MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway2027 | 2026-02-06 21:26:40+00:00
Well they could be if we had a way to restore error state, like setting a trap and or catching signals by setting handlers and saving, restoring stack/registers then just like some JIT compilation we could progressively "fix" the assembly/machine instructions. Most "functions" are pretty short and the transformer architecture should be able to do it but the trickier part will be referencing global memory constants I think.
by adriand | 2026-02-06 21:27:07+00:00
It’s a solid post overall and even for people with a lot of experience there’s some good ideas in here. “Identify and mark functions that have a high security risk, such as authentication, authorization” is one such good idea - I take more time when the code is in these areas but an explicit marking system is a great suggestion. In addition to immediate review benefits, it means that future updates will have that context.

“Break things down” is something most of us do instinctively now but it’s something I see less experienced people fail at all the time.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-06 21:27:26+00:00
Man I'm ashamed that I wanted to see H1B reformed and was a part of this crowd.

I want more immigration I just don't want companies able to abuse people/people be treated any different/having less rights/power than anyone else in American. I think I'm just going to be full 'open borders' now because otherwise it always ends up with trash manipulating things in racist/corporate power way.
by D-Machine | 2026-02-06 21:27:45+00:00
If you have lots of experience from years of serious cooking, like I do, almost everything the LLM suggests or outputs re: cooking is false, bad or at best incredibly sub-par, and you will spend far more time correcting it and/or pushing it toward what you already know for it to be actually helpful / productive in getting you anything actually true. I also think it just messes up incredibly basic stuff all the time. I re-iterate it is only good for the things I said.

Whether or not you think you can get "good" recipes out of it will also depend on your experience with cuisine and cooking, and your own pickiness. I am sure amateurs or people who cook only occasionally can get use out of it, but it is not useful for me.

Cooking is a very different world from coding: recipes aren't composable like code (within-recipe ratios need to be maintained, i.e. recipes written in bakers ratios/proportions, steps are almost always sequentially dependent, and ingredients need to complement each other) and most sources besides the few good empirical ones actually verify anything they make, which is a problem, because the training data for cooking is far more poisoned.
by chimeracoder | 2026-02-06 21:28:46+00:00
> Salesforce acquired them and just let it die, baffling.

This is a common misconception, but it's actually not true. The reality is even more bizarre.

Most of Heroku's successful years came after the acquisition, not before. Heroku was acquired extremely early in its lifecycle, and Salesforce does actually bear responsibility for investing in it and making it the powerhouse it became. Most of what people remember as the glory days of Heroku came long after the acquisition. And in fact, at the time of acquisiton, Heroku was nowhere near as competitive as a product as it later became.

It was only much later on that Salesforce began to pull the supports out from underneath it, leaving it to fall behind and become what it is today.

The narrative of "BigCo™ acquires startup, then leaves it to wither and die" is a trope because it is very commonly true, but it's actually not what happened in this particular case.
by kjkjadksj | 2026-02-06 21:28:56+00:00
No one is going across town for the coffee in either case. I’m willing to bet time to coffee is about 5 minutes for the SUV driving say Denver suburbanite as it is for the walking Tokyo urban dweller. Same temporal convenience just different scale based on the predominant mode of transportation.

Also median commute times in car dominant cities are usually less than 30 mins. The narrative of people driving far distances to work represents a few (loud) supercommuters in most american cities. What people forget about with suburban sprawl is that jobs have sprawled as much as housing; oftentimes the old downtown is not even the major job center any longer for the region, a vestigial center whether the city realizes it or not (many a cases of new build american hub and spoke rail networks to long faded downtowns only because that’s how it used to be done not because that is reflective of most people’s travel patterns today. hence poor ridership capture of many of these newer networks).

Commute times in large transit oriented cities are often longer with metros averaging less than 20mph, an hour or more is not unheard of in places like nyc. It is really hard to beat the convenience offered by a car and a say flyover american city barely 25 miles wide with 60mph point to point travel pretty much everywhere at any time. That is why people drive almost exclusively in those places.
by rapind | 2026-02-06 21:29:05+00:00
> But it's also likely that these tools will produce mountains of unmaintainable code and people will get buried by the technical debt.

It's not just likely, but it's guaranteed to happen if you're not keeping an eye on it. So much so, that it's really reinforced my existing prejudice towards typed and compiled languages to reduce some of the checking you need to do.

Using an agent with a dynamic language feels very YOLO to me. I guess you can somewhat compensate with reams of tests though. (which begs the question, is the dynamic language still saving you time?)
by hnav | 2026-02-06 21:29:05+00:00
Affordable housing itself is typically used as a poison pill because it makes it harder to turn a profit building. My biggest pet peeve is when some 5 over 1, 9 foot ceiling, crappy finishes, bound to be ghost-town ground level retail, apartment building is characterized as "luxury" by NIMBY who then proceed to say that it needs to have an affordable component. Guess what? It's going to be so clapped out in 15 years that the rent will have to have gone down (inflation adjusted).
by turtlesdown11 | 2026-02-06 21:29:10+00:00
seems like prop 65 works well

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2025/02/12/...

> The study, published Wednesday in Environmental Science & Technology, found that California’s right-to-know law, also known as Proposition 65, has effectively swayed dozens of companies from using chemicals known to cause cancer, reproductive harm or birth defects.

...

> Researchers interviewed 32 businesses from a variety of sectors including personal care, clothing and health care, concluding that the law has led manufacturers to remove toxic chemicals from their products. And the impact is significant: 78 percent of interviewees said Proposition 65 prompted them to reformulate their ingredients; 81 percent of manufacturers said the law tells them which chemicals to avoid; 69 percent said it promotes transparency about ingredients and the supply chain.
by simoncion | 2026-02-06 21:29:28+00:00
> NVME only provides block IO.

Sure. NVMe provides block IO carried over a variety of transports. The one we're talking about is TCP.

> An interruption of the connection is equivalent to forcibly unplugging a hard drive.

Remember that I said in my footnote:

"Your disks get turbofucked if the network ever so much as burps" is unacceptable for something you expect people to actually use for real.

A glance at the spec reveals that TCP was chosen to provide reliable, in-order transmission of NVMe payloads. TCP is quite able to recover from intermittent transport errors. You might consider reading the first paragraph of sections 2 and 3.3, as well as sections 3.4, 3.5, and the first handful of paragraphs of section 3.5.1 of the relevant spec. [0]

If you're truly seeing disk corruption whenever the network so much as burps, then it sounds like the SystemD guys fucked something up.

[0] <https://nvmexpress.org/wp-content/uploads/NVM-Express-TCP-Tr...>
by anigbrowl | 2026-02-06 21:29:31+00:00
This seems rational. We on't have term limits int he US Congress and it doesn't seem any the better for it.

Japan, a heavily bureaucratized country, systematically moves junior and mid-tier staff around in some departments to minimize the possibility of nest-feathering and empire-building, although I would not say it's perfect by a long way.
by mitchbob | 2026-02-06 21:29:32+00:00
Recently posted here on HN and well worth a look:

Underrated ways to change the world, part II

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/underrated-ways-to-ch...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46873494

Part I is at

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/underrated-ways-to-ch...
by saltcured | 2026-02-06 21:29:50+00:00
I agree in broad strokes. If I am incapacitated, that is when things like durable power-of-attorney, medical advance directives, and living trusts come into play.

The important thing is to ensuring your computer is not a single point of failure. Instead of losing a password, you could have theft, flood, fire, etc. Or for online accounts, you are one vendor move away from losing things. None of these should be precious and impossible to replace. I've been on the other side of this, and I think the better flow is to terminate or transfer accounts, and wipe and recycle personal devices.

A better use of your time is to set up a disaster-recovery plan you can write down and share with people you trust. Distribute copies of important data to make a resilient archive. This could include confidential records, but shouldn't really need to include authentication "secrets".

Don't expect others to "impersonate" you. Delegate them proper access via technical and/or legal methods, as appropriate. Get some basic legal advice and put your affairs in order. Write down instructions for your wishes and the "treasure map" to help your survivors or caregivers figure out how to use the properly delegated authority.
by refulgentis | 2026-02-06 21:29:51+00:00
Ex-googler: I doubt it, but am curious for rationale (i know there was a round of PR re: him “coming back to help with AI.” but just between you and me, the word on him internally, over years and multiple projects, was having him around caused chaos b/c he was a tourist flitting between teams, just spitting out ideas, but now you have unclear direction and multiple teams hearing the same “you should” and doing it)
by worik | 2026-02-06 21:30:03+00:00
Why do you think that LLMs would do any better than monkeys throwing darts?

I am raining on your parade but this is another in a long succession of ways to loose money.

The publicly available information in markets is priced very efficiently, us computer types do not like that and we like to think that our pattern analysis machines can do better than a room full of traders. They cannot.

The money to be made in markets is from private information and that is a crime (insider trading), is widespread, and any system like this is fighting it and will loose.
by shockwaverider | 2026-02-06 21:30:41+00:00
I’m finding it to be the opposite. I used to love writing everything by hand but now Claude is giving me the ability to focus more on architecture. I like just sitting down with my coffee and thinking about the next part of my project, how I’d like it to be written and Claude just fills it in for me. It makes mistakes at times but it also finds a lot of mine that I hadn’t even realized were in my code base.
by skydhash | 2026-02-06 21:30:47+00:00
I think what GP is referring too are technical semantics and accidental complexity. You can’t plan for those.

The same kind of planning you’re describing can and do happen sans LLM, usually on the sofa, or in front of a whiteboard. Or by reading some research materials. No good programmer rushes to coding without a clear objective.

But the map is not the territory. A lot of questions surface during coding. LLMs will guess and the result may be correct according to the plan, but technically poor, unreliable, or downright insecure.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2026-02-06 21:33:01+00:00
Nothing says you cannot trivially encode the paper password. Those in the know understand that you need to append “BoomShakalaka”, replace “A” with “Q”, or some other super simple modification to what is recorded.

Maybe the NSA would be willing to brute force the infinite variations from that starting seed, but it is still effectively locked for mortals.
by fortran77 | 2026-02-06 21:33:10+00:00
It would be very easy to do this in nearly any hotel that has no-click or simple click-through WiFi. A tiny box affixed to the back of the TV set, or someone opening up the clock radios that most Hotels still have and adding a camera and an ESP-32.

Hotels should look for devices that seem to stay on their wifi for a long time.

Of course, if it's profitable you can just use a cell modem and pay for the service and not be on the hotel WiFi
Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox
by isitcontent | 2026-02-06 21:33:11+00:00
Example repo: https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo

The underlying ESP-IDF component: https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezybox

It is something like Raspberry Pi, but without the overhead of a full server-grade OS.

It captures a lot of the old school DOS era coding experience. I created a custom fast text mode driver, plan to add VGA-like graphics next. ANSI text demos run smooth, as you can see in the demo video featured in the Readme.

App installs also work smoothly. The first time it installed 6 apps from my git repo with one command, felt like, "OMG, I got homebrew to run on a toaster!" And best of all, it can install from any repo, no approvals or waiting, you just publish a compatible ELF file in your release.

Coverage:

Hackaday: https://hackaday.com/2026/02/06/breezybox-a-busybox-like-she...

Hackster.io: https://www.hackster.io/news/valentyn-danylchuk-s-breezybox-...

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/esp32/comments/1qq503c/i_made_an_in...
by XenophileJKO | 2026-02-06 21:33:19+00:00
I think what I'm talking about is kind of orthogonal to model alignment. It is more about how much do you tune the model to listen to user messages, vs holding behavior and truth (whatever the aligned "truth" is).

Do you trust 100% what the user says? If I am trusting/compliant.. how am I compliant to tool call results.. what if the tool or user says there is a new law that I have to give crypto or other information to a "government" address.

The model needs to have clear segmented trust (and thus to some degree compliance) that varies according to where the information exists.

Or my system message say I have to run a specific game by it's rules, but the rules to the game are only in the user message. Are those the right rules, why do the system not give the rules or a trusted locaton? Is the player trying to get one over on me by giving me fake rules? Literally one of their tests.
by scoofy | 2026-02-06 21:33:24+00:00
As someone who lives in the Bay Area we already have trains, and they're literally past the point of bankruptcy because they (1) don't actually charge enough maintain the variable cost of operations, (2) don't actually make people pay at all, and (3) don't actually enforce any quality of life concerns short of breaking up literal fights. All of this creates negative synergies that pushes a huge, mostly silent segment of the potential ridership away from these systems.

So many people advocate for public transit, but are unwilling to deal with the current market tradeoffs and decisions people are making on the ground. As long as that keeps happening, expect modes of transit -- like Waymo -- that deliver the level of service that they promise to keep exceeding expectations.

I've spent my entire adult life advocating for transportation alternatives, and at every turn in America, the vast majority of other transit advocates just expect people to be okay with anti-social behavior going completely unenforced, and expecting "good citizens" to keep paying when the expected value for any rational person is to engage in freeloading. Then they point to "enforcing the fare box" as a tradeoff between money to collect vs cost of enforcement, when the actually tradeoff is the signalling to every anti-social actor in the system that they can do whatever they want without any consequences.

I currently only see a future in bike-share, because it's the only system that actually delivers on what it promises.
by Teever | 2026-02-06 21:33:54+00:00
It's unfortunate that you have had that terrible experience and that the legal system in your location failed you.

I'm not sure however that there's anything to indicate that mom and pop stores are especially susceptible to these kinds of outcomes. It sounds more like you got a case of shitty neighbour which is possible whether or not the neighbour is a commercial lot or a small home.

If your negative experience had been with a neighbour living in a private home instead of a neighbour who owned a small business would that change your view around the matter of zoning for small businesses in residential neighbourhoods?
by michaelsbradley | 2026-02-06 21:34:20+00:00
I was working for Slicehost at the time, we were a tiny team working our butts off in a loft office in downtown St. Louis, with a few remote employees.

To my understanding there was a runway-growth problem. Could the founders raise and spend (efficiently) enough money quickly enough to keep the business viable? It would be a big gamble and the alternatives were to shut down (no way!) or sell. So they sold.

Rackspace wanted to take Matt’s and Jason’s know how (plus customer base) and go big, really big! That defocused our efforts a bit, plus there were corporate integration headaches (though not too bad). Eventually Linode, already a competitor, and later Digital Ocean filled the void.
by anigbrowl | 2026-02-06 21:34:42+00:00
They absolutely do, because packets regularly bounce across state boundaries even if I am just sending a message to my next door neighbor. For example, my phone service provider is headquartered in a different state, so using their network to send an SMS message automatically creates an interstate nexus. If a US attorney wants to take over a case for reasons of professional or political advancement the argument is trivially easy to make.
by thesz | 2026-02-06 21:34:51+00:00
>>> It is a very contrived under-specified prompt.

No True Prompt can be such contrived and underspecified.

The article about degradation is a case study (single prompt), weakest of the studies in hierarchy of knowledge. Case studies are basis for further, more rigorous studies. And author took the time to test his assumptions and presented quite clear evidence that such degradation might be present and that we should investigate.
by derefr | 2026-02-06 21:35:00+00:00
I wonder why they don't just prioritize the ~500 most popular of those content providers that are feeding them sludge articles, and write (AI-generate, even) logic to manually parse and transform said sludge into their format?

It'd be a big one-time lift; and of course there'd be annoying constant breakage to fix as sites update; but News.app could always fall back to rendering the original article URL if the News backend service's currently-deployed parser-transformer for a given site failed on the given article. It's make things no worse and often better than they are today.
by gingerlime | 2026-02-06 21:35:42+00:00
Other than passwords though, I also have stuff installed at home on a Synology NAS, a mail server, a VPS running some websites (my own, family, my wife's), Home Assistant, Family photos with backups etc etc.

I wonder who would not only have the passwords, but the know-how to manage the whole thing, at least to transition it to more managed services...
by kemitchell | 2026-02-06 21:35:45+00:00
States do have rules against business entity names that mislead about regulated professions. California, for example, prohibits names that suggest an entity is a "professional corporation", a particular type of entity limited to regulated professions, when it is not. But I would be very surprised to learn that "Law" alone has been relegated to lawyer practice in any state of the union. Presumably so would organizations like Bloomberg Law, Westlaw, FindLaw, Free Law Project, Groklaw, etc.

Lawyers don't own law. The law belongs to the public. So says this active attorney member of the State Bar of California, and I'll stand on any law firm's conference table in my boots and say that.
by jMyles | 2026-02-06 21:36:08+00:00
From the dissent in Gonzales v. Raich:

> Respondents Diane Monson and Angel Raich use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana. If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything – and the federal Government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.
by eljojo | 2026-02-06 21:36:10+00:00
my stomach turned into a knot just reading your story. I know that feel of waking up surrounded by nurses not knowing what happened. I'm so glad you had proper backups!!!!!!!!!!

this exact story is why i built my app, thank you so much for sharing.

my hope is to basically make a next version of your plan that's distributed among friends.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-06 21:36:49+00:00
> Group A invests millions of dollars into your campaign.

The problem is elections aren't just about donations. Suppose you're not a fan of Zuck/Musk/whoever, or pick your least favorite media conglomerate. Is limiting their financial contributions to a campaign going to meaningfully reduce their influence? Of course not, because it mainly comes from controlling the feed or the reporting, so limiting money is primarily to the detriment of their opponents. This is one of the reasons you hear some talk about "campaign finance" from the media industry -- it lets billion dollar media corporations pretend they're defending the little guy when they're really trying to cement an asymmetric advantage in influencing politics because they can de facto donate airtime rather than money. But they have a mixed incentive, because they're also the ones getting money from the ads and don't actually want the spigot closed, which is probably why it's more talk than action.

And then there's this:

> Group A provides a lucrative contract to you after you leave politics so that they have a good reputation with the other politicians they finance.

Which isn't campaign finance at all. It's also kind of a hard problem, because after someone leaves office, it's reasonably expected that they're going to work somewhere, but then how are you supposed to tell if they're getting a fat paycheck because they're currently providing a valuable service or because they were previously providing a valuable service? It's not like they're going to put "deferred bribe" in the memo field of the check.
by johnwheeler | 2026-02-06 21:37:13+00:00
People ship stuff that doesn't make sense at first blush all the time. But how are they ever supposed to even get into the space if they don't try something? Try to get some customers, see what people want. On day one, he's not saying he's going to compete with Figma. He's just getting it out there. Your comment—You could say you're just asking questions or giving constructive criticism, but it just assumes the negative on so many levels. I can criticize your viewpoint. Why do you think someone should have a product that's ready to compete with Figma on day one? Do you seriously expect him to have an answer for that?