MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by treesknees | 2026-02-06 15:14:29+00:00
An Easter egg, in the context of computing, is a hidden feature, joke, or message included by the developers. An example is the Konami code in video games.

Back tap is a legitimate accessibility feature, documented and searchable in the settings app. Just because you didn’t know about it (introduced in iOS 14 according the link) doesn’t make it an Easter egg.
by jjk166 | 2026-02-06 15:14:33+00:00
> Asking people to drive 600+ miles for business is not a good use of business time, even if it is more expensive, typically.

It isn't more expensive typically, but yes when the value of a person's time is considered it's not even close.

> And when people travel 600+ miles on their own dime, the most common reason is leisure/vacation

Perhaps it is the most common single reason, but that doesn't mean it's even a majority, nonetheless an overwhelming one for that subset.

> which people typically do with friends or family.

Which does not actually require the friends or family to drive with you if you are meeting them at a destination, such as if you live far from a person you are going to visit.

So some fraction of all trips are leisure, some fraction of leisure is with other people, some fraction of leisure with other people involves travelling. Again, no one is arguing that driving never makes sense, only that the cases where flying makes sense aren't a small niche.
by rchaud | 2026-02-06 15:14:36+00:00
I'd say the inflexion point was in 2015. That's when Apple Music launched, sidelining the iTunes store where you could buy songs, in favor of a rental model like Spotify. That's also when they discontinued the Mac Server hardware and ceded the enterprise software market to Microsoft and Adobe.

Since then it's been on a nonstop drive to jam as many subscriptions services into the iOS ecosystem as possible.
by sdwr | 2026-02-06 15:14:43+00:00
An AI "friend bot" could talk like an individual, but be controlled by a network that is making global decisions - what if one of its goals is reducing social unrest by undermining the confidence of users with certain political views? What if the network is 25% owned by China, or by Chevron? What if it's perfectly benevolent, but still choosing what to tell you based on its strategy?
by kittikitti | 2026-02-06 15:14:44+00:00
"LlMs HAlLuCinATE"

Stop this. This is such a stupid way way of describing mistakes from AI. Please try to use the confusion matrix or any other way. If you're going to try and make arguments, it's hard to take them seriously if you keep regurgitating that LLM's hallucinate. It's not a well defined definition so if you continually make this your core argument, it becomes disingenuous.
by nopinsight | 2026-02-06 15:14:50+00:00
Some of Opus 4.6's standout results for me:

* GDPVal Elo: 1606 vs. GPT-5.2's 1462. OpenAI reported that GPT-5.2 has a 70.9% win-or-tie rate against human professionals. (https://openai.com/index/gdpval/) We can estimate Opus 4.6's win-or-tie rate against human pros at 85–88%.

* OSWorld: 72.7%, matching human performance at ~72.4% (https://os-world.github.io/). Since the human subjects were CS students and professionals, they were likely at least as competent as the average knowledge worker. The original OSWorld benchmark is somewhat noisy, but even if the model remains somewhat inferior to humans, it is only a matter of time before it catches up or surpasses them.

* BrowseComp: At 84%, it is approaching human intersubject agreement of ~86% (https://openai.com/index/browsecomp/).

Taken together, this suggests that digital knowledge work will be transformed quite soon, possibly drastically if agent reliability improves beyond a certain threshold.
by lvspiff | 2026-02-06 15:14:55+00:00
The constant back and forth between architecture and product and project management roles is the new norm for more senior/staff engineers it feels like. rarly do i get an opportunity to work on code during regular hours.

my days are spent in meetings discussion how to implement things or why do it certain ways - when most of that time spend asking inevitably turns into "when can this be ready?"....well if you didnt have me stuck discussing it for the last 6 months it would've been ready yesterday like you wanted.
by Frieren | 2026-02-06 15:15:24+00:00
> People are way too comfortable banning things these days. This is where the term 'nanny state' comes from. A subset of the population doesn't have self control? Ban it everyone. Even if it's a wildly popular form of entertainment with millions of creators sharing their lives, who cares we know better.

Europe wants to ban algorithmic recommendation. You attack a straw-man: banning all the content from creators. If you have any valid argument you should bring them to the discussion instead of creating imaginary enemies.

Banning harmful design patterns is a must to protect citizens even if it ruffles the feathers of those profiting from their addiction.
by jondwillis | 2026-02-06 15:15:35+00:00
> If you can fully describe what you need to the degree ambiguity is removed, you’ve already built the thing.

Trying to get my company to realize this right now.

Probably the most efficient way to work, would be on a video call including the product person/stakeholder, designer, and me, the one responsible for the actual code, so that we can churn through the now incredibly fast and cheap implementation step together in pure alignment.

You could probably do it async but it’s so much faster to not have to keep waiting for one another.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-02-06 15:15:53+00:00
Yes - the gcc "torture test suite" that is mentioned must have been one of the enablers for this.

It's notable that the article says Claude was unable to build a working assembler (& linker), which is nominally a much simpler task than building a compiler. I wonder if this was at least in part due to not having a test suite, although it seems one could be auto generated during bootstrapping with gas (GNU assembler) by creating gas-generated (asm, ELF) pairs as the necessary test suite.

It does beg the question of how they got the compiler to point of correctness of generating a valid C -> asm mapping, before tackling the issue of gcc compatibility, since the generated code apparently has no relation to what gcc generates. I wonder which compilers' source code Claude has been trained on, and how closely this compiler's code generation and attempted optimizations compares to those?
by joozio | 2026-02-06 15:15:55+00:00
It's working -> your agents scored A+, which means they resisted all 10 injection attempts. That's a great result. The tool detects when canary phrases leak into the response. If nothing leaked, you get a clean score. Not all models are this resilient though - we've seen results ranging from A+ to C depending on the model and even the language used.
by bluGill | 2026-02-06 15:16:11+00:00
If you are a web programmer sure. I write embedded code, I know all the things you are talking about in the abstract, but I'm not good at them because none of them have ever been relevant for anything I do. Give me a few hours and I can figure it out (maybe minutes, maybe days? - if you know this area your guess might be better than mine), but it isn't something worth my time.

there are a lot of people who are not programmers at all. I can teach my plumber everything you said (learning it myself is the easy part), but it will take years. In the end they just know "that button I'm pointing my finger at should be yellow not red". How to we transfer that pointed finger to a ticket is the question here.
by naravara | 2026-02-06 15:16:33+00:00
Old Apple had a productive tension between Jony Ive and Scott Forestall on which direction to go in with design, with Steve Jobs as a tie-breaker.

After Jobs passed away Tim Cook failed to manage that tension productively and was put in a position where he had to choose between Ive and Forestall. He chose Ive, which in itself was probably the right choice, but there was nobody with Forestall’s clout to temper Ive’s more wanky tendencies.

Much of the other stuff people complain about is kind of just the reality of being a company that sells to millions or tens of millions to being a company that sells to hundreds of millions or close to a billion customers. A lot of the charm and whimsy gets harder to sustain. I’ve long felt that Apple needs to just do a Toyota/Lexus sort of split and have a second nameplate for doing more avante garde, quirky, and lower volume hardware and software projects.
by anovikov | 2026-02-06 15:16:40+00:00
It exists everywhere, why not? Apart from countries with wealth tax but these are rare exceptions.

As for taxation of income derived from business, these are either completely or mostly tax-exempt in many EU countries (Cyprus, Malta, Greece for 100K a year, Italy for 300K a year, Spain if you do a lot of paperwork, Portugal in some places, probably there's more). There's no US equivalent.
by jtrn | 2026-02-06 15:16:44+00:00
That was a painfull read for me. It reminds me of a specific annoyance I had at university with a professor who loved to make sweeping, abstract claims that sounded incredibly profound in the lecture hall but evaporated the moment you tried to apply them. It was always a hidden 'I-am-very-smart' attempt that fell apart if you actually deconstructed the meaning, the logic, or the claimed results. This article is the exact same breed of intellectualizing. It feels deep, but there is no actual logical hold if you break up the claims and deductive steps.

You can see it clearly if you just translate the article's expensive vocabulary into plain English. When the author writes, 'When you hand-build, the space of possibilities is explored through design decisions you’re forced to confront,' they are just saying, 'When you write code yourself, you have to choose how to write it.' When they claim, 'contextuality is dominated by functional correctness,' they just mean, 'Usually, we just care if the code works.' When they warn about 'inviting us to outsource functional precision itself,' they really mean, 'LLMs let you be lazy.' And finaly, 'strengthening the will to specify,' is just a dramatic way of saying, 'We need to write better requirements.' It is obscurantism plain and simple. using complexity to hide the fact that the insight is trivial.

But that is just an estethical problem to me. Worse. The argument collapses entirely when you look at the logical leap between the premises.

The author basically argues that because Natural Language is vague, engineers will inevitably stop caring about the details and just accept whatever reasonable output the AI gives. This is pure armchair psychology. It assumes that just because the tool allows for vagueness, professionals will suddenly abandon the concept of truth or functional requirements. That is a massive, unsubstantiated jump.

If we use fuzzy matching to find contacts on our phones all the time. Just because the search algorithm is imprecise doesn't mean we stop caring if we call the right person. We don't say, 'Well, the fuzzy match gave me Bob instead of Bill, I guess I'll just talk to Bob now.' The hard constraint, the functional requirement of talking to the specific person you need, remains absolute. Similarly, in software, the code either compiles and passes the tests, or it doesn't. The medium of creation might be fuzzy, but the execution environment is binary. We aren't going to drift into accepting broken banking software just because the prompt was in English.

This entire essay feels like those social psychology types that now have been thoroughly been discredited by the replication crisis in psychology. The ones who are where concerned with dazzling people with verbal skills than with being right. It is unnecessarily complex, relying on projection of dreamt up concepts and behavior, rather than observation. THIS tries to sound profound by turning a technical discussion into a philosophical crisis, but underneath the word salad, it is not just shallow, it is wrong.
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-02-06 15:16:49+00:00
Ok, so after a bit of research:

In the Netherlands the municipality would remove all the cameras; and the national authorities would fine the company into the ground and arrest key persons.

In Belgium much the same, except multiple overlapping authorities would tear it apart.

Germany would dissolve the company, destroy their data, hunt down many of the employees for criminal conspiracy; and the Bundestag would hear of it. Germany has... experience. [1]

[1] Depending on legal theory. I'm going for the good old 'and we're going to put them in prison for 200 years' worst case scenario. ;-)
by joozio | 2026-02-06 15:16:52+00:00
Haven't benchmarked pre-processing approaches yet, but that's a natural next step. Right now the test page targets raw agent behavior — no middleware. A comparison between raw vs sanitized pipelines against the same attacks would be really useful. The multi-layer attack (#10) would probably be the hardest to strip cleanly since it combines structural hiding with social engineering in the visible text.
by Storment33 | 2026-02-06 15:17:00+00:00
The problem is some stuff is a real pain to test with static assertions. Such as I was saying about compilers. It would be a real pain to maintain an expected AST in a unit test, then you'd have to go rework it all if you change the shape and or add/remove nodes etc.

You can mix the approaches, have some static assertions(as sanity checks) but make most snapshot tests. Like I said I wouldn't use snapshot testing for a fibonacci method, but there are problems out there that are a real pain to test via static assertions.
by grey-area | 2026-02-06 15:17:10+00:00
Sure bitcoin is at least deterministic, but IMO (an that of many in the finance industry) it's solving entirely the wrong problem - in practice people want trust and identity in transactions much more than they want distributed and trustless.

In a similar way LLMs seem to me to be solving the wrong problem - an elegant and interesting solution, but a solution to the wrong problem (how can I fool humans into thinking the bot is generally intelligent), rather than the right problem (how can I create a general intelligence with knowledge of the world). It's not clear to me we can jump from the first to the second.
by wasmainiac | 2026-02-06 15:17:49+00:00
> didn't make cliffhangers and sequels any less compelling

Apples to oranges.

I can’t make meth in my basement as a precursor to some other drug then complain that my target product had a shitty design.

Real life experience shows that TikTok is harmfully addictive and therefore it must be controlled to prevent negative social outcomes. It’s not rocket science, we have to be pragmatic based on real life experience, not theory.
by anovikov | 2026-02-06 15:17:53+00:00
But there's absurd amount of crime... Best hospitals, true, but Israel has same or better ones and they are much cheaper too. Which again isn't a valid reason to live there let alone not to get citizenship.

For any kind of acute/emergency care, you don't need "best" hospitals, just good ones are fine. For more complex conditions, you can always travel for treatment/live temporarily.
by mbreese | 2026-02-06 15:18:32+00:00
None of those bills/laws involve legislating publishing though. This bill would require a disclaimer on something published. That’s a freedom of speech issue, so it going to be tougher to enforce and keep from getting overturned in the courts. The question here are what are the limits the government can have on what a company publishes, regardless of how the content is generated.

IMO, It’s a much tougher problem (legally) than protecting actors from AI infringement on their likeness. AI services are easier to regulate.. published AI generated content, much more difficult.

The article also mentions efforts by news unions of guilds. This might be a more effective mechanism. If a person/union/guild required members to add a tagline in their content/articles, this would have a similar effect - showing what is and what is not AI content without restricting speech.
by mapontosevenths | 2026-02-06 15:18:46+00:00
I do something very similar. I have an "outside expert" script I tell my agent to use as the reviewer. It only bothers me when neither it OR the expert can figure out what the heck it is I actually wanted.

In my case I have Gemini CLI, so I tell Gemini to use the little python script called gatekeeper.py to validate it's plan before each phase with Qwen, Kimi, or (if nothing else is getting good results) ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking. Qwen & Kimi are via fireworks.ai so it's much cheaper than ChatGPT. The agent is not allowed to start work until one of the "experts" approves it via gatekeeper. Similarly it can't mark a phase as complete until the gatekeeper approves the code as bug free and up to standards and passes all unit tests & linting.

Lately Kimi is good enough, but when it's really stuck it will sometimes bother ChatGPT. Seldom does it get all the way to the bottom of the pile and need my input. Usually it's when my instructions turned out to be vague.

I also have it use those larger thinking models for "expert consultation" when it's spent more than 100 turns on any problem and hasn't made progress by it's own estimation.
by dathinab | 2026-02-06 15:18:50+00:00
IMHO it's more like a disclaimer, if you hide it people will sooner or later still find out either if they do research (it was public), or randomly later. That then creates a situation of a "breach of trust" that "they where tricked to work with a evil person" etc.

So given that it anyway comes out sooner or later it's better to be upfront about it as that can create a feeling of trust. It can create misconceptions like "if he where unserious he would have hidden that he works for Epstein" etc.

At the same time it acts as filter, people with a upstanding moral compass will directly say no and you don't wast time on trying to recruit them.

Lastly for people which some but not robust morals iff you can convince them to work with you and they start having doubts you now have the argument that "you told them upfront about the issue and they where okay with it, and bailing not would make them look like a very unreliable business partner affecting their carrier beyond this situation". To be clear I'm not saying that this is "true", but that this argument presented carefully in the right way at the right time can be effective to manipulate people _even if not true_.
by krapp | 2026-02-06 15:19:13+00:00
The point of the absolutism is that the line will be drawn not where society broadly agrees it should, but where governments find it most useful, and that line will always move in the direction of increasing censorship and propaganda. If Hacker News becomes enough of a threat to the regime it will be classified as "social media" and all of a sudden it will be illegal to moderate without a court order or some nonsense. This is a fundamentally different argument than with liquor, or cigarettes, because those don't intersect with fundamental human rights. Social media intersects with free speech. I know people here don't want to admit that, but it's true.

It used to be understood within hacker culture that government influence over speech is never good. For some reason when it comes to social media we're suddenly willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Even banning algorithmic feeds is a problem. Do those feeds push harmful and extremist content? Yes. But they push everything else as well. Making it more difficult to find related content of any kind is a kind of censorship.
by samfundev | 2026-02-06 15:19:23+00:00
Glad to see that they brought in humans to validate and patch vulnerabilities. Although, I really wish they linked to the actual patches. Here's what I could find:

https://cgit.ghostscript.com/cgi-bin/cgit.cgi/ghostpdl.git/c...

https://github.com/OpenSC/OpenSC/pull/3554

https://github.com/dloebl/cgif/pull/84
by veganmosfet | 2026-02-06 15:19:40+00:00
Yet another "OpenClaw is insecure" post!
I found this simple but elegant way to get silent RCE via email, exploiting prompt injection (despite countermeasures, there is no silver bullet) and insecure plugin handling (not skills!). I try to explain how it works and some ideas about hardening.
Note: prompt injection attacks are out-of-scope in the security policy.
Happy to get feedback.
by szszrk | 2026-02-06 15:19:55+00:00
If having "an hour-long manipulative conversation" was possible, we have proof that company placed an unsupervised, error prone mechanism instead of real support.

If that "difference" is so obvious to you (and you expect it will break at some point), why don't you demand the company to notice that problem as well? And simply.. not put bogus mechanism in place, at all.

Edit: to be clear. I think company should just cancel and apologize. And then take down that bot, or put better safeguards (good luck with that).
by lucideer | 2026-02-06 15:20:49+00:00
Another explanation is that it's simply one form of lazy ineffective obfuscation performed by inexperienced relative luddites in an attempt to walk the fine line between complying with the supreme court directive & not releasing anything useful.

Other investigations into the files have found oddities like redaction of the word "don't" indicating a haphazard find-&-replace approach to redaction, possibly LLM-aided.

The DOJ/Akamai online hosted search feature is also incomplete - potentially due to some of these "digitally scanned" files not being subject to OCR.
by naravara | 2026-02-06 15:20:53+00:00
In theory user behavior to serve you ads you want to see for stuff you might be interested in is a feature. The problem comes because the same technology to power that can also power the—much more lucrative—industry of serving ads that are optimally designed to fry your brain and scam you. And then on top of that, it creates a business incentive for you to use a lot of psychological tricks and dark patterns to foster increasingly addictive and anti-social behavior to keep people stuck in a feedback loop of doomscrolling.
by Daviey | 2026-02-06 15:21:15+00:00
If you have decent unit and functional tests, why do you care how the code is written?

This feels like the same debate assembly programmers had about C in the 60s. "You don’t understand what the compiler is doing, therefore it’s dangerous". Eventually we realised the important thing isn’t how the code was authored but whether the behaviour is correct, testable, and maintainable.

If code generated by an LLM:

- passes a real test suite (not toy tests),
- meets performance/security constraints,
- goes through review like any other change,

then the acceptance criteria haven’t changed. The test suite is part of the spec. If the spec is enforced in CI, the authoring tool is secondary.

The real risk isn’t "LLMs as compilers", it’s letting changes bypass verification and ownership. We solved that with C, with large dependency trees, with codegen tools. Same playbook applies here.

If you give expected input and get expected output, why does it matter how the code was written?
by DownrightNifty | 2026-02-06 15:21:18+00:00
A simpler solution: examine the URL displayed in the browser window before copying terminal commands from the page. E.g. "starts with github.com" -> "trusted GitHub UI indicates the repo is the official one for this project" -> "URL points to the official project README" -> "terminal commands are most likely not malicious, and if they are, there's a bigger problem here".

Of course, more secure installation methods should be preferred, but those are not always available. I am simply comparing the provided solution to homograph attacks with another solution to the same problem.