Ask HN: Have you started to use "->" when you type after working with LLMs?
by FailMore | 2026-02-04 23:30:47+00:00
I work with CC every day at work and Cursor for personal projects. I have seemingly unconsciously started to use "->" ALL THE TIME when I type.

Instead of "For example," I will "For example ->". Instead of "Confirm the logic: A, B, C" I will "Confirm the logic -> A, B, C".

I think it's because (on my keyboard at least) it feels more natural to "->" than move my hand to ",". And I think that when talking with a LLM, you want to quickly chain thoughts... or something?!

Curious to know if lots of time spent talking to LLMs is changing how you write messages.
by m463 | 2026-02-04 23:31:00+00:00
I've always thought that outlier kinds of people are very valuable.

For example - richard stallman is pedantically correct about many things regarding licenses or privacy or any number of related subjects. But nobody can wholeheartedly accept and adopt his viewpoint and behave as he does (no phone, doesn't use non-free software, etc)

Musk is similar in his promises and predictions. Nobody can wholeheartedly accept his views.

But the reason these folks are valuable are - they move the goalposts. Moving the goalposts moves the thoughts and behavior of people close to their viewpoints, and can eventually unseat the complacent middle.

imho :)

EDIT: I think nobody is immune to this. Lots of people will understand the bullshit is deep when someone comes up to them and relentlessly over-the-top flatters them. But they are likely to listen to and accept the person, logic be damned.
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-04 23:31:39+00:00
The standardization is for presentation of how the information is made available to the harness. Optimizations in how the information is presented to the model can be iterated on without impacting the presentation to the harness. Initially, agent skills have already been provided by:

(1) providing a bash tool with direct access to the filesystem storing the skills to the model,

(2) providing read_file and related tools to the model,

(3) by providing specialized tools to access skills to the model,

(4) by processing the filesystem structure and providing a structure that includes the full content of the skills up front to the model.

And probably some other ways or hybrids.

> It increases benchmarks a few points now but what's the point in standardizing all this if it'll be obsolete next year?

Standardizing the information presentation of skills to LLM harnesses lets the harnesses incorporate findings on optimization (which may be specific to models, or at least model features like context size, and use cases) and existing skills getting the benefit of that for free.
by high_priest | 2026-02-04 23:32:49+00:00
A lot of tedium is added into these games to force the player into spending real money for skips & access to content. It is a valid way to incentivize customers into paying for given service, but also means there are many time wasting repetitive tasks that can ruin the experience if one does not grasp the concept of "when the game starts getting tedions, you are supposed to pay"
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-04 23:33:12+00:00
Is this a real product? This is a solved problem.

First I’m personally never going to create infrastructure in the console. I’m going to use IAC from the get go. That means I can reproduce my infra on another account easily.

Second if I did come across an environment where this was already the case, there are tools for both Terraform and CloudFormation where you can reverse your infra to reproducible IAC.

After that, let Claude go wild in my sandbox account with a reasonably scoped IAM role with temporary credentials
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-04 23:33:14+00:00
This whole administration is like watching the sort of petty politics HN assures me basically don't exist outside small towns play out at a state and federal level. Politicians flinging poo at each other, inter agency pettiness. Some guy writes an email and DHS's reactions is "who's this guy who thinks he's so smart, scrutinize him, maybe we can screw him" like a local enforcer who has no "real" power except to cause misery who got offended by someone in the facebook comments.
by danparsonson | 2026-02-04 23:33:57+00:00
> Dragon spends 6mo+ in orbit regularly.

... hooked up to the ISS, with humans in attendance to fix anything that goes wrong... not doing very much.

It's akin to the difference between a boat moored up in a port, and an autonomous drone in the middle of the Pacific. Aside from that, satellites have to maneuver in orbit (to stay in the correct orbit, and increasingly to avoid other satellites). Hefting around additional kgs of shielding makes that more difficult, and costly in terms of propellant, which is very important for the lifetime of a satellite.
by Teknoman117 | 2026-02-04 23:34:02+00:00
Trust / spam score is the largest one I think, second to consumer ISPs blocking the necessary ports for receiving mail.

Even if your "self hosting" is renting a $5/month VPS, some spam lists (e.g. UCEPROTECT) proactively mark any IP ranges owned by consumer ISPs and VPS hosting as potential spam. I figured paying fastmail $30/yr was worth never having to worry about it.
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-04 23:34:04+00:00
I don't agree, I use it all the time. I never use the 'real' office at home, though I do at work. And I'm really happy with it. It works fine, it's pretty light and it runs on every OS without me having to use a substandard web version.

I understand their copying the MS Office look and feel because that muscle memory is key to converting users. I like the way they didn't go all-in on those ribbons which have always been pretty terrible.

In that sense I think the biggest issues with the product is that it's taking so many cues from MS Office which on its own is pretty terrible but has grown to be abundant.

I think the whole office workflow is grossly outdated anyway. Excel is mostly misused as a pisspoor database which it deeply sucks at because it doesn't offer any way to safeguard data integrity. What MS should do is overhaul Access completely to make users grok it better. But they don't care.

Word docs are still full of weird template issues, PowerPoint still uses the old overhead projector transparent slide paradigm.

What it really needs is someone to look at this without any of the 1980s baggage and come up with tools for workflow problems from this century with techniques that fit this century. Adding an AI clippy like MS has done does not cut it at all.

But it does mean having to chip away at the entrenched market position of office, that's the problem. Microsoft stops innovating when they've cornered the market, just like they did with internet explorer. Someone has to do a chrome on office, but it will need someone with a big bag of money. Not an open source project run on a shoestring.

So yeah I think LibreOffice is not great but the not great bits are copied from MS Office because they simply have no alternative.
by re-thc | 2026-02-04 23:34:35+00:00
> that is they are describing a new type of programmer that will only use agents and never read the underlying code

> and wouldn't look at the code anymore than, say, a PHP developer would look at the underlying assembly

This really puts down the work that the PHP maintainers have done. Many people spend a lot of time crafting the PHP codebase so you don't have to look at the underlying assembly. There is a certain amount of trust that I as a PHP developer assume.

Is this what the agents do? No. They scrape random bits of code everywhere and put something together with no craft. How do I know they won't hide exploits somewhere? How do I know they don't leak my credentials?
by nickthegreek | 2026-02-04 23:35:03+00:00
I am going to assume that is a question asked in good faith by an inquisitive mind. That assumed, asking that question to any proper LLM will provide an answer more in depth than I am willing to type this evening.

Palantir, to me, is the weaponization of big data, where advanced analytics are used to target vulnerable populations. Not just abroad, but here against its own citizens. It is the dystopic enabler that we have been warned about.

Palantir and the words from its leadership seem to me to be in direct opposition to parts of the Constitution doc that Anthropic hold up to show their ethics and seriousness.
by reaperducer | 2026-02-04 23:35:26+00:00
Your premise that the leaders of every single one of the top 10 biggest and most profitable companies in human history are all preposterously wrong about a new technology in their existing industry is hard to believe.

It's happened before.

Your premise that companies which become financially successful doing one thing are automatically excellent at doing something else is hard to believe.

Moreover, it demonstrates both an inability to dispassionately examine what is happening and a lack of awareness of history.
by johanvts | 2026-02-04 23:35:32+00:00
The lightning network can handle transactions sure. Because it is not a distributed POW system. You can also just sell some BTC, transact via VISA or paypal etc., and buy BTC when you are done. Im not saying you can’t use BTC as a store of value. Just that transaction costs are way to high to use for payments/transactions i.e. as a currency.
by ChuckMcM | 2026-02-04 23:36:11+00:00
Yup, I've been here before. Back in 1995 we called it "The Internet." :-) Not to be snarky here, as we know the Internet has, in fact, revolutionized a lot of things and generated a lot of wealth. But in 1995, it was "a trillion dollar market" where none of the underlying infrastructure could really take advantage of it. AI is like that today, a pretty amazing technology that at some point will probably revolutionize a lot of things we do, but the hype level is as far over its utility as the Internet hype was in 1995. My advice to anyone going through this for the first time is to diversify now if you can. I didn't in 1995 and that did not work out well for me.
by JohnMakin | 2026-02-04 23:36:21+00:00
> LLMs are great at generating Terraform, OpenTofu, Ansible, etc. but bad at guessing how production systems work.

Sorry, that last part is absolutely not the case from my experience. IaC also uses the API to inquire about the infrastructure, and there are existing import/export tools around it, so I’m not exactly sure what you are gaining by insisting on abandoning it. IaC also has the benefit of being reusable and commitable.