MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jcynix | 2026-02-06 15:32:05+00:00
> A stream is programmed by somebody else and who knows if they are trying to please me or their partners.

That's one problem, yes. The other, more subtle, might be that one cannot really develop a personal taste. If you have a CD (or nowadays Vinyl ;-) you can listen to it even when the artist isn't in the stream any more.

I'm a fan of J. J. Cale's music for example, and have a number of his CDs (ripped for convenient mobile handling, of course) so can mix my own "stream" to take with me and listen to it when I'm in the mood. I'm a fan of Bach, Händel, Telemann too, own a number CDs of course, and when I'm in the mood for a relaxing bit of classic I can "stream" my own selection. So I decide what to listen to and I decide when to do it, depending on my mood.

Just some days ago I learned that many people sell their CD collection and you can find them in cheap batches on Ebay. When I suddenly remember a long forgotten artist (forgotten by me as time goes by), I will be able to grab a CD, rip it and listen to things I remember. Doing that with a streaming service? Tough thing, I suppose.

I do listen to music new to me (mainly on Youtube) every now and then, and learn about artists I didn't know, but if I really like enough of their work, I'll get a CD. Which, BTW, is not always easy for certain niche artists which either publish a limited set of vinyl and/or downloadable collections only nowadays.
by Jide_Lambo | 2026-02-06 15:32:16+00:00
I relate to this alot. I've been working in B2B SaaS for years and saw the exact same gap in customer success tooling. The serious tools start at $10k - $50k per year and take months to set up, and everyone else that can't afford them use spreadsheets. There's almost nothing in the middle.
What's funny is the actual workflows usually aren't that complicated. The complexity is artificial. It comes from the vendor trying to serve every possible use case. When you build something focused on the real workflow, it turns out you can get 80% of the value in a fraction of the time and cost.
The open source angle is smart tool. In B2B, the "let me just try it" factor matter so much. If someone has to sit through a sales call just to see if the tool fits, most small operators will just stick with their spreadsheet.
by amarant | 2026-02-06 15:32:24+00:00
I don't like this narrative. I'm a person, and HN is the only social media I use.I tolerate this one because I find the addictiveness off-putting, but unlike other social media HN doesn't engage in that much.

I'm not some sort of prodigy or anything, just a random schmuck. If I can do it, anyone can. People just really like blaming others for their own vices instead of owning up to having a vice.

HN is a vice too. One of many that I have. And they're all mine. I've chosen them all. In most cases knowing full well that I probably shouldn't have.
by sigbottle | 2026-02-06 15:33:20+00:00
I think one of the best ways to understand the "nice property" of compilers we like isn't necessarily determinacy, but "programming models".

There's this really good blog post about how autovectorization is not a programming model https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/18/ispc-origins

The point is that you want to reliably express semantics in the top level language, tool, API etc. because that's the only way you can build a stable mental model on top of that. Needing to worry about if something actually did something under the hood is awful.

Now of course, that depends on the level of granularity YOU want. When writing plain code, even if it's expressively rich in the logic and semantics (e.g. c++ template metaprogramming), sometimes I don't necessarily care about the specific linker and assembly details (but sometimes I do!)

The issue I think is that building a reliable mental model of an LLM is hard. Note that "reliable" is the key word - consistent. Be it consistently good or bad. The frustrating thing is that it can sometimes deliver great value and sometimes brick horribly and we don't have a good idea for the mental model yet.

To constrain said possibility space, we tether to absolute memes (LLMs are fully stupid or LLMs are a superset of humans).

Idk where I'm going with this
by DaedalusII | 2026-02-06 15:33:28+00:00
Investor analyst looks at earnings growth and determines Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Customer Acquisition Cost Payback Period (CACPP). They determine that ABC Software Corporation has no marginal manufacturing cost because it makes software that it sells online, so if it invested 90% of its profit margin into marketing it could grow its ARR by 140% a year. Then they extrapolate that for 30 years and say ok the NPV of 30 years of 140% ARR on current CAC, etc etc...

If everyone in the industry benchmarks on more or less the same multiples, it becomes a good idea to buy any b2b crud saas trading at 10x earnings because if the big boys see it they'll probably bid it up to 30x

the other classic move is to take a business which really isn't even a new technology, like revolut, and call it a tech business. now suddenly a bank can trade on a 50x earnings multiple instead of 15x like say a bank. many such cases~
by ridaabh | 2026-02-06 15:33:41+00:00
Location: Dallas, TX

Remote: Yes or Hybrid or In Person

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Python, Java, C++, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, SQL, Git/GitHub, Figma

Résumé: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fuuVTvNGFrH65WK8XpX5JvRx...

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ridaabhatti/

Website: https://github.com/ridaabhatti

Email: bhattiridaa@gmail.com

I am a Junior at The University of Texas at Dallas studying Computer Science. I am looking for summer 2026 internships as SWE Intern, Product Management Intern or Data and Analytics Intern.
by james-barney | 2026-02-06 15:33:59+00:00
i gave Spotify's AI playlist feature a specific prompt with 4 constraints. when i added a 5th constraint that it couldn't use, it refused to use it (good!) but then it also revealed that it had made up how it used the other constraints to build the original playlist. (to be clear, i really like this spotify feature. i've made and listened to about 20 of these playlists already this week)

this led me to define this concept i call prompt fidelity -- a measurable fraction of your original intent grounded in data by your agent. it's basically a weighted sum based on the selectivity of the constraints in the prompt. there's a fundamental limit to prompt fidelity since humans can make infinitely specific requests but agents have finite data sources to work with.

the good news is you can estimate it, measure it in real time, and show it to your users. the bad news is you can't really guarantee perfect fidelity, even with perfect LLMs. at some point a user will ask for something that exceeds the data your agent has access to, and at that point, your agent will have to fill in the blanks from its own knowledge.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-02-06 15:34:48+00:00
Basically, any test that involves binary trees (sorry - "btree" is a somewhat different thing).

Realistically, most programmers never see another binary tree, after they leave school.

It's a "youth-pass filter." People right out of college will ace them. Us oldsters are less likely to do as well (unless we cram for them). In forty years of programming, I never encountered a single one, in the wild, and a lot of our image processing algorithms involved a decent amount of data crawling, so they had some relation to binary trees (shows why they teach them), but the way they were handled was much different.
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-06 15:35:27+00:00
Yeah, the social engineering + structural combination is brutal to defend against. You can strip the technical hiding but the visible prompt injection still works on the model. Would be interesting to see how much of the ~70% success rate drops with just basic sanitization (strip comments, normalize whitespace, remove zero-width) vs more aggressive stripping.

If you build out a v2 with middleware testing, a leaderboard by framework would be killer. "How manipulation-proof is [Langchain/AutoGPT/etc] out of the box vs with basic defenses" would get a lot of attention.
by Analemma_ | 2026-02-06 15:35:46+00:00
Fitness+ is okay-ish but it’s not getting any attention and I don’t think it deserves its $10/month price. Non-Apple fitness subscriptions at the same price are far better.

Just for starters, what if you have two people in the house who want to do a Fitness+ workout together? Too bad: even if they both pay for it, one gets the nice tracking and HUD and the other gets squat. This is an obvious and trivial feature, and it’s nowhere to be found. I could maybe see it getting cut for the launch checklist if people were behind schedule, but Fitness+ plus is more than five years old now, there is no excuse.

It’s total abandonware from a company trying to do the absolute minimum to get your recurring subscription.
by ozgrakkurt | 2026-02-06 15:35:55+00:00
I am assuming the author doesn’t know much about how this flow actually goes since he didn’t get into that at all.

It is annoying to see a complex field as law being judge by stock prices of some SaaS products or w/e they are basing this on.

Could have at least gave it some effort and interviewed 2-3 people that use these kind of products but that would be too much work surely.

It is not surprising that people that slop like LLMs are so into LLMs
by hnarn | 2026-02-06 15:36:06+00:00
debian netinst is when you want a small boot environment, it can then be as small or large as you want it to, but that is also true for booting debian live with gnome, you could install with ”debootstrap”.

a more analogous debian tool would be debian live-build: https://manpages.debian.org/testing/live-build/live-build.7....
by kyralis | 2026-02-06 15:36:13+00:00
It's definitely that publishers don't want it.

This is actually the trajectory of both Apple News and iAd before it, which is what started out providing the ad service for Apple News. Apple would like to do a high quality solution, and then keeps relaxing their standards when there's not enough buy-in from the content providers. They were forced to allow the non-curated news formats to have sufficient content.
by xXSLAYERXx | 2026-02-06 15:36:13+00:00
I've been using codex for one week and I have been the most productive I have ever been. Small prs, tight rules, I get almost exactly what I want. Things tend to go sideways when scope creeps into my request. But I just close the PR instead of fighting with the agent. In one week: 28 prs, 26 merged. Absolutely unreal.
by horsawlarway | 2026-02-06 15:36:28+00:00
To the framing issue - I can frame an alternate lens through which we balance enrichment against engagement.

Media can enrich people - expose them to new ideas, new stories, different views and opinions. This expands worldview and generally trends in the same direction as education.

Media can also be engaging - Use tools that make it compelling to continue viewing, even when other things might be preferable, on the low end: cliffhangers and suspenseful stories. on the high end: repetitive gambling like tendencies.

I'd argue if we view tiktok through this lens - banning it seems to make sense. Honestly, most short form social media should be highly reviewed for being low value content that is intentionally made addictive.

---

It's not society's job to cater to the whims of fucking for-profit, abusive, media companies. It's society's job to enrich and improve the lives of their members. Get the fuck outta here with the lame duck argument that I need to give a shit about some company's unethical profit motives.

I also don't care if meth dealers go bankrupt - who knew!
by mcnamtm1 | 2026-02-06 15:36:31+00:00
"Agents started calling tools nobody remembered wiring up"

This is very familiar to me. I have seen this problem before. Because AI is often a network of microservices and follow service mesh patterns, there is an inherent ability for agent workloads to reach other agent workloads even if they weren't designed for that. To me, that is an 'authorization' problem and traditional solutions focus on policies to control authorization. But an authz policy approach is avoided because it involves a central server, additional latency, and is a single point of failure.

I found a different approach that restricts the authorization of agent interconnections to a pre-defined topology and has strict access controls per agent during runtime use dynamic access credentials unique to the agents in the topology. There is no central server.

And the dynamic access credentials guarantee the control and security of the data flows over the authorized AI topology during runtime.

I think about securing AI systems a lot. And I am amazed that people expect conventional API security to protect AI systems when these same solutions are failing tremendously for every other kind of API. In my opinion, AI is a leap-ahead technology that needs a leap-ahead security approach rather than the conventional API security methods.

Happy to discuss further
by robinhood | 2026-02-06 15:36:34+00:00
The article might be true for private companies, but as an OSS developer with one popular project and many smaller ones, having free access to a CI that, yes, sucks balls in terms of UX (ohhh the horrible click on a failed job and never be able to come back reliably), but which still work and is still pretty fast for the price I pay (ie 0$), is great. I think it's net positive for the OSS community.
by breuleux | 2026-02-06 15:36:35+00:00
> It's easier for a small number of people to coordinate, than a large number.

That's basically my main argument for replacing election-based democracy by lottery-based democracy. Electing the right representatives is a coordination problem in and of itself, a process which the wealthy are already quite adept at manipulating, so we might as well cut the middle man and pick a random representative sample of the population instead, who can then coordinate properly.
by mapt | 2026-02-06 15:37:09+00:00
The prospect of "Attack" and "Literal War" is limited by the fact that worst-case resistance involves a drone strike, and worst-case compliance involves retaining enough wealth for you and everyone you know to live on the beach sipping mojitos for the rest of your natural lives, while holding a nice trophy.

Just not, you know, a space program and a larger military than Krushchev's reporting to you personally.
by WarmWash | 2026-02-06 15:37:44+00:00
Unfortunately the "beast" is the Internet content itself.

Even HN itself is a massive ad. We are lured here with tech links so YC companies can fish in curated waters for workers. That is explicitly why this board is hosted.

The real fix is paying money for everything, but as evidenced by the many attempts at this, no one actually wants to pay. People overwhelmingly want to block ads and backdoor subscriptions.

For example, your average techy YouTuber just doing cool geeky stuff, 50% of viewers block ads and <1% become patreon/other paying subs. This comes under some kind of misplaced guise that if everyone blocks ads, geeky YouTuber will work for free.

The Internet needs a level headed reconciliation with "the beast".
by arghwhat | 2026-02-06 15:38:06+00:00
> you're also trusting that the client's HTTP stack is parsing HTTP content correctly

This is an improvement: HTTP/1.1 alone is a trivial protocol, whereas the alternative is trusting the client's much more complicated TLS stack and its HTTP stack.

For technical reasons, unencrypted HTTP is also always the simpler (and for bulk transfers more performant) HTTP/1.1 in practice as standard HTTP/2 dictates TLS with the special non-TLS variant ("h2c") not being as commonly supported.

> for that matter, you're also trusting that the server (and any man-in-the-middle) is generating valid HTTP responses

You don't, just like you don't trust a TLS server to generate valid TLS (and tunneled HTTP) messages.

> you're also trusting that the client's response parser doesn't have a vulnerability (and not, say, ignoring some "missing closing bracket" or something)

You don't. Authentication 101 (which also applies to how TLS works), authenticity is always validated before inspecting or interacting with content. Same rules that TLS needs to follow when it authenticates its own messages.

Furthermore, TLS does nothing to protect you against a server delivering malicious files (e.g., a rogue maintainer or mirror intentionally giving you borked files).

> you're also trusting that the client is parsing the correct signature (and not, say, some other signature that was tacked-on later)

You don't, as the signature must be authentic from a trusted author (the specific maintainer of the specific package for example). The server or attacker is unable to craft valid signatures, so something "tacked-on" just gets rejected as invalid - just like if you mess with a TLS message.

> It's trivially easy to disassemble software to find vulnerabilities like those, though. So it's a lot of trust given for an untrusted software stack.

The basis of your trust is invalid and misplaced: Not only is TLS not providing additional security here, TLS is the more complex, fragile and historically vulnerable beast.

The only non-privacy risk of using non-TLS mirrors is that a MITM could keep serving you an old version of all your mirrors (which is valid and signed by the maintainers), withholding an update without you knowing. But, such MITM can also just fail your connection to a TLS mirror and then you also can't update, so no: it's just privacy.
by tart-lemonade | 2026-02-06 15:38:43+00:00
> It works because everyone in the game has something to gain from it

It's reminiscent of triangulation fraud in that regard. The incentive is for everyone involved to keep their mouths shut because you buy something for below-market prices on sites like eBay, the "seller" places orders using stolen credit and debit cards with legitimate retailers, and the product ships directly to you. Everyone wins...as long as the account holder doesn't pay attention to their statements.
by antves | 2026-02-06 15:38:50+00:00
Thanks for bringing this point up!

We take security very seriously and one of the main advantages of using Smooth over running things on your personal device is that your agent gets a browser in a sandboxed machine with no credentials or permissions by default. This means that the agent will be able to see only what you allow it to see. We also have some degree of guard-railing which we will continue to mature over time. For example, you can control which URLs the agent is allowed to view and which are off limits.

Until we'll be able to run everything locally on device, there must be a level of trust in the organizations that control the technology stack, passing from the LLM all the way to the infrastructure providers. And this applies to every personal information you disclose at any touch point to any AI company.

I believe that this trust is something that we and every other company in the space will need to fundamentally continue to grow and mature with our community and our users.
by Llamamoe | 2026-02-06 15:39:06+00:00
> That could do more harm than good.

The downside to having labels on AI-written political comments, stellar reviews of bad products, speeches by a politician, or supposed photos of wonderful holiday destinations in ads targeted at old people are what, exactly?

Are you really arguing that putting a label on AI generated content could do more harm than just leaving it (approximately) indistinguishable from the real thing might somehow be worse?

I'm not arguing that we need to label anything that used gen AI in any capacity, but past the point of e.g. minor edits, yeah, it should be labeled.
by observationist | 2026-02-06 15:39:07+00:00
Sometime after 685 AD, they invented spaces between words. All text - in Latin to that point, mostly - was written in scriptio continua.

All sorts of ambiguity and hilarity would ensue; to be a good writer, you needed to ensure that words didn't bleed together and form incorrect meanings in unintended combinations. If you lost your place when reading, you'd have to know generally where you were in a scroll, and restart from a place you remembered.

Kinda crazy to think how difficult it would be to cross reference things and do collaborative research with no spaces or pages.
by dylan604 | 2026-02-06 15:39:12+00:00
I really love how kids today are so inundated with 3D CGI that when they see well done practical shots like this and my other go to favorite of the submarines in Hunt For Red October it is immediately assumed as CGI as well. Then again, adults are no less fooled either. The size of the sets is also surprising but makes sense when the size of a film cameras used defined the scales. The HBO intro is another example that makes the rounds.
by dinfinity | 2026-02-06 15:39:27+00:00
Exactly. It's not that the producers or distributors (of food, content, etc.) are not malicious/amoral/evil/greedy. It's that the real solution lies in fixing the vulnerabilities in the consumers.

You don't say to a heroin addict that they wouldn't have any problems if those pesky heroin dealers didn't make heroin so damn addictive. You realize that it's gonna take internal change (mental/cultural/social overrides to the biological weaknesses) in that person to reliably fix it (and ensure they don't shift to some other addiction).

I'm not saying "let the producers run free". Intervening there is fine as long as we keep front of mind and mouth that people need to take their responsibility and that we need to do everything to help them to do so.
by the_sleaze_ | 2026-02-06 15:40:03+00:00
See:

1. The reactions to banning drunk driving: "It's kind of getting communist when a fella can't put in a hard day's work, put in 11 to 12 hours a day, and then get in your truck and at least drink one or two beers."

2. Mandatory seatbelts: "This is Fascism"

You're going to balk at just about anything that comes down the line - I guarantee it.

[https://www.unilad.com/news/us-news/americans-react-drink-dr...] [https://www.history.com/articles/seat-belt-laws-resistance]
by oculussec | 2026-02-06 15:40:13+00:00
Great question, and your combination of AI and human validation is definitely something that could be strong.

As far as the 'give up' signal, the Agent has several triggers that could stop it from executing, as well as a max number of actions it can take before giving up. Examples of the triggers are page has not loaded after 30s, button clicks or inputs are not responding, etc. If the agent is given the task of 'complete the onboarding process', it will evaluate after each action whether or not it has sufficient information or needs to continue. Once it determines that it has completed the task, it summarizes the actions taken into the final report, including screenshots where applicable.

Are there additional triggers that you think would be helpful? Should the 'max steps' be user-customizable (i.e. maybe you allow it to take up to 50 actions before failing vs. 20 or something like that)

Thank you for your input! It's much appreciated!
by fromMars | 2026-02-06 15:40:18+00:00
There is a lot of hyperbolic vitriol in your post. Saying that Gates "has no qualms in killing children..." is quite a stretch.

Using words like "Big Pharma" to make working on vaccines look like something awful is also a poor rhetoric device.

It would be nice if you had a second source on the trials you referenced in India as it is not clear who the blame lies with.

Capital research isn't a serious source as they clearly have their own anti-vax agenda.
by rswail | 2026-02-06 15:40:29+00:00
Waterfall specifications have never worked as advertised.

The 1980s and 90s were full of DOD-497 multi-kilogram documents being analyzed atomically to determine the specification, and they rarely came in close any of the 3 main dimensions of success: time, quality, or cost.

On the other hand, neither has Agile with a capital A, with the ceremony of documents replaced with the ceremony of JIRA tickets and t-shirts.