MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by larodi | 2026-02-04 15:54:09+00:00
> I think ERP providers should continue to exist. It's hard to vibe code financial/accounting specs

I can see how easy it is to actually agentically-dev a very decent ERP if you have the blueprints such as value stream diagrams, caps, bpmns, domain models and seq. diagrams.

But this does not require that you use SAAS, right? It requires one understands business architecture and knows how to apply such mental tools. It requires someone implementing these, translating them to code. Well this is precisely what LLM agentic systems do. And they do it much cheaper with much shorter dev.cycles. And tailored also.
by parineum | 2026-02-04 15:54:11+00:00
> they took in $308bn in premiums and paid out $264bn in medical costs ... they're taking 14% off the top just to exist as a middle-man.

In 2023, they had a 0.8% profit margin[0]. 9 billion dollars in a trillion dollar industry.

Ignoring the disingenuous framing ("taking off the top" including how much they pay their employees), how does that compare to other industries?

[0]https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/2024-annual-hea...
by originalvichy | 2026-02-04 15:54:21+00:00
Any guesses why some of the newest files seem to have random ”=” characters in the text? My first thought was OCR, but it seemed to not be linked to characters like ”E” that could be mistakenly interpreted by an OCR tool. My second guess is just making it more difficult to produce reliable text searches, but probably 90% of HN readers could find a way to make a search tool that does not fall apart in case a ”=” character is found (although making this work for long search queries would make the search slower).
by buildsjets | 2026-02-04 15:54:42+00:00
Aerospace Engineer here. In my industry, hand-tied harnesses are commonplace at every level, from homemade garage-built aircraft, throughout all current commercial aircraft, and extending to the Mars Rover. It’s also commonplace in better racecar and motorcycle wire harness builds. I will frequently use cable ties to temporarily assemble a harness, then hand tie the final configuration and cut off the cable ties.

Also, I guarantee you there is no better tool for flush-cutting cables ties so you don’t get scratched by em than the IGAN-P6 side cutters sold on Amazon for around seven dollars. I bypass my Snap-On cutters and grab them every time.

If I am really, really forced to use a cable tie I prefer Cobra Ties, which have a low-profile head that keeps the tail parallel to the band, rather than protruding at a 90 degree angle.

https://www.cobraties.com/collections/cobra%C2%AE-low-profil...
by cf100clunk | 2026-02-04 15:54:43+00:00
> why are you forcing me to deal with an impenetrable forest of symlinks rather than simply hand-edit a couple of basic rc scripts?

Run levels. That's it, run levels. Each run level provided or killed off its own specific list of runnable things.

Run levels were a desirable feature back in the day amongst System V Unix vendors, so each run level required its own kill and start scripts for each item. Rather than duplicate some or all such scripts across some or all run levels, symlinks were the solution. For example, Solaris had levels 0 through 6, though 4 was unspecified and therefore kept for purely local configuration.

Its not hard to understand when you get the big picture, and it wasn't hard to administer if you had the proper overview of it all. Admittedly, admins coming in cold would have to sort through it all, which is partly why it gained a reputation for murkiness. Keep in mind it was the era of administering sendmail macros by hand and you get the picture.
by JoshTriplett | 2026-02-04 15:54:47+00:00
> They probably don’t communicate to you all of the little parts you didn’t spec because they don’t think you want them to.

And yet, every single time I've seen reports of people having trouble with manufacturing, this was one of the problems. Someone presumably had to figure out all the little parts, so send the result of the figuring out before manufacturing begins!

I'm not trying to oversimplify, here. There are constraints this doesn't account for; for instance, getting a spec written in English might be an added expense. But getting whatever was written doesn't seem unreasonable...

> why waste money on American salaries speccing all the tedium

But someone had to spec it out, and it seems like it'd help everyone involved to communicate that spec, even if it's just filed in a drawer somewhere.
by Nerios | 2026-02-04 15:54:51+00:00
New account because I created it for this post. GitHub empty because code isn't the point — documented service quality is.

If my writing seems polished, maybe that's because I spent $200/mo on tools to make it that way.

The data is real. 19 incidents, 14 days. Verify it yourself on status.anthropic.com history.
by AlienRobot | 2026-02-04 15:55:14+00:00
This week Adobe decided, out of nowhere, to kill their 2D animation product (Animate, which is based on Flash) to focus on AI. I'm already seeing animators post that Adobe killed their entire career.

Although that feels a bit exaggerated, I feel it's not far from the truth. If there were, say, 3 closed source animation software that could do professional animation in total, and they just all decided to just kill the product one day, it would actually kill the entire industry. Animators would have no software to actually create animation with. They would have to wait until someone makes one, which would take years for feature parity, and why would anyone make one when the existing software thought such product wasn't a good idea to begin with?

I feel this isn't much different with AI. It's a rush to make people depend on a software that literally can't run on a personal computer. Adobe probably loves it because the user can't pirate the AI. If people forget how to use image editing software and start depending entirely on AI to do the job, that means they will forever be slaves to developers who can host and setup the AI on the cloud.

Imagine if people forgot how to format a document in Word and they depended on Copilot to do this.

Imagine if people forgot how to code.
Show HN: I built Clash to avoid conflicts when running AI agents in parallel
by matk9 | 2026-02-04 15:55:25+00:00
Hey HN,

I made Clash, an open-source cli tool that helps you/your coding agent manage merge conflicts that occur during parallel development on the same repository.

Example: Two agents working on different features both modify src/main.rs. Clash shows you this conflict immediately and not after lots of time and tokens spent during the merge time.

It is a simple tool that your agent can use as part of the development process to check if the commits agents make are conflicting with any other worktrees in the repo. This helps pre-emptively capture merge conflicts before feature completion and helps make the merging together of different features into main branch much easier.

Unlike git, which only shows conflicts at merge time, Clash detects conflicts between all active worktrees during development. It's 100% read-only & never modifies your git repo and outputs JSON so agents can adapt their approach before wasting time.

With all of us moving to a world of Managing coding agents rather than being a coding agent themselves, we would be working on multiple different features & bug fixes which unlocks the new ability to have merge conflicts with ourselves.

The vision with clash is to be a tool, that help coordinate internal agents amongst themselves.

Example workflow:
- Agent 1 commits changes to src/main.rs in worktree A
- Agent 2 commits changes to src/main.rs in worktree B
- Both run `clash status --json` after committing
- They see the conflict and coordinate to avoid incompatible changes

To better showcase the clash in action, we have added a number of gifs on Clash in action in the github repo.

I’d be interested in feedback on how this tool would fit into your workflow & any general thoughts you have in this area. Try it out and let me know how it performs on your end. Install Instructions available in the readme.

This is Mathew, Thanks for reading!
by JohnnyMarcone | 2026-02-04 15:55:30+00:00
I really hope Anthropic turns out to be one of the 'good guys', or at least a net positive.

It appears they trend in the right direction:

- Have not kissed the Ring.

- Oppose blocking AI regulation that other's support (e.g. They do not support banning state AI laws [2]).

- Committing to no ads.

- Willing to risk defense department contract over objections to use for lethal operations [1]

The things that are concerning:
- Palantir partnership (I'm unclear about what this actually is) [3]

- Have shifted stances as competition increased (e.g. seeking authoritarian investors [4])

It inevitable that they will have to compromise on values as competition increases and I struggle parsing the difference marketing and actually caring about values. If an organization cares about values, it's suboptimal not to highlight that at every point via marketing. The commitment to no ads is obviously good PR but if it comes from a place of values, it's a win-win.

I'm curious, how do others here think about Anthropic?

[1]https://archive.is/Pm2QS

[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/opinion/anthropic-ceo-reg...

[3]https://investors.palantir.com/news-details/2024/Anthropic-a...

[4]https://archive.is/4NGBE
by palmotea | 2026-02-04 15:55:30+00:00
> Still go to prison for not showing. So until devices have multiple pins for plausible deniability we are still screwed.

> What’s so hard to make 2-3 pins and each to access different logged in apps and files.

Besides the technical challenges, I think there's a pretty killer human challenge: it's going to be really hard for the user to create an alternate account that looks real to someone who's paying attention.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-02-04 15:55:41+00:00
Sigh.

Like, this is a function of fragmented capital markets rather than anything else. Ryanair would 100% have a market cap of 50bn+ if it had a US listing.

Anyway, market cap is a really really bad metric for basically anything. Like Walmart has a market cap of over 1tn now, do you think its business has materially changed since 2021 (when it was half that)?

Meta has basically doubled since then, and again, their business is basically the same as it was 5 years ago.

As another example, Stripe is valued at about 100bn, while both OpenAI and Anthropic are 3.5-5x that. Which ones would you rather put your money in?

If we were to look at income mobility the numbers look much more different: https://slowrevealgraphs.com/2024/01/13/income-mobility-acro...

(apologies I figured the OECD would have better data but this was the best I could find).

So, on average it would take a low-income person half the time to become upper income in Denmark versus the US. Is this a better metric? Certainly for a low income person with unlimited mobility options.
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-04 15:56:35+00:00
My favorite GPT-2 experience was setting homepages to the now-depricated website which used an LLM to generate new words (this word does not exist.com), 2021.

Its bespoke definition didn't always make sense [2], but I kept a curated list of "my favorite computer-generated words" (and recommended to crossword/scrabble -type friends to set the same homepage).

Favorites were sent via postcards, or shared over coffee. Mom, you were a real nayter [1], shall miss our decades of scalpable [Z] glossip [0].

----

[1] nayter (v.): to present one's viewpoint as true rather than having exaggerated or undeserved moral beliefs

[2] ...the second definition was always static text: "a word that does not exist; it was invented, defined and used by a machine learning algorithm" with link to what GPT-2 was.

[0] glossip (n.): a term of abuse attached to words used to discredit the person or group with which the author of a story is confiding

[Z] scalpable (adj.): able to be moved with considerable ease and without needing to be lifted or deformed

[bonus] dumbfuck (adj.): (especially of an electric guitar) having a fixed flat fretboard or tuned tuner
by Zak | 2026-02-04 15:56:55+00:00
This is a misunderstanding. That's the area in which the border patrol has jurisdiction to can conduct very limited searches of vehicles and operate checkpoints without individualized suspicion in order to enforce immigration law. It does not allow searches of electronic devices.

There is a separate border search exception at the point a person actually enters the country which does allow searches of electronic devices. US citizens entering the country may refuse to provide access without consequences beyond seizure of the device; non-citizens could face adverse immigration actions.

To be clear, I do think all detentions and searches without individualized suspicion should be considered violations of the 4th amendment, but the phrase "constitution-free zone" is so broad as to be misleading.
by pbhjpbhj | 2026-02-04 15:56:59+00:00
We don't know if they did the right thing here. With a previous case it seemed (to me) like Apple might have pushed an update to give access ... they presumably could do that, remotely copy all the data, then return the device to the former state. One can't know, and this sort of thing seems entirely tenable.

FBI don't have to tell anyone they accessed the device. That maintains Apples outward appearance of security; FBI just use parallel construction later if needed.

Something like {but an actually robust system} a hashed log, using an enclave, where the log entries are signed using your biometric, so that events such a network access where any data is exchanged are recorded and can only be removed using biometrics. Nothing against wrench-based attacks, of course.
by LordGrey | 2026-02-04 15:57:21+00:00
To save a click:

* Lockdown Mode needs to be turned on separately for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

* When you turn on Lockdown Mode for your iPhone, it's automatically turned on for your paired Apple Watch.

* When you turn on Lockdown Mode for one of your devices, you get prompts to turn it on for your other supported Apple devices.
by skydhash | 2026-02-04 15:57:21+00:00
> 90-99% of programming is a waste of time. Most apps today have less than a single spreadsheet page of actual business logic.

I would very much like to know the kind of app you’ve seen. It’s very hard to see something like mpv, calibre, abiword, cmus,… through that lens. Even web apps like forgejo, gonic, sr.ht, don’t fit into that view.
by Neeek | 2026-02-04 15:57:26+00:00
Just to be clear, I don't think this is useful or good legislation. While the idea that the state is a shady body that's out to fleece an honest and unsuspecting peoples is a great story beat, I just don't think it's particularly accurate to reality and we shouldn't pretend that it is just because it sounds good in a HN comment.
Show HN: Finding similarities in magazine covers (updated)
by tkp-415 | 2026-02-04 15:57:54+00:00
About a month ago I shared a web app that let you compare magazine covers using image hashes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46518106

Samin100 suggested giving CLIP and DinoV2 a shot for better results. I had no idea what those were, but researching them led me to learn about vision transformers. DinoV2 was created by Meta, and CLIP is by OpenAI.

The updated version of the magazine comparison tool lets you use those two models (Photo = DinoV2 and Design = CLIP)

I've personally really enjoyed the journey through New Yorker covers:

Bikes
https://shoplurker.com/labs/img-compare/match?model=vt&cover...
by canucktrash669 | 2026-02-04 15:58:09+00:00
It’s about the agent. Not the model or the format.

The "bitter lesson" only applies if the model makes the agent redundant. We aren't there yet. Agentic loops are just software engineering on top of CS constructs; they help current models produce better results.

Could models eventually internalize the logic used in Claude Code / Codex / OpenCode / Aider? Maybe. But for now, keeping that complexity in the agent is more energy-efficient. Even if complex agents eventually get replaced by simple loops, these standards save tokens and time today. That’s worth something.
by cjauvin | 2026-02-04 15:58:20+00:00
For "something that is published" (which includes a comment like this) I clearly dislike it too, but for chatting / texting, I realize that I often use it more than my interlocutors, and I'm not sure why. There's a part of lazyness I guess, but also a vague sense of "conveying the impression of a never ending stream of communication", which is closer in my mind to the essence of the chat medium. In French, there is also the additional layer of "using the accents or not".
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-02-04 15:58:40+00:00
Better to be held in contempt than to give up constitutional rights under pressure - most functioning democracies have and defend the right to free press, protecting said press sources, and can't make you incriminate yourself.

Anyway, it's a good thing to be skeptical about claims that iphones can't be hacked by government agencies, as long as it doesn't mean you're driven to dodgier parties (as those are guaranteed honeypots).
by shermantanktop | 2026-02-04 15:59:15+00:00
- State-aligned media outlets, where media consumption choice is a political act

- Grandiose architecture projects for historically important sites

- Obsession with massive monuments - the tallest, the most gold, the most expensive

- Military parades and lionization of the military, while demanding political support from military leadership

- A population which become keenly interested in whether something does or doesn’t benefit the leader personally

I think the terms fascism or authoritarianism are close enough to be helpful, even if some of the specifics don’t align perfectly. But the ones that do align are oddly specific sometimes.
by intended | 2026-02-04 15:59:20+00:00
If you had argued that it’s impossible to track what is made on local models, and we can no longer maintain hashes of known CP, it would have been a fair statement of current reality.

——-

You’ve said that whatever is behind door number 1 is unacceptable.

Behind door number 2, “holding tool users responsible”, is tracking every item generated via AI, and being able to hold those users responsible.

If you don’t like door number 2, we have door number 3 - which is letting things be.

For any member of society, opening door 3 is straight out because the status quo is worse than reality before AI.

If you reject door 1 though, you are left with tech monitoring. Which will be challenged because of its invasive nature.

Holding Platforms responsible is about the only option that works, at least until platforms tell people they can’t do it.
by fheinsen | 2026-02-04 15:59:50+00:00
When linear approximation error is of similar magnitude as quadratic numerical error, don’t the two become comparable? In practice, attention is computed with low-precision (4-bit, 8-bit, 16-bit) floats. Numerical error, in fact, may be a plausible explanation as to why quadratic attention, in practice, exhibits "context rot" as context gets longer, very much like an RNN.
by zeroxfe | 2026-02-04 15:59:59+00:00
I've used both gVisor and microvms for this (at very large scales), and there are various tradeoffs between the two.

The huge gVisor drawback is that it __drastically_ slows down applications (despite startup time being faster.)

For agents, the startup time latency is less of an issue than the runtime cost, so microvms perform a lot better. If you're doing this in kube, then there's a bunch of other challenges to deal with if you want standard k8s features, but if you're just looking for isolated sandboxes for agents, microvms work really well.
by mekdoonggi | 2026-02-04 16:00:00+00:00
I don't know how we even allowed these companies to not be responsible for everything on their platform.

The entirety of the social media platform is based on the idea that the company isn't responsible for what the users post, which is just wrong. If you own a magazine, you should be held responsible for everything published.

You shouldn't be allowed to profit from publishing anything, then hide behind "the users did it, not us".

And in this case, Elon should be held responsible for every single image of CSAM published on X. Same with Zuck. Same with Truth Social, whatever you want.
by zamadatix | 2026-02-04 16:00:01+00:00
2", found a matching reference to it but this is not where I bought it (and also waaay more than I paid) https://www.ebay.com/itm/136814704435. Here's a funny picture comparing it to a 2 liter https://i.imgur.com/UIzpDMO.jpeg. As far as the matching bolt... I never did find one to order so I gave that as a challenge to figure out before next year! So far he has been using it as a doorstop so he can get all of the double takes as people come in for the first time.

For some reason I think the listing I bought it from also claimed it was 5 lbs, but then it ended up arriving as a solid hunk of metal. ~21 lbs for the package weight seems right, and there wasn't much to the packaging beyond cardboard and tight bubble wrap.
by whatarethembits | 2026-02-04 16:00:06+00:00
Almost everything described in the post, amounts to a few hours in total in a given year to do "manually". I agree, there isn't compelling value (yet).

What's puzzling to me is that there's little consideration of what one is trading away for this purported "value". Doing menial tasks is a respite for your brain to process things in the background. Its an opportunity to generate new thoughts. It reminds you of your own agency in life. It allows you to recognise small patterns and relate to other people.

I don't want AI to summarise chats. It robs me the opportunity to know about something from someone's own words, therefore giving a small glimpse in their personality. This paints a picture over time, adding (or not) to the desire to interact with that person in the future. If I'm not going to see a chat anyway, then that creates the possibility of me finding something new in the future. A small moment of wonder for me and satisfaction for the person who brought me that new information.

etc etc.

Its like they're trying to outsource living.

Maybe the story is that, outsourcing this will free them up to do more meaningful things. I've yet to see any evidence of this. What are these people even talking about on the coffee chats scheduled by the helpful assistant?
by alcazar | 2026-02-04 16:00:14+00:00
This isn’t just a problem in the Netherlands or a thing of the past. 2025 actually saw the highest number of attacks ever recorded [0].

There are ways to prevent this. Like using multi-sig with geographical separation (so you can't move funds alone) or setting up forced time-delays. Ultimately, being your own bank is a massive responsibility, and I think too many people take that reality too lightly.

0: https://stats.glok.me/
by jdhwosnhw | 2026-02-04 16:00:25+00:00
> A Starlink satellite uses about 5K Watts of solar power. It needs to dissipate around that amount (+ the sun power on it) just to operate.

The “+ solar power” part is the majority of the energy. Solar panel efficiency is only about 25-30% at beginning-of-life whereas typical albedos are effectively 100%. So your estimate is off by at least a factor of three.

Also, I’m not sure where you got 5 kw from. The area of the satellite is ~100 m2, which means they are intercepting over 100 kw of bolometric solar power.
by Avicebron | 2026-02-04 16:01:31+00:00
I remember hearing that people used it as a way to signal that they were too busy, too on the go, too important to use proper punctuation..it was an obnoxious c suite trend as long as I can remember. Like you're always trying to signal that you were doing all of your comms from your cell phone between meetings/travelling. Given this article's tone and content I would say that what the author is trying to emulate or convey , maybe subconciously.