MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bratwurst3000 | 2026-02-05 15:16:28+00:00
hmmm I am 50% with you. Imho to be an amazing engineer is to see a problem and find a good(whatever good means) solution. Beeing a good scientist is asking precise questions and finding experiments validating them.

I think its more the nuanced difference between safety and security. Engineers build things so they run safe.
For example building a roof that doesnt collapse is a safe roof.
Is the roof secure? Maybe I can put thermites in the wood...

this is the difference. Safety is no harm done from the thing itself Engineers build and security is securing the thing from harm from outside.
by MisterTea | 2026-02-05 15:16:38+00:00
> What was this person thinking?

Driving to work yesterday I was almost side swiped on the parkway by a driver who was weaving and swerving because he was staring down at his phone as if he was the only person driving on the road at 45 MPH.

What was this person thinking?

So yeah, I don't agree with indiscriminately jamming everyone's phone but I get it. Driving in some areas is like navigating a lord of the flies playground.
by InsideOutSanta | 2026-02-05 15:17:06+00:00
My suspicion is that the problem here is pretty simple: people publishing articles that contain these kinds of LLM-ass LLMisms don't mind and don't notice them.

I spotted this recently on Reddit. There are tons of very obviously bot-generated or LLM-written posts, but there are also always clearly real people in the comments who just don't realize that they're responding to a bot.
by kergonath | 2026-02-05 15:17:29+00:00
> There's nothing the CIA does without political motivation.

Even then, political motivation in itself does not make it inaccurate. It’s easy to see why a liberal democracy supposed to defend liberty across the globe would be interested in making facts accessible. Facts and education are the best way to fight obscurantism and totalitarianism. It’s also easy to see why a regime sliding back towards autocracy would have no interest in doing it. If they were competent, they could have continued pretending they cared and actually use it as a propaganda tool. Same with Radio Liberty and the others.
by komali2 | 2026-02-05 15:17:34+00:00
The "good/neutral/bad" DND axis implies moral intent, not necessarily outcome. A stupid person doing something insane for a reasoning that is generally understood to be morally good can be seen as "chaotic good." Hence why a lawful good Paladin can maintain their lawful good status, and their divinely derived abilities, even when they're doing things we may consider evil, like executing a youth for breaking a law, so long as the Paladin (and the divine entity) strongly believe that it's for the greater good of the law and society.

In this case, the guy thought he was preventing people from using their phones while driving, which is a good thing, but he was too dumb to realize it would have negative consequences apparently.
by bitwize | 2026-02-05 15:17:56+00:00
In the USA, in Sega v. Accolade the judge ruled that you can't use a trademark to block access to your stuff. The context was, the Sega Genesis DRM had a check for the string "SEGA" somewhere in the game's ROM; presumably, Sega reasoned that they could license their trademarked name for this purpose to licensed devs and sue makers of unlicensed cartridges for trademark infringement; and did sue Accolade when they attempted to publish unlicensed games for copyright and trademark infringement. The appeals judge overturned an earlier decision in favor of Sega, citing that trademarks can't be used to block what would otherwise be a fair-use act.

Much of Sega v. Accolade was overruled by the DMCA, which explicitly makes defeating DRM a crime in the general case. But the prohibition against using trademarks to gatekeep people performing legal, nonfraudulent activity probably remains and may be cited in future cases.
Show HN: Character AI Bots Directory – Curated AI Roleplay Characters
by lincyang | 2026-02-05 15:18:11+00:00
Hi HN,

I built a directory for AI roleplay characters: https://www.characteraibots.com

The problem: Character.AI and similar platforms have thousands of characters, but discovery is poor. Users spend hours browsing to find quality characters.

My solution: A curated directory with ratings, search, and filtering across multiple platforms (Character.AI, JanitorAI, SpicyChat).

Tech stack:
- Next.js 14 with SSR
- Dynamic sitemap generation
- SEO optimized (canonical URLs, OG images)
- Mobile responsive

Features:
- 50+ curated characters
- Search by name, type, tags
- Category browsing (Yandere, Tsundere, Vampire, etc.)
- Ratings and popularity rankings
- Multi-platform support

The site is completely free. I'm considering monetization through featured listings or API access.

Open to feedback and suggestions!
by bobchadwick | 2026-02-05 15:19:12+00:00
I pay for YouTube Music and I see really inconsistent behavior when asking Siri to play music. My five-year-old kid is really into an AI slop song that claims to be from the KPop Daemon Hunters 2 soundtrack, called Bloodline (can we talk about how YT Music in full of trashy rip-off songs?). He's been asking to listen to it every day this week in the car and prior to this morning, saying "listen to kpop daemon hunters bloodline" would work fine, playing it via YT Music. This morning, I tried every iteration of that request I could think of and I was never able to get it to play. Sometimes I'd get the response that I had to open YT Music to continue, and other times it would say it was playing, but it would never actually queue it up. This is a pretty regular issue I see. I'm not sure if the problem is with Siri or YT Music.
by whizzter | 2026-02-05 15:19:14+00:00
I was implicitly including all those with mutexes in the last sentence, it might be easier to reason about each in isolation because you're an experienced programmer that can/want to reason about the details.

In practice you want to keep the sharp knives away from junior programmers in larger contexts, handling a few ones in a limited scope is ok but when you start to reason about larger systems, actors in concurrent contexts can be explained even to junior programmers in terms of conveyor belts of messages or a similar analogy.

I don't know if you heard the story of how C++ was used and a large part of the collapse of that project was due to C++, OO and/or threading issues and how Erlang was then used in a crash project to successfully write a replacement on the same HW.

Some people claim that functional programming and/or actor systems are inherently superior, I don't really agree on that assessment, it's more that the actor patterns were easily handled in a distributed system and when used by less seasoned programmers it was possible for them to create their parts in mostly "single-threaded" contexts + message passing without causing trouble by using lower level concurrency primitives.

Really, imagine 500+ mid-junior programmers banging away concurrent code on a larger project that needs to be shipped soon.

This is what I mean by philosophically cleaner.
by triceratops | 2026-02-05 15:19:29+00:00
> Basketball is a general purpose sport. The Claude of it can win.

There aren't too many pro-ballers shorter than 5'10" (177cm), and definitely no dominant ones.

If we're defining "general purpose sport" as a sport in which people of all shapes and sizes are able to achieve greatness, then I would say soccer or golf fit that definition better.

Men's soccer in the 2010s was dominated by 2 of the best players in history: Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. There's a 7 inch height difference between the two. Ronaldo is powerful and muscled, Messi is lithe and graceful. Both played in approximately the same position on the field, in the same era. Both were brilliant.
by komali2 | 2026-02-05 15:19:32+00:00
Tell us the country and I'm pretty sure the traffic nerds here (me included) will come back and show you how what you perceived as harmony is actually a place with shockingly high per-capita traffic fatality rates.

> Traffic cops are road marauders/parasites.

I do agree with this, but mostly because better road design and cameras can completely eliminate the need for traffic cops.
by estsauver | 2026-02-05 15:19:43+00:00
I think the closest that this has come is in the form of GitLab, which pretty famously did a ton of the corporate work in the format of a very open Handbook (https://handbook.gitlab.com/)

In the early years, it was extremely, extremely open and comprehensive. I've definitely looked through it when I wasn't sure how to handle something at work.
by swed420 | 2026-02-05 15:20:01+00:00
I don't expect you to take my word, but fwiw, I obviously know nothing about you personally and did not mean it that way. It's just that what you said reminded me vividly of past me. Could have just been a coincidence, but either way, maybe our exchange will help somebody else in a tight spot.

> Was internet pedantry ultimately what helped you decide to quit?

No, at the time, the internet pedantry and the drinking actually helped fuel each other. Sober me now has more healthy limits regarding the internet, and I unplug when it becomes unhealthy instead of using it as an excuse to drink.

What ultimately helped me quit drinking was several things combined over a long enough time, including:

* in-person groups like AA (replacing the higher power stuff with an agnostic modification I found meaningful at the time) and S.M.A.R.T.

* online communities like /r/stopdrinking and /r/cripplingalcoholism

* regular therapy to target root causes like personal mental deficits (and how to re-wire my brain away from them) and other life struggles that were keeping me trapped in the cycle and fueling the addiction and symptoms of depression
by throwaw12 | 2026-02-05 15:20:03+00:00
I disagree with your sentiment and genuinely think something big is coming. It doesn't need to be perfect now, but it could be good enough to disrupt SaaS market.

> say all of this fluff when everyone knows it’s not exactly true yet

How do you know it's not exactly true? I am already seeing employees in enterprises are heavily reliant on LLMs, instead of using other SaaS vendors.

* Want to draft email and fix your grammar -> LLMs -> Grammarly is dying

* Want to design something -> Lovable -> No need to wait designer, no need to get access to Figma, let designer design and present, for anything else use lovable, or alternatives

* want to code -> obviously LLMs -> I sometimes feel like JetBrains is probably in code red at the moment, because I am barely opening it (saying this as a heavy user in the past)

To make message shorter, I will share my vision in the reply
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-05 15:20:20+00:00
Concrete example: Next/Turborepo. These tools make your life easier if you drink some kool aid. Rather than have the agent scaffold the app you have the agent use a tool that scaffolds. Agents write specs to manage tools, and those tools scaffold the code, then the agents just sprinkle in business logic that is too bespoke for codegen.
by sunir | 2026-02-05 15:21:35+00:00
I find these throws of passionate despondency similar to the 1980s personal computing revolution. Oh dear. Giving mere mortals the power of computing?! How many people would abandon their computers or phones.

It’s not like it changes our industry’s overall flavour.

How many SaaS apps are excel spreadsheets made production grade?

It’s like every engineer forgets that humans have been building a Tower of Babel for 300000 years. And somehow there is always work to do.

People like vibe coding and will do more of it. Then make money fixing the problems the world will still have when you wake up in the morning.
by whartung | 2026-02-05 15:21:53+00:00
“Simply Scheme” was a foundational work on my path to a parenthesta.

Simply, for me it was a Rosetta Stone that put Lisp/Scheme concepts into ones that I already understood. Simple things like using “function” instead of “lambda” were Aha moments that lead to breakthroughs.

Super helpful for me.
by karel-3d | 2026-02-05 15:22:16+00:00
I think - not sure - that

* Collabora Online is rebranded, and hosted, LibreOffice Online

* or rather - LibreOffice Online never really existed and it was always Collabora Online Development Edition (I cannot find any LibreOffice Online that's not just Collabora Online Development Edition)

* Collabora Office for Desktop is Collabora Online, packaged as a desktop app

* Collabora Office Classic is just rebranded LibreOffice

* Collabora (the company) is one of the biggest contributors to LibreOffice
by eole666 | 2026-02-05 15:23:18+00:00
People actually use this kind of software today ?
When I read OpenClaw description :
"The AI that actually does things.
Clears your inbox, sends emails, manages your calendar, checks you in for flights.
All from WhatsApp, Telegram, or any chat app you already use.".
It does not appeal to me at all. I wouldn't trust an IA agent near my mails, calendars, messages, flights or anything it could mess-up with. It sounds like a security nightmare waiting to happen.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-05 15:23:31+00:00
Perhaps we need bootcamps for on prem stacks if we are concerned about a skills gap. This is no different imho from the trades skills shortage many developed countries face. The muscle must be flexed. Otherwise, you will be held captive by a provider "who does it all for you".

"Today, we are going to calculate the power requirements for this rack, rack the equipment, wire power and network up, and learn how to use PXE and iLO to get from zero to operational."
by greatgib | 2026-02-05 15:23:41+00:00
I think that it is a narrow view of a "developer" that imagine reinventing what basically already exist in decade with HR/"people management" management software that are widely distributed.
It is sometimes also done by big ERP and basically available in any big directory and access management platform like Microsoft Entra ID (or whatever is the last current name) and co...

In some big companies, for expenses or performance reviews you have a terrible stack of relationship info and logic involved.

We could even say somehow that the first big entreprise software were creating with that kind of purpose for the modern IT area.

The worst limitation to all of this is users being lazy to input all the info that might be required, or updating it.
For example, how many of you never filled their "address" in their record in the big company internal directory portal because it looks useless and is not mandatory?
by komali2 | 2026-02-05 15:23:48+00:00
> 1. Vigilantes are bad

I agree that this guy was an idiot, and generally speaking that's a somewhat fine argument against vigilantism, but I also have witnessed the complete inability of the justice system in the several countries I've lived in to handle even the barest minimum of enforcement of the law.

When I lived in California, I would every single day, stop cars from making illegal right turns across a bike lane when bicyclists have right of way. Me biking forward and blocking the right turn on, signaling with my strobe, could be seen as a form of vigilantism, but if I didn't do it, inevitably I would have seen a bicyclist get run over on one of my commutes.

Unless, maybe you have some clear personal definition that separates vigilantism from direct action/
by kccqzy | 2026-02-05 15:23:56+00:00
I do. Most of these bot blockers block bots because of scale: these bots operate with superhuman speed and their traffic comes from all sorts of IP addresses. Tools like Anubis appear because such bot traffic dwarfs human traffic. And they typically have fake User-Agent headers set to a browser while their TLS/HTTP fingerprints would suggest they are made from curl or the requests library.

This is different. There is no scale. The bot’s browsing session exactly replaces a human session. The browser is real.
by toyg | 2026-02-05 15:24:41+00:00
This is a good joke, but it's also true that the whole charade of trying to look "institutional" and "fact-based" was a pretty decent way to go about pursuing the US agenda. "Hey we are the good guys, we show you real numbers" was a good line to push, and it could often show up the opposition as cranks and liars.

Nowadays, nobody even pretends to not be a liar, from any side. There is no debate that even attempts to look at the facts - it's vibes all the way down and fuck you if you don't agree, only money and guns matter. In the long run, this can't hold.
by ranger_danger | 2026-02-05 15:24:55+00:00
> He may not have had the explicit goal of disrupting emergency communication, but he absolutely knew he was doing so

How could you prove that though? They could absolutely claim ignorance and be right, they might not have known... but it's still illegal and they'll still be punished. As the saying goes... "ignorance of the law is no excuse."

What I'd really like to know though, is the history of how/why it became that way.

Who got to decide that everyone must be presumed to know all the laws at all times, and why?

How is it fair that we expect everyone to know all applicable laws?

I realize that claiming ignorance would just lead to widespread abuse, but at the same time I don't think it's fair because laws are massively complex and ever-changing... no single person can reasonably be expected to know it all.
by gowld | 2026-02-05 15:25:16+00:00
Even funnier when you try that from the "freedom" whitepage download https://www.collaboraonline.com/case-studies/opendesk/

If you don't give an email address, it doesn't even prompt you to ttry again. It just bugs out and redirects to a home page with a broken URL attempting to inject HTML from client side.

That's strange because the only reason for a user to use OpenOffice/Collabra is because they don't want to deal with an annoying company that makes a far superior product. If the inferior product is also run by an annoying company, why bother?
by throwaw12 | 2026-02-05 15:25:49+00:00
Let's imagine AI is not there yet and won't be there for 100% accuracy, but you still need accountability, you can't run everything in autopilot and hope you will make 10B ARR.

How do you overcome this limitation?

By making human accountable, imagine you come to work in the morning and your only task is to: "Approve / Request improvement / Reject". You just press 3 buttons all day long:

* Customer is requesting pricing for X, based on the requirements, I found CustomerA had similar requirements and we offered them 100$ / piece last month. What should I do? Approve / Reject / "Ask for 110$"

* Customer (or their agent) is not happy with your 110$ proposal, I used historical data and based on X,Y,Z min we can offer is 104$ to make our ARR increase 15% year-over-year, what should I do? Approve / Reject / Your input

....
by mothballed | 2026-02-05 15:26:34+00:00
You could get a visa in someplace like UAE tomorrow if you incorporate a shell company. Why would you wait if your plan is to flee anyway? It will only get more difficult the longer you wait.

By the way most countries require an apostilled FBI background check, recent copy of birth certificate w/ updated apostille, apostilled other documents, etc for a resident visa and they all have to be done within 90 days of your visa . So by the time the government is dysfunctional you'll only be able to flee to places without functional immigration control like Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, central Africa, etc as there will simply be no way to get the needed documents.

Oh and as a side note, having fought, and later leaving a civil war. Most likely you will get out if you have enough intelligence or money to navigate the border but you'll be robbed of everything you have on the way out unless you're just incredibly lucky.
by bagacrap | 2026-02-05 15:26:36+00:00
Does it matter if they are truly moral or truly cynical but think they can capture some sort of "morality premium" by taking a stance?

Yes they are beholden to investors. But so is Musk. The thing is that his investors are also his fans, so a majority of them will approve whatever tactics or schemes he comes up with.

Anthropic may be able to cultivate investors in a similar way, without even trying. After all, why would you invest in a company if you didn't agree with how it was run? Of course there could be a hostile takeover by private equity group who thinks they can squeeze more value out of the tech, but that is harder the larger the company grows.

Edit: also, the morality premium is usually enjoyed more in terms of employees than investors. Google for a long time attracted idealists, by which I mean they were able to pay slightly below market rate for a certain kind of person. If you have a moral compass and you get an equal offer from oai and anthropic right now, which one you choosing?
by InsideOutSanta | 2026-02-05 15:26:59+00:00
Yep, he did. Here you go:
https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/theprimeagen/comments/1qvk772/...

Presented as originally written:

"There's about 1 Million things people want me to do, I don't have a magical team that verifies user generated content. Can shut it down or people us their brain when finding skills."
by pkolaczk | 2026-02-05 15:27:01+00:00
If you can afford losing a bit of frequency stability, you can use a varicap instead and control it by voltage. Precise multiturn potentiometers are much cheaper. Or just buy a programmable clock signal generator based on PLL and then make it into a superhet (you can still have analog filtering and detection, but digital frequency synthesis so it can look more like a modern radio with frequency display).

There are so many options and all are very cool to explore.
by Insanity | 2026-02-05 15:27:30+00:00
Exactly. OpenAI is riding out a first mover advantage, but they have no moat. Plus a company like Google can bundle Gemini with other corporate offerings like Drive and Google Docs etc.

I just don’t see OpenAI winning this in the long run. And I’m saying that while I am subscribed to ChatGPT lol.
by dlojudice | 2026-02-05 15:27:34+00:00
As a programmer and founder, I think the idea is incredible, I would just change the understanding of "Code", given that what we've been hearing most lately is that "a markdown file is all you need".

I think it's not too far-fetched to think about standards, cultures, guardrails, compliance, etc. being documented, versioned, but more importantly, verifiable and applicable. In natural language, no code needed.
by beepbooptheory | 2026-02-05 15:27:39+00:00
There is surely no difficulty, but can you provide an example of what you mean? Just because I don't see it here. Or at least like, if I read a blog from some saas company pre-LLM era, I'd expect it to sound like this.

I get the call for "effort" but recently this feels like its being used to critique the thing without engaging.

HN has a policy about not complaining about the website itself when someone posts some content within it. These kinds of complaints are starting to feel applicable to the spirit of that rule. Just in their sheer number and noise and potential to derail from something substantive. But maybe that's just me.

If you feel like the content is low effort, you can respond by not engaging with it?

Just some thoughts!
by zjaffee | 2026-02-05 15:27:58+00:00
Isn't this essentially just trying to reinvent ERP (i.e. what SAP has built a 207 billion dollar company at time of writing on and 90% of fortune 500 companies along with endless other large organizations use).

One can argue that ERP as code is higher value than whatever it is right now, but to act like this is a totally new idea is insane.
by Someone | 2026-02-05 15:28:00+00:00
I would guess that’s because those chips were designed for use in systems that didn’t have a CPU, but reading the data sheet, it doesn’t look as if you can easily hook up this thing to 7-segment LEDs, so maybe this is a matter of “this is how we always did it, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, and then ‘fix’ it, anyways?