MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zahlman | 2026-02-06 23:09:45+00:00
> beyond some vague allusions that perhaps racial/ethnic profiling should make a comeback.

It suggests nothing of the sort, and in fact explicitly attempts to establish that none of this is intrinsic to any affinity group. The point isn't that the fraudsters in this case were of a particular ethnicity; it's that they shared an ethnicity, which enables the kind of internal social trust that fraud rings require.

Further, it suggests many clear heuristics that are nothing to do with ethnicity. The suggestions are clear and explicit; they just happen to involve occasionally denying services without proof of already-committed fraud, which you apparently consider unacceptable. But here is an experienced person telling you from expertise, with abundant citations and evidence, that nothing else really works, and furthermore that this is common knowledge in a well established industry specifically devoted to the problem.
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-06 23:09:52+00:00
Ads would be pretty hard to block if sites just served them from their own domain. But there's two greed related reasons why that won't happen: the adsellers lose their metrics in terms of impression rate so they have to trust the sites. And the other one is that cross site tracking would stop working so they'd lose a lot of surveillance data to sell.

So really the industry gets what it wants. They want their cake and eat it. That means they leave the Achilles heel open.

And those of us really serious about adblocking can use a real browser like Firefox with the real ublock. It's fine like this for me. I consider paywalls a bigger problem now. Especially because addons like bypass-paywalls-clean have moved to really obscure sites due to dcma takedown crap.
by arbol | 2026-02-06 23:10:21+00:00
This doesn't make any sense. To overwhelm proof of stake you need to have a majority of the crypto. To overwhelm proof of work, you need to have a majority of mining power. AI agents have neither of these.

AI native Blockchains inherently have no value because they're not attached to real world money.

Plus the whole site is AI generated slop
by mrandish | 2026-02-06 23:11:24+00:00
The thesis makes sense. I agree AI coding will enable increasing disruption and competitive threats in large enterprise SaaS. For being in tech, it's a category which has been relatively free of major disruption for a while and is probably overdue for some 'excitement' (in the Chinese proverb sense).

Another factor is customer expectations, which can have a way of turning into self-fulfilling prophecies. All the hype around AI in software creates a sense of overall change in the air, making large enterprise managers question if they need to do anything about it. And just by increasing how often that question is asked, orgs will end up changing more things faster than before.
by saint_fiasco | 2026-02-06 23:12:03+00:00
There was also the point about lack of granularity and follow-through.

The government has the power to ruin your whole life, so it's reasonable that they have high standards of evidence to ruin your life. But if they can't secure a conviction they do nothing, they'll let you open another NGO and apply for another government grant as if nothing happened.

A business has the power to inconvenience you by refusing to do business with you. That's less ruinuous than what the government does so it's OK that their standards of evidence are lower.

But perhaps there should be something that the government can do in between nothing at all and ruining your life. Otherwise the same frauds will happen again and again.
by tptacek | 2026-02-06 23:12:08+00:00
I don't think that's indirect at all. It's pretty clearly what did in fact happen in Minnesota. I don't read the author as claiming it's endemic to liberal values, any more than the isomorphic pathologies are endemic to the finance industry (which Patrick also writes about), or the defense industry. Again: it's easy to find Democratic sources saying the same thing.

Why is it so difficult for people to acknowledge that Minnesota fucked this up badly? What is that going to cost us? The attempts to downplay it seem pretty delusive.
by wolvoleo | 2026-02-06 23:12:09+00:00
Not really. There's still stuff it can't do. Apparently YouTube ads are harder to block in chrome now. And really everything a MV3 blocker can do a MV2 can too. Additionally, someone can make a MV3 and reinstate the API that Google dropped from it.

Besides, I use ublock origin also for my own personal block list. I don't just block ads but also the sites' own big image highlight blocks, videos and other crap. So the sites I visit all pretty much look like the hacker news front page, just text and none of the marketing crap.

I don't think this can be done in MV3 blockers because they include the lists.
by jonnycoder | 2026-02-06 23:12:09+00:00
I like your website design, especially the two-column layout in most sections once I get past the hero image (full size screenshot). I found myself looking at all the images. The downside is that I did not really get any motivation to try it out or really understand how it could help me.

I am a backend software engineer so I'm always on the lookout for a way to easily and simply create a professional looking landing page. Therefore I'm always asking the question... is there a template I can choose from and just start filling it in? Just yesterday I found a figma template hosted on figma.site and I used chrome devtools to edit the hero text and navbar and got instant results .. as in I sort of liked it. Typography, spacing, use of color, detailed data presentation (ie bullet points, 2 column layout, etc), and fill-in images are my starting point (as an amateur designer). I could spend hours tweaking a design but I would rather just copy some existing component designs and call it a day. Hope this helps.
by zmmmmm | 2026-02-06 23:12:32+00:00
I'm finding it quite a lot more assertive. It's doing things without asking every now and then. It cleaned up a whole lot of commented out of code that was unrelated to the change it was asked to make. Yes it's not great to have sections of commented out code, but destructive changes really should never be happening outside the scope of what it is asked to do.

And it refuses to do things it doesn't think are on task - I asked it to write a poem about cookies related to the code and it said:

> I appreciate the fun request, but writing poems about cookies isn't a code change — it's outside the scope of what I should be doing here. I'm here to help with code modifications.

I don't think previous models outright refused to help me. While I can see how Anthropic might feel it is helpful to focus it on task, especially for safety reasons, I'm a little concerned at the amount of autonomy it's exhibiting due to that.
Ask HN: What are the best robot arms with car/chasis for under $500 in 2026?
by tristenharr | 2026-02-06 23:12:33+00:00
I'm looking for something to perform some automations moving and aligning ~9x6 inch pieces of slate that weigh <2kg. Looking at things like the HIWONDER arms and want something with vision and such. Trying to determine the best value, but I'm mostly looking on Amazon because I personally need fast shipping for an internal hackathon we're doing next week.

What are some of the best robot arms and what type of chassis would you recommend? Best for the value? Best in class? Etc. (Also perhaps to make this a useful thread to others if I wasn't in a rush what would be the best?)

What capabilities are useful and which are over-hyped? Thanks HN! :)
by simonw | 2026-02-06 23:13:00+00:00
I got a WebAssembly build of this working and fired up a web playground for trying it out: https://simonw.github.io/research/monty-wasm-pyodide/demo.ht...

It doesn't have class support yet!

But it doesn't matter, because LLMs that try to use a class will get an error message and rewrite their code to not use classes instead.

Notes on how I got the WASM build working here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/6/pydantic-monty/
by try_the_bass | 2026-02-06 23:13:07+00:00
But this is not what Flock or other ALPRs do. They do not monitor nor aggregate your movements, unless specifically asked to. Or, at least, that's how they say they're being used, and until we find evidence to the contrary (we haven't), we should take them at their word and think about the model a little differently. If no one is looking for your movements in particular, after some period of time, the data that contains evidence of your movements if deleted. The vet result for most users is a temporary record of a short history of their movements that no one ever sees, and which is permanently forgotten after some period of time.

This is like when people complain that Facebook and Google are "selling their data". They aren't, but they are doing a closely-related thing: selling access to you, based on your data. These are not the same thing, and the difference is important when it comes to finding solutions to the problems it causes!

If we all voted to ban companies like Facebook and Google from selling your data, they'd shrug and say "sure I guess, we weren't selling it anyway", and nothing would change.

If we all voted to ban Flock from "tracking all of us", they'd shrug and say "that's already true" and it would not have any impact on their operations.

What we should instead vote for is strict controls over how long they can store the data, and how it is allowed to be used, and apply steep penalties for its misuse or unauthorized disclosure.
by Mawr | 2026-02-06 23:14:10+00:00
> IMO the presence of safety chase vehicles is just a sensible "as low as reasonably achievable" measure during the early rollout. I'm not sure that can (fairly) be used as a point against them.

Only if you're comparing them to another company, which you seem to be. So yes, yes it can.

Seriously, the amount of sheer cope here is insane. Waymo is doing the thing. Tesla is not. If Tesla were capable of doing it, they would be. But they're not.

It really is as simple as that and no amount of random facts you may bring up will change the reality. Waymo is doing the thing.
by tstrimple | 2026-02-06 23:14:22+00:00
Ultimately it is selfish interest. Either because they literally have money invested or they are "losing" their childhood. But it's not disingenuous. It's how they actually feel. The area losing its "character" is an accurate description of that. It doesn't matter if I think or you think the mixed use zoning would vastly improve things long term. Doesn't matter how many studies are shown. Things will necessarily change in ways many people don't want and many times there are actual downsides for existing residents to make way for the new. Especially during transition periods.

None of these are arguments from me against new development or pushing past NIMBYs where they become intractable. But if development in Pasadena can maintain as much existing green space as possible and commit to building out more, it would be a lot palatable to the "natives". And I think it would lead to better results for future residents as well. I think it's okay that people want to live in a neighborhood full of quaint small family businesses and resist the Subway and the McDonald's and the Dollar General. But that's "NIMBY" too so where do you draw the line? We live in a capitalist society after all, and the only thing preventing these large mega-corporations from being absolutely everywhere are the few NIMBY willing to say no to it with the little power they have over their slice of the world.
by unclad5968 | 2026-02-06 23:14:59+00:00
Reading the early Christian church leaders was enlightening, as a member of an evangelical church. My church didn't really have any answers when I asked why our practices/beliefs diverged so intensely, which was somewhat disappointing. The writings of the early Christian leaders are filled with Greek philosophy, genuine debates about theology, and a ton of wisdom for both believers and unbelievers.
by stareatgoats | 2026-02-06 23:15:17+00:00
Somehow I appreciate this type of attitude more than the one which reflects total denial of the current trajectory. Fervent denial and AI trash-talking being maybe the single most dominant sentiment on HN over the last year, by all means interspersed with a fair amount of amazement at our new toys.

But it is sad if good programmers should loose sight of the opportunities the future will bring (future as in the next few decades). If anything, software expertise is likely to be one of the most sought-after skills - only a slightly different kind of skill than churning out LOCs on a keyboard faster than the next person: People who can harness the LLMs, design prompts at the right abstraction level, verify the code produced, understand when someone has injected malware, etc. These skills will be extremely valuable in the short to medium term AFAICS.

But ultimately we will obviously become obsolete if nothing (really) catastrophic happens, but when that happens then likely all human labor will be obsolete too, and society will need to be organized differently than exchanging labor for money for means of sustenance.
by quickthrowman | 2026-02-06 23:15:40+00:00
Epstein being murdered is the one conspiracy that I personally still think may be possible/probable.

All it takes is a single actor paying off some guards to ‘fall asleep’, a camera to be disabled, and a 15 minute window of opportunity. It’s much more probable than something like the US Government planning 9/11 and somehow keeping thousands of co-conspirators silent.

I don’t really spend a whole lot of time thinking about it since as you said, we’ll never know for sure. It just seems at least probable if he actually did have kompromat on powerful people.
by krapp | 2026-02-06 23:15:46+00:00
Yeah... no. You're not going to convince anyone that Obama and his wife were portrayed as apes, monkeys, what have you by the Trump administration as a compliment or that there was some kind of reverse racism against white people involved, or a sly jab at Trump's intelligence.

I'm half convinced you're doing satire here, and you don't even believe it yourself.
by simonw | 2026-02-06 23:16:31+00:00
The Salesforce acquisition closed in 2010, when Heroku was barely three years old.

A whole lot of Heroku's best features shipped after they were acquired. They had a pretty good run under Salesforce for the first few years.

It would be interesting to hear a full oral history of when and where things went wrong after that. I expect the original founders leaving was a major factor.
by jwpapi | 2026-02-06 23:16:34+00:00
The first rule is an antipattern. I think describing your architecture or ANY kind of documentation for your AI is an anti-pattern and blows the context window leading to worse results, and actual more deviation.

The controlling systems are not give it more words at the start. Agentic coding needs to work in loop with dedicated context.

You need to think about how can i give as much intent as possible with as little words.

You can built a tremendous amount of custom lint rules ai never needs to read except they miss it.

Every pattern in your repo gets repeated, repo will always win over documentation and when your repo is good structured you don’t need to repeat this to AI

It’s like dev always has been, watch what has gone wrong and make sure the whole type or error can’t happen again.
by deadeyesusan | 2026-02-06 23:16:37+00:00
Figured I'd check this out for the heck of it. Tried the first chapter of 'So I'm the Hero's Therapist?' and wow, AI writing sans a human editor is worse than I thought. This is a special kind of incohesive, even within a single prompt. If I'd made paper notes (or any notes), it'd just be 'how do you know that', 'that's not how that works', and 'wtf' scrawled all over it.

I really do not support this kind of project on a personal level, but on a neutral, interesting-project level, best of luck. You've got your work cut out for you.

Edit: spelling and minor tone change
by eek2121 | 2026-02-06 23:16:54+00:00
Most of my career, I've worked for startups and small/medium sized businesses, mostly using Ruby On Rails or Node based stuff for language/frameworks.

In every single company I've worked for in the past 15-20 years in this capacity the biggest focus was to exit heroku as quickly as possible. The reason: Price. You don't get to charge a premium for tooling, especially not when open source tooling exists that lets you use cloud providers without paying "the Heroku Tax".) Is Heroku still using AWS/any cloud provider? They should have rolled their own infrastructure decades ago. Alas, they got bought by a shit show of a company.

(Note: I stopped working in 2023 due to health, and much of my early career was ASP/PHP/.NET)
by zahlman | 2026-02-06 23:18:04+00:00
> The reason why risk departments all inevitably reinvent Maoism is because the only effective enforcement mechanism they have is to refuse service.

How is it Maoist to refuse service???

> This calculus falls apart for the government.

It really doesn't. The judicial process is expensive and jail time isn't at all proportional to the amount defrauded (especially not when there is no political appetite for locking up a disproportionately "racialized" set of culprits, never mind the facts); nor does it solve the problem of recovering those funds. Further, the projections on the amount of fraud uncovered make it seem rather likely that a high percentage of those responsible are going free.

> We don't need to repeatedly reinvestigate the same people for the same crime "just in case".

The entire point of the system you're calling "Risk Maoism" is that it does not involve reinvestigation; it involves a presumption that reinvestigation would be a waste of time.
by thrance | 2026-02-06 23:19:25+00:00
There's Freeciv [1] for IV, and Unciv [2] for V. I doesn't have many fans, VI is too recent, and VII, well... Let's not talk about VII.

> Civ fans tend to prefer [...]

I'd say, each entry in the series gets love. The saying goes: "Your favorite Civ game is the first one you ever played". In my experience, that's pretty true (Still stuck on V).

[1] https://www.freeciv.org/

[2] https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv
by lll-o-lll | 2026-02-06 23:19:25+00:00
I was a 90’s hacker (teenager in the early 90’s deep into “hacking”). “Hackers” was clearly a movie for teenagers and released in the 90s, so it stands to reason that it captured some of that cultural moment. I did love it.

However, Sneakers was also released at around the same time, and that really captured my imagination and had a real lasting impact on my life. Hackers was fun, but Sneakers was aspirational.
by pixelready | 2026-02-06 23:19:30+00:00
I think there’s a lot of poor incentives at play here. Having to mash everything down into a handful of top line success metrics (annual test scores, attendance rate) is certainly one, alongside this obsession with one-size-fits-all age-cohort based schooling.

It is clear that public schooling in the US was originally designed to build obedient citizens and efficient factory workers. Horace Mann’s love of the Prussian model, the use of bells to condition timely synchronized movement between activities, the focus on testing and measurable output, etc… All other goals over the years were half-heartedly bolted on to that structure and it’s showing its age.
by Dweller1622 | 2026-02-06 23:19:30+00:00
The world at large seems to have descended into moral panic on all sorts of subjects and it's difficult for me to understand precisely how or why. Perhaps it's no coincidence that over the last decade and change there seems to have been broad political shifts to the right. Certainly the various moral panics would have interplay with that, but I'm not sure which came first if either.
by craigmccaskill | 2026-02-06 23:19:50+00:00
Disclosure: I'm a PM at ServiceNow. Opinions my own.

High. SoR systems tend to either be where or are closely tied to wherever the work is being done. It's an incredibly disruptive thing to rip out and change all of the process and backend systems that run your business. It's why land and expand is such an effective strategy for these companies and everything is sold as an interconnected economy of scale.

I'm quite a bit more bullish than OP, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't worried about the way the market has reacted and the 'new multiple' trend.

There is always going to be a market for a business operating system, we just might be a similar situation to Netflix/HBO last decade, where the race was about which side could shore up their core weakness first: content engine vs. streaming platform.

We're seeing the same thing happen now. Enterprise has the data, business logic, customer base and distribution but it needs to add SotA AI capabilities into the core of the product without just bolting something on. The Ai companies have the models, talent and are agile enough they can turn out demos and compelling pitches abut they're missing the enterprise data, domain specificity and being able to operate with the regulatory and compliance scaffolding that is required to operate in the enterprise.

Both sides are racing toward the middle, but the problems left for the AI companies to solve are arguably the harder ones, especially when the models themselves are rapidly commoditizing or are open source. It's tough to build enterprise-grade infrastructure on top of a layer where your core differentiation is eroding.

There was another comment in this thread about value moving to the agent layer. I'd push back a little on this. An agent is only useful if it has reliable, governed access to the system where the work actually happens. The SoR that builds a credible agent platform on top of its own data and workflow layer has a structural advantage over a standalone agent tryin to orchestrate across five different systems via an API. IMO the strong foundation wins out here.
by jpollock | 2026-02-06 23:19:50+00:00
I have a different opinion. :) DevOps is great feedback to the engineering team.

Too many alarms or alarms at unsocial hours? The engineering team should feel that pain.

Too hard to push? The engineering team should feel that pain.

Strange hard to diagnose alarms? Yep, the engineering team should feel that pain!

The feedback is very important to keeping the opex costs under control.

However, I think the author and I have different opinions on what DevOps is. DevOps isn't a full time role. It's what the engineer does to get their software into production.
by dghlsakjg | 2026-02-06 23:20:05+00:00
> You think people don't care about what their neighborhood is like?

I'm not saying that at all. I haven't said anything like that. I'm saying that people care so deeply that they come up with horseshit to justify what they want instead of just saying it.

I'm saying - repeatedly - that 'character' is a term that is so nebulous as to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean. In my sibling comment that you also responded to I pointed out that I can use the "character" of a neighborhood to justify infill, densification, and transit lanes as easily as I can use it to argue against the exact same things. It can, and is, weaponized for really petty gripes.

I'm not arguing that you shouldn't argue for or against changes that affect you. I'm arguing that "character" is a virtuous shield that people use to hide behind the argument of "I personally don't want this, but can't come up with a reason that sounds better than personal preference". The problem with "character of the neighborhood" is that you can't really argue against something that is so loosely defined.

Your complaint about apartments can just be straightforward, you can say that you are concerned with the possible nuisances that can come with dense housing, and you don't trust the current enforcement or rules to allow you to enjoy your property peacefully. That is a perfectly valid reason to oppose something.