MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2026-02-17 02:13:28+00:00
> I personally would stay away from calling someone, or an LLM, 'stupid' for making this mistake because of several reasons.

I wouldn't. Because there's a difference between calling someone's action stupid and saying that someone is stupid. These are entirely dependent upon the context of the claim. Smart people frequently do stupid stuff. I have a PhD and by some metric that makes me "smart" but you'll also see me do plenty of stupid stuff every single day. Language is fuzzy...

But I think responses like yours are entirely dismissive at what's being attempted to be shown. What's being shown is how easily they are fooled. Another popular example right now being the cup with a sealed top and open bottom (lol "world model"?).

> There are a lot of 'gotcha' articles

The point isn't about getting some gotcha, it is about a clear and concise example of how these systems fail.

What would not be a clear and concise example is showing something that requires domain subject expertise. That's absolutely useless as an example to everyone that isn't a subject matter expert.

The point of these types of experiments is to make people think "if they're making these types of errors that I can easily tell are foolish then how often are they making errors where I am unable to vet or evaluate the accuracy of its outputs?" This is literally the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect in action[0].

> I totally agree with the language ambiguity point. I think that is a feature and not a bug.

So does everybody. But there are limits to natural language and we've been discussing them for quite a long time[1]. There is in fact a reason we invented math and programming languages.

> Finally, we often really don't know enough but we still need to say something and like gradient descent, an ambiguous statement may take us a step closer to a useful answer.

Was this sentence an illustrative example?

Sometimes I think we don't need to say something. I think we all (myself included) could benefit more by spending a bit longer before we open our mouths, or even not opening them as often. There's times where it is important to speak out but there are also times that it is important to not speak. It is okay to not know things and it is okay to not be an expert on everything.

[0] https://themindcollection.com/gell-mann-amnesia-effect/

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
by Spivak | 2026-02-17 02:14:11+00:00
You can't control others, you can only control your response to them. How people perceive you is a comprehensive and isn't always based in logic. You can use this to your advantage and take control of your own narrative or not. But you'll be worse off for it if you don't.

I think you'll be pleasantly surprised about what kinds of things people look favorably on.
by salawat | 2026-02-17 02:14:56+00:00
Yup. Same here. Combo of car infotainment systems and smartphones are what did me in. Every bit of software made these days seems designed to produce maximum anxiety or friction to the elderly. It's one thing when you're developing it and it becomes second nature because you built the damn thing right? Walk away for 6 months, or a year, then come back. It's a fucking nightmare.

At this point, I truly fear that if we don't inject more humanity into the tech sector, ya know, kindness, empathy, appreciation for those in an increasingly degraded cognitive state; we're definitely building ourselves a hell we 100% deserve for the hubris on display.
by buremba | 2026-02-17 02:15:27+00:00
Neat! I wasn’t aware that Docker has an embedded microVM option.

I use Kata Containers on Kubernetes (Firecrackers) and restrict network access with a proxy that supports you to block/allow domain access. Also swap secrets at runtime so agents don’t see any secrets (similar to Deno sandboxes)

If anybody is interested in running agents ok K8S, here is my shameless plug: https://github.com/lobu-ai/lobu
by the__alchemist | 2026-02-17 02:15:29+00:00
You're right that that is a concern. I think I set mine for 190C? Don't remember. But as you infer, my goal is to get it slightly below melting temperature so the the other components' solder doesn't melt. (Disaster if they do, then the board gets jostled or you knock a component with tweezers). Then when you hit it with the air, just that component melts.

Also, it seems to not melt if you don't flux the pads prior. Not really sure why.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-17 02:15:54+00:00
> I feel like Facebook really dropped the ball here

This story was from more than a decade ago.

Facebook had facial recognition after that, but they deleted it all in response to public outcry. It’s sad to see HN now getting angry at Facebook for not doing facial recognition.

> I hope when Zuck is lying on his death bed, he gets to think about these choices that he has made.

Are we supposed to be angry at Zuckerberg now for making the privacy conscious decision to drop facial recognition? Or is everyone just determined to be angry regardless of what they do?
by zachlatta | 2026-02-17 02:15:54+00:00
It takes a screenshot of the current window and sends it to Llama in Groq asking it to describe what you’re doing and pull out any key info like names with spelling.

You can go to Settings > Run Logs in FreeFlow to see the full pipeline ran on each request with the exact prompt and LLM response to see exactly what is sent / returned.
by egedev | 2026-02-17 02:16:05+00:00
We hit exactly this kind of race condition in our Go + Postgres SaaS when handling concurrent waitlist signups. Two requests would read the current count, both pass the limit check, and both insert — exceeding the waitlist cap.

Ended up using SELECT FOR UPDATE on the waitlist row before the count check. Simple but effective. The barrier testing approach described here would have caught this much earlier in development instead of discovering it under load.

One thing I'd add: in Go, it's tempting to handle this at the application level with mutexes, but that breaks the moment you have multiple instances. Pushing the serialization down to Postgres is almost always the right call for correctness.
by jml78 | 2026-02-17 02:16:15+00:00
Not sure if you will see this.

We were buying a sailboat(we actually did it). Wife got diagnosed with cancer. We talked with doctors about treatment, felt confident with catching it so early.

Purchased the sailboat, we live on the sailboat with our two kids, two dogs, and two cats, 6+ months out of the year.

What you can't plan for is shit that happens on land. We came back in June 2025, my wife was stopped at a red light and got rear ended by a dump truck. That has put a pause on our sailing life. But we should be getting back out there soon.
by refulgentis | 2026-02-17 02:17:26+00:00
So if I'm understanding correctly, Garry Tan copy-pasta'd AI slop he had an LLM write for him.

It calls MacKenzie Scott (née Bezos) divorce settlement a "sugar pile."

And it's clear the LLM was prompted to argue for a reason giving away money was actually bad...she gave it away too fast! because some college gave the president's son a job. and enrollment went down.

Our elites are really unhinged, man. Sad stuff.
by _heimdall | 2026-02-17 02:19:38+00:00
This is exactly how we collectively "solve" so many problems today though, its far from unique to this topic.

We over medicate people, especially the elderly, because each new med has side effects and they're dying eventually anyway. We print more and more debt to paper over massive budget surpluses because the unspoken reality is that we're financially screwed either way. We pile more and more regulations on because we'd rather further grow the government and kick the can a few more times. We bolt one new emissions system after another on our diesel engines because they're already unreliable, who cares.

We don't consider how we got here, only what the next step we take should be. And don't even ask where a step should be taken, progress requires changing things constantly and we rarely give ourselves time to look back and retrace our steps.
by smallmouth | 2026-02-17 02:19:45+00:00
"Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' d*k body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell? The whole hill. Smelled like... victory. Someday, this war's gonna end."
by JSR_FDED | 2026-02-17 02:19:52+00:00
There’s all these non-coding elements to a developer’s job that make me think AI replacing developers will take a lot longer than everyone thinks.

What portion of a job must be done by AI before the human loses their job? 80%? Even 98% (and we’re nowhere near that) will produce a ton of friction when applied to a team of developers.

The problem is that the narrative of imminent job displacement is the prevailing one and becomes self fulfilling.
by hackyhacky | 2026-02-17 02:20:08+00:00
This is an allusion to the old days, before the internet became a popular phenomenon. It used to be, that every September a bunch of "newbies" (college student who just access to an internet connection for the first time) would log in and make a mess of things. Then, in the late nineties when it really took off, everybody logged in and made a mess of things. This is this the "eternal september." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
by renewiltord | 2026-02-17 02:21:43+00:00
In the history of the sport one woman made the Top 100 of the sport and this is supposedly evidence. And how many black? Count them out. They form at least a sixth of the world population. Now how many old? And perhaps then we find out that we can invent reasons for the defence of the old: traveling is hard, they have more responsibilities with children, they are more senior in primary career.

> The fact that the women's side hasn't exploded just like the men's side can mostly be tracked to the fact that chess isn't considered a "feminine pursuit" worth putting the time into (that finally seems to be changing slowly in recent decades).

A defence that doesn’t pass for software engineering, amazing. This old canard. The girls just don’t like engineering. It’s not feminine enough. Damore got whacked for this.
by dham | 2026-02-17 02:22:00+00:00
At worst, this would only be temporary. Yes, it will cause hardship, but once it trickles down to regular companies, that an LLM is a word predictor, workers will be back. Seems Andrew Yang has never used an LLM to the lengths we do as software developers.

The thing we have to worry about is what's after the LLM.
by snarfy | 2026-02-17 02:22:20+00:00
It doesn't have to be low quality. It really is another tool like any other. You can put low effort in and get working results. This low effort, working result gets shipped immediately and gives the whole process a bad wrap. The source is generated crap that lacks craftsmanship and quality. But this gets AI dismissed when it shouldn't be. You can get quality, well crafted source code if you make that a goal and keep iterating.
by jason_oster | 2026-02-17 02:22:21+00:00
> Doesn't offering two options to the LLM, "walk," or "drive," imply that either can be chosen?

Yes, but the problem is specifically that proposing two choices also eliminates other options. An open-ended question would lift that restriction. GPT-5.2 Thinking: https://chatgpt.com/share/6993d099-ef4c-8005-aa62-bdb826b707...

Other possible issues in the question: Is biking also an option? What do you want to do at the carwash when you get there, wash the car or buy a bucket, sponge, and soap? Is the car already at the carwash and you want to drive a second car? What about calling the carwash to see if they will have someone wash the car for you?

There are many ways to interpret the question because it contains ambiguities that must be resolved through assumptions. (Lacking information and constraints such as possible alternatives that satisfy the goal of washing the car.) The follow up questions I asked also have assumed answers but answering them provides no clear resolution to the ambiguity present in the original question.

So, no, I disagree that there is any solid implication of where the car is. And even if there is a solid implication, it can hardly be reasoned that it "isn't an XY problem" or that the question is clear cut in any real sense.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-17 02:22:56+00:00
You can still debug that hobby 3D engine any way you want. Anything you could do 5 years ago you can still do now.

There is an entire new world of people having fun with LLM coding. There are people having fun with social media, too. These people having fun with their thing doesn’t make your thing less fun for you to do.

Let people enjoy things. You can do your own thing and they do theirs. The internet is a big place and there’s room for everyone to find their own way to have fun. If you can’t enjoy your thing because someone else is doing it differently, that’s a you problem.
by debarshri | 2026-02-17 02:23:08+00:00
This weekend, I found an issue with Microsoft's new Golang version of sqlcmd. Ran Claude code, fixed the issue, which I wouldn't have done if agent stuff did not exist. The fix was contributed back to the project.

I think it is about who is contributing, intention, and various other nuances. I would still say it is net good for the ecosystem.
by commandersaki | 2026-02-17 02:23:53+00:00
Also timely is an IACR paper on the security of password managers [1].

1Password did really well, but doesn't get off scot-free as there's a vault substitution attack described in Appendix D where an attacker could substitute a vault and freshly created items in said vault by the user could be read by the attacker. I don't think in any stretch it would be easy to pull off, and I imagine to apply the fix despite simple would require a significant architecture overhaul across 1P applications, protocol, and architecture. But otherwise it does well against its rivals, and a lot of it is thanks to having a high entropy key masking the password used to unlock a vault, meaning dictionary attacks are not even possible.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/058
by zzleeper | 2026-02-17 02:24:02+00:00
That's actually amazing, and might give me a way to use all the cores I have lying around. 2s per page is an insane 600 pages per minute at 20 cores!

Please do open source it, even if you don't do much around it (worst case I can just spend a few million tokens trying to get opus 4.6 to get it to work)
by refulgentis | 2026-02-17 02:24:32+00:00
The claim is that an article was submitted intentionally to manipulate public perception of DHS.

We can't relax the claim to "well, it says DHS found a pedo, so it's propaganda ipso facto, because DHS did something good": they specifically argue the submission was the propaganda, specifically because it'd be absurd to claim it was published as DHS propaganda. (it's an article by the BBC)
by skeeter2020 | 2026-02-17 02:25:08+00:00
>> I ask this because the need for information hasn't decreased for human beings, just because the capability to produce slop has suddenly increased.

Isn't that the complaint to which you're responding? the SUPPLY side of the equation is the problem, so reading encyclopedias wouldn't impact that. Funny enough the criticism of Wikipedia was that a bunch of amateurs couldn't beat the quality from a small group of experts curating a controlled collection, and we saw that wasn't true. Maybe AI has pushed this to a new level where we need to tighten access and attention once again?
by softwaredoug | 2026-02-17 02:25:46+00:00
Are there maintainers of mature open source projects that can share their AI coding workflow?

The bias in AI coding discussions heavily skews greenfield. But I want to hear more from maintainers. By their nature they’re more conservative and care about balancing more varied constraints (security, performance, portability, code quality, etc etc) in a very specific vision based on the history of their project. They think of their project more like evolving some foundational thing gradually/safely than always inventing a new thing.

Many of these issues don’t yet matter to new projects. So it’s hard to really compare the greenfield with a 20 year old codebase.
by ilkhan4 | 2026-02-17 02:26:11+00:00
I haven't read through the entire thing yet, but looks conceptually similar to Zenstack (https://zenstack.dev) with the auth plugin and auto-generated APIs, so I'd be interested in a comparison with that.

Fwiw, I went down the path of trying to do something similar with Drizzle and gave up since it was in such a state of flux (this was last year). There are (were) a ton of edge cases around trying to add automatic filters to queries to the point that it was hard to justify not just rolling my own ORM.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-17 02:26:26+00:00
I see these claims in a lot of anti-LLM content, but I’m equally puzzled. The pace of progress feels very fast right now.

There is some desire to downplay or dismiss it all, as if the naysayers are going to get their “told you so” moment and it’s just around the corner. Yet the goalposts for that moment just keep moving with each new release.

It’s sad that this has turned into a culture war where you’re supposed to pick a side and then blind yourself to any evidence that doesn’t support your chosen side. The vibecoding maximalists do the same thing on the other side of this war, but it’s getting old on both sides.
by doodlebugging | 2026-02-17 02:27:33+00:00
>You are awfully cynical.

A cynic is simply a realist who has seen too much shit. I am a firm realist. I see the world as it is and hope that others will come along to help make it better but I don't naively hold my breath.

DHS needs a win in the public's eyes. BBC has the air of a trusted platform. It is no big stretch to make the connection that dredging up an old story about tracking down and capturing a pedo using an elite DHS unit would be a useful tool to win back some public support. You notice that there are no dates given in the article so the reader has no way to know that this went down years ago. It looks new and fresh.

Propaganda. I don't have to be gullible so I choose not to be.
by egonschiele | 2026-02-17 02:27:33+00:00
Really good to know Handy exists; it's the first I'm hearing about it. I use a speech-to-text app that I built for myself, and I know at least one co-worker pays $10 a month for (I think) Wispr. I think it's possible there was no intention to market, and the creator simply didn't know about Handy, just like me.
by skeeter2020 | 2026-02-17 02:28:28+00:00
I get your core point, but the reality is it CAN destroy the ecosystem around OSS upon which it heavily relies: discoverability and community. I don't think you're accurately representing just how much noise and confusion AI slop creates. When it comes to using github it's not because it is an amazing application, but because that's were the people are.
by CodeBit26 | 2026-02-17 02:29:01+00:00
I’ve been playing around with a few AI automation stacks lately, and honestly, the shift from basic autocomplete to actual 'context-aware agents' is wild.
The biggest headache isn't getting the AI to write a function, but making sure it doesn't break the overall architecture of a large project. I've found that combining Cursor with specific testing agents cut down my boilerplate work significantly—up to 85% in some sprints.
Is anyone else seeing a real difference in how they structure their CI/CD pipelines to fit these agents, or are we still in the 'glorified linter' phase?
by gortok | 2026-02-17 02:29:09+00:00
There's a trust built up over years (in this case, decades) by a news organization. In this case, Ars Technica. I don't trust the rando on the internet, but I do trust a news organization that has proven over the course of decades to release factual information.

Now that Ars Technica has been caught and admitted to using AI-generated material in its stories, I now have to question that trust. A week ago, I wouldn't have had to.
by d4rkp4ttern | 2026-02-17 02:30:09+00:00
Big fan of handy and it’s cross platform as well. Parakeet V3 gives the best experience with very fast and accurate-enough transcriptions when talking to AIs that can read between the lines. It does have stuttering issues though. My primary use of these is when talking to coding agents.

But a few weeks ago someone on HN pointed me to Hex, which also supports Parakeet-V3 , and incredibly enough, is even faster than Handy because it’s a native MacOS-only app that leverages CoreML/Neural Engine for extremely quick transcriptions. Long ramblings transcribed in under a second!

It’s now my favorite fully local STT for MacOS:

https://github.com/kitlangton/Hex
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-17 02:30:17+00:00
> plenty of things are both smaller and tougher (on this "support its own weight" metric) than cells or proteins with their squishy folding rules

I was thinking microscopic versus nanoscale. Folding something out of a flat material is probably cheaper than machining it, and if it's stronger than additively manufacturing it you have applications in medical devices and aerospace for starters.
by treetalker | 2026-02-17 02:30:32+00:00
FWIW, I like the following simple prompt to rewrite text the way the author should have written it in the first place (in most cases):

> Distill $content by condensing sentences without loss of meaning and then restructuring as a Minto Pyramid. Use point headings, not trite labels; prose, not bullet points; and up to four outline levels, as appropriate. Provide summary umbrella sections to enumerate upcoming sub-points.

That usually gets the main points toward the top and logically organizes supporting details. It lets me quickly grok the gist. But it's always lossy and doesn't convey all levels of the text.

If the text is worth reading and understanding, then I like to paste the original text into a plain text file or outliner; put each sentence on its own line (you can use an LLM for this but regex is better, faster, and cheaper); and both rewrite and reorganize it myself. (Sublime Text and outliners such as Bike and OmniOutliner make moving and indenting lines easy with keyboard shortcuts.)

PS: People need to learn that they should either write better in the first place or else have an LLM properly structure their writing so that it gets done correctly once "on the server side" instead of forcing each reader to do it for them many times (inefficiently and more expensively) on the reader / "client side".

PPS: Kagi's Research and Research (Experimental) models work well with the prompt suggested above.
by simon666 | 2026-02-17 02:30:43+00:00
"only" is probably too strong here. But certainly UI/UX gets more weight in the decision making. Nevertheless, people often do things simply because other people are doing them (fad, fashion, in-group signalling) so just showing that enough people of the right stripe are doing it is often enough for a switch---I'm setting aside cases of making a switch then switching back.
by silverwind | 2026-02-17 02:30:44+00:00
I think AI is a huge boon as it reduces the human bottleneck.

AI is a tool that must to be used well and many people currently raising pull requests seem to think that they don't even need to read the changes which puts unnecessary burden on the maintainers.

The first review must be by the user who prompted the AI, and it must be thorough. Only then I would even consider raising a PR towards any open source project.
by sgerenser | 2026-02-17 02:32:20+00:00
I opted out a long time ago after learning about them. I’d recommend doing so unless you like losing leverage in job negotiation. They get their info directly from companies (or indirectly through payroll companies like ADP). I recall there being a scary amount of detail, including the exact dollar amount of gross pay, and how much I put into my 401k/medical/etc on each paycheck.