MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-02-01 17:48:54+00:00
The best deep-dive into coding agents (and best architecture) I've seen so far. And I love the minimalism with this design, but there's so much complexity necessary already, it's kind of crazy. Really glad I didn't try to write my own :)

Re: security, I think I need to make an AI credential broker/system. The only way to securely use agents is to never give them access to a credential at all. So the only way to have the agent run a command which requires credentials, is to send the command to a segregated process which asks the user for permission, then runs it, then returns status to the agent. It would process read-only requests automatically but write requests would send a request to the user to authorize. I haven't yet found somebody else writing this, so I might as well give it a shot

Other than credentialed calls, I have Docker-in-Docker in a VM, so all other actions will be YOLO'd. I think this is the only reasonable system for long-running loops.
by reify | 2026-02-01 17:48:59+00:00
yeah! we came up with this pile of shit, after we all smoked about 10 bongs of the best skunk known to man, downed 5 pints of guinness, double dropped the best MDMA in the world, then we all had a 5 grams of magic mushrooms. Sweet!

we knew straight away that we had created a moltster
by fsckboy | 2026-02-01 17:50:24+00:00
FTA: This scroll is one of the most important literary documents still in private hands.

and: However, the return of the scroll to the auction block echoes an earlier controversy. In 2001, when the manuscript was last offered for sale, Carolyn Cassady – the former wife of Neal Cassady, the real-life inspiration for the novel’s Dean Moriarty – denounced the auction as “blasphemy”, arguing that the scroll belonged in a public library rather than a private collection. “Jack loved public libraries,” she said at the time, adding: “If they auction it, anybody rich could buy it and keep it out of sight.”
by VoidWhisperer | 2026-02-01 17:50:30+00:00
Seems to be timing out for me (not necessarily surprising, given that it is a floppy disk and HN has a history of hugging sites to death)

Archive link incase people want to see the page but can't load it: https://web.archive.org/web/20260129015513/http://floppy.ddn...
by jmward01 | 2026-02-01 17:51:29+00:00
The great thing that a site like this can bring is helping to discover and refine anti-patterns [1]. I am a huge fan of showing valid paths to take to speed up learning, but showing dead ends, or at least sub-optimal paths, is often very helpful as well.

One criticism I have though is that documenting a failure doesn't mean you actually realized what truly went wrong and even if you accurately describe what went wrong that doesn't mean you have a real solution to that problem. Often the reason things went wrong were far more nuanced and the fix is not obvious. Adding an untested lesson at the end of each of their failures is premature. I'd call them, at best, observations and next steps to try. They are only lessons after they have truly been tested and successfully navigated around the original failure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern
by baubino | 2026-02-01 17:51:38+00:00
Reasonable accommodations have been made for students with disabilities for decades now. While there might be some cases where AI might be helpful for accommodating students, it is not, nor should it be, a universal application because different disabilities (and different students) require different treatment and support. There‘s tons of research on disability accommodations and tons of specialists who work on this. Most universities have an entire office dedicated to supporting students with disabilities, and primary and secondary schools usually have at least one person who takes on that role.

So how do you handle kids who can‘t write well? The same way we‘ve been handling them all along — have them get an assessment and determine exactly where they need support and what kind of support will be most helpful to that particular kid. AI might or might not be a part of that, but it‘s a huge mistake to assume that it has to be a part of that. People who assume that AI can just be thrown at disability support betray how little they actually know about disability support.
by JasonADrury | 2026-02-01 17:51:59+00:00
Yes, it's apparently hosted behind some fastflux setup. That's neither new nor special, nor is it particularly expensive. Such setups are offered on various forums starting from a few hundred dollars a month.

> Their nodes both in Russia and spread all around the world would not be permitted by Russia to mirror random sites without authorization to do so.

This is simply not true. You can absolutely run a website like this in Russia without any authorization. Who would you even ask? The whole idea is bizarre.
by subhobroto | 2026-02-01 17:52:17+00:00
> I find, as a parent, when I talk about it at the high school level I get very negative reactions from other parents. Specifically I want high schoolers to be skilled in the use of AI, and particular critical thinking skills around the tools, while simultaneously having skills assuming no AI. I don’t want the school to be blindly “anti AI” as I’m aware it will be a part of the economy our kids are brought into.

This is my exact experience as well and I find it frustrating.

If current technology is creating an issue for teachers - it's the teachers that need to pivot, not block current technology so they can continue what they are comfortable with.

Society typically cares about work getting done and not much about how it got done - for some reason, teachers are so deep into the weeds of the "how", that they seem to forget that if the way to mend roads since 1926 have been to learn how to measure out, mix and lay asphalt patches by hand, in 2026 when there are robots that do that perfectly every-time, they should be teaching humans to complement those robots or do something else entirely.

It's possible in the past, that learning how to use an abacus was a critical lesson but once calculators were invented, do we continue with two semesters of abacus? Do we allow calculators into the abacus course? Should the abacus course be scrapped? Will it be a net positive on society to replace the abacus course with something else?

"AI" is changing society fundamentally forever and education needs to change fundamentally with it. I am personally betting that humans in the future, outside extreme niches, are generalists and are augmented by specialist agents.
by Merrill | 2026-02-01 17:52:19+00:00
With good speech to text and text to speech technologies the skills of writing and reading may become unnecessary for the bulk of the population. If the average person needs to create a critical document like a contract or a will, or to understands some important document, then it's likely that they will hire someone with the specialized skill set.

What is unclear is whether specialists in STEM can dispense with reading and writing. The representation of information in STEM subjects includes many non-textual systems, such as drawings, charts, figures, diagrams of various sorts, tables, etc. While not primarily consisting of texts in a language, in many cases there are text components ranging from math symbols to full sentence captions or bullet points.
by alenmangattu | 2026-02-01 17:52:28+00:00
I’ve spent the last 3 months building a crawler to index the public parts of Telegram (https://telehunt.org). The native search is essentially a black box that favors the top 0.1% of bot almost invisible.
The Tech: I had to deal with rate limits and the lack of a global 'sitemap'. I’m currently using a hybrid approach of metadata scraping to keep the index fresh.
The Goal: It’s an experiment in making 'un-indexable' bot data discoverable.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-01 17:52:47+00:00
I fully support having huge stockpiles in addition to subsidies. There's a lot of things midway on the scale between "business as usual" and "meteor strike" where minimizing supply chain disruptions would likely prove to be of great benefit.

I completely agree that the current way things are being handled appears to have its share of problems and could stand to be better optimized. But that doesn't mean it's useless either.
by ebiederm | 2026-02-01 17:52:55+00:00
Having moved between states and taken a lot of drivers tests. I can say the exact rules are something that vary between states and over time. Including how it was taught.

My first drivers test was yield to the right. Later it was fifo order of who made it to the stop.

My running interpretation is fifo order with yielding to the right in case of ambiguity.
by TheRealPomax | 2026-02-01 17:53:06+00:00
And for those we tell them the truth: if all this bothers you, and it should, pay for the version of Windows that you can control, instead of paying nothing and having your computer (and data) be controlled by someone else.

Or, of course, pay nothing and use Linux. But as much as we want to pretend that's a solution that works for everyone, that's not a solution that works for everyone. Especially as, just like Windows, you're not done once it's installed, you still need to do that one time configure-all-the-things pass on Linux, too.
by julienchastang | 2026-02-01 17:55:03+00:00
"Never copy and paste the output from generative AI chatbots" is mentioned in the article three times. This has been my experience as well. Initial AI output can be stunning until you quickly realize that it is mostly BS, filler and pap. However, I do find LLMs to be really useful for brainstorming, ideation, sounding boards etc.
by woile | 2026-02-01 17:55:30+00:00
For the guys at Netbird, please create an entry in the https://wiki.nixos.org explaining how to use it with nixos.

- Tailscale has one entry
- Pangolin is getting one

I would like to see, even if brief:

1. Getting started

2. Hardware requirements

3. Security considerations

4. Recommended architecture, like running in a VPS if it
makes sense

5. Configuring a server

6. Configuring devices

7. Resources (links to read more on netbird)

Thank you from the home lab community
by bc569a80a344f9c | 2026-02-01 17:55:33+00:00
> it would be just nice to quickly change (or even better: have access to multiple at once!) networks.

Accessing multiple corporate networks simultaneously from the same endpoint violates all sorts of access policies. If it doesn’t, the access policy is lacking. Even for startups.

And no, unless you build it and enforce it from the start, no one ever succeeds in bolting on a reasonably security posture after implementing all their other processes no one will dare touch.
by adastra22 | 2026-02-01 17:56:00+00:00
Billions. The total carrying capacity of the Earth maxes out at 4bn people, even with maximally optimized agriculture and a vegetarian diet. The extra half of the Earth's population today owe their existence to Haber-Bosch.

It really was a two-man team that discovered nitrogen fixation - the other being not Carl Bosch, but Robert Le Rossignol who assisted Haber in developing his bench-scale nitrogen fixing reactor. Carl Bosch led the team that scaled it up, and that was a large effort of hundreds of people.
by mbreese | 2026-02-01 17:58:23+00:00
It’s not the time that’s the friction. It’s the choice. The student has to actively take the picture and upload it. It’s a choice. It takes more effort than reading the autogenerated summary that Google Drive or Copilot helpfully made for the digital PDF of the reading they replaced.

It’s not much more effort. The level of friction is minimal. But we’re talking about the activation energy of students (in an undergrad English class, likely teenagers). It doesn’t take much to swing the percentage of students who do the reading.
Show HN: I analyzed 6 years of Hacker News data and here's what I found
by Tusharmagar | 2026-02-01 17:59:02+00:00
I built this for a hackathon after analyzing Hacker News data from 2020–2025, and some of the patterns around front-page posts were more interesting than I expected, so I’m sharing it here.

A couple of notable data points: the highest-upvoted post in this period was about Sam Altman being fired from OpenAI (5,000+ upvotes), and weekends turned out to be a surprisingly good time to post.

Following my own advice for this post — let’s see how it goes xD
Show HN: DeskTab – See the browser tabs like apps on a phone home screen
by aiibe | 2026-02-01 17:59:21+00:00
You know how your phone shows apps in a nice grid and you just tap one? I wanted that for my 47 browser tabs.

So I made a Chrome extension. Hit Cmd + . and a grid overlay pops up showing all your tabs. Click one, you're there. Close one, it's gone. Drag them around if you're feeling organized (you're not, but still).

Fully vibe-coded, vanilla JS, no build step, no frameworks, no tracking, no account. Just tabs.

GitHub: https://github.com/aiibe/desktab

Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/cnmgiocnlfnkelhmgjn...

Would love feedback — does this actually help anyone else, or is it just me and my tab problem?
by alexst07 | 2026-02-01 17:59:57+00:00
I got tired of maintaining separate, brittle E2E suites for different platforms (Appium, Espresso, XCUITest). I’m building Talos, a QA agent that is completely agnostic to your tech stack.
The Core Insight:
Because Talos uses AI Computer Vision to "see" the interface, it doesn't care if your app is written in Flutter, React Native, Kotlin, Swift, or Web. If it has pixels, Talos can test it.
How it works:
Generation: It scans your Source Code and Figma designs to auto-generate Natural Language test cases (e.g., "User logs in").
Execution: It drives the simulator/browser, capturing screenshots and logs in real-time.
Verification: The AI analyzes the visual capture against your Figma/Reference images to pass/fail the test, completely ignoring the underlying View Hierarchy.
I’m looking for feedback from mobile devs on different frameworks to see how it handles specific native animations.

https://github.com/Talos-Tester-AI/Talos
by joecool1029 | 2026-02-01 18:00:28+00:00
> but because of the higher frequency used in 5G

For the most part they use the same or lower frequencies. N71 (600mhz) is lower than any of the 2G/3G bands and requires less cell density than 3G (UMTS/WCDMA) did.

> 5G infrastructure isn’t limited to tall easily visible radio towers like 4G and before;

Nor were earlier technologies. DAS systems get used in large buildings/cities and were done with 4G as well. Small cells and femtocells have been a thing since at least 3G era.

> 5G transmitters are small and relatively inexpensive, making them very common.

Transmitter cost wasn't the primary limitation before, the options for unlicensed/lightly-licensed spectrum were low before and the standards weren't really designed to use them as primary carrier until NR. Also you had to run way more components to run earlier technologies, the stack is just smaller for a NR deploy.
by whatever1 | 2026-02-01 18:00:46+00:00
Any idea why ethernet stagnated in terms of speed? There was a time it was so much faster compared to usb. Now even wifi seems to be faster.

Sure one can buy nice ethernet cards and cables, but the reality is that if you grab a random laptop/desktop from best buy and a cable, you are looking at best at a 2.5Gb/s speed.
by bsimpson | 2026-02-01 18:01:05+00:00
I have been. Hoping it cuts out some of the manual work and prevents me from accidentally writing a PR against an obsolete nixpkgs. The only changes I've made are ones I'd want to be upstreamed. So from the point of view of my individual devices, it's basically the same as just putting nixpkgs-weekly in my flake. I can nix flake update to pull changes into nix, and hard reset to update my local repo (which is now just an easier way to fast forward + rebase/cherry-pick).

We'll see how it goes. So far, it was broken upstream once when gcc was upgraded out of sync with godot3, and it looks like sublime-text might break next week do to an openssl change. But those are both artifacts of depending on weekly. If it stays this hairy, maybe I'll end up using the biannual release channels.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-02-01 18:01:25+00:00
> I mean Hackernews came after reddit and its community

HN is a weird thing. I think it just managed the perfect storm of improbabilities. It managed to find just enough audience for it to be interesting, but didn't reach a critical mass that sees it going exponential (possibly its subject matter repels popular interest and especially youth interest). It has a one-man (or at least tiny moderation) team that (somehow) resists the urge to do anything but put the smackdown on bad actors (possibly the hard rule against political stories helps). And as the last refuge of people who hate Facebookization, it's also possible there is zero demand for it to be swipe-able and phone-centric.

But, in truth, it is also sort of fossilized, and will die once our generation (and -a-half) retires and has little time for it. So we've got 15 or 20 years more, and it will shrink as it goes, and then one day it'll just be gone. It won't even be here to memorialize its demise.

>I do wonder if this can be replicated with the communities that you mention tho.

Maybe someone is more clever than I, and can figure it out. But I've spent nearly 20 years at this point, and I've come up with squat. I think the forums that people did enjoy (for awhile) were completely organic and just can't be artificially created.

>Or what exactly would you classify as "shit show"?

It's difficult to even describe what you're missing, if you weren't there to see it for yourself. It didn't start with reddit, it didn't start with Slashdot, I'm not even sure what it did start with that's before my time. Are you even aware that many of these websites didn't even require an account to post? That was only if you wanted your name attached to some comment that was really clever. There was this sweet spot though, where it all converged. It was post-internet-boom, so some of the people who were posting had hobbies besides the internet itself... making for conversations about anything and everything. And, as a rule, people weren't jaded about it in general... people weren't expecting you to be rude or have some agenda. If they could even imagine that, then it was you were a spammer trying to sell something which was more junk than scam. There was the idea that if the software/website itself were bad, eventually it would be improved. Everything was text/typing/reading, so it was literate and not 10 second tiktok garbage. Phone-texting hadn't quite spoiled everything with text-speech. People managed to get fed up with bad design and bad behavior, there were so-called exoduses. And, from time to time, it was possible to be noticed without Russian mafia connections or Illuminati endorsements.

What we have now is quite possibly the worst possible timeline, so to speak. All of the points I've mentioned don't even quite begin to describe what's changed.
by KingMob | 2026-02-01 18:02:05+00:00
If it helps, this was all I needed in my CLAUDE.md to make it use jj perfectly:

# Version Control

- IMPORTANT: YOU MUST assume we use Jujutsu ("jj") for version control. Check by running `jj root` (or look for a `.jj/` directory) to confirm.
- If I say "commit", "branch", "squash", etc., assume jj equivalents first.
- You can ignore any `git add` command, since jj always auto-adds.
- Use `jj` commands instead of `git`. Never run `git` in a jj repository.
- ALWAYS prefer jj change IDs over commit SHAs. jj change IDs are stable.
- jj doesn't usually require named branches
- If you need named branches, use `jj bookmark`, but you must manually update the bookmark after making new commits, since they won't automatically get updated
- When reading data from jj, always use `--ignore-working-copy` to avoid snapshotting the working copy (which is slow and unnecessary for read operations). But when writing (commit, squash, rebase, etc.), you MUST NOT use `--ignore-working-copy`.
- If you get "Error: The working copy is stale", run `jj workspace update-stale` first
by nixosbestos | 2026-02-01 18:02:27+00:00
I guess I'll just say that I hope you share the blame with the appropriate parties whenever you are suffering through iOS entitlements and provisioning to publish or self-load it on your iPhone, since Netbird's iOS client is open source.

Though, maybe it's not doing business in the US, and maybe the app is not similarly geo-blocked.

Actually can you not just pull the app and then side-load it anyway? That's what I would do if I couldn't get Tailscale from the Play Store...

Maybe this comment helps shed light on who I think are real the cause of your ire. Frankly I strongly agree with Brad's comment on why they don't care to open source the iOS client like they do the Android one.
by riversflow | 2026-02-01 18:04:03+00:00
Getting sick isn’t just life or death.

My parents both got measels, and they had no hesitancy getting me vaccinated. I’m significantly taller than my dad, who lost 40 pounds when he got German measles when he was 17. I grew several inches that year.

People who don’t get vaccinated are bad people. I have no qualms saying it.
by masfuerte | 2026-02-01 18:04:12+00:00
Yes, and they can be smaller. The circle is about the right size but it has lots of room around it. Imagine a crossroads at the meeting of two residential streets, both just wide enough for two cars. Stick the circle from your picture in the middle of that imagined junction. That's what the mini roundabouts are like on the 1930s suburban estate I live next to.
by throw0101c | 2026-02-01 18:04:14+00:00
> Until motherboards include SFP ports […]

A micro-ATX motherboard with on-board 2xSFP28 (Intel E810):

* https://download-2.msi.com/archive/mnu_exe/server/D3052-data...

* https://www.techradar.com/pro/this-amd-motherboard-has-a-uni...
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-01 18:04:27+00:00
> Aging muscles heal more slowly after injury—a frustrating reality familiar to many older adults.

> In skeletal muscle, this decline is largely driven by impaired function of muscle stem cells (MuSCs)

I take it that as mitosis (cell division) gets slower with age, there's also simply no way aging muscles could potentially not heal more slowly?

So slower mitosis and then in addition to that muscle cells going into a "less repair, more survival" mode. Darn, sucks to get old.
by thundergolfer | 2026-02-01 18:04:42+00:00
Totally agree, and this is covered in an (identically named?) Google Research blog [1].

Just last week I was writing a demo-focused Python file called `safetykit.py`, which has its first demo as this:

def praise_dryrun(dryrun: bool = True) -> None:
...

The snippet which demonstrates the plan-then-execute pattern I have is this:

def gather(paths):
files = []
for pattern in paths:
files.extend(glob.glob(pattern))
return files

def execute(files):
for f in files:
os.remove(f)

files = gather([os.path.join(tmp_dir, "*.txt")])
if dryrun:
print(f"Would remove: {files}")
else:
execute(files)

I introduced dry-run at my company and I've been happy to see it spread throughout the codebase, because it's a coding practice that more than pays for itself.

[1] https://www.gresearch.com/news/in-praise-of-dry-run/