MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by snayan | 2026-02-07 04:38:21+00:00
I mean, I don't know you well, but, I see your posts on here from time to time and from what I gather you are very, very, exceptional at what you do.

Reality is, these AI giants are here and they are using a massive amount of resources. Love them or hate them, that is where we are. Whether or not you accept the job with them, OpenAI is gonna OpenAI.

Given how much the detractors scream about resource uses, you'd think they'd welcome the fact that someone of your calibre is going in and attempting to make a difference.

Which, leads me to believe you're encountering a lot of projecting from people who perhaps can't land the highest of comp roles, and shield their ego by ascribing to the concept of it being selling out, which they would of course never do.
by scoofy | 2026-02-07 04:40:31+00:00
The vast majority of the anti-social behavior on public transit not relevant in automobiles because (1) you can't turnstile jump the gas tank, (2) an automobile is effectively very expensive set of headphones, and (3) you can inhale whatever you want in your vehicle and your neighbor doesn't have to breath it.

Automobiles are a wildly inefficient and expensive form of transportation in urban areas. At the same time, we ought to be willing to ask why a significant amount of our urban population still prefers to pay all that extra money to sit in traffic.
by tiny-automates | 2026-02-07 04:40:56+00:00
the abstraction level argument is spot on. i've been working on browser automation for AI agents and the biggest lesson has been that exposing Playwright-level primitives to a foundation model is fundamentally the wrong interface. the model burns most of its context reasoning about DOM traversal and coordinate-based clicking instead of the actual task. the natural language intent layer is the right call, it's basically treating the browser interaction as a tool-use problem where the tool itself is agentic.

curious about failure recovery though: when the specialised browsing model misinterprets an intent (e.g. clicks the wrong "Submit" on a page with multiple forms), does the outer agent get enough signal to retry or reframe the instruction? that's been the hardest part in my experience, the error surface between "the browser did the wrong thing" and "I specified the wrong thing" is really blurry.
by tagraves | 2026-02-07 04:41:03+00:00
There's three main things we do to solve this, all of which relate to the fact that we have our own (OCI-compatible) container runtime under the hood instead of using Docker.

1. We don't gzip layers like Docker does. Gzip is really slow, and it's much slower than the network. Storage is cheap. So it's much faster to transmit uncompressed layers than to transmit compressed layers and decompress them.

2. We've heavily tuned our agents for pulling layers fast. Disk throughput and IOPS are really important so we provision those higher than you typically would for running workloads in the cloud. When pulling layers we modify kernel parameters like the dirty_ratio to values that we've empirically found with layer pulls. We make sure we completely exhaust our network bandwidth and throughput when pulling layers. And so on.

3. This third one is experimental and something we're actively working on improving, but we have our own underlying filesystem which lazily loads the files from a layer instead of pulling tons of (potentially unneeded) files up front. This is similar to AWS's [Seekable OCI](https://github.com/awslabs/soci-snapshotter) but tuned for our particular needs.

I've been slowly working on improving our documentation to explain these kinds of differentiators that our architecture and container runtime provide, but most of it is unpublished so far. We definitely need to do a much better job of explaining _how_ we are faster and better rather than just stating it :).

The other side of this is that we also made _building_ those layers much much faster. We blogged a little bit about it at https://www.rwx.com/blog/we-deleted-our-dockerfiles but just to hit some quick notes: in RWX you can vary the compute by task, and it turns out throwing a big machine at (e.g.) `npm install` is quite effective. Plus we make using an incremental cache very easy, and layers generated from an incremental cache are only the incremental parts, so they tend to be smaller. And we're a DAG, so you can parallelize your setup in a way that is very painful to do with Docker, even when using multi-stage builds. And our cache registry is global and very hard to mess up, whereas a lot of people misconfigure their Docker caches and have cache misses all over their docker builds. And we have miss-then-hit semantics for caching. Okay, I'm rambling now! But happy to go into more depth on any of this!
by FranklinJabar | 2026-02-07 04:41:11+00:00
Using slack makes me so depressed. The interactions we have today pale in comparison to what we had in IRC 30 years ago.

Of course I accept we're stuck with slack. I just have no clue what to write with such a limited interface. The above posted link is a great example of making the most of a tiny interface and coming up short compared to... 30 years ago
by tomca32 | 2026-02-07 04:41:23+00:00
It’s an innate human desire to do everything in one’s power to save the person you love.

If you had a feeling you could do more, would you not try?

When you’re not personally involved, it’s easy to see that this might be misguided, but when living through it and experiencing daily fear of loss of your partner, it’s extremely difficult to think logically.

I have seen this multiple times and it’s always so unbearably sad.
by kgraves | 2026-02-07 04:42:26+00:00
> Ignore the haters (who sadly have become extremely common on HN now).

Nobody is hating anyone here, I don’t know where you got that from.

They are asking Brendan to be honest.

It is fine to say it is about the money.

But it is silly, borderline patronising to tell readers that you’re “saving the world” because you got a job at OpenAI.
by D-Machine | 2026-02-07 04:42:34+00:00
Getting some strong ChatGPT vibes from the overall sectioning and some stylistic flags, e.g. the "This isn't X, it's Y" meme appears many times as an intro to paragraphs or sections, e.g. "This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s something more mundane and more durable: structural incentive alignment". There are lots of (spaced) em-dashes, and the overall rhythm, tone, and length of things is very ChatGPT.

The way the references are sort of lazily clustered also to me strongly looks like they could have been pasted from a ChatGPT Extended Thinking sidebar: if you were doing this kind of research organically, you'd just more clearly be able to link your references to each clause that is is relevant, with appropriate enumeration. I would bet with about 90% certainty that this was mostly done via ChatGPT with Extended Thinking.

There is also not much discussion and/or consideration that, well, perhaps Rust is being adopted because it actually does provide strong guarantees in combination with things like being modern, having cargo, being fast, and etc. bla bla bla. The proposed alternatives of ADA, modern C++, and hardware optimization just feel laughably out of touch.

It's a weak post overall, but I do really appreciate the documentation of some of the financial ties involved in supporting / boosting Rust.
Show HN: Fitspire – a simple 5-minute workout app for busy people (iOS)
by devavinoth12 | 2026-02-07 04:42:39+00:00
Hi HN,

I just launched Fitspire, a small iOS app built around one idea: workouts shouldn’t require 45–60 minutes to be effective.

I’m a builder, and like many people working long hours, I found it hard to stay consistent with traditional fitness routines. Most apps felt either too intense, too time-consuming, or overloaded with features.

So I built Fitspire around:

1. Structured 5-minute workouts
2. Minimal, distraction-free UI
3. Simple progress tracking (streaks, reports, history)
4. No subscriptions at launch (100% free for now)

The goal isn’t to replace full gym training — it’s to reduce the friction of starting.

Tech stack:

1. Built with React Native
2. Backend with Firebase
3. iOS release via App Store

I’m mainly looking for feedback on:

Does 5-minute positioning make sense?
What would make this actually sticky?
Where do fitness apps usually fail in retention?

Would appreciate any honest feedback — especially critical ones.

Thanks.
by tiny-automates | 2026-02-07 04:43:32+00:00
frontend QA is exactly where i've seen the biggest ROI with browser agents. the gap with Playwright MCP specifically is that it assumes the agent can reason about CSS selectors and DOM state, which breaks constantly on anything with dynamic rendering, client-side routing, or shadow DOM.

the right abstraction for QA is probably closer to what a manual tester actually does, describe expected behavior, let a specialized system figure out the mechanical verification steps.

but the harder unsolved problem is evaluation: how do you reliably distinguish "the agent verified the behavior" from "the agent navigated to the right page and hallucinated a success report"? visual diffing against golden screenshots helps for regression but doesn't cover semantic correctness of dynamic content.
by Ygg2 | 2026-02-07 04:43:45+00:00
In context of grandparents post.

> You determine the weights via brute force. Simply running a large amount of data where you have the input as well as the correct output

Brute force just means guessing all possible combinations. A dataset containing most human knowledge is about as brute force as you can get.

I'm fairly sure that Alpha Zero data is generated by Alpha Zero. But it's not an LLM.
by cootsnuck | 2026-02-07 04:43:47+00:00
In my experience, it just entirely depends on the company. Different companies will use the same title and they can have wildly different mixtures of pre vs post sales involvement. My career has all been customer/client facing technical roles. Titles range from:

- support engineer

- solutions engineer

- sales engineer

- applied engineer

- forward deployed engineer

- solutions / sales architect

- field engineer

And that's leaving out titles that avoid calling someone an engineer who is still entirely technical, has to code, has to deploy, etc. but deals with clients.

I will say though that roles that want pre-sales focused engineers typically are pretty picky about people who have the sales-facing experience. So it shouldn't be too hard to avoid those roles if you're wanting a role focused almost entirely on post-sales.

(I say that, but I do know that if a company lacks pre-sales dedicated engs then other engs definitely can get roped into it. I know a guy with a PhD in ChemEng that basically is the director of research at his company and has had to wear a "sales eng" hat quite a bit in his role.)
by bonsai_spool | 2026-02-07 04:44:12+00:00
> system flagged it at a score that was "higher than the late night average"

Being charitable to the quality of Uber's legal team, I feel they could easily and compellingly have offered this defense.

It's telling that other documentary evidence highlighted that Uber decided sharing its reservations/acting on its system would be detrimental to growth.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-02-07 04:45:02+00:00
There is a lot of literature on join operations using discrete global grid systems (DGGS). H3 is a widely used DGGS optimized for visualization.

If joins are a critical performance-sensitive operation, the most important property of a DGGS is congruency. H3 is not congruent it was optimized for visualization, where congruency doesn’t matter, rather than analytical computation. For example, the article talks about deduplication, which is not even necessary with a congruent DGGS. You can do joins with H3 but it is not recommended as a general rule unless the data is small such that you can afford to brute-force it to some extent.

H3 is great for doing point geometry aggregates. It shines at that. Not so much geospatial joins though. DGGS optimized for analytic computation (and joins by implication) exist, they just aren’t optimal for trivial visualization.
by Fire-Dragon-DoL | 2026-02-07 04:45:02+00:00
I don't know, she is not terminal, she is in the part where the knowledge is lacking, so what he is doing is actually reasonable.
Nobody knows anything, giving a shot to save the love of your life, with their approval, might be good, assuming you still spend time with them.

The symptoms if they came back would kill any hope for traveling anyway
by econ | 2026-02-07 04:45:18+00:00
I'm no crypto expert, just fooling around.

The security questions are like extra shares of lower value.

My mental model is something like burying the password in your 100x100 yard. You give one friend the X and a different friend the Y coordinates both rounded down to a multiple of 10 meters. The security questions can be added to the X and Y coordinates.

X = 30 + 2 + 3 + 1

Y = ?? + 3 + 5 + 1

You only have to dig 9 holes now.
by ed_mercer | 2026-02-07 04:45:32+00:00
Hmm. Perhaps it serves as a commitment to post about this publicly? And as one other person mentioned, you have a far better chance of beating this today than just a few years ago, especially with some money and connections.

>It leads to especially dark places when they don't succeed.

The same can be said about child birth, and yet, people still make kids.
by an0malous | 2026-02-07 04:47:14+00:00
If we had a machine today with unlimited intelligence could it figure out a cure for cancer with our currently available data, or would it just request more data and ask us to conduct more studies? Is the bottleneck our ability to recognize patterns in the current data (i.e. intelligence) or the lack of sufficient data to determine a pattern? Or is it some other more nebulous thing that we aren’t considering?
by davidgay | 2026-02-07 04:47:30+00:00
Not intrinsically or commonly deadly. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas... says "1 in 10 people will develop a pituitary adenoma in their lifetime" - pituitary adenomas is the more general class of these benign tumors, as the pituitary gland produces multiple hormones.
by ndriscoll | 2026-02-07 04:48:12+00:00
Why do people have to make this stuff so complicated? An API that requires a key and enabling an MCP server and configuring your client to fetch markdown files on the fly? Why not just a tar with all the docs? How big are they? A couple MB? Agents are really good at using grep on text files. So is my text editor.

I haven't yet figured out the point of this MCP stuff. Codex seems to have innate knowledge of how to curl jira and confluence and gitlab and prometheus and SQL databases and more. All you need to configure is a .netrc file and put the hostname in AGENTS.md. Are MCP tools even composable? Like can the model pipe the response to grep or jq or another MCP call without it entering/wasting context? Or is a normal CRUD API strictly more powerful and easier to use?
by D-Machine | 2026-02-07 04:48:16+00:00
Yup, agreed. I don't trust these companies for a second, but I also don't want overreach.

Also, though this isn't super relevant, I am not actually personally too worried if they are really using behavioural psychologists. Most psychology is such junk science and most research psychologists struggle with such basic math and stats that I am extremely skeptical they'd be gaining anything from having a person like that on hand.

I think the reality is that the addictiveness is engineered with simple A/B and other kinds of testing and data, and this kind of engineering / research is better done by people with other qualifications. This would be the thing to look for and demand documentation and evidence about, if we were serious about limiting this kind of thing.
by quacker | 2026-02-07 04:48:38+00:00
I don’t agree.

She has posted publicly about her condition.

He is 25 years old and trying to cope with a hard life event. Let’s not act like it doesn’t affect him. It affects everyone around her and the strong reaction from him is really a positive reflection on her, isn’t it?

His post is written and edited to garner sympathy and support. I don’t mind that for a naive but noble cause. And there is always a slim chance of success.
by monocasa | 2026-02-07 04:48:48+00:00
Given that it's use is banned in most academic journals dealing with imaging/graphics, you'd be wrong.

And as several journals have brought up in the banning, it's not even good at what it purports to be for these use cases. It's a pretty poor quality image to start off with due to being scanned to a digital file with 1970s technology.

At this point the ones defending its continued use are the vocal minority on some weird anti-woke crusade that doesn't even make sense on technical grounds.
by cootsnuck | 2026-02-07 04:49:27+00:00
Yup, it is. It's my bread and butter too. So much so I decided to just do it for myself and start my own consulting company.

Being a solutions engineer at the right companies means you get to be one of the few people with full end-to-end visibility of the entire lifecycle of both a client and the technology adoption, deployment, optimization, maintenance, etc. process. And you'll get to see it dozens or hundreds of times for a variety of clients across industries. Again though, totally depends on the company.
by tyre | 2026-02-07 04:50:55+00:00
Having used Heroku at multiple startups during the 2012–2015 years, this is not correct.

With heroku you could `git push heroku master` and it would do everything else from there. The UX was nice, but that was not the reason people chose it. It was so easy compared to running on EC2 instances with salt or whatever. For simple projects, it was incredible.
by AdieuToLogic | 2026-02-07 04:51:56+00:00
> A lot of how I form my thoughts is driven by writing code, and seeing it on screen, running into its limitations.

Two principles I have held for many years which I believe are relevant both to your sentiment and this thread are reproduced below. Hopefully they help.

First:

When making software, remember that it is a snapshot of
your understanding of the problem. It states to all,
including your future-self, your approach, clarity, and
appropriateness of the solution for the problem at hand.
Choose your statements wisely.

And:

Code answers what it does, how it does it, when it is used,
and who uses it. What it cannot answer is why it exists.
Comments accomplish this. If a developer cannot be bothered
with answering why the code exists, why bother to work with
them?
by abound | 2026-02-07 04:53:05+00:00
This post was actually really tough for me to read, because it read exactly like a suicide note a friend had sent me (and others) after his partner had died suddenly. It chronicled the joy and happiness in their relationship, her illness, his slow descent into desperation, and, after she passed, his resolve to follow her.

If the author of the post is reading these comments, your heart is in the right place, but just be careful and take care of yourself. Don't lose the forest for the trees.
by ares623 | 2026-02-07 04:53:46+00:00
Sorry but I think you have it the other way around.

The ones against it understand fully what the tech means for them and their loved ones. Even if the tech doesn't deliver on all of its original promises (which is looking more and more unlikely), it still has enough capabilities to severely affect the lives of a large portion of the population.

I would argue that the ones who are inhaling "copium" are the ones who are hyping the tech. They are coping/hoping that if the tech partially delivers what it promises, they get to continue to live their lives the same way, or even an improved version. Unless they already have underground private bunkers with a self-sustained ecosystem, they are in for a rude awakening.
by kermatt | 2026-02-07 04:54:14+00:00
Yes.

They (and our Board) jumped on to it as a solution to reduce headcount and cost, and have stuck their heads in the sand when data shows project velocity is slowing, and bugs are getting created more frequently, because they have attempted to replace experienced teams with Cursor and cheap outsourcing.

The allure is too strong to face reality that AI can be a powerful addition to the toolbox for productivity, but it is not a replacement for actual skill and experience.
by rramadass | 2026-02-07 04:54:20+00:00
As an Indian living in India's Silicon Valley, I am calling BS on this.

"All young (early 20s) women" doing pron/explicit content manual filtering is not normal. No Indian Family would allow their daughters (and sons) to take up such a job if they knew about it.

As the article itself points out, the workers are drawn in by non-explicit/non-pron image annotation and then switched to disgusting work when they cannot leave due to job-needs/contracts-enforcement.

This is pure bait-and-switch scam which has severe psychological effects on the women involved and should not be blithely hand-waved away.

For a detailed understanding of the dangers of explicit image annotation (not specific to India) see this documentary The "Modern Day Slaves" Of The AI Tech World - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPSZFUiElls
by IhateAI | 2026-02-07 04:54:23+00:00
Sorry if I'm shaming. I suppose you're right, someone will probably build them. But in order to prevent bad outcomes for the average joe/worker we are can't just hand optimizations over to corporations for free in the form of open open source. We know all too well how open source is exploited.

I don't know how to prevent people from stopping this without shaming them. I think more shaming might be required, as uncomfortable as that may be. Its a societal wide prisoner's dilemma (well if I don't build it, someone else will), except we this isn't a prisoners dilemma and we can coordinate, sort of.

It would be one thing if GPUs and Tokens were cheap and everyone could take these implementations and out compete the corporations, but that's not the game theoretical terms we're on here. They have the resources, and I promise they are not going to let the average joe be able afford to out compete them. They are the ones that are going to be able to get the most advantage from these tools.. Why give them the extra leverage. It will be used to displace you. The ruling class or those with the resources, have zero intention of letting the tide rise all boats. And if there are any in the ruling class that do have good intentions, they will be rooted out.

We see this evidence all across literature, history, and in their own actions. This year in Telluride Colorado the Ski Patrol Union went on strike over wages. The billionaire owner who lives in California, Chuck Horning, did not want to concede to the Ski Patrolers over a $66k spread out over 3 years, like 22k a year over the contract length. He shutdown the ski resort during the Christmas holidays, and brought the town to its knees. This is just one example, but there are many. It is ideological to these people, its about maintaining their control over the working class. We are at the beginning of a class struggle that Earth has never witnessed before, with way more lives at stake.

I do not think LLMs are going to lead to super intelligence btw, I do believe it will get decent enough to uproot many lives when its used as a weapon against the value of labor and accelerate concentration of resources into the few(er). We are up against people like Chuck Horner, who'd rather destroy an entire town of workers over 22k a year than concede any power. They have zero interest in building a equitable society, or we wouldn't see this type of behavior. This will 100% get used to replace you, then what will they do with us? They aren't going to just let everyone chill, I promise you that.

I believe the devaluation (and surveillance )of labor because of LLMs, robotics (machine learning in general) is the most pressing issue of our time.

I get the draw to building cool tools with these things, but please don't do it in the open. Let someone else do it, and then we can call them out too. The slower these developments can happen the better.