MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by empath75 | 2026-02-05 17:20:03+00:00
> To those who are acquainted with the principles of the Jacquard loom, and who are also familiar with analytical formulæ, a general idea of the means by which the Engine executes its operations may be obtained without much difficulty. In the Exhibition of 1862 there were many splendid examples of such looms.
It is known as a fact that the Jacquard loom is capable of {117} weaving any design which the imagination of man may conceive. It is also the constant practice for skilled artists to be employed by man­u­fac­turers in designing patterns. These patterns are then sent to a peculiar artist, who, by means of a certain machine, punches holes in a set of pasteboard cards in such a manner that when those cards are placed in a Jacquard loom, it will then weave upon its produce the exact pattern designed by the artist.
〈WEAVING FORMULÆ.〉
Now the man­u­fac­turer may use, for the warp and weft of his work, threads which are all of the same colour; let us suppose them to be unbleached or white threads. In this case the cloth will be woven all of one colour; but there will be a damask pattern upon it such as the artist designed.
But the man­u­fac­turer might use the same cards, and put into the warp threads of any other colour. Every thread might even be of a different colour, or of a different shade of colour; but in all these cases the form of the pattern will be precisely the same—the colours only will differ.
The analogy of the Analytical Engine with this well-known process is nearly perfect.
The Analytical Engine consists of two parts:—
1st. The store in which all the variables to be operated upon, as well as all those quantities which have arisen from the result of other operations, are placed.
2nd. The mill into which the quantities about to be operated upon are always brought.

- Charles Babbage, Passages from the life of a philosopher.
by unethical_ban | 2026-02-05 17:21:02+00:00
SV and financial services are quite different.

It's 2026 and banks are still running their mainframe, running windows VMs on VMware and building their enterprise software with Java.

The big boys still have their own datacenters they own.

Sure, they try dabbling with cloud services, and maybe they've pushed their edge out there, and some minor services they can afford to experiment with.
by jorvi | 2026-02-05 17:21:22+00:00
But that isn't how normal people interact with search engines. Which is the whole argument everyone is saying here, how LLMs are now better 'correct answer generators' than search engine. They're not. My mother directly experienced that. Her food would have come out much better if she completely ignored Gemini and checked a site.

One of the best things LLMs could do (and that no one seems to be doing) is allow it to admit uncertainty. If the average weight of all tokens in a response drops below X, it should just say "I don't know, you should check a different source."

At any rate, if my mother has to figure out some 10 sentence stunted multiform question for the LLM to finally get a good consistent answer, or can just type "best Indian restaurant in Brooklyn" (maybe even with site:restaurant reviews.com"), which experience is superior?

> LLMs are no different than programming a computer or anything else in this domain.

Just feel like reiterating against this: virtually no one programs their search queries or query engineers a 10 sentence search query.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-05 17:21:35+00:00
On the flip side... I can't tell you how many times I've had to explain how public/private key crypto works do developers and IT security staff working in government projects. And this is just for one-way trust of JWTs for SSO integrations.

I mean, I don't mind if the same dev public-keys are used nearly everywhere in internal dev and testing environments... but JFC, don't deploy them to client infrastructure for our apps.

FWIW, aside... for about the last decade, I generally separate auth from the application I'm working with, relying on a limited set of established roles and RSA signed JWTs, allowing for the configuration of one or more issuers. This allows for a "devauth" that you can run locally for a whoever you want usage. While more easily integrating into other SSO systems and bridges with other auth services/systems in differing production environments. Even with firm SSO/Ouath, etc services, it's still the gist of configuration.
by lumost | 2026-02-05 17:21:42+00:00
I don’t understand why most cloud backend designs seem to strive for maximizing the number of services used.

My biggest gripe with this is async tasks where the app does numerous hijinks to avoid a 10 minute lambda processing timeout. Rather than structure the process to process many independent and small batches, or simply using a modest container to do the job in a single shot - a myriad of intermediate steps are introduced to write data to dynamo/s3/kinesis + sqs/and coordination.

A dynamically provisioned, serverless container with 24 cores and 64 GB of memory can happily process GBs of data transformations.
by gdhkgdhkvff | 2026-02-05 17:21:46+00:00
On one hand, I think this project is super cool and something I would use and/or would have loved to build myself for my own use.

On the other hand, it makes me wonder if we’re just heading for a future where everyone is just always working, at all times, even while doing other things.

“Wow look at our daughter taking her first steps! She’s doing so… wait hold on… No, Claude. I said to name the class “potatoes”, not “‘pot’ followed by eight ‘O’s,” you dumb robot!”
by DrewADesign | 2026-02-05 17:22:06+00:00
In my feeds, I’ve seen activity among several an-LLM-is-my-tech-lead-level newly tech-ish people, who are just plugging their lives into it and seeing what happens.

If this really was primarily tech savvy people prodding at the ecosystem, the top skill available, as of a few days ago, probably wouldn’t be a malware installer:

https://1password.com/blog/from-magic-to-malware-how-opencla...
by regenschutz | 2026-02-05 17:22:21+00:00
It was updated weekly. Constantly writing and maintaining so much information is almost certainly very expensive. Coupled with the fact that you have to be VERY careful before releasing each edit to make sure that no accidental personal beliefs or theories slip by (as that would be a diplomatic catastrophe), I reckon the cost of maintaining the thing could be very high.

I would wager that they're still going to maintain their own version of the World Factbook, and just simply not share it. This would allow them to cut out the very costly review step that I talked about.

Now whether that's a good decision or not is a completely different question.
by Arathorn | 2026-02-05 17:22:33+00:00
Matrix is a decentralised encrypted chat protocol on which you could build something like Zulip, except decentralised and end-to-end encrypted.

Element is the actual app being trialled here, which feels more like Slack and/or Signal than Zulip. The point is that you get something you can selfhost while also interoperating with other deployments… while also encrypting the data end-to-end with Signal protocol.
by mbreese | 2026-02-05 17:23:02+00:00
They've had cloud products for a long time, but I don't think that Microsoft fundamentally changed. I still see them organized and treated as an Enterprise software company. (This is from my N=1 outside perspective.)

ChatGPT says that "productivity and business processes" is still the largest division in Microsoft with 43% of revenues and 54% of operating income (from their FY2025 10K). The "intelligent cloud" division is second with 38% revenue and 35% operating income. Which helps to support my point -- their legacy enterprise software (and OS) is still their main product line and makes more relative profits than the capital heavy cloud division.
by Jeffallan | 2026-02-05 17:23:29+00:00
Remember when “just prompting it” felt like you accomplished something?
After about a year of agentic coding, I think we are all starting to realize how important planning, context management, and disciplined AI use actually are.

Here is my system:
65 skills and 9 workflow commands for Claude Code. The interesting parts:

1 /common-ground: surfaces Claude's hidden assumptions about your project before you start. You confirm or reject them. "A smart thing to do." https://github.com/hesreallyhim/awesome-claude-code#latest-a....

2 Project workflows: discovery → planning → execution → retrospectives, with Jira and Confluence integration. Real tickets, real acceptance criteria, real code review.

Vibe coding is great for prototyping. Vibe engineering helps build production applications.

Repo: https://github.com/jeffallan/claude-skills
Docs: https://jeffallan.github.io/claude-skills

I would love both your feedback and your take on where to keep humans in the loop.
by maebert | 2026-02-05 17:23:49+00:00
I love the vision, but it glosses over the most important difference between Infrastructure and Companies.

Infrastructure as code is prescriptive. The code is the source of truth, and the world gets crested from it.

Company as code is descriptive. It is constantly catching up to meat-space, rather than creating it. Changes are gradual instead of instant roll-outs. Patterns change over time and only get documented later.

Making the company code prescriptive would require an insane amount of discipline that might be more stifling and restrictive than it is freeing.
by avaer | 2026-02-05 17:23:49+00:00
You're right, but the people that say they're pilled/sticking it to the man/breaking out of the matrix -- they're just parroting things they saw on X or tiktok. And then shuffling their money based on that.

They haven't researched or thought about any of this, otherwise they wouldn't be reducing finance to repeating someone else's soundbytes.

There's no ethos there, it's just reposts. Yes, it is weird.
by rustyhancock | 2026-02-05 17:24:06+00:00
It's is RLHF that dominates the style of LLM produced text not the training corpus.

And RLHF tends towards rewarding text that first blush looks good. And for every one person (like me) who is tired of hearing "You're making a really sharp observation here..." There are 10 who will hammer that thumbs up button.

The end result is that the text produced by LLMs is far from representative of the original corpus, and it's not an "average" in the derisory sense people say.

But it's distinctly LLM and I can assure you I never saw emojis in job applications until people started using Chatgpt to right their personal statement.
by repelsteeltje | 2026-02-05 17:24:16+00:00
In the Netherlands, a lot of government systems aren't procured from the Microsofts of this world. There are a lot of middle men (consultancy agencies) involved that over the years have helped build a strong ecosystem with lots of expertise around Microsoft and related suppliers.

So indeed, it's not like you can just replace a software product (or service) by some EU or open alternative. And there are huge vested interests.
by layer8 | 2026-02-05 17:25:07+00:00
Yes. From the original announcement: “HTML + JavaScript-based front end, powered by your system’s native browser engine (like WebKit, Chromium, etc.)”

From the email-walled “whitepaper” [0]: “If you need tools like the Base database
module (including Java-based
components) or the full Math module,
Collabora Office Classic remains the
right choice - Collabora Office isn’t
trying to replicate those. Collabora
Office will run macros, but for
advanced macro authoring and
debugging you should use Classic. For
extreme Calc workloads (think complex
Solver models or analysis across
hundreds of thousands of rows) Classic
is likely the better fit.”

[0] https://paste.c-net.org/FuriousWhistler
by sgarland | 2026-02-05 17:25:30+00:00
> And if each of your clients is in the Healthcare industry and dealing with end-user medical data? Or financial data?

Then you're probably going to need some combination of HIPAA / SOC 2 / PCI DSS certification, regardless of where your servers are physically located. AWS has certified the infrastructure side for you, but that doesn't remove your obligations for the logical side.

> Are you prepared for appropriate data isolation/sharding and controls? Do you have a strategy for scaling database operations per client or across all clients?

Again, you're going to need that regardless of where your servers physically exist.

> vs. relying on a new backend instance per client in a cloud infrastructure

You want to spin up an EC2 per client, and run an isolated copy of the application, isolated DB, etc. inside of it? That sounds like a nightmare to manage, especially if you want or need HA capabilities.
by pixl97 | 2026-02-05 17:25:35+00:00
>as everything a developer needs can be set up easily by that developer.

So yea, developers are the worst when it comes to security. You put up a few walls and the next thing you know the developer is settings access to ., I know, I make a living cleaning up their messes.

I mean, people leave their cars unlocked and their keys in them FFS. Thinking we're going to suddenly teach more than a handful of security experts operating system security abstractions just has not been what has been occurring. Our lazy monkey brains reach for the easy button first unless someone is pointing a gun at us.
by Macha | 2026-02-05 17:25:39+00:00
Matrix has threads. So does discord, but discords UI around them basically renders them functionally useless.

Anyway, the first goal listed in this project was to move to European sovereign solutions so Zulip failed at the first hurdle.

Given the (lack of) speed of European bureaucracy, this is likely more a reaction to the US sanctioning the ICC than the more recent Greenland saber rattling, but you'll probably see more of this in the future.
by neom | 2026-02-05 17:26:25+00:00
Oh they had $25MM in funding, $0 ARR - lol - the two reasons I decided to leave it as a weekend project: "Thanks!!! I decided not to build it, that space is already too busy, there is a startup with $25MM in stealth, who else is in stealth? On top of that, this method will get stale very very quickly, foundation model businesses are just too hard to work around right now, it's a silly way to do business. My magic is I've build a startup from scratch to over 400 people and watched what they do, it won't be long till that isn't worth much." and "I build it on my own over a weekend, on my own. I just wanted to confirm it can be done therefore will exist, that is all. Personally, I decided not to peruse it because I am old and lazy and don't want to compete against a16z and sequoia funded adderall filled teenagers." - 8 months forward I was right: If I could slap a bunch of python together and create business as a service that actually functions, in a weekend as just me, that's a feature on someone elses product! :)
by kstrauser | 2026-02-05 17:26:32+00:00
My school switched to C++ for intro stuff right before I enrolled, and egad, I still think it's a horrid choice. It required learning, or at least memorizing, a significant amount of boilerplate before a freshman could even start to consider writing their logic. I'd already written an awful lot of programs before I got there so it wasn't too awful for me to make the leap. I spent a lot of time helping my fellow students get over the massive speedbumps they faced so they could start learning.
by jarboot | 2026-02-05 17:26:35+00:00
I spun up an Debian stable ec2 vm (using an agent + aws cli + aws-vault of course) to host openclaw, giving it full root access, and I talk to it on discord.

It's a little slow sometimes, but it's the first time I've felt like I have an independent agent that can handle things kind of.

The only two things I did were 1. Ask it to create a Monero address so I could send it money, and have it notify me whenever money is sent to that address. It spun up its own monerod daemon which was really heavy and it ran out of space. So I had to get it to use the Monero wallet instead, but had to manually intervene to shut down the monerod daemon and kill the process and restart openclaw. In the end it worked and still works.
2. I simply asked it "@ me the the silver price every day around 8am ET" and it just figured out how to do it and schedule it. To my understanding it has its own cron functionality using a json file.
3. Write and host some python scripts I can ping externally to send me a notification

I've had it done other misc stuff, but ChatGPT is almost always better for queries, and coding agents + Zed is much better for coding. But with a cheap enough vm and using openrouter plus glm 4.7 or flash, it can do some quirky fun stuff. I see the advantage as mainly having control of a system where it can have long term state (like files, processes, etc) and manage context itself. It is more like glue and it's full mastery and control of a Linux system gives it a lot of flexibility.

Think of it more as agent+os which you aren't getting with raw Claude or ChatGPT.

I've done nothing that interesting with it, it's absolutely a security nightmare, but it's really fun!
by cardanome | 2026-02-05 17:26:44+00:00
I mean German police is using Palantir.

There is nothing magic about Palantir, especially not about the subset of Palantir that the German police uses as we have stricter data privacy laws.

You might think that would be a strategic risk not worth taking especially with the US getting more hostile towards Europe but here we are.

Why? Honestly I don't have a good answer other than well the whole system is rotten, corruption, lobbyism, take your pick.
by 01jonny01 | 2026-02-05 17:27:12+00:00
Important Email Update from Google:

Dear Programmable Search Engine user,

Thank you for contacting us via the Web Search Products Interest Form. We have received your feedback and are actively reviewing the specific use cases you shared.

We are writing to share important details regarding the transition plan and the available solutions for your search needs.

1. For Unrestricted Web Search: Future Web Search Service

For partners requiring unrestricted "Search the entire web" capabilities, we are developing a new enterprise-grade Web Search Service. As you evaluate your future needs, please be aware of the commercial terms planned for this new service:

Pricing: USD $15 CPM (Cost Per Mille / 1,000 requests).

Minimum Commitment: A minimum monthly fee of USD $30,000 will apply.

We’ll release more information on this service later in 2026. Existing 'Search the entire web' engines remain functional until January 1, 2027.

2. For AI & Advanced Search: Google Vertex AI

We strongly encourage you to explore Google Vertex AI as another option for partners who need enterprise search and AI capabilities across 50 or fewer domains. Vertex AI offers powerful capabilities for:

Grounded Generation: Connecting your AI agents to your own data and/or to Google Search to provide accurate, up-to-date responses.

Custom Data Search: Building enterprise-grade search engines over your own data and specific websites.

This solution is available now and is designed to scale with your specific application needs.

Clarification on Current Service Status:

While you evaluate which path fits your business needs, please remember the timeline for your current implementations:

Existing Projects: If you have an existing Programmable Search Engine configured to "Search the entire web," your service will continue to function until January 1, 2027. You have the full year to plan your migration.

New Projects: As of January 20, 2026, new engines created in the Programmable Search Engine admin console are restricted to "Site Search Only" (specific domains only).

Later in 2026 we’ll provide you with more updates regarding the new Web Search Service and the means to express your desire to use it to power your web search experiences.

Sincerely,

Programmable Search Engine Team
by MisterTea | 2026-02-05 17:27:20+00:00
It's even easier than that. A lot of older ignition locks could be defeated by a screwdriver so you just smash the window, jimmy the ignition lock with the screw driver and off you go! There was a specific model of jeep that was stolen a lot because the rear lock could be popped out easily with pliers, a matching key made, and you return later with the key to steal the car.
by tonymet | 2026-02-05 17:27:40+00:00
I'm not going to say that any OS is perfect. and it's great that you actually test Windows. most critiques I see are 1990s assessments of ACLs and memory protection.

Generally protected folders (CFA) will protect system32 , but trusted apps can make it through. e.g. explorer.exe and powershell.exe if it's run in the terminal. Untrusted apps are expected to be blocked.

My general point is that modern windows landscape has an incredible number of protections that linux systems don't. and linux has become a bigger target over the past 10+ years as well.

It's not so much to say that Windows is better, but to encourage Linux users to be more careful with their systems, and Windows users to enable those features if they turned them off in the past.
by sanderjd | 2026-02-05 17:28:34+00:00
This makes total sense to me. I'm thinking through the flow that would lead me to be a customer of yours.

In my current job, I think we're honestly a bit past the phase where I would want to take on a migration to a service like yours. We already have a good team of infrastructure folks running our cloud infrastructure, and we have accepted the lock-in of various AWS managed services. So the high-touch devops support doesn't sound that useful to me (we already have people who are good at this), and replacing all the locked-in components seems unlikely to have good ROI. I think we'd be more likely to go straight to #3 if we decided to take that on to save money.

But I'll probably be a founder or early employee at a new startup again someday, and I'm intrigued by your offering from that perspective. But it seems pretty clear to me that I shouldn't call you up on day 1, because I'm going to be nowhere near $5k a month, and I want to move faster than calling someone up to talk about my needs. I want to self-serve a small amount of usage, and cloud services seem really great for that. But this is how they get you! Once you've started with a particular cloud service, it's always easiest to take on more lock-in.

At some point between these two situations, though, I can see where your offering would be great. But the decision point isn't all that clear to me. In my experience, by the time you start looking at your AWS bill and thinking "crap, that seems pretty expensive", you have better things to do than an infrastructure migration, and you have taken on some lock-in.

I do like the idea of high-touch services to solve the breaking-the-lock-in challenge! I'll certainly keep this in mind next time I find myself in this middle ground where the cloud starts feeling more expensive than it's worth, but we don't want to go straight to #3.
by zelphirkalt | 2026-02-05 17:28:37+00:00
But it is not really XML like syntax, is it? It is still a string, even if a template string or whatever it is called, no?

That still leaves the door open for XSS. A good (proper?) (e?)DSL would have the things that make the DOM as keywords in the language, and then we could ensure, that things which should merely be a text, are really only rendered as text, not injected DOM nodes. And the next failure is, that this DSL that is jsx needs to rename HTML attributes, because of overlap with JS keywords like "class". It lacks the awareness of context and therefore is not truly like HTML, no matter how hard it tries to be. It also comes with hacks like "<>" or fragment.

Overall it is usable, but not a particularly well made DSL. It might be as good as it gets with JS.

For inspiration check SXML in various lisps, which comes with immunity to XSS and which works just like the rest of the language, can be structurally pattern matched upon and iterated through, like a proper tree structure.