MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scuff3d | 2026-02-22 04:29:55+00:00
That's not how it works. It's not on everyone else to prove claims false, it's on you (or the people who argue any of this had a measurable impact) to prove it actually works. I've seen a bunch of articles like this, and more comments. Nobody I've ever seen has produced any kind of measurable metrics of quality based on one approach vs another. It's all just vibes.

Without something quantifiable it's not much better then someone who always wears the same jersey when their favorite team plays, and swears they play better because of it.
by umairnadeem123 | 2026-02-22 04:29:59+00:00
The real insight buried in this thread is that Palantir's moat has nothing to do with ontology as a concept - it's that they solved the data integration problem for organizations that are deeply allergic to engineering. Every large org I've worked with has the same issue: dozens of data sources, no consistent schema, and teams that refuse to standardize. Palantir just charges a premium to do the dirty work of normalization and relationship mapping that most internal teams can't get funding or political buy-in for. You could replicate the tech with a graph DB and some ETL pipelines, but good luck getting a government agency to build and maintain that internally.
by umairnadeem123 | 2026-02-22 04:30:24+00:00
The unique email technique ColinWright describes is the gold standard for tracking data leaks and I wish more people did it. I use a catch-all domain for this exact purpose - every service gets service@mydomain format. The pattern is pretty clear: services that get acquired are the worst offenders. The new parent company inherits the data and applies their own, usually worse, privacy practices. LinkedIn being acquired by Microsoft and then the spam starting tracks perfectly with this. The legal framework treats acquisitions as a continuity of service even when the privacy practices change completely.
by aobdev | 2026-02-22 04:30:30+00:00
I don’t doubt it but that doesn’t negate the fact that Slack as a company exists and makes money by selling software. My question is this: AI makes it cheaper to build software, but ADP, SAP, and Salesforce also have access to AI and could make cheaper versions of their products. How does AI change the build vs buy trade off in a way that eliminates economies of scale? My opinion and that of the article is that it doesn’t.
by umairnadeem123 | 2026-02-22 04:30:54+00:00
The distinction nobody makes is between the AI infrastructure bubble and AI utility. The infrastructure spending is clearly overheated - the capex numbers are insane relative to actual revenue. But the underlying technology genuinely works for specific use cases. I use LLMs daily in production pipelines and they save me hours of work that would otherwise require hiring. The bubble popping would mean GPU prices crater, API costs drop further, and the actual useful applications become cheaper to run. That's not a catastrophe for builders - it's a gift. The people who get hurt are investors in pure-play AI companies with no real moat and NVIDIA's stock price.
by umairnadeem123 | 2026-02-22 04:31:16+00:00
The hackathon judging problem predates AI - it's always been biased toward demos that look impressive in a 3-minute pitch. What AI changed is the floor. Previously you needed at least one competent frontend person to make something presentable. Now anyone can generate a polished UI in an hour. Counterintuitively this should force hackathon organizers to judge on harder criteria: does it actually work with real data? Did you solve a genuinely hard integration problem? Is there a novel architecture decision? The best hackathon I attended had judges who asked to see the git log and architecture diagram, not just the demo.
by umairnadeem123 | 2026-02-22 04:31:35+00:00
Something that helped me was starting a side project that was entirely my own. At work you're always comparing yourself to people who have years more context in that specific codebase and domain. On a side project, you own the entire stack and every decision. It recalibrates your sense of competence because you can see the full picture of what you're capable of. Also, as someone who went through the immigrant + new parent combination: the first few months are survival mode and that's normal. Your sharpness comes back. Give yourself grace during the transition.
by Barrin92 | 2026-02-22 04:31:44+00:00
>why does the US create so much stuff that Europe doesn't?

because the "stuff" in question is social networks who live, as the name suggests, off network effects. To have a European LinkedIn would require everyone in Europe to switch at the same time. Which can be trivially arranged, we just would need the courage to ban LinkedIn and every other American social media company. We'd have a clone up and running in a month. You only need to look to China who did exactly this.
by latchkey | 2026-02-22 04:34:01+00:00
The way I look at it, from a quality perspective, this is the worst it will be. I certainly won't ever go back to coding without AI. If you extrapolate from there and the general need for tokens compounding with the demand, it is only upwards, whether you agree with it or not.

We can debate endlessly whether the horse and buggy is better than the car, or the cell phone will replace the film camera. But at the end of the day, history has shown that none of that matters. We're better off just agreeing to it and working to improve it.
by dlt713705 | 2026-02-22 04:36:01+00:00
That why I wrote "a VM or a separate host", "specific credentials" and "data provided to the agent must be considered compromised or leaked".

I should have added, "and every data returned by the agent must be considered harmful".

You should not trust anything done by an agent on the behalf of someone and certainly not giving RW access to all your data and credentials.
by umairnadeem123 | 2026-02-22 04:36:22+00:00
The real answer buried in Boris's comment is "Claude is great at it" - meaning LLMs produce better Electron/React code because that's what most of the training data looks like. This creates a self-reinforcing loop: teams use AI to write code, AI is best at web stack code, so teams choose web stacks, which produces more web stack training data. The practical implication is that "what stack should we use" increasingly has an implicit factor of "what stack does our AI tooling produce the most reliable output for" and right now that's overwhelmingly JS/TS/React.
by abetusk | 2026-02-22 04:36:39+00:00
People did not. How quickly everyone forgets.

There was constant sneering at dot-com businesses and venture capitalists. There was FuckedCompany.com [0]. The Pets.com superbowl ad was seen as a cautionary tale.

Startup.com [1] portrayed paying parking tickets online as Sisyphean. People thought the internet was for porn and weirdos. Krugman famously said "By 2005 ... it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." [2]

Clay Shirky: "The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works." [3]

A lot of the above was from mid to late 1990s but, in my opinion, living through it, it carried over into the 2000s with people being highly skeptical and quick to engage in shadenfruende whenever a company didn't live up to the hype.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup.com

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20030226083257/http://www.redher...

[3] https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...
by the_snooze | 2026-02-22 04:36:46+00:00
Anyone who's paid attention to the last 15+ years of tech and business knows that it's all about capture and extraction. All the feel-good language about "democratizing" tech or "making the world more open and connected" or "don't be evil" is just a smokescreen for people who want to bring about modern feudalism.

It's hard to see AI as anything but the latest accelerant for that.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-22 04:38:39+00:00
Holy moley rose tinted glasses.

There was plenty of internet and computer pessimism at the time as well, with the Internet expected to lead to more coal being used [0], being viewed as a conduit for scams [1], the risk of moral panics [2], and being blamed for causing the Columbine Massacre [3].

Ironically, this same author at the NYT (David Streitfeld) was a reporting negatively about the Dot-Com boom in the 1990s at the WashPo [4][5] as well as during the subsequent bust [6] and has been very public about his oride of being "low-tech" [7]. Nothing wrong with that, but the entire premise of the article that techno-optimism was the norm which turned into techno-pessimism is clearly written in bad faith, when a large portion of the intelligentsia was already techno-pessimistic in the 1990s and 2000s, just like they were in the 80s, 70s, and earlier.

[0] - https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=286...

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/01/technology/internet-s-cha...

[2] - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/322796.322800

[3] - https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/weekinreview/the-nation-a...

[4] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1999/11/06/g...

[5] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1999/05/18/o...

[6] - https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jul-21-mn-24886...

[7] - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/18/technology/personaltech/t...
by tennysont | 2026-02-22 04:39:19+00:00
In university, a team member on a final project swore he fixed an input injection issue. I playfully typed `rm -rf /` on his machine and challenged him to press `RET` if he was confident. He hit enter, but protested that "I just don't believe those characters should ever be typed into a computer on principle."

I'm a fan of PR #2 "be less evil"

> If we were using this in some kind of automation, the last thing I want is it to blow everything away by accident. Probably should fixup the sql injection one too...

- "/dev/null; rm -rf /\*; echo",
+ "/dev/null; touch /tmp/blns.fail ; echo",
by davidw | 2026-02-22 04:39:24+00:00
Who are the actors working to "improve it" though?

You have big tech oligarchs salivating at the idea of moar profits by firing a bunch of people.

You have elected officials who might mean well but won't be able to react quickly and don't understand the nuance of a lot of tech things.

You have ordinary people trying to figure out how to make use of this stuff without losing their own jobs. But they don't have a ton of influence.
by jopsen | 2026-02-22 04:39:24+00:00
> Obviously all of the gains are going to go to capital.

Right now sota models requires a lot of iron.

It's possible that this will always be the case. But its is not a certainty!

We've seen software improvements shave orders of magnitude of compute requirements before. This could totally happen here. Iron could easily become stranded assets.

But that said, models have already become commodities, well somewhat.
Is the value in running inference or applying it?

Today, we dare not use vibe coded libraries for mission critical things, HTML sanitization as an example.

But one day, who is to say the industry won't be disrupted by a vibe coded database with ~100% Oracle compatibility?
Made by a nerd in a garage.

Established code bases is a moat today. It might not be in 5 years.
Big tech won't be well positioned to take advantage, because trusting vibe coded crap is risky.

My point is mostly: the future is uncertain. Big established software companies might see their moat challenged by nerd in a garage running LLMs in the cloud.

What about the Adobe suite? AutoCAD? Office, etc.
(To be fair, it's possible that software never was the moat).
by vlmutolo | 2026-02-22 04:40:11+00:00
This article is a little confusing. I think this is a roundabout way to invent the blocked bloom filter with k=2 bits inserted per element.

It seems like the authors wanted to use a single hash for performance (?). Maybe they correctly determined that naive Bloom filters have poor cache locality and reinvented block bloom filters from there.

Overall, I think block bloom filters should be the default most people reach for. They completely solve the cache locality issues (single cache miss per element lookup), and they sacrifice only like 10–15% space increase to do it. I had a simple implementation running at something like 20ns per query with maybe k=9. It would be about 9x that for native Bloom filters.

There’s some discussion in the article about using a single hash to come up with various indexing locations, but it’s simpler to just think of block bloom filters as:

1. Hash-0 gets you the block index

2. Hash-1 through hash-k get you the bits inside the block

If your implementation slices up a single hash to divide it into multiple smaller hashes, that’s fine.
by cowlby | 2026-02-22 04:40:52+00:00
I picture like semi conductors; the 5nm process is so absurdly complex that operators can't just peek into the system easily. I imagine I'm just so used to hand crafting code that I can't imagine not being able to peek in.

So maybe it's that we won't be reviewing by hand anymore? I.e. it's LLMs all the way down. Trying to embrace that style of development lately as unnatural as it feels. We're obv not 100% there yet but Claude Opus is a significant step in that direction and they keep getting better and better.
by sdkfjhdsjk | 2026-02-22 04:40:59+00:00
So your thesis is that this hillbilly was likely to take his fully automatic paintball gun and shoot up a school with it?

Or that his possession and use of this gun might somehow serve as a sort of "gateway drug" to Harder Weapons that he would then use to the same end?

Neither one appears to have actually happened. In fact, I've never known a single person who has been involved in a school shooting, or heard of one happening here at all, ever. It just doesn't happen, regardless of whatever is supposedly happening on the glowing box in the corner of everyone's living room that's always portraying doom and danger everywhere.

Indeed, I don't recall a single one of my paintball playing friends (who all nonchalantly used illegal in Australia and super dangerous semi-automatic paintball guns against each other) who later went on to be involved in any kind of gun related incident.

I'm sure you've got some kind of excellent response prepared however, so we will now hear the details of how wrong I am and how Paintball Guns Are In Fact Really Dangerous Because Reasons And the Australian Government Nannies Are Right.
by aobdev | 2026-02-22 04:42:28+00:00
I believe that. Companies will build cheap tools today while competitors are spinning up to undercut ADP, Salesforce, and SAP. But what happens tomorrow? There are plenty of examples in IT today where the reasonable option is to outsource in 90% of cases: don’t roll your own auth, don’t host your own email server, don’t build your own data center. I don’t see how AI can change that, when the people who build specialized software also have access to AI.

Another great example is open source. I think PostgreSQL being free and usable by everyone is a more economic outcome than every Fortune 500 company building their own database engine. Payroll, ERP, and CRM fall into the same category of being commodity software in a lot of cases.
by mrchumbastic | 2026-02-22 04:42:33+00:00
This might be a personal preference, but I think you should put the demo (either a gif, video, or the button) front and center on your landing page. I was about to leave until I saw the demo option at the bottom, then almost left again until I noticed the demo persona that I could test without a login. Once I got into the demo I was hooked. Clean design and intuitive UI that shows me everything I'd be looking for in this type of app.

So many landing pages just explain things with text then jump straight to a signup or pricing page, but what I want to know at a glance is what does your app do. Again, might be a personal preference and I don't know how well this fits with the "call to action" rules people normally have for landing pages, but I typically ignore any site that can't show me what it does before it asks me to give information.
by zdragnar | 2026-02-22 04:43:23+00:00
If you read the comment a little more closely, it is very obvious that the "this" engineers turn their noses up at is the flexible model full of glue code, ala Salesforce, as opposed to "good architecture".

It's more or less in the same vein as pointing out that WordPress powered a massive chunk of the Internet despite violating almost every good coding practice you can name, and that getting things done is what makes money, not building ivory towers.

The fact that you turned that argument into some sort of anti American screed says much more about you than the parent.
by justaj | 2026-02-22 04:43:43+00:00
When I went to the main article link [0] (which for some reason was linked from a Twitter comment), it said "Page is not supported"

It's also not on archive.org Wayback Machine it seems.

So can anyone please copy and paste the article contents here? Thanks.

0: http://x.com/i/article/2024235288512569344
by TheSpiceIsLife | 2026-02-22 04:45:46+00:00
> But I don't doubt they'd be doing that in their mom's basement without

I’m 110% on board with that. It’s exactly one of the functions of family: communism is a perfectly function system of governance up to the level of the family.

> basic income

I’m 120% not on board with that. Men need to work, especially young men. WPPP - Work / Protect / Provide / Procreate. There is nothing worse for a society than idle young men with time and money in their hands.

I’m voting for Compulsory Service before I’m voting for Basic.

You work to earn your keep.
by notatoad | 2026-02-22 04:46:03+00:00
>Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, recently said artificial intelligence was spreading more slowly than he had expected.

his company has grown from ~10 million to ~900 million users in three years. if that's not quickly enough, the problem is unreasonable expectations.

people like AI! they just don't want it to be shoved into absolutely every aspect of their lives at all times.
by Barrin92 | 2026-02-22 04:47:01+00:00
>Notice how China managed to break free from US tech dominance, no matter how difficult it was

They did this because in the Chinese narrative Americans are a bunch of hegemonic brutes and self sufficiency was a matter of survival. Europeans don't use LinkedIn because they're victimized, they use American products because there was a belief that the United States is a civilized country whose companies and government can be relied on.

That Americans of all people now adopt the rhetoric of the Chinese about themselves and Europe, which has some terrifying and unflattering implications about their own self image should make people think about what they're saying. Europe didn't go for a different route because of victim-hood, but because the rule of law and the so-called Western values do still mean something.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-22 04:47:18+00:00
We need regulation requiring ISPs to care. In the US they will severely reduce your speeds (if not outright cancel your account) over repeated DMCA complaints so why can't they do the same for reported botnet activity?

I guess logistically they'd need a way to assess if the problem had been resolved though. It would be pretty challenging to validate reports and then follow up on them in an automated manner. There's not going to be much budget for this after all. Still you'd think it could be done for the largest (and thus well understood) botnets.
by Uncorrelated | 2026-02-22 04:47:36+00:00
You're thinking of the The History of England podcast, not The History of English. The History of English Podcast does cover English history, often going deeper than is strictly necessary for tracing the evolution of English, but its primary focus is language. It's also very cozy, something you could listen to while sipping tea by a warm fire, and its consistency, clarity, and depth has made it my favorite podcast.
by klodolph | 2026-02-22 04:48:01+00:00
> How does AI change the build vs buy trade off in a way that eliminates economies of scale?

I think a more likely scenario here is that something good and free escapes containment at some point and Slack’s core product just kind of deflates. Not something better than Slack, but something good enough that people don’t care about Slack any more.

I don’t see it as a question of whether you build it or buy it, but a question of the time horizon for selling messaging software as a business strategy. Most business strategies have a finite time horizon. How long can you continue to sell messaging software before there are too many competing solutions available and you stop making money from it?
by modeless | 2026-02-22 04:49:35+00:00
You don't need exclusive fullscreen on Windows to bypass the compositor. Fullscreen borderless windows also bypass the compositor. And in newer Windows versions the compositor can be bypassed even in regular windows using hardware overlays.

Windows's desktop compositor DWM is actually very advanced, and I don't believe any Linux desktop compositor is anywhere close. It's one of the things I miss when leaving Windows.
by FuckButtons | 2026-02-22 04:49:40+00:00
That’s because it’s superstition.

Unless someone can come up with some kind of rigorous statistics on what the effect of this kind of priming is it seems no better than claiming that sacrificing your first born will please the sun god into giving us a bountiful harvest next year.

Sure, maybe this supposed deity really is this insecure and needs a jolly good pep talk every time he wakes up. or maybe you’re just suffering from magical thinking that your incantations had any effect on the random variable word machine.

The thing is, you could actually prove it, it’s an optimization problem, you have a model, you can generate the statistics, but no one as far as I can tell has been terribly forthcoming with that , either because those that have tried have decided to try to keep their magic spells secret, or because it doesn’t really work.

If it did work, well, the oldest trick in computer science is writing compilers, i suppose we will just have to write an English to pedantry compiler.
by ahartmetz | 2026-02-22 04:51:44+00:00
Historically, but likely not anymore. You wouldn't be allowed to casually poison the ground in a Western factory anymore and we have the technology to keep the environment mostly clean. I don't even see it being very expensive compared to other fab costs. Have a sealed floor and proper waste / exhaust processing, don't spill in the first place. Things must be extremely well controlled anyway.
by svnt | 2026-02-22 04:52:28+00:00
The challenge to this is that so much of the difficulty in getting people to switch products is trust, and a couple of people running saas with claude code has no differentiation and no durability.

I think it will be a little different: black box the thing, testable inputs and outputs, and then go to town for a week or two until it is reasonable. Then open source it. Too big/complex for an agent? Break down the black box into reasonable ideas that could comprise it and try again. You can replace many legacy products and just open source the thing. If the customer can leave behind some predatory-priced garbage for a solution where they get the code I think they would be a lot more likely to pay for help managing/setting it up.
by zdragnar | 2026-02-22 04:52:49+00:00
> To be fair, it's possible that software never was the moat

This is the answer to all of your questions. Network effect and brand recognition sell Oracle, Adobe, office etc. Alternatives to all of them already exist, with either feature parity or close enough for most people.

The existing brands keep going because big companies and institutions don't pay for products vibe coded by some guy in a garage, they buy products that have paid support that they know will continue to exist for years.