MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by noosphr | 2026-02-06 04:17:56+00:00
LLMs work on text and nothing else. There isn't any magic there. Just a limited context window on which the model will keep predicting the next token until it decides that it's predicted enough and stop.

All the tooling is there to manage that context for you. It works, to a degree, then stops working. Your intuition is there to decide when it stops working. This intuition gets outdated with each new release of the frontier model and changes in the tooling.

The stateless API with a human deciding what to feed it is much more efficient in both cost and time as long as you're only running a single agent. I've yet to see anyone use multiple agents to generate code successfully (but I have used agent swarms for unstructured knowledge retrieval).

The Unix tools are there for you to progra-manually search and edit the code base copy/paste into the context that you will send. Outside of Emacs (and possibly vim) with the ability to have dozens of ephemeral buffers open to modify their output I don't imagine they will be very useful.

Or to quote the SICP lectures: The magic is that there is no magic.
by tomhow | 2026-02-06 04:18:48+00:00
> You are seemingly overriding the wishes of the community

That's false. The overwhelming sentiment of the community is that HN should be free of LLM-generated content or content that has obvious AI fingerprints. Sometimes people don't immediately realise that an article or comment has a heavy LLM influence, but once they realise it does, they expect us to act (this is especially true if they didn't realize it initially, as they feel deceived). This is clear from the comments and emails we get about this topic.

If you can publish a new version of the post that is human-authored, we'd happily re-up it.
by nl | 2026-02-06 04:19:01+00:00
When you setup a spreadsheet, you choose a column or cell to show the NPV. You use the npv formula on this cell and apply it to inputs from other columns or cells.

This process of deciding what data to put in what column and how to apply NPV to it is non-deterministic. You could choose to put it in column A, or column B or maybe even row 3 - it depends!

The LLM does that part non-deterministically.
by legitster | 2026-02-06 04:19:42+00:00
Even the previous justice departments struggled with PDFs. The way they handled it was scrubbing all possible metadata and uploading it as images.

For example, when the Mueller reports were released with redactions, they had no searchable text or meta data because they were worried about this exact kind of data leaks.

However, vast troves of unsearchable text is not a huge win for transparency.

PDFs are just a garbage format and even good administrations struggle.
by carefree-bob | 2026-02-06 04:22:30+00:00
From the title, I thought this was going to be another one of those speculative execution information leakage bugs that are basically impossible to fix, but something this simple and easily fixable -- it's discouraging. Hopefully this decision is reversed. Also "Thank you for hacking our product" seems a bit unprofessional for someone engaging in responsible disclosure for a major security issue with your product.
by sonofhans | 2026-02-06 04:23:22+00:00
FWIW it’s not that I don’t find the worlds logical, just that Bradbury doesn’t explain them. E.g., have you read Seveneves (Neal Stephenson)? At one point he spends about 30 pages describing in loving detail the tech behind a high-atmosphere human glider suit. Really cool stuff. I still don’t remember a damn thing about the person who wore it.

Were it Bradbury, or LeGuin, we’d have had two sentences about the tech behind the suit and pages about the people involved. We’d have learned more about the character and, maybe, our common humanity.
by iJohnDoe | 2026-02-06 04:23:46+00:00
They’re concentration camps. What else do you call a place built to hold tens of thousands of people? Why do you need 75,000 beds if you’re not planning to cram people in?

Then what happens after they’re locked in there? Are they processed one by one? Do the math. Even with absurdly optimistic assumptions of one hour per person, eight hours a day, every single day. You’re still talking about more than a year to get through 75,000 people. And that assumes perfect efficiency, no delays, no shortages, no illness.

While all that’s happening, people will get sick, injured, desperate. People will die. And after someone is “processed,” where do they go? Immediately put on a plane and sent back to their home country? Is that realistically happening at scale?

This setup isn’t about processing people. It’s about warehousing them. And when large numbers of people are caged indefinitely under those conditions, deaths get written off as “suicides.”
by Hizonner | 2026-02-06 04:23:55+00:00
Apparently it's also outside the scope of their bug fixing program, despite being trivially remotely exploitable to get privileged code execution.

Man in the middle attacks may be "out of scope" for AMD, but they're still "in scope" for actual attackers.

Ignoring them is indefensibly incompetent. A policy of ignoring them is a policy of being indefensibly incompetent.
by analog31 | 2026-02-06 04:24:18+00:00
This is the thing that really baffles me. My kids went through K-12 when Common Core was a thing, and there was a huge backlash about it, so I decided to look it up and to see how it was being used in our school district.

A few states published their Common Core guidelines. I looked at one state, and the curriculum goals looked no different than the things that I learned when I was a kid. It seemed completely ordinary. I remain baffled about why it was so controversial.
by danpalmer | 2026-02-06 04:24:51+00:00
No, there are companies that sell voice activated phone trees, but no one is getting results out of unstructured, arbitrary phone call answering with actions taken by an LLM.

I'm sure there are research demos in big companies, I'm sure some AI bro has done this with the Twilio API, but no one is seriously doing this.

All it takes is one "can you take this to the post office", the simplest, of requests, and you're in a dead end of at best refusal, but more likely role-play.
by nl | 2026-02-06 04:25:16+00:00
Did you actually read these or just Google for problems?

> "Floating-point arithmetic may give inaccurate results in Excel"

Well.. yes? That's what floating point numbers do.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40168077/floating-point-...

So what?

> "Classification of Spreadsheet Errors"

It's a taxonomy of the types of bugs spreadsheets have.

There are these for most other programming languages too.

etc, etc

Look, my first job was translating an Excel spreadsheet into an actual application and we found errors all the time.

Once Excel spreadsheets get too complicated they tend to fall apart. This is very well known by people who use it heavily.

It doesn't mean that it is useless.
Show HN: Built AI Music Generator Using Claude 4.5 and 4.6
by mr_windfrog | 2026-02-06 04:25:31+00:00
Hi everyone,

I'm a YouTuber in San Francisco, and I’ve always struggled to find copyright-safe music for my videos. I wanted something quick and flexible, so I decided to build my own tool.

In about a week, I put together Trymusic AI (https://trymusic.ai), a browser-based music generator. The main feature is the AI Song Generator, which can produce music from text descriptions or moods.

I also added a few extra tools for convenience: Lyrics Generator, BPM Detector, MP3 to MIDI, Jingle / 8-Bit Music Maker, Slowed Reverb Generator

I used Claude Opus 4.5 for stability and 4.6 for more complex prompts. 4.6 has a 1M-token context window, which lets it handle longer or layered instructions better. From what users have noted, it can recall almost all details from long texts, showing clear improvements over 4.5.

I had almost no web dev experience. I used Next.js for the front-end, Vercel for deployment, and claude code to help write and organize code. After seven days of testing, I had a working site where I could generate music directly in the browser.

It's still quite early, but I'd love feedback. I'll be around to answer questions.

[1] https://trymusic.ai/docs
by pinnochio | 2026-02-06 04:25:53+00:00
I'm not sure what you mean by 'metaphysical' here, but I get the impression that you're dismissively trivializing real psychological problems by using that word.

An improvement in material conditions does not straightforwardly make up for these problems. What if they cause the viewer to commit suicide, or be so distraught they can no longer continue to work? People who do this work tend not to be able to do it for very long.

You also seem to be evaluating this by taking the current order of things for granted, as if it were not possible for this kind of thing to not be necessary in the first place. Quite a stunted imagination.
by chrysoprace | 2026-02-06 04:26:30+00:00
There's a point at which these things become Good Enough though, and don't bottleneck your capacity to get things done.

To your point, React, while it has new updates, hasn't changed the fundamentals since 16.8.0 (introduction of hooks) and that was 7 years ago. Yes there are new hooks, but they typically build on older concepts. AWS hasn't deprecated any of our existing services at work (besides maybe a MySQL version becoming EOL) in the last 4 years that I've worked at my current company.

While I prefer pnpm (to not take up my MacBook's inadequate SSD space), you can still use npm and get things done.

I don't need to keep obsessing over whether Codex or Claude have a 1 point lead in a gamed benchmark test so long as I'm still able to ship features without a lot of churn.
by sorbus-25 | 2026-02-06 04:27:02+00:00
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HONORING ELISA PORT, MD, FACS
AND
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SPECIAL MUSICAL PERFORMANCES
CAROLINE JONES, K'NAAN,
HALEY REINHART, THALIA, EMILY WARREN
MANDARIN ORIENTAL
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LOBBY LOUNGE
8:00PM DINNER AND ENTERTAINMENT
MANDARIN BALLROOM
FESTIVE ATTIRE
Ask HN: How have you been tracked validated learning?
by localeyes | 2026-02-06 04:28:11+00:00
Hey HN

Lean Startup / customer development works great until you try to actually keep track of what we've validated. Our Assumptions get written down, interviews summarized, experiments run, learnings captured… then everything gets hard to track. Spreadsheets are a bit clunky, Notion seems overkill for this use case, and three months later it's hard to track why we pivoted or dumped an idea. We built ourselves a dead-simple single-page board just to stop losing that history: idea → segment → pain → hypothesis → riskiest assumption → validation method → execution → actual learning. Nothing fancy, no bloat. Before I assume that's a common pain, I'd rather hear from people who do this stuff more than I.

Could you tell me about the last time you ran real validation learning experiment (customer convos, tests, etc.). How did you actually record and organize what you learned? What was the hardest/annoying part about keeping it all together as things moved fast? What have you tried so far (spreadsheets, Notion, physical notes, rituals, apps, whatever) and where did it break down?

Stories welcome, no sales pitch coming, just trying to understand if this is worth polishing further. Thanks!
by winddude | 2026-02-06 04:28:20+00:00
here's another few to decode,

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01804...

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA007755...

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA004349...

and than this one judging by the name of the file (hanna something) and content of the email:

"Here is my girl, sweet sparkling Hanna=E2=80=A6!
I am sure she is on Skype "

maybe more sinister (so be careful, i have no ideas what the laws are if you uncover you know what trump and Epstein were into)...

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02715...

[Above is probably a legit modeling CV for HANNA BOUVENG, based on, https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA011204..., but still creepy, and doesn't seem like there's evidence of her being a victim]
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-06 04:30:07+00:00
Tennessee pro-tip:

Most trailers do not require license plates.

The fee for the first time you get caught without a plate on your registered vehicle is $10 (2nd is $20).

Trailer hitch balls do not "count" when considering whether a vehicle's plate is obstructed — I literally have one hung across my Camry, not technically obstructing the plate (but you can't see shit).

YMMV. Lasers might be a good offensive, but defense is more important.
by zamadatix | 2026-02-06 04:30:20+00:00
Should AI tools use memory safe tabs or spaces for indentation? :)

It is a shame it's become such a polarized topic. Things which actually work fine get immediately bashed by large crowds at the same time things that are really not there get voted to the moon by extremely eager folks. A few years from now I expect I'll be thinking "man, there was some really good stuff I missed out on because the discussions about it were so polarized at the time. I'm glad that has cleared up significantly!"
by Spooky23 | 2026-02-06 04:30:25+00:00
I think that it is grotesque to take some moral high ground while global companies are exploiting the most desperate workers that they can find. They don’t give a shit about poor people in India, they need people with marginal English language ability whom have little or no worker protections.

People will do what they have to do to survive. But this is hurting these people who long suffer long after the social media company’s contractor discards them.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-02-06 04:30:43+00:00
Eww. Like 19th c. children in dangerous factories, abusing poor people's mental health sifting through the Global North's cavalcade of depravity. There must exist more productive and honest uses of people's time, and some jobs shouldn't be done for any amount of money. Some jobs done risky ways shouldn't be done by human beings at all in dangerous manners (coal mining without safety equipment, loom maintenance while running, carrying sulfur chunks out of active volcanoes) because they lower us all. "But they're making money" is not a good enough excuse because that's a false choice as there infinitely other activities, and any number of safer activities or similar tasks done with meaningful precautions are needed, desirable, and could be done instead.
by ragall | 2026-02-06 04:30:44+00:00
It already is like that, but not because of the cloud. Those of us who begun with computers in the era of the command line were forced to learn the internals of operating systems, and many ended up turning this hobby into a job.

Youngsters nowadays start with very polished interfaces and smartphones, so even if the cloud wasn't there it would take them a decade to learn systems design on-the-job, which means it wouldn't happen anyway for most. The cloud nowadays mostly exists because of that dearth of system internals knowledge.

While there still are around people who are able to design from scratch and operate outside a cloud, these people tend to be quite expensive and many (most?) tend to work for the cloud companies themselves or SaaS businesses, which means there's a great mismatch between demand and supply of experienced system engineers, at least for the salaries that lower tier companies are willing to pay. And this is only going to get worse. Every year, many more experienced engineers are retiring than the noobs starting on the path of systems engineering.
by surajkumar5050 | 2026-02-06 04:30:55+00:00
Just to clarify one more point: the language model is also local.

It runs via Ollama on the same machine as the assistant. There’s no cloud inference, no API calls to OpenAI/Anthropic/etc., and no data sent out for processing. The model is only used to parse intent and time expressions, not to execute actions or access credentials.

If the machine has no internet connection, the assistant still works locally, the only thing you lose is the ability to message it remotely via Telegram.

Happy to clarify further, but this is intentionally designed to be local-first end to end.
by Hizonner | 2026-02-06 04:32:23+00:00
I am pretty sure nation states hire people smart enough to use whatever works.

What the hell is more effective than getting root with a trivial MITM?

Not only is it effective, it's stealthy, in that it doesn't out you. It's obviously possible to both find and exploit it without a huge investment, which means nobody knows you're a nation state when you use it. You don't have to risk burning any really arcane zero-days or any hard to replace back doors.

Nation states are absolutely going to use things like that. And so is everybody else.
by nextos | 2026-02-06 04:32:38+00:00
Progress with RL is very interesting, but it's still too inefficient. Current models do OK on simple boring linear code. But they output complete nonsense when presented with some compact but mildly complex code, e.g. a NumPyro model with some nesting and einsums.

For this reason, to be truly useful, model outputs need to be verifiable. Formal verification with languages like Dafny or theorem provers like Isabelle might offer some solutions. Otherwise, a gigantic software artifact such as a compiler is going to have a critical correctness bugs with far-fetched consequences if deployed in production.

Right now, I think treating a LLM like something different than a very useful information retrieval system with excellent semantic capabilities is not something I am comfortable with.
by simianwords | 2026-02-06 04:32:50+00:00
_you_ don’t know what it means to be under material poverty.

Look up farmer suicides in India an you can understand how material poverty leads to even more suicides statistically.

These people don’t even have food to sustain. One of the biggest problems is that poor people in India have low IQ because they literally can’t afford food with vitamins.

Low IQ leads to irrational decisions, low productivity and they get equal vote so they vote in idiots that slow progress.

These jobs are the best deal for overall progress of India. Sure they have to struggle in the middle but at least they have good food on the plate. Some safety net to make long term decisions and vote for better leaders.

You wouldn’t get it. You would just show concern. But Indians have to deal with the problems.
by bastawhiz | 2026-02-06 04:32:58+00:00
Lol no, did you even read the list? You could pay someone to just search "LinkedIn" and "talent" and "recruiting" on the chrome web store and download each extension. It's probably harder to automate this than it is to do it manually. This is something you could develop in an afternoon and pay a small team of people to do for pennies on the dollar. Even ten thousand extensions is nothing. Spread that over years and this is trivial.
by queenkjuul | 2026-02-06 04:33:46+00:00
If i were the kind of person to say "i told you so" (and i am), i would point out that people have been screaming since like 1994 that the term "terrorist" is a tool of the state to punish anyone they find inconvenient.

Unfortunately for me i was born in 1991 and so i wasn't actually screaming in 1994 or 1998 or 2001 or 2003 but god damnit EVERYONE just decided "ah, typical left wing cranks" and said fuck it, let's let the president do whatever he wants, it's fine?

Obama executed a US citizen without trial on allegations of terrorism. I was absolutely screaming then.
by tagraves | 2026-02-06 04:34:01+00:00
I hope the author will check out RWX -- they say they've checked out most CI systems, but I don't think they've tried us out yet. We have everything they praise Buildkite for, except for managing your own compute (and that's coming, soon!). But we also built our own container execution model with CI specifically in mind. We've seen one too many Buildkite pipelines that have a 10 minute Docker build up front (!) and then have to pull a huge docker container across 40 parallel steps, and the overhead is enormous.
by chasil | 2026-02-06 04:34:30+00:00
I read Jason Couchman's book for Oracle 8i certification, and passed the five exams.

They left much out, so many important things that I learned later, as I saw harmful things happening.

The very biggest thing is "nologging," the ability to commit certain transactions that are omitted from the recovery archived logs.

"You are destroying my standby database! Kyte is explicit that 'nologging' must never be used without the cooperation of the DBA! Why are you destroying the standby?"

It was SSIS, and they could never get it under control. ALTER SYSTEM FORCE LOGGING undid their ignorant presumption.
Show HN: Intentify – annotate –> preview –> code generation
by slad | 2026-02-06 04:35:00+00:00
I’m launching Intentify, currently in closed beta. It's free while in Beta! See explainer video - https://youtu.be/5ZGQ1Jyc2cc

Intentify is built for simple UX changes. Instead of creating bugs, assigning them, prioritizing them, and waiting in a queue, you can point at the UI, explain what you want in plain language, and move on. Intentify captures the intent, creates a detailed bug ticket automatically, and generates the code changes as a pull request for engineers to review and ship.

Before anything is approved, Intentify shows a preview of the proposed change, so you can see what it will look like and validate it before it goes to engineering.

Important note: your data is not used to train any AI models. It works with your existing workflow and keeps your code and context private.

If you’re a founder, product leader, or non-technical CEO who wants to move fast and make small changes, this is for you.

Request access at https://intentify.dev or DM me. Happy to also just take any feedback, suggestions
by CGamesPlay | 2026-02-06 04:35:22+00:00
This is just an ad hominem attack. Doesn't seem like the author is "in over their head"; they seem to have a pretty solid grasp of actual identifiable gaps between implementations and various specs, and the article was written with the same kind of "chastising" tone as you would see from any grey-bearded hacker who's unsatisfied with the way things are.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2026-02-06 04:35:45+00:00
Actions is many things. It’s an event dispatcher, an orchestrator, an execution engine and runtime, an artifact registry and caching system, a workflow modeler, a marketplace, and a secrets manager. And I didn’t even list all of the things Actions is. It’s better at some of those things and not others.

The systems I like to design that use GHA usually only use the good parts. GitHub is a fine events dispatcher, for instance, but a very bad workflow orchestrator. So delegate that to a system that is good at that instead
by regularization | 2026-02-06 04:37:55+00:00
> forced to pay dues to unions

If I'm forced to pay dues to a union, I'm forced to pay expropriated profits to my company. And I don't get a vote on that (or a vote on the existence of the management, board and rentiers). The company political activity is almost always to find a way to screw me over more. I can just leave? So can the people at these jobs.
by simianwords | 2026-02-06 04:38:56+00:00
What’s your alternative? The people in villages are struggling without jobs and they are poor. They don’t even have food to put on their plate.

They make irrational decisions - don’t send their kids to school, make them work in farms. They are mentally stunted because of low quality food. They vote for idiots which stall progress even more.

You show concern but what is the alternative? Ask the capitalists for even more money?
by vbezhenar | 2026-02-06 04:39:44+00:00
What's so hard about it? Compiler construction is well researched topic and taught in the universities. I made toy language compiler as a student. May be I'm underestimating this task, but I think that I can build some simple C compiler which will output trivial assembly. Given my salary of $2500, that would probably take me around a year, so that's pretty close LoL.