MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lkbm | 2026-02-11 17:38:54+00:00
Addendum: In the paragraph after merging Shockwave and GIFs, NYT references a Forbes interview[0] where she specifically says she didn't invent GIFs.

NYT:

> Ms. Gelobter was the director of program management at Macromedia where she helped develop Shockwave into a web plug-in that allowed for video games and animation on the web, turning still images into moving GIFs — animated images known as a graphics interchange format.

Interview linked in the very next paragraph:

> Gelobter: I want to clarify that I did not create GIFs although I get credited for it a lot. I think people conflated thinking about animation on the web as being animated GIFs but that was Shockwave. Again, what we did with Shockwave was transformative.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jumokedada/2021/02/18/meet-the-...
by ThrowawayR2 | 2026-02-11 17:39:06+00:00
Sorry, my wording was imprecise; when I said "educator", I meant popular science educator, along the lines of Asimov, Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, etc. I can't think of anything Schwinger ever wrote or a public lecture that he gave that would be accessible to a general or even a semi-technical, non-physicist audience.

But, beyond that, yes, I think we're largely in agreement.
by munk-a | 2026-02-11 17:39:16+00:00
If performance was the true goal then we'd just naturally see slow adopters unperform and phase out of that company. If you make good tooling available and it is significantly impactful the results will be extremely obvious - and, just speaking from a point of view of psychology, if the person next to you is able to do their job in half the time because they experimented with new tooling _and sees some personal benefit from it_ then you'll be curious and experiment too!

It might be that these companies don't care about actual performance or it might be that these companies are too cheap/poorly run to reward/incentivize actual performance gains but either way... the fault is on leadership.
by nilkn | 2026-02-11 17:39:27+00:00
The competitive advantage belongs to companies, not engineers. That's exactly the conflict. What you're predicting -- voluntary adoption due to advantages -- is precisely what is happening, but it's happening at the company level. It's why companies are mandating it and some engineers are resisting it. Just like in the riots I mentioned -- introduction of agricultural machinery was a unilateral decision made by landowners and tenant farmers, often directly against the wishes of the laborers.
by throwup238 | 2026-02-11 17:39:45+00:00
> Although it doesn't really matter much. All of the open weights models lately come with impressive benchmarks but then don't perform as well as expected in actual use. There's clearly some benchmaxxing going on.

Agreed. I think the problem is that while they can innovate at algorithms and training efficiency, the human part of RLHF just doesn't scale and they can't afford the massive amount of custom data created and purchased by the frontier labs.

IIRC it was the application of RLHF which solved a lot of the broken syntax generated by LLMs like unbalanced braces and I still see lots of these little problems in every open source model I try. I don't think I've seen broken syntax from the frontier models in over a year from Codex or Claude.
by samkim | 2026-02-11 17:39:49+00:00
Agreed, sandboxing is only part of agent security. Authorization (what data the agent can access and what tools it can execute) is also a big part of it.

I've found primer on agent sandboxes [0] is a great reference on sandboxing options and the trade-offs

For agents there's a tension between level of restriction and utility. I think a large part of OpenClaw's popularity is that the lack of restriction by default has helped people see the potential utility of agents. But any agent that isn't just for trying things out requires consideration of what it should and should not be able to do and from there the decision around the best combination of sandboxing and authorization.

At work, we've found it helpful to distinguish coding agents vs product agents. Coding agents have the ability to add new execution paths by pulling in external code or writing their own code to run. Product agents have a strictly defined set of tools and the runtime prevents them from executing anything beyond that definition. This distinction helps us reason about what sandboxing is required.

For data permissions it's trickier. MCP uses OAuth for authentication but each server can have different expectations for access to the external service. Some servers let you use a service account where you can narrow the scope of access but others assume a token minted from an admin account which means the MCP server might have access to things beyond what the agent using the server should.

So for that, we have an MCP proxy that lets us define custom permissions for every tool and resource, and at runtime makes permission checks to ensure the agent only gets access to the subset of things we define ahead of time. (We're using SpiceDB to implement the authorization logic and checks) This works well for product agents because they can't add new execution paths. For coding agents, we've tinkered with plugins/skills to try to do the same but ultimately they can build their way around authorization layers that aren't part of the runtime system so it's something we're still trying to figure out.

---

[0] https://www.luiscardoso.dev/blog/sandboxes-for-ai
by talkingtab | 2026-02-11 17:39:58+00:00
The point about trust and respect is a good insight. Especially in the context of our current internet. A friend once said to me "trust is the one thing you can't get on then internet". So how would one bring that trust to the internet?

And the insight about meetings brought back memories of some horrendous meetings. At software companies. OMG. But very funny very long after the fact.
Good points all. Trust, respect, reputation.
by falcor84 | 2026-02-11 17:40:26+00:00
> If I had spent an afternoon thinking through what I actually needed, I would have ended up exactly where I am now.

That's not how life works. Real life experience is immeasurably more valuable than imagining what it would be like to do something.

> Don’t let the ease of building trick you into skipping the strategy. It’s more expensive than it looks.

You shouldn't be skipping the strategy, but being able to experiment faster is really valuable. To quote from The Lean Startup, your big goal is often to obtain "validated learning", and projects like this, even (and especially) if you then throw them away, are fabulous for this, and can offer significantly more value than taking on a strategy consultant.
by mikestew | 2026-02-11 17:40:38+00:00
I really do hate throwing shade on someone's article, but this reads like one of those "Pearls of Wisdom from Two Years of Junior-Level Software Development". Thanks, person who just a few months ago moved to a snowy, remote area with poor infrastructure, but this is NOT how you flush a toilet with no running water:

"Anyway, to flush a toilet without a running tank, dump about a gallon of water right into the bowl as fast as possible."

No, ya dork, you fill the tank then flush. There were a few other pearls, but no need to pile on. Anyway, I hope someone finds it useful or perhaps is put off the idea of moving to rustic, romanticized places when they'd be better off elsewhere.
by steveBK123 | 2026-02-11 17:41:10+00:00
It's really cascaded down too.

Each department head needs to incorporate into their annual business plan how they are going to use a drill as part of their job in accounting/administration/mailroom.

Throughout the year, must coordinate training & enforce attendance for the people in their department with drill training mandated by the Head of Drilling.

And then they must comply with and meet drilling utilization metrics in order to meet their annual goals.

Drilling cannot be fail, it can only be failed.
by greenie_beans | 2026-02-11 17:41:30+00:00
idk maybe you should try curiously reading about the experiences of other people rather than belittling them/projecting your insecurities onto them. these people are earnestly sharing their experiences, including anecdotes about how they struggle to relate in small talk with non-entrepreneuers, and here you are ironically unable to relate, proving the point. in a comically toxic manner.
by yieldcrv | 2026-02-11 17:41:36+00:00
come on guys, you were using Opus 4.5 literally a week ago and don't even like 4.6

something that is at parity with Opus 4.5 can ship everything you did in the last 8 weeks, ya know... when 4.5 came out

just remember to put all of this in perspective, most of the engineers and people here haven't even noticed any of this stuff and if they have are too stubborn or policy constrained to use it - and the open source nature of the GLM series helps the policy constrained organizations since they can theoretically run it internally or on prem.
by Fnoord | 2026-02-11 17:41:52+00:00
Patch Tuesday. They were coming for us. Thousands of AI bots. Scrambling. All our computers getting pwned by both zero days the machines were sitting on, and quickly programmed exploits which were abused the exact same minute the patch notes were up. First, they came for our IoT. But I didn't run any IoT, so I did not object. Second, they came for our smartphones. But I didn't own any smartphone, so I did not object. Next, they came for our desktops. But I didn't run any desktop, so I did not object. Then, they came for the cloud. But I didn't run any cloud, so I did not object. Finally, they came for our server. And only I remained, no other server existed at this point. I was quickly able to describe the above, with the conclusion: the machines won. EOL
by syntaxing | 2026-02-11 17:42:38+00:00
Tim Dettmers had an interesting take on this [1]. Fundamentally, the philosophy is different.

>China’s philosophy is different. They believe model capabilities do not matter as much as application. What matters is how you use AI.

https://timdettmers.com/2025/12/10/why-agi-will-not-happen/
by warthog | 2026-02-11 17:42:59+00:00
https://banker.so/ - Retool alternative through vibecoding

- Building a Retool/Looker alternative for internal tools so non-technical teams can build their own without creating busywork for engineers.
- Works like Lovable/Replit with two differences: Got 3,000 integrations out of the box through Pipedream SDK and got access controls in place with embedded auth, backend (django) and database
by giobox | 2026-02-11 17:43:26+00:00
I'm guessing its used for some of their in-car UIs - unreal engine has found a market (Rivian, Volvo, Ford...) for embedded automotive use now that so many cars display an interactive 3d model to the driver for things like tapping to unlock corresponding door or trunk etc etc.

> https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/uses/hmi
by mandevil | 2026-02-11 17:43:39+00:00
The same way that anyone would: they conduct a statistical sample and report unemployment numbers based on that. Source: 15 years ago I was one of the people they contacted. As I recall, a letter came to our apartment, asking for the adult (18+) who had their birthday closest to that date to contact them and provide a phone number and some basic demographic data. That was me, not my roommate, so for the next 12 months I got a call once a month asking me for my employment details about a specific week that month- had I been looking for a job, was I still employed, etc.
by ativzzz | 2026-02-11 17:44:09+00:00
AI - in this case, LLMs and their ecosystem - is an incredibly impactful technology. I would put it up with:

- the printing press

- radio

- tv

- personal computers

- internet

in terms of important contributors to human civilization. We live in the information age, and all of these are significant advances in information.

The printing press allowed small organizations to create written information. It de-centralized the power of the written text and encouraged the rapid growth of literacy.

Radio allowed humans to communicate quickly across long distances

TV allowed humans to communicate visually across long distances - what we see is very important to the way we process information

PCs allowed for digitizing of information - made it denser, more efficient, easier to store and generate larger datasets

The internet is a way to transfer large amounts of this complex digital information even more quickly across large distances

AI is the ability to process this giant lake of digital information we've made for ourselves. We can no longer handle all the information that we create. We need automated ways to do it. LLMs, which translate information to text, is a way for humans to parse giant datasets in our native tongue. It's massive.
by Havoc | 2026-02-11 17:44:31+00:00
I'm certainly not in favour of censorship, it just strikes me as silly that it's the first thing people "test" as if it's some cunning insight. Anyone not living under a rock knows tiananmen is censored in anything chinese

>That is very different than centralized

I guess? If the government's modus operandi is the key thing for you when you get access to a new model then yeah maybe it's not for you.

I personally find the western closed model centralised under megacorps model far more alarming, but when a new opus gets released I don't run to tell everyone on hn that I've discovered the new Opus isn't open weight. That would just be silly...
by snovymgodym | 2026-02-11 17:45:06+00:00
Gaming technology is kind of stagnant, and there aren't the sort of technical leaps between generations anymore. Games today look and feel like games from 2014 with slightly better graphics (and more aggressive monetization).

The Switch has been out since 2017 and has probably reached market saturation at this point. Keep in mind that consoles are pretty durable and lots of people buy used. The Switch 2 isn't selling well yet since it has the PS3 disease (no games).

Anyways, the economy is probably bad but I don't think Nintendo Switch sales are much of an indicator for that.
by insane_dreamer | 2026-02-11 17:45:17+00:00
It's not shootings per child that matters, it's shootings per _school_.

I don't want my child to be traumatized by a school shooting on their school even if they themselves are not killed. That's pretty basic. If multiple people were shot and killed at your workplace, how would you feel about continuing to go there? You think that survivors of a plane crash where other people on the plane died are ready to get back on a plane the next day because "the chances of it happening again are small"?

And I don't care whether it's targeted gang violence or some other type of shooting, it's still an event where someone with a gun is on the school and kills one or more people.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-02-11 17:45:20+00:00
Can you elaborate on that point? I didn't downvote you, but I'm also not going to watch a 3-hour #metoo video about a guy from my grandfather's era in order to understand what you mean.

What's next... is she going to tell me that Newton was a real asshole? Noooooo, say it isn't so.
by stared | 2026-02-11 17:45:20+00:00
> Increased sun exposure was associated with an older appearance and accelerated with age (p  0.015), as was a history of outdoor activities and lack of sunscreen use.

Bahman Guyuron et al., "Factors Contributing to the Facial Aging of Identical Twins" (2009) https://gwern.net/doc/longevity/2009-guyuron.pdf
by Sharlin | 2026-02-11 17:45:20+00:00
Living in Finland, there's always news about tens of thousands of households being left without power for days after particularly heavy winter storms. It works as a reminder that yes, some people do still live in rural backwoods, their local electricity distribution depending on fragile wires suspended on wooden poles. Whereas living in a town of any size, blackouts caused by weather simply never happen.
by sathish316 | 2026-02-11 17:45:39+00:00
How is NanoClaw immune to the Lethal trifecta attack based on prompt injection that OpenClaw is also prone to?

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta/

Lethal trifecta:

1. Access to your private data

2. Exposure to untrusted content

3. The ability to externally communicate

Any combination of 1-3 or more skills can result in a prompt injection attack if it satisfies the above criteria - Gmail or sales personal data, Reddit or X posts or comments in white text, Gmail or Reddit or X to send confidential information to the attacker.
by ikshitapuri | 2026-02-11 17:45:51+00:00
Super cool to see this being shipped.

Watching the shift from hand written prompts to systematically optimizing prompt × model combinations is fascinating. It challenges how I’ve traditionally thought about prompt engineering and points toward a more systems-driven approach to reasoning.

Curious whether this becomes the default for LLM applications, where prompts aren’t static artifacts but continuously optimized components of the stack.
by dang | 2026-02-11 17:45:56+00:00
Related. Others?

Who Smeared Richard Feynman? (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23418130 - June 2020 (56 comments)

Who smeared Richard Feynman? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8024982 - July 2014 (54 comments)
by ericmay | 2026-02-11 17:46:09+00:00
In some cases different Visa or Mastercards have different fees associated with them, and if the merchant has configured or negotiated with their service providers to only accept cards under a certain fee percentage then just being a Visa or Mastercard is not enough. One example I can think of is the Chase Sapphire Reserve card as that is (or was I guess things can change) a Visa Infinite card and I believe transaction fees are closer to ~4%> or something versus maybe a standard ~3%. I don't know the exact fee percentages but that's the mechanism.

I agree the reality is a bit more complicated and even wrote about it in France when dealing with gas stations but what I wrote is broadly true. You can just take a credit card to Europe and the vast majority of the time you just won't need cash. I also agree it's a good idea to have a couple of cards though and maybe your debit card too. Frankly I do this in the US as well, and not just when traveling abroad.
by duckmysick | 2026-02-11 17:46:11+00:00
How am I supposed to research things myself? Let's say I want to research effectiveness and safety of a flu vaccine by myself.

I don't have resources to set up my own lab. I don't even know if the manufacturer will sell a dozen or so vaccines directly to me. So can't even do a basic stoichiometry on my own. And forget about me setting up a trial with actual people - I have no idea where I could begin to make it possible.

If by research you mean reading already published papers, that's literature review and I wouldn't call that a research. But because doing my own experiments and trials is out of question, I'm willing to settle for that.

Reviewing published papers comes with its own set of problems. A lot of papers are behind paywall and I don't have money for the ongoing journal subscriptions. I suppose I can rely only on open journals and pre-prints but that's not all of them. Messaging the authors directly is also an option but it's doesn't scale well and takes time.

Suppose I get my hands on a couple of relevant papers. How can I be sure what's written there is actually correct? It would be nice if I could double check against the raw data, but often that's not available. And at best all I can verify is that the paper's content matches the source data. I can't verify the data itself. At some point I have to trust the authors. Not to mention I don't have access to the data from research that wasn't published, for example because the experiments didn't show anything novel.

But that's fine. Nothing is perfect and after hours (if not days) of reading and playing with data I came to a conclusion that I'm happy with. Of course I have to review it again in a few years. The new research will be published by then. Maybe they will discover something different and I have to review that too.

Overall, I spent a lot of time and it was exhausting. Diligently reading and cross-referencing all that data is mentally taxing. I can't complain though because I've learned something.

There's one problem though. All of that effort was about just a single vaccine. But there's more of them. For other diseases too. And there are other problems I'd love to research. Windmills. Microplastics. Glyphosate. Dozens of types of food. Economic theories. How can I research all of that in a timely fashion?

I'm genuinely asking because I want to. I realize there will be trade-offs involved, but all of them are either relying on someone else (which we try to avoid) or won't be deep enough to form an informed opinion. And I'm not happy with either.
by larsiusprime | 2026-02-11 17:46:38+00:00
This is actually how the popular Texas dominoes game of "42" was invented. It's similar to Spades and other trick-taking games with bids and trumps, but it's played with dominoes, not cards, and therefore it's okay :) Two boys from a Baptist family who got in trouble for playing cards came up with it.

http://texas42.net/42Article.html
by Larrikin | 2026-02-11 17:46:41+00:00
Nintendo indicated when the Switch 2 was launching that they were going to do their best to ensure a large supply and make sure actual players were prioritized. They did not want resellers to be profitable and did not want to create a situation like the PlayStation.

It still sold out and was a little difficult to get on release, but consoles came out at a pretty quick pace and resellers basically could not unload their stock for a profit. It became a bit of a joke about the resellers not being able to unload their stock because stores were getting replenishment stocks so often and Nintendo was constantly sending out emails to players saying they had been selected to buy directly from Nintendo.

I had my personal Switch 2 from the store within about a month of casual checking around and got one for a Christmas gift directly from Nintendo the next week.
by wang_li | 2026-02-11 17:46:47+00:00
>But we fumbled that because we (collectively) have no idea what we are doing.

Because, almost entirely, the software development industry has disclaimed all responsibility. It's super common for people to try to do shit they have no experience or skill at, push their effort to be adopted by others, then when it crashes and burns they have no accountability. If software "engineers" adopted the rigors and accountability and dignity of traditional engineering, the industry would be very different.
by dekhn | 2026-02-11 17:47:06+00:00
Ah, my grandfather was a ham (N4MDB) and he always tried to get me interested in it, but I had to tell him I preferred the internet (this was late 80's, so few people actually had internet). Later when I read Stevens networking books I learned there was a whole Hawaii-based packet radio (ALOHAnet) , and the UC campuses had intercampus microwave networking for a while as well. I actually still remember him telling me about bouncing radio waves off the atmosphere which seemed like magic to me at the time.
by blacklion | 2026-02-11 17:47:26+00:00
Friend of mine suggested "vacation camera" concept when Panoramio was established (around 2006): box with compass, GPS and Internet connection. You point it to the sight, press button, it downloads photos of this sight. If you have premium subscription, it downloads professional photos with professional post-processing.

Inserting user's mates was a problem in 2006.
by hackeraccount | 2026-02-11 17:48:02+00:00
There was a debate with Mike Dukakis when one of the moderators asked if he would want the death penalty for someone who killed his wife. He gave some cold blooded answer.

The real answer was probably - I shouldn't be the one who decides what happened to the person who killed my wife.

In the same way - It shouldn't be up to me if I get fired or my job gets shipped overseas or done by an AI. If we're in a free market it's up to all the people who are buying what I'm making. If there's a cheaper way why wouldn't they take it?