MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by timoth3y | 2026-02-04 22:42:36+00:00
The article fundamentally misrepresents what AI is doing.

It claims that people using AI to create works that violate copyright is equivalent to individual artists painting pictures or people writing fan fiction. But that is not at all what is happening.

OpenAI and others are taking money from customers to generate copyrighted works. That's back-letter copyright infringement.

The states that it is unreasonable to go after all the individual customers. That's true, but that's not how copyright law has ever been enforced. If you have a company selling copyrighted works without permission, you go after that company not after their customers.
by sixdimensional | 2026-02-04 22:42:36+00:00
I concur.

Also, it was paid for by US taxpayer dollars - the entire content should have been released somewhere for free, maybe even someone would have started up a new project to maintain it, for example, something under Wikimedia or some other nonprofit.

This wholesale elimination of valuable information and data owned by the public is so incredibly sad and damaging to our future.

Maybe we need a FOIA request to get the entire contents released to the public.
by Legend2440 | 2026-02-04 22:42:38+00:00
>The preposterousness of those space data centers and the fact that we don't have a theory of consciousness makes it seem plausible that AI could also not continue to rocket ahead.

The rate of datacenter construction in the last few years exceeds Moore's law and is almost certainly unsustainable. 'Only' 2x improvement every 2 years would seem relatively slow compared to what's happened recently.

However, I expect AI will continue to advance over the coming decades even once the bubble pops. They're clearly on to something with neural networks.
by LoganDark | 2026-02-04 22:42:38+00:00
Social media is not the problem here. It is a problem, but it's not the cause for what you're describing.

I got my career (programming) from social media and online social interaction in general. Sure, I did the bare minimum on homework for efficiency, because I disliked the extra steps and writing that teachers wanted of me (I probably have dysgraphia and can't write well), and preferred just to get the answer. It was never explained that they weren't scoring or teaching the answer, and that they were instead measuring the method. (That was a failure of the school system. Big problem in general. I digress.)

Social media allowed me to meet others like me I otherwise never would've met. Allowed me to learn things from others like me I otherwise may never have learned. Allowed me to find the people that I could get along with rather than trying to make do only with the people physically close to me.

Sure, TikTok and whatever didn't exist back then. They're terrible, even if they manage to deliver some goods. I don't have a TikTok account, don't have a Facebook account, etc.

I do have a Discord account. I did have a Cohost account, before they shut down. I have Reddit and Hacker News. Those are where I feel I spend most of my non-work, non-hobby time. I use Discord almost entirely for private communications. I used Cohost almost entirely for making connections on Discord. I use Reddit to offer advice to and receive advice from others. I use Hacker News for some sample of current events and to offer my thoughts and discussion on them.

I do have some bad habits. I scroll Twitter every once in a while, though I do find many memes and other posts to share with friends and relate over.

And social media has done some bad for me. I won't elaborate on this but I had a few very major traumas through social media when I was 12-14, and some lesser ones more recently.

But it's been a major driver of good in my life for a long time; fulfillment and connection I never could have had otherwise; and of course hard lessons I would've eventually needed anyway.

There's an argument to be made that I just wasn't the type of young person that social media is particularly harmful to, but it's done me some major harms, some exactly the type of harm that's used to protest against it, and yet none of the harm was social media's fault. All of it was interpersonal interaction. All social media did was reduce the friction to that interpersonal interaction.
by gus_massa | 2026-02-04 22:42:57+00:00
It has been done for snakes. Nobody minds you have a snake farm and sell them to the government. Neighbors may even sell you captured mices.

On the other hand, infecting the children at the school will make everyone go to your house, probably burn it and hit you until you are rescued by the police. Did I mention the local police chief has nephew in the school?
by manmal | 2026-02-04 22:44:20+00:00
> Someone is still reading the code.

But you are not. That’s the point?

> Where's the people in this case?

Juniors build worse code than codex. Their superiors also can‘t check everything they do. They need to have some level of trust for doing dumb shit, or they can’t hire juniors.

> Does such a thing exist here? Just "done".

Not sure what you mean. You can definitely ask the agent what it built, why it built it, and what could be improved. You will get only part of the info vs when you read the output, but it won’t be zero info.
Ask HN: chat agent for n8n development?
by realityfactchex | 2026-02-04 22:44:36+00:00
I want to give some AI app (either self hostable or reasonable SaaS is fine) my n8n server's URL and credentials, and let the the AI app's chat interface be the interface for creating, and modifying, and checking on my n8n server.

I want n8n to be fully behind the scenes and configured fully automatically by the AI app.

If more info is needed to configure the automation I want, or if things break and my input is needed, or if I need to check statuses -- I just want to chat with the AI app. A web browser on a regular computer is fine, I do not need mobile app.

What app does this? Does it exist?

(I could provide my own LLM API creds for tokens, or a hosted system could use its own model and charge accordingly, either way.)
by culi | 2026-02-04 22:44:43+00:00
Chomsky the propaganda theorist, 8th most cited academic of all time, author of over 100 books, and person who misjudged the character of Epstein—as many did.

You know you're taking that quote out of context. I don't defend Chomsky's misjudgements but I think it's important to state there's been zero evidence in the Epstein leaks of any sexual or illegal favors happening between the two

This Guardian article from yesterday gives a complete overview of all the links found: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/03/epstein-file...
by DaedalusII | 2026-02-04 22:44:59+00:00
there is no saas downturn caused by AI. wall street is just starting to say hang on a minute, why is this SaaS stock trading at a price to earnings ratio of 300?

then the sell-off is attributed to AI because it is far easier to say to shareholders hey we know our company lost half its value but thats actually a good thing because we need to pivot to AI and we're going to spend all our free cash flow on AI software and our stock should totally be trading at 300x earnings again in a few weeks. if you can last another few months as CEO and the fed cuts rates you'll be able to ride it out

of course, the tide is going out on a few dogs. I don't think adobe will become dominant again

you see the same trend with mass-layoffs being blamed on AI. easy way to sell bad news to the shareholders

in 2026, AI and JE are the two reasons for absolutely everything
by AngryData | 2026-02-04 22:45:06+00:00
Personally I don't find "tick atleast this one box and sign your name, otherwise you get a $20 fine" is too much to ask. If it wasn't the US I would assume most fines would still be ignored by the law anyways, but giving the US legal system another way to fuck with people is also kind of worrying when it is so bad already.
by gombosg | 2026-02-04 22:45:22+00:00
I think this analogy to assembly is flawed.

Compilers predictably transform one kind of programming language code to CPU (or VM) instructions. Transpilers predictably transform one kind of programming language to another.

We introduced various instruction architectures, compiler flags, reproducible builds, checksums exactly to make sure that whatever build artifact that's produced is super predictable and dependable.

That reproducibility is how we can trust our software and that's why we don't need to care about assembly (or JVM etc.) specifics 99% of the time. (Heck, I'm not familiar with most of it.)

Same goes for libraries and frameworks. We can trust their abstractions because someone put years or decades into developing, testing and maintaining them and the community has audited them if they are open-source.

It takes a whole lot of hand-waving to traverse from this point to LLMs - which are stochastic by nature - transforming natural language instructions (even if you call it "specs", it's fundamentally still a text prompt!) to dependable code "that you don't need to read" i.e. a black box.
by kace91 | 2026-02-04 22:45:36+00:00
>I spot check tests depending on how likely I think it is for the agent to have messed up or misinterpreted my instructions

So a percentage of your code, based on your gut feeling, is left unseen by any human by the moment you submit it.

Do you agree that this rises the chance of bugs slipping by? I don’t see how you wouldn’t.

And considering the fact that your code output is larger, the percentage of it that is buggy is larger, and (presumably) you write faster, have you considered the conclusion in terms of the compounding likelihood of incidents?
by galleywest200 | 2026-02-04 22:46:04+00:00
I would forgive quite a lot of the software decisions if they just let me export the snap-to-text highlights without the use of a third party tool. Many e-ink devices have had this feature for years now.

I currently use RCU (Remarkable Connection Utility) to extract my highlights: https://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/
by straydusk | 2026-02-04 22:46:05+00:00
No pun intended but - it's been more "vibes" than science that I've done this. It's more effective. When I focus my attention on the harness layer (tests, hooks, checks, etc), and the inputs, my overall velocity improves relative to reading & debugging the code directly.

To be fair - it is not accurate to say I absolutely never read the code. It's just rare, and it's much more the exception than the rule.

My workflow just focuses much more on the final product, and the initial input layer, not the code - it's becoming less consequential.
by tsunamifury | 2026-02-04 22:46:25+00:00
Vibe coding seems to be the iPhone camera to DSLR moment for programming.

- No professional used an iPhone for years. Most don’t today.

- Professional scoffed at it as a toy

- The toy shifted the balance of volume through everyday enablement of amateurs to a degree that professional were right, but now in a severely lopsided terrain.

The value ends up in the most engaged paradigm, rather than the most perfect one.
by norbert515 | 2026-02-04 22:46:31+00:00
Thanks!

Binaries in Dart are definitely larger than 200kb, I just AOT compiled one of the examples and it was ~7.4MB (arm64 MacOS). Dart has a few different targets it can compile to, but it generally requires a couple of MBs, as it packages the whole runtime.

Yeah, my goal definitely is to have to as close to Flutter where it makes sense. You should mostly be able to copy it over 1:1, with a couple of caveats (GUI and a TUI app have a few differences here and there).
by DavidSJ | 2026-02-04 22:46:41+00:00
A mistake in this critique is it assumes an exponential: a constant proportional rate of growth. It is true that, in some sense, an exponential always seems to be accelerating while infinity always remains equally far away.

But this is a bit of a straw man. Mathematical models of the technological singularity [1], along with the history of human economic growth [2], are super-exponential: the rate of growth is itself increasing over time, or at least has taken multiple discrete leaps [3] at the transitions to agriculture and industry, respectively. A true singularity/infinity can of course never be achieved for physical reasons (limited stuff within the cubically-expanding lightcone, plus inherent limits to technology itself), but the growth curve can look hyperbolic and traverse many orders of magnitude before those physical limits are encountered.

[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23928/w239...

[2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wcEPEb2mnZ9mtGlkv8lEtScU...

[3] https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/longgrow.pdf
by sho_hn | 2026-02-04 22:46:43+00:00
> Never thought this would be something people actually take seriously.

You have to remember that the number of software developers saw a massive swell in the last 20 years, and many of these folks are Bootcamp-educated web/app dev types, not John Carmack. They typically started too late and for the wrong reasons to become very skilled in the craft by middle age, under pre-AI circumstances and statistically (of course there are many wonderful exceptions; one of my best developers is someone who worked in a retail store for 15 years before pivoting).

AI tools are now available to everyone, not just the developers who were already proficient at writing code. When you take in the excitement you always have to consider what it does for the average developer and also those below average: A chance to redefine yourself, be among the first doing a new thing, skip over many years of skill-building and, as many of them would put it, focus on results.

It's totally obvious why many leap at this, and it's even probably what they should do, individually. But it's a selfish concern, not a care for the practice as-is. It also results in a lot of performative blog posting. But if it was you, you might well do the same to get ahead in life. There's only to so many opportunities to get in on something on the ground floor.

I feel a lot of senior developers don't keep the demographics of our community of practice into account when they try to understand the reception of AI tools.
by jackota | 2026-02-04 22:46:47+00:00
I've always been a big fan of SEO and GEO (SEO in LLMs). You get the best leads and customer from there.

But honestly creating content for SEO and GEO is a pain in the ass. So basically I thought: why can't I use content created by others in my Discord server and use them to position for SEO?

I worked for a while and created this comly.app

Basically you plug it, and makes your entire Discord server (and slack asap too) indexable on Google and AI, so if anyone look up for a specific question or keyword, it appears as first result your community.

Let me know what you think, open to any feedback or question :)
by ncruces | 2026-02-04 22:47:20+00:00
I need to bring writes to my version of the VFS.

I'm still waiting on how they'll prevent accidental corruption from multiple writers; there's a PR implementing write leases, not sure if that's the direction they'll take.

That said, pausing local polling when writes are enabled - i.e. assuming you're the only writer - makes sense, it's a good idea; hadn't occurred to me.

Ideally, I'd like to offer durability on fullfsync. I think this is feasible. In a concurrent system (single host), while a writer is waiting for durability confirmation, readers can continue reading the previous state, and the next writer can read the committed - but not yet durable - data and queue its writes to be batched. You can have as many pending writes as you're willing to have connections.
by cyberax | 2026-02-04 22:48:14+00:00
Sigh. ReMarkable.

It's just remarkable how they keep shooting themselves in the foot. Their hardware is great, but their software just sucks. And for no real reason, as far as I can understand. They technically do have a cloud subscription that needs to lock out users, I guess?

For example, they don't have handwriting recognition for non-Latin languages. They don't even have on-screen _keyboards_ for non-Latin languages. Their note-taker sucks. Their "remote whiteboard" feature doesn't work reliably. Etc.

Just open source it all, and allow people to fix it. It's clear that your in-house developers can't do that.
by Retric | 2026-02-04 22:48:24+00:00
Humanity has been rapidly advancing throughout recorded history. We just gloss over advancements in outdated technology. Who cares about when exactly the stirrup was invented when we have cars. Medieval armor was vastly better than what was available in the Roman Empire, but it didn’t just suddenly jump to better there was a host of minor innovations.

The amazing complexity in rigging seen in the age of sail is built on a long line of innovation, but engines rendered it largely irrelevant etc. As such ~1700 isn’t some clear tipping point, just the horizon before which innovation seems less relevant.
by tombert | 2026-02-04 22:49:12+00:00
Has it though? Isn't one of the concerns of information on the internet (regardless of political affiliation) that a lot of it is total bullshit?

I've seen so many responses from AI and AI "Summaries" that source claims from 20 year old unsourced forum posts. For that matter, people just make shit up, all the time, often for no apparent reason. It's upsetting that it took me until my 30's to realize that, but regardless I think there is value in canonical, well-funded sources, even with the internet.
by sho_hn | 2026-02-04 22:49:58+00:00
I enjoy new technology in general, so I very much keep up with the tools and also like using them for the things they do well at any given moment. I'm not among the Luddites, FWIW. I think there's a lot of legitimately great building going on right now.

Note though we're talking about "not reading code" in context, not the writing of it.
by crystal_revenge | 2026-02-04 22:51:34+00:00
The problem with the concept of "the singularity" it is has a hidden assumption that computation has no relationship to energy. Which, once unmasked, is a pretty outlandish claim.

There is a popular illusion that somehow technological progress is a pure function of human ingenuity, and that the more efficient we can make technology the faster we can make even better technological improvement. But history of technology has always been the history of energy usage.

Prior to the emergence of homo-sapiens, "humans" learned to cook food by releasing energy stored in wood. Cooking food is often considered a prerequisite for the development of the massive, energy consuming, brain of homo-sapiens.

After that it took hundreds of thousands of years for Earth's climate to become stable enough to make agriculture feasible. We see almost no technological progress until we start harvesting enormous amounts of solar energy through farming. Not long after this we see the development of mathematics and writing since humans now had surplus energy and they could spend some of it on other things.

You can follow this pattern though the development and extraction of coal, oil etc. You can look at the advancement of technology in the last 100 years alongside our use of fossil fuels and expansion of energy capabilities with renewables (which historically only been used to supplement, not replace non-renewables).

But technological progress has always been a function of energy, and more specifically, going back to cooking food, computational/cognitive ability similarly demands increasingly high energy consumption.

All evidence seems to suggest that we increasingly need more energy for incrementally smaller return on computation.

So for something like the singularity to happen, we would also need incredible changes in available energy (there's also a more nuanced argument that you also need smooth energy gradients but that's more discussion than necessary). Computation is not going to rapidly expand without also requiring tremendously large increases in energy.

Further it's entirely reasonable that there is some practical limit to just how "smart" a thing can be based on the energy requirements to get there. That is, you can't reasonably harvest enough energy to create intelligence on the level we imagine (the same way there is a limit to how tall a mountain can be on earth due to gravity).

Like most mystical thinking, ignoring what we know about thermodynamics tends to be a fundamental axiom.
by mc32 | 2026-02-04 22:51:59+00:00
Lots of acquisitions in retrospect were bad or didn’t work out. Buyers don’t usually go in knowing it’s not going to work. Sometimes companies buy others for IP or to block competitors from IP even if the company acquired is getting shut down. Most of the time it’s because they see an upside -sometimes that goes sideways.

He may well have thought _he’d_ be able to turn it around —like buyers of perennially losing sports teams and then he figured out he was wrong. It happens without malice —if anything it’s seldom due to malice. People don’t like losing money.
by runako | 2026-02-04 22:52:43+00:00
The thing about lower barriers is that it makes it easier for e.g. Salesforce to raise the level of expectations. And that's the moving target. New employees will come from elsewhere and wonder how a company is operating using tools from 2020 when X, Y, Z are becoming industry standard.

The key here is that the moving target will _never_ be "what can 1-2 people vibe code without any expectation of being the best at what it does?"

(Also: training people on bespoke tools takes much longer than training on configurations of standard tools. Imagine if you had to learn a new source control system at every job, like in the '80s.)
by tombert | 2026-02-04 22:52:44+00:00
I don't have a Remarkable, but I do have a Pocketbook InkPad Color 3. I really like it, but color on that thing is pretty disappointing.

I was hoping that it would be a way to read through the comics I bought on Humble Bundle, but the colors are so washed out that I still just read them on a computer screen.

I have no idea what the engineering challenges are with making color e-ink, but they must be enormous because I (and many others) would pay considerable money for good color on e-ink.
by turtlebits | 2026-02-04 22:52:53+00:00
Making clones of production isn't trivial. Is your app server clone going to connect to your production database? It is going to spin up your whole stack? Seems a bit naive.

A better approach is to have AI understand how prod is built and make the changes there instead of having AI inspect it and figure out how to apply one off changes.

Models are already very good at writing IaaC.
by IgorPartola | 2026-02-04 22:52:58+00:00
The Ryobi walk behind mowers are direct drive and everything is underneath the deck so there isn’t much that can go wrong that you wouldn’t contend with if you were standing with your toes next to it except you are actually riding it. The wheels still do have a short belt and a tensioner but not the really long belt with the clutch pulley. The only safety thing I could have added is the electronic brake on the deck motors but for my use I am not super concerned about letting things slow down unassisted. As soon as I leave the seat everything shuts off and the light blades don’t actually have a ton of momentum without power.
by boring-human | 2026-02-04 22:53:26+00:00
Roger that. Here's some thought experiments aligned with your points.

(1) Downloaded attachment file exploiting a metadata parsing bug, plus privilege escalation.

(2) Malicious media file on website in an open Safari tab, auto-reloaded when the tab preview updates (without the user even switching to the tab), plus privilege escalation.

Auto-reinfection for (1) is shortly after boot or after the user first opens the Files app, for (2) it's when the tabs view is first shown or scrolled.

Both of these might be rowboats or frigates. If they're rowboats, installing developer betas would defeat (1), but would not make a difference with (2).

However, if (1) exists, every other exploit by the same maker would transmogrify into a (1), so defenses against it are somewhat more important.