MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-02 15:17:13+00:00
"So, let me get this straight. If I've been lazy, postponed updates and I'm still on 8.5.8 (Oct 2023) - it turns out I'm actually...safer?"

This is true for a large number of software "security" issues

A software version earlier in date/time is not necessarily inferior (or superior) to a version later in date/time

As it is "updated" or rewritten,, software can become worse instead of better, or vice versa, for a vaariety of reasons

Checking software's release date, or enabling/allowing "automatic updates" is not a substitute for reading source code and evaluating software on the merits
by alkonaut | 2026-02-02 15:17:21+00:00
Anyone else get the feeling that Microsoft has been driven "top down" by various weird metrics like "We need to drive users adopt service X" (OneDrive, Copilot, whatever)?

And then every single decision for every single product, at least outside of dev tools, is tainted by this?

Like I understand you always want to have a vision and direction and that needs to be set out by management. But it feels like they just dug down every other vision like "We want users, especially power users, to like using our product"? How does an organization let that happen? Who says "we should make people sign into ms paint" without getting laughed out of the room? Microsoft has great engineers on all levels of the organization. What's going on?
by hellojesus | 2026-02-02 15:17:30+00:00
When did we try this? I'd argue we haven't tried it since the 16th Ammendment went into effect.

This isn't a problem that needs solving at scale. It's a problem that needs local/hyperlocal solutions with very strict strings attached. If we're not able to monitor the outcomes of each participant and ensure not a single drop of benefits aren't spent on no essentials (self improvement allowable), then we are wasting dollars on lazy.
by terryops | 2026-02-02 15:17:44+00:00
Good question. Security was definitely top of mind when setting this up.

For Stripe, I use a restricted API key with read-only access to subscriptions/invoices, plus limited write permissions (e.g., creating coupons). No refund capability—that stays manual.

For Gmail/outbound actions, everything goes through human-in-the-loop. The bot drafts responses and queues them for one-click approval. Nothing leaves the system without explicit confirmation.

OpenClaw logs every tool call with full context, so auditing is built-in. The general principle: read access is generous, write access is tight and gated.

It's less "keys to the kingdom" and more "keys to the lobby with a security desk."
by seanhunter | 2026-02-02 15:18:11+00:00
Probably that's what will happen.

1. The permanent collections of just about all museums in the UK are free so if they go to a museum they will be free to see (after an initial exhibition if they were to host that)

2. This is not uncommon for things like Roman ruins in the UK. For example, near the Tower of London, there is a glass window in a random pedestrian underpass where you can see part of the original Roman wall around London, or in Cirencester and St Albans there are big parks where you can see all the Roman ruins. Where relics are smaller or more valuable, something like a railway station isn't really set up to keep them secure and on display so they would sometimes show casts or photographs of items, and have the original in an actual dedicated exhibition in a museum. For example if you go to Orkney you can see some viking relics in situ (eg the "viking grafitti" runes on the stones in maes howe) and some (like the scar boat burial) you need to go to an actual museum to see.
by hibikir | 2026-02-02 15:18:34+00:00
A failure of governance if your goal is to have the best possible OS, and you have one person in charge who would rather not ship something than ship detrimental features, but that's not really how companies today work.

If instead we look at all of this as a company that doesn't really care about the overall product that much, and wants a chance of growth, then it all makes sense: Every team/owner decides that they want to ship AI in whatever bit of the OS they control, as it's a chance for relevancy with minimal downside. Then their boss realizes that they don't want to say no to anyone, and in fact might have the winning lottery ticket if more AI features are tried under them, and then you end up with the kind of disaster you see.

This isn't Microsoft specific at all: I bet many of us have seen this elsewhere, and even in different cycles. Everything is turned into a website whether it needed it or not, and then rewritten into a single page, because it was going to be revolutionary. Five different blockchain teams inventing use cases, including one spending a hundred million a year trying to make NFT videogames happen, and every project failed. This is the current governance standard in a megacorp.

People will only bother about the unstable mess when the risk is balanced, and they have as much to lose for ending up with an unstable mess as they have to win for risking instability for a half baked feature. Because I bet that, just like everywhere else, some people get promotions and large amounts of stock compensation for shipping a product before it proves to be good, so one can even be lavishly rewarded for failing.

So from where I stand, all of this is just Microsoft showing that they are just like everyone else. Given how fast the world moves, the governance you describe is rarer every year. So rare that even though I share your instincts, I am not even sure what "right" might be.
by hattmall | 2026-02-02 15:18:35+00:00
DEI is, by most people who complain about it's definition, prioritizing hiring / access based on targeted diversity metrics. It's not really that complex and there's not really anyway to reasonabley accomplish it that won't result in an over representation of poor performers among the "diversity group", which in turn just reinforces the stereotypes that made DEI a necessity in the first place.
by riazrizvi | 2026-02-02 15:19:30+00:00
I think the main divisions are 1) people who are using it in fields they have little knowledge of to get basic competence, 2) the same people using it for advanced competence who are kidding themselves, 3) experts who are battling it in their own fields to finally get better answers than they could without it.

The first group are like Improved-Generalists. The third are Improved-Specialists. The second are delusional hype jockeys that drive the dumb talking points that extrapolate up the whazoo what AI is going to do and whatnot.
by rvnx | 2026-02-02 15:20:11+00:00
This is not ok I totally agree with you, but still, I would rather just block the ads, and not buy their products or support them.

There is a side-effect in terms of privacy: you send a fake click request every single time, you also actually disclose to adnetworks which page you are visiting and incidentally your whole browsing history (not through referrers, but because click URLs have a unique click IDs to match).
by SR2Z | 2026-02-02 15:20:16+00:00
> No one was saved from freezing to death by cheaper textiles.

Citation needed for that one.

> Except for the fact that the Luddites' labour grievances could easily have been addressed by the factory owners (rise in pay, better conditions) while still offering cheaper fabrics through industrialization.

So how long would the employers be required to pay them, in your mind? A year? Ten? A lifetime?

It would be the end consumer of the textile that would have to pay for those former textile workers to do nothing.

People can find new jobs when the world changes. It's not pleasant, but it's frankly a lot better than trying to force their old employer to keep them on payroll in a job where they can't do work.
by kibwen | 2026-02-02 15:20:20+00:00
> Easier to reason about, sure, fine. Your earlier comment claims the actor model is a dead end in non-distributed systems.

If you have two ways of structuring something, and the worse way is so predominant that it obscures even the existence of the better way, that's a dead end in my book. In the pre-structured-programming days when people had to fight tooth and nail to get people to acknowledge the value of `if` and `while` over `goto`, we would have also called `goto` a dead end; it's plain to see that we would be in a worse place today if the structured programming advocates had not managed to convince everyone of its superiority.

> Results from my quick search on structured/unstructured concurrency were all references to Swift. Is this a Swift thing?

I have no idea whether Swift supports it, but no, it's not a Swift thing any more than `while` and `if` are a Python thing. I highly, highly encourage people to read the linked blog post, it will be the best use of your time today.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-02-02 15:20:23+00:00
All gas masks simply buy the wearer time, and not much time at that...

Automotive Painter shops use an actual filtered external fresh-air feed medical-grade pump, as it avoids whatever mystery compounds are in various paints and cleaners.

Don't cheap out on PPE, as 3M does make good quality filters. Working in a cheap meshed-off painters tent outside is also good if you have that option. =3
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-02-02 15:20:47+00:00
Thing is, at the time it felt like these experiences (e.g. demos) were rare and a treat; nowadays you can open up Steam or the App Store and get full versions of full games with hundreds if not thousands of hours of gameplay right there and then.

Back in the Windows era, you relied on friends that copied shareware (or sometimes full versions!) games onto diskettes, or that one guy with a CD burner. For a short amount of time these people made a lot of money on the side, selling software or music albums for €25 apiece.
by Braxton1980 | 2026-02-02 15:21:21+00:00
>Sometimes it isn't. Sometimes messing up the status quo

What exactly does this mean?

Do you mean making things worse will cause other to make it better?

How do you know that will happen? Are you claiming that Trump making things worse without plan is beneficial as a catalyst for better?

>~20% of people in the US have a net worth of zero or negative. Housing costs are unsustainably increasing faster than wages:

What's this compared to other countries?
by superkuh | 2026-02-02 15:21:28+00:00
As someone with big bulky eye glass lenses and frames I looked up the solution for the CM-6 derived masks, https://www.rigad.com/avec-spectacle-insert-for-cm-6-masks. Sounds like you'd have to get new lenses just for it and put 'em in, and the field of view is not great, but it is feasible.
by 2dogsanerd | 2026-02-02 15:21:28+00:00
Thanks! The Community Edition is intentionally a 'primitive' – single container, zero config
However, I disagree on the 'maintenance tax'. ClawRAG isn't a weekend project; it's the retrieval engine extracted directly from our Enterprise RAG Core V4 system. It keeps the same connection pooling and health checks, so it is built to be 'always-on' without babying
The full V4 system adds Governance (Solomon Consensus/Multi-lane validation), not basic stability. You don't need the Enterprise layer just to keep the lights on

Re: PAIO – if they implement an MCP Client, ClawRAG can serve them. But I'd argue: if you already run a host, adding a container gives you provable privacy vs. 'trust us' managed services. I prefer owning the keys AND the lock ;-)
by jcfrei | 2026-02-02 15:21:31+00:00
Not sure why you are getting downvoted - I'm wondering the same thing. Catching up is inherently more expensive than just maintaining a lead. And on top of that the EU pensioners will oppose any reallocation of resources outside of their retirement / pension schemes. The EU does have more fiscal headroom than the US, ie. lower debt per GDP and lower debt per capita - so through borrowing they could mobilize some more funds. But that's about it and I'm doubtful that's going to be enough.
by alex_smart | 2026-02-02 15:22:47+00:00
I know Jenkins is not fashionable these days, but the warnings-ng plugin is perfect for solving this in a tool-independent way. :chefskiss:

The way it works is - the underlying linter tool flags all the warnings, and the plugin helps you keep track of when any particular issue was introduced. You can add a quality gate to fail the build if any new issue was added in a merge request.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-02-02 15:22:53+00:00
For sure, and mainly because the stakes are so high - they invested billions into it. But despite AI being very popular - loads of people ask ChatGPT or Gemini before punching in two words into a search engine - it's hard to monetize, or the monetization does not cover costs let alone investments made.

AI tools are here to stay but they'll be scaled back a lot. Plus, there's still so much investments made into it that there's enough free plans or free alternatives (remember DeepSeek?), and you can't compete with free.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-02 15:23:10+00:00
Sure, there are plenty of researchers working on fanciful daydreams. They pursue those goals at behest of their employer. You attempted to make a distinction between the employer and the employee's goals, as though a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft was just playing around on a whim doing hobby projects for fun. If Microsoft is paying him $1m annually to work on this, plus giving him a team to pursue the goal of rewriting Windows, it is not inaccurate to state that Microsoft's goal is to completely rewrite Windows with LLMs, and they will earn negative publicity for making that fact public. The project will likely fail given how ridiculous it is, but it is still a goal they are funding.
by vscode-rest | 2026-02-02 15:23:26+00:00
Calculator.app does have history now FWIW, it goes back to 2025 on my device. And you can make the default vertical be a scientific calculator now too.

Also it does some level of symbolic evaluation: sin^-1(cos^-1(tan^-1(tan(cos(sin(9))))))== 9, which is a better result than many standalone calculators.

Also it has a library of built in unit conversations, including live updating currency conversions. You won’t see that on a TI-89!

And I just discovered it actually has a built in 2D/3D graphing ability. Now the question is it allows parametric graphing like the MacOS one…

All that said, obviously the TI-8X family hold a special place in my heart as TI-BASIC was my first language. I just don’t see a reason to use one any more day to day.
by xethos | 2026-02-02 15:23:35+00:00
Ballmer was kinda the best Microsoft CEO for Windows, IMO. He didn't get the Justice department's attention in either the states or Europe, and he started building alternate revenue streams (XBOX, Windows Phone) without destroying the core product. Sure, MetroUI had no place in Server2012, but that was less egregious than the AI-everything and multiple settings menus

Nadella is a marvelous Microsoft CEO for Linux though. Credit where it's due
by freedomben | 2026-02-02 15:24:21+00:00
As an aside, claude and codex (and probably gemini) are pretty good at doing that. I've now done it with several repos and they are pretty good at finding stuff. In one case codex found an obscure way to reach around the authentication in one of our services. This is a great use case for LLMs IMHO

They are (of course) not foolproof and very well may miss something, so people need to evaluate their own risk/reward tradeoff with these extensions, even after reviewing them with AI, but I think they are pretty useful.
by zzzeek | 2026-02-02 15:24:54+00:00
I used Sublime for years and VSCode is vastly better (the breaking straw was how they'd silo off critical bug fixes in new versions that were pay-only, upon finding vscode I felt silly for not switching sooner, it was so much easier to use and more powerful). Still use vim daily but not as a general IDE, memorizing decades of weird character commands and directives is not a great use of my time.

my favorite VSCode feature is the SSH remote working feature. VSCode gives me the full editing / console / Claude environment on my local workstation, where all files, shells, and yes Claude as well run on a company lab machine over the VPN. Props to the collaborative working feature where several people can all share the same VSCode editor session on their individual workstations.

Vim can do the above two things if you run as a terminal app with tmux. Sublime could do it if you shared the editor via X or Waypipe. But VSCode integrates it directly in the app and it's a much better experience.
by ksec | 2026-02-02 15:24:57+00:00
> Why would 6K be better if no one can tell the difference between 4K and 8K?

Because that is not entirely accurate. It is just in most cases. And now the improvement all went to HDR and Framerate. Which is much more useful, but we missed the opportunity for a Higher Res and forever stuck with 4K when economy of scale meant anything but 4K wont ever be able to compete.
by bmandale | 2026-02-02 15:25:00+00:00
click fraud consists of the person who runs a website themselves clicking, running bots to click, paying someone else to click, etc ads on their own website. it becomes fraud first because they have contractually agreed not to do that, and second because they are materially benefiting from it. an unaligned third party clicking (etc) on ads has neither of those conditions being true, and hence isn't fraud or otherwise illegal.
by ericpauley | 2026-02-02 15:25:11+00:00
Rclone is a fantastic tool, but my favorite part of it is actually the underyling FS library. I've started baking Rclone FS into internal Go tooling and now everything transparently supports reading/writing to either local or remote storage. Really great for being able to test data analysis code locally and then running as batch jobs elsewhere.
by silexia | 2026-02-02 15:25:13+00:00
I think this is satire, but I actually agree with the article. It is very popular to complain about Amazon, but we all benefit massively from Amazon's convenient fast delivery. Same thing with the businesses founded by most other billionaires.

Billionaires actually created real value for all of us in the real world, unlike politicians who simply steal our money then waste it on bribes for their supporters.
by groundzeros2015 | 2026-02-02 15:25:22+00:00
- it adds locking to almost every line of code using classes
- anytime you start holding complex references to classes you get cycles which will not be released
- it’s extremely hard to debug. You have to capture memgraphs at runtime and track dependencies
- it coexists with old systems like auto release pools so resources are still not released when all references go away

Try to implement a linked list in swift and you’ll get a sense of how absurd this is. And remember linked lists are a special case of graphs.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-02 15:25:53+00:00
Even in the 1980s you had C compilers for micros that had bigger numbers than the platform supported. However, if you've got a small number of registers (esp on the 6502) it's not appealing to generate straightforward register-based code and you're likely to use interpreter methods like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16

On machines like the Z-80, 6809, and the 8086 you had more real compilers.

The AVR-8 is a special case because it has a huge register file (32 registers!) so if you are using 32-bit numbers you have room for 8 big registers. gcc supports 24-bit integers and those save resources taking just 3 native registers.
by joneldominic | 2026-02-02 15:26:14+00:00
Hey HN! Built this on a Saturday to scratch my own itch.

I'm doing a backend codebase migration and kept losing track of which files I'd reviewed and ported. Tried spreadsheets (got stale), comments like // MIGRATED (clutters code), and deleting finished files (TypeScript screamed at me with 200+ errors. Did I keep doing it anyway? Yes.).

I just wanted to look at the file tree and see what's done.

So I built this. Right-click a file, mark it as Done/In Progress/Pending/etc., badge shows up in the Explorer. Comes with 6 built-in markers but you can define your own. Markers persist in .vscode/file-markers.json for team sharing or gitignore it for personal use.

Vibe coded the whole thing with Claude in one sitting.

Feedback and PRs welcome!
by b33j0r | 2026-02-02 15:26:29+00:00
The only thing I agree with the current US president about is that American Football should be called something else.

- Helmetball

- Gridiron

- Scrimmage

- Brain-B-Gone

- Turnover (if you are Bo Nix)

- Fumblederp

- Kicks and Giggles
by mklein994 | 2026-02-02 15:26:46+00:00
For me, it was how I learned Vim. The awkward keyboard pushed me towards learning more efficient keystrokes, so now I'm very comfortable with Vim.

I would learn it on the bus, and at the time I didn't have a data plan, so I could only access things I had already downloaded. The `:help` documentation is very thorough.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-02-02 15:27:13+00:00
Oh wow, if we're talking about code reviews that's a different topic. I've never, FWIW, encountered "artisans" in code reviews. More like "that's not how I would have coded itsans" and "let me show you some new tricksans".

Yeah, to hell with code reviews. The best years of my career were when I was given carte blanche control over an entire framework, etc. When code reviews came along coding at work sucked.

If anything, the code reviews killed the artisanship.
by rvnx | 2026-02-02 15:28:25+00:00
Doubtful.

If you intentionally loop-download large files or fake requests on websites that you don't like, in order to create big CDN charges for them, then what ?

Without reaching the threshold of Denial of Service, just sneakily growing it.

Nobody benefits, except for the weird idea of the pleasure of harming people, still illegal.
by JeremyNT | 2026-02-02 15:29:19+00:00
They jumped the gun really.

The way the code assistants like opencode / claude / etc are improving with good models, I could easily see some kind of Copilot-like utility driving the whole OS in a pretty useful way to automate all kinds of tasks, just... not today.

Just like Google shoving the shittiest version of gemini into search results, Microsoft is shoving mostly useless half-baked AI features into Windows. There must be some kind of insane culture of just wanting to ship before it's done and assuming users won't notice it's crap, rather than waiting for a truly good experience.
by gambiting | 2026-02-02 15:29:30+00:00
>>They're not the ones doing it, it is those who control them

No, it is quite literally them doing it, not the people running the operation. Same as if there is an organised gang in my area it's the people who are in my house that are doing the burglaring, not the people running the gang.

And yes, I appreciate very much that they might not have any choice in the matter which is why I said, I am genuinely sympathetic to their position and I hope we can solve this.
by felineflock | 2026-02-02 15:29:56+00:00
I did something similar decades ago: ran on debug with and without the dongle, then compared the execution path to identify where exactly it deviated.
Then replaced the "jump" with "nop" to prevent it from branching out when the dongle was absent.
This was with an early version of Visual C++ and I knew only a little 8086 Assembly.