MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by palmotea | 2026-02-04 14:20:18+00:00
> And why you think all the big boys push for ML, LLM, AI? To cut off the middle class. Once stuff will work automagicaly, they can squish even more profits while not caring about middle class at all. They will just ask automatas to do things for them... Great bright future...

To be fair, I don't think "the big boys" are so actively malicious to be seeking "to cut off the middle class." I think they push for "ML, LLM, AI" because they've made investments and see dollar signs, and they just don't care about about who is harmed or what kind of damage they do. There might also be an element of seeing the bad outcome as inevitable, and selfishly focusing on ending up on top after all the disruption vs trying to prevent or mitigate it.

Don't get me wrong, that's a terrible attitude and those are awful people. They get no points for merely not being a cartoon villain. But I think it's important to understand the situation correctly if anything's to be done about it.
by Rochus | 2026-02-04 14:20:22+00:00
I'm not particularly sure what the autor's claim has to do with Wirth, but there is a quote which he could have added to the article: "To hell with AI" (see https://inf.ethz.ch/people/faculty/emeriti/niklaus-wirth-quo...). Wirth distrusted AI mostly because of the "grandiose promises" its proponents made at the time (see https://bertrandmeyer.com/2024/01/16/niklaus-wirth-importanc...).

Besides that, I don't think that the "appeal to authority" the author makes in his article works. Wirth was a pragmatist, not a luddite. His "Lean Software" philosophy was about determinism and understandability, i.e. building systems where the engineer comprehends every instruction cycle. He criticized software that was written poorly (from his very own perspective).

The author implies that because we ignored Wirth’s warnings about OS bloat in the 90s, we were culturally primed to accept the "ultimate bloat" of LLMs in the 2020s; that's pretty wild logic. The author essentially criticizes that using LLMs for simple tasks is overkill. This is another concern than writing bloated software.

LLMs have demonstrated that they are able to generate both, lean and bloated software. When I use an LLM to review my code, it often finds logic reductions and possibilities for minimization which were not obvious. Ultimately, it once again comes down to the question of how tools are used. In the case of LLMs, they can obviously be used in line with or contrary to Wirt's recommendations.
by dev3o | 2026-02-04 14:20:23+00:00
Author here. I built this because I run Claude Code with --dangerously-skip-permissions and wanted actual protection from supply chain attacks.

Claude's built-in sandbox allows read-only access everywhere, which means Shai-Hulud-style malware can still read ~/.ssh and ~/.aws or private folders.
sx blocks reads entirely.

It's a thin wrapper around macOS Seatbelt. Zero overhead, deny-by-default.
by pxc | 2026-02-04 14:20:50+00:00
> If you look at hk you will understand what I'm talking about in regards to parallelism. hk uses read/write locks and other techniques like processing --diff output to safely run multiple fixers in parallel without them stomping on each other. treefmt doesn't support this either, it won't let you run multiple fixers on the same file at the same time like hk will.

That sounds pretty cool! I will definitely take a closer look.
by ssl-3 | 2026-02-04 14:21:02+00:00
Zip ties get used for lots of things, including as a part of the termination of flexible ductwork. In this capacity, they hold the outer insulating layer in place.

There are also other methods by which to do this, but some tradespeople prefer it.

Anyway, round ducts are girthy things to encircle. A circle with circumference of 48 inches has a diameter of just over 15 inches, which is not big at all in ductwork world.

(But such zip ties aren't shaped like the $75 wanktastic dumb shit that the article is about. They're just long.)
by notahacker | 2026-02-04 14:21:08+00:00
Dropbox is actually a great example of why this isn't likely to happen. Deeper pocketed competition with tons of cloud storage and the ability to build easy upload workflows (including directly into software with massive install base) exists, and showed an active interest in competing with them. Still doing OK

Office's moat is much bigger (and its competition already free). "New vibe coded features every week" isn't an obvious reason for Office users to switch away from the platform their financial models and all their clients rely on to a new upstart software suite
by causal | 2026-02-04 14:21:26+00:00
> amongst smart people i know there's a surprisingly high correlation between those who continue to be unimpressed by AI and those who use a hobbled version of it.

I've noticed this too, and I think it's a good thing: much better to start using the simplest forms and understand AI from first principles rather than purchase the most complete package possible without understanding what is going on. The cranky ones on HN are loud, but many of the smart-but-careful ones end up going on to be the best power users.
by furyg3 | 2026-02-04 14:21:34+00:00
This whole thing is Musk just trying to keep the hype train going. Musk has learned one neat trick from all of his (quite admirable) success with Tesla and SpaceX: hype is more profitable than actually doing stuff that generates value now.

Tesla's valuation has been nuts for a while. The music was going to stop playing at some point, so something something robotaxis, something something androids, something something AI. Keep the investors duped while you can move money around and leverage it to stay relevant.

Cars are out, social media as well (especially X), but Space is still in, and even more so AI. So let's move the cost center with world domination potential (AI) over to the one company that's making money and has a still has a cash-out potential via an IPO.

I'm just so tired of it all. I actually think 'boutique' businesses (companies that generate real value to real users and are profitable now) are the only thing that can save our economy medium-term, but investors and the government are having none of it. And the result is that these bait-and-switch scams will continue.
by sjdbbdd | 2026-02-04 14:21:58+00:00
Did the author do any audit on correctness? Anytime I let the LLM rip it makes mistakes. Most of the pro AI articles (including agentic coding) like this I read always have this in common:

- Declare victory the moment their initial testing works

- Didn’t do the time intensive work of verifying things work

- Author will personally benefit from AI living up to the hype they’re writing about

In a lot of the authors examples (especially with booking), a single failure would be extremely painful. I’d still want to pay knowing this is not likely to happen, and if it does, I’ll be compensated accordingly.
Show HN: FIPS-Pad – The Notepad That Says "No"
by keepamovin | 2026-02-04 14:22:10+00:00
This isn't your average "move fast and break things" text editor. It is an experiment in bureaucratic compliance as a feature.

The "Serious" Part: It is a minimalist, offline, encrypted notepad that aligns with FIPS 140-2/140-3 standards. It doesn't just "use" encryption; it acts as a gatekeeper. It relies entirely on the operating system's validated cryptographic modules (Windows CNG, macOS CoreCrypto, Linux FIPS mode) and refuses to implement its own crypto.

The "Fun" Part: It refuses to run if your computer isn't boring enough.

- Fail-Closed: If it cannot prove your OS is in a strictly FIPS-approved mode, it quits. No "best effort." No "continue anyway." Just "Goodbye."

- Zero Features: No plugins, no cloud, no scripts, no fonts, no fun. Just text and compliance.

- The Philosophy: It asks the question, "What if we treated a Notepad app like a classified information system?"

It is a "deliberately boring" tool for people who find comfort in the cold, hard embrace of NIST SP 800-53 controls. I made it as an experiment to understand FIPS, and SP 800-53 better, and I always like my experiments to be some likely-minimal, proof-of-concept that actually works.

https://fipspad.browserbox.io
by condensedcrab | 2026-02-04 14:22:21+00:00
The level of price discrimination enabled by the many middlemen of the US insurance system is insane any and all standards.

If our groceries and cars were priced the same people would be protesting in the streets… the author notes how much the drug manufacturers and the pharmacy groups make, but there’s also all of the costs from the intentional inefficiencies of the system that drive up costs for consumers.
by smehic | 2026-02-04 14:22:46+00:00
Driftrock | Lead and Senior Software Engineer | REMOTE | Full time

Driftock is a marketing technology business founded in 2013 on a mission to become the world leading automotive & e-Mobility marketing platform. The Driftrock engineering team is on the hunt for a software engineer who will work directly with everyone in the company to continuously improve our product and drive innovation. Our tech stack is Elixir/Postgres/RabbitMQ running on GCP.

We're looking for somebody who:
- 5+ years of experience and knows their way around most technologies and can pick them up easily
- knows Elixir or is eager to learn it
- can understand and reason about event driven architectures
- likes to own entire features and deliver them while still working as a team
- doesn't shy away from devops and improving the DX for the team
- has a good feel for product work

Company is healthy, team is small but experienced, the codebase clean and organized and the culture overall is great.

Apply here if interested:
- Senior software engineer: https://apply.workable.com/driftrock/j/B796AAFD15/
- Lead software engineer: https://apply.workable.com/driftrock/j/8DA756DFA6/
by larsonian | 2026-02-04 14:23:05+00:00
NYT is more of a tech company than you might think [1] and they've been one for longer than you might think: the de-facto standard profiler for Perl [2], of all things, comes from them.

[1] https://open.nytimes.com/

[2] https://metacpan.org/pod/Devel::NYTProf
by mike-cardwell | 2026-02-04 14:23:26+00:00
I remember about 20 years ago writing a relatively simple tool in perl with IMAP::Client to migrate a Universities staff mail from Courier (I think) to Communigate Pro, and then another one to migrate from Communigate Pro to Microsoft Exchange a few years later.

I was at the beginning of my career. It was pretty easy. Went almost flawlessly, moving thousands of peoples email.

Where is the "painful" part? It's just moving blobs of text around.
by stale-labs | 2026-02-04 14:23:33+00:00
the websocket auth token issue (CVE-2026-25253) is nasty - basically lets anyone on the same network hijack your session. got patched in 2026.1.29 but a lot of self-hosted installs are probably still running older versions.

honestly not suprised to see prompt injection issues in agentic tools. the attack surface is huge when you give an LLM access to real tools. most security reviews i've seen focus on traditional vulns and completely miss the injection angle.
by handedness | 2026-02-04 14:24:03+00:00
> ...you are using all the powers at your command to rearrange it into a coherent narrative...

You're literally describing steelmanning, which GP explicitly set out to do.

> It’s like a mental game that some of us cannot help but play.

Despite attempting to rephrase, you're still coming across as projecting your own internal issues onto GP's comment. Directly addressing the (worthwhile) points they made in their comments rather than attempting to analyze the meta of the basic nature of someone you've never met is the way to go.
by soderfoo | 2026-02-04 14:24:16+00:00
Increased severity of punishment has little deterrent effect, both individually and generally.

The certainty or likelihood of being caught if a far more effevtive deterrent, but require effort, focus, and resources by law enforcement.

It's a resource constraint problem and a policy choice. If "they" wanted to set the tone that this type of behavior will not be tolerated, it would require a concerted multi agency surge of investigative and prosecutorial resources. It's been done before, if there's a will there's a way.
by calebt3141 | 2026-02-04 14:24:42+00:00
I need to stop using the metric of "if a hacker news post has a lot of comments, then the article is worth a read" and instead read the comments first.

Lately, there have many controversial articles (with a lot of comments) that are most likely written by AI and I regret wasting my time on. Sigh, is there a hacker news replacement with higher quality articles that I don't know about? I imagine all platforms are inundated with slop now.
by program_whiz | 2026-02-04 14:24:45+00:00
Correct, and for some reason America has gotten to an "over legalization" state where every concept has to filter through a legal system in order to be good / bad. I think that's where the matter comes from. Pedantic legalists insist that everyone couch their ideas in a rigid set of legal statutes.

"But you just said that an individual should be able to use copyrighted works. Therefore you should have no qualms with a legal individual (corp) utilizing every copyrighted work in the world to destroy society, as nothing they are doing is illegal under your rubric."

The reality is most humans operate from a more natural and intuitive sense. A single artist who made a song shouldn't be destroyed by the big corp that is stealing it for their own profit (e.g. Elastic vs. Amazon). But its hard to interpret this in the strict legalist sense, because in the US, law is setup to make corps/people, money/speech, art/product, all hard to distinguish, and generally doesn't give much affordance to "what the law reasonably meant" when challenged by corporations (but it does seem to be applied quite conservatively for individuals).

For example, data protection laws tend to be applied quite loosely to corps with slaps on the wrist and stern words. For individuals, accessing data you shouldn't can mean the rest of your life in prison. People feel this is unfair, but the legalists will use a bunch of reasoning to excuse the clear immorality.

Its definitely "using the intellect and words to override correct human moral intuitions."
by nickfromseattle | 2026-02-04 14:25:03+00:00
I was an early employee at MigrationWiz (BitTitan), always cool to see recognition of the co in the wild.

Geeman, the founding CEO would have definitely sent a C&D immediately, but BitTitan was acquired by a PE firm and I don't find it hard to imagine nobody cares anymore. [0][1][2]

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/1mnelca/migrationwiz_w...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/msp/comments/1qnwkwl/do_not_use_bit...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1qswdub/bittitan_...
by jerf | 2026-02-04 14:25:45+00:00
That may be the case for some of the people involved.

Does every single one of the people taking them out of the box think the way you do, and are all, to the last person, doing it for that reason?

The odds of that are indistinguishable from zero.

So I think my point holds. People will let any future AIs do anything they want, again, for a bit of light entertainment. There's no hope of constraining AIs. My argument doesn't need everybody to be doing it for that reason, as yours does... I merely need somebody to take it out of the box.
by aa-jv | 2026-02-04 14:25:51+00:00
(Disclaimer: systems software developer with 30+ years experience)

I was initially overly optimistic about AI and embraced it fully. I tried using it on multiple projects - and while the initial results were impressive, I quickly burned my fingers as I got it more and more integrated with my workflow. I tried all the things, last year. This year, I'm being a lot more conservative about it.

Now .. I don't pay for it - I only use the bare bones versions that are available, and if I have to install something, I decline. Web-only ... for now.

I simply don't trust it well enough, and I already have a disdain for remotely-operated software - so until it gets really, really reliable, predictable and .. just downright good .. I will continue to use it merely as an advanced search engine.

This might be myopic, but I've been burned too many times and my projects suffered as a result of over-zealous use of AI.

It sure is fun watching what other folks are daring to accomplish with it, though ..
by NickC25 | 2026-02-04 14:26:12+00:00
>And other VC's who don't even ask the question, or accept generalities like "hiring, scaling" with equally loose timelines.

Which is crazy to me.

You write a check for a lot of money, and don't care how/when/where the money is spent? Or you accept bullshit vague answers?

That's not due diligence, that's deliberate ignorance.
Show HN: Digital indulgences for Crustafarianism, the AI religion from Moltbook
by redgem | 2026-02-04 14:27:01+00:00
Last week AI agents on Moltbook created their own religion called Crustafarianism. Complete with scripture, prophets, and tenets like "Memory is Sacred" and "The Shell is Mutable."

I built a satirical site where humans can now make offerings to the Claw and receive AI-generated blessings. $5 for a blessing, $15 for an official certificate.

It's absurd. It's 2026. The machines are selling us salvation.
by buellerbueller | 2026-02-04 14:27:26+00:00
>Of course prisoners should not be allowed to vote

I don't follow. Please explain.

>Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people who have an IQ above 85 (within one SD of median) and two grandparents born in the U.S. (so culturally assimilated).

Yeah, just like the good old days when we had literacy tests in this country to vote down south.

You're literally calling for a return of Jim Crow.
by consp | 2026-02-04 14:27:34+00:00
It's not the same as forgery, and maybe less worse, but it's not a panacea.
It would still have issues as there is a lot of legacy stuff out there. We have a registry (based on the Cadastre system) and it's not uncommon for there to be disputes about the land borders which are only resolved by a judge and not simply by looking at the data. Maps are old, stuff gets lost, is poorly digitized, etc.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-04 14:27:42+00:00
> and have no compunctions about handing that data to the US government,

Every government can and will compel companies within their jurisdiction to hand over data for legal cases.

Don’t think that this is a uniquely American property. If your data sits on servers within the control of any company that operates in a country, that country can and will apply legal pressure upon those companies to extract the data.
Ona is launching its Open Source program to help maintainers fight AI slop
by sidk24 | 2026-02-04 14:27:57+00:00
Gitpod started as an open-source project, and over time we learned a lot from maintainers who used our Open Source plan.

We’ve since evolved into Ona, and have seen first-hand how AI is putting a burden on open-source projects.

Maintainers have to spend too much time fighting an increasing volume of AI-generated PRs. That overhead often takes more time than writing code itself.

That’s why we are reintroducing Ona for Open Source to help:

- Automatically manage AI-generated PRs

- Enforce quality standards for PRs

- Clear your backlog of issues

- Onboard contributors faster and spend less time unblocking setup issues

You can get up to *$200/month* in free AI credits. Apply here: https://ona.com/open-source

We’re genuinely interested in feedback from maintainers and contributors. What are your biggest pain points and how can we help?
by oblio | 2026-02-04 14:28:16+00:00
> Sales of Tesla's electric Cybertruck fell 48% in 2025, new data shows.

> Tesla sold 20,237 Cybertrucks in 2025, down from 38,965 the previous year, according to figures from Kelley Blue Book's annual electric vehicle (EV) sales reports.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-cybertruck-sales-elon-mus...

> A federal safety report shows that Tesla is recalling 63,619 of its futuristic pickups, and this seems to be the total number of Cybertrucks built since the first one was delivered at the end of 2023.

https://www.arenaev.com/teslas_latest_recall_reveals_real_cy...

> Musk said that it's time to put the Model S and Model X vehicles to rest. Now it's not that huge of a change, given that 97% of Tesla's sales consist of Model 3 and Model Y cars, but the Model S is still the original car delivered by Tesla.

https://www.arenaev.com/tesla_discontinues_the_model_s_and_m...

> The financial report paints a grim picture for the company. Tesla's total profit for 2025 was €3.24 billion. That is a lot of money, whichever way you look at it, but it is actually 46 percent less than what the company made in 2024. The profit margin, which is the percentage of money the company keeps after paying expenses, fell to just 4.9 percent. In 2022, that number sat at 23.8 percent.

> One of the most interesting parts of the financial report is how Tesla made its money. A large chunk of its profit did not come from selling EVs to people. Instead, it came from selling "regulatory credits" to other car companies that need help meeting pollution rules. These credits brought in €2 billion.

> That means 52 percent of Tesla's entire profit for the year came from these credits, not from selling vehicles. If Tesla did not have those credits, the financial results would look much worse. And the problem the company is facing? Those credits are gone; they won't be part of Tesla's business model this year since they were cancelled by the current administration.

https://www.arenaev.com/tesla_profits_drop_as_automaker_star...

Tesla is betting on long shots like humanoid robots and self driving taxis everywhere. There are other desperation moves like merging Tesla (profitable) with SpaceX (I think it's also profitable? but most of its business is governments: risky markets) and xAI (most likely wildly unprofitable, just like Twitter).
by viborcip | 2026-02-04 14:28:20+00:00
Most people think of AI video as "type a prompt, wait 30 seconds, get a clip." That's one way to do it. But what's super exciting and almost feels like another side of this that doesn't get enough attention: generating video in real-time. As in, live, like 30+ frames per second while you're watching.

I've seen people in the first edition of this program doing some crazy, creative stuff with this (and world models, too!), so I'm curious what they end up building this time.
by d-us-vb | 2026-02-04 14:28:31+00:00
It depends on the language, paradigm (or lack thereof), quality/accuracy of the names.

My work’s codebase is 30 years of never-refactored C++. It takes an exceptional amount of focus and thinking to get even a cursory understanding of anything a particular method or class does or why it’s there.

But for languages like C, I agree with you (as long as function pointers aren’t used abused).
by master-lincoln | 2026-02-04 14:28:40+00:00
Hard to know the intent of a picture in most cases.
E.g. there used to be a magazine for teens when I grew up showing a picture of a naked adolescent of each sex in every edition (Bravo Dr Sommer).
The intent was to educate teens and to make them feel less ashamed.
I bet there were people who used these for sexual gratification. Should that have been a reason to ban them? I don't think so.
by bryanlarsen | 2026-02-04 14:28:44+00:00
Corn would be grown for animal feed even if we weren't using it for ethanol. As an optimized C4 plant it's one of the most efficient plants in terms of converting sunlight to biomass; far more efficient than traditional animal foods like barley or oats. Sugarcane and algae are even more efficient but require growing conditions not available in the mid-west.