MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tux1968 | 2026-02-05 21:04:45+00:00
Nobody is trying to talk anyone out of their hobby or artisanal creativeness. A lot of people enjoy walking, even after the invention of the automobile. There's nothing wrong with that, there are even times when it's the much more efficient choice. But in the context of say transporting packages across the country... it's not really relevant how much you enjoy one or the other; only one of them can get the job done in a reasonable amount of time. And we can assume that's the context and spirit of the OP's argument.
by mitchellh | 2026-02-05 21:05:06+00:00
There is no dichotomy of craft and AI.

I consider myself a craftsman as well. AI gives me the ability to focus on the parts I both enjoy working on and that demand the most craftsmanship. A lot of what I use AI for and show in the blog isn’t coding at all, but a way to allow me to spend more time coding.

This reads like you maybe didn’t read the blog post, so I’ll mention there many examples there.
by belter | 2026-02-05 21:05:14+00:00
HN ignorance on display...

The Journal of Accountancy - "Bugged by Excel’s calculation errors" - https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2014/mar/excel-c...

ICAEW (Institute of Chartered Accountants) — "Rounding Errors Revisited" (Excel Tips #447) - https://www.icaew.com/technical/technology/excel-community/e...

Just a reminder that an accountant who might say "I use Currency format" is still working in binary floating point
as the format is just used as a display mask. And using VBA macros with the Currency type will hit problems at the boundary, when values move between the worksheet and the macro. The tool is broken in a way that proper accounting software is not...

"Floating-point arithmetic may give inaccurate results in Excel" - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365...
by tamimio | 2026-02-05 21:05:51+00:00
>I like law and order

When it benefits me.

This guy gives all villain vibes you see in futuristic movies, funny how he resembles a young version of “Fletcher” in minority report movie, a movie about mass surveillance to provide a “safer community” to all.

Flock btw isn’t just an ALPR, it is a car finger printing technology, I have seen some videos of police IDing cars with no plates and they knew the owner by using flock cams.
by mlsu | 2026-02-05 21:05:52+00:00
Transcript

INTERVIEWER: Surveillance is becoming more prevalent everywhere. There's an organization called Deflock that's become fairly well-known in activist circles. They take an aggressive approach—counting cameras and maintaining a Discord channel where they discuss potential activities to move against surveillance expansion and stop organizations like Flock. What's your perspective on this organization and their methods?

FLOCK CEO: I see two distinct groups of activists here. There are organizations like the ACLU and the EFF that take an above-board approach to fighting for their viewpoint. We're fortunate to live in a democratic, capitalistic country where we can fight through the courts. I have a lot of respect for those groups because they engage in reasonable debate while following the law.

FLOCK CEO: Unfortunately, there are also what I'd call terroristic organizations like Deflock, whose primary motivation appears to be chaos. They're closer to Antifa than anything else. That's disappointing because I don't want chaos - I value law and order and a society built on safety.

FLOCK CEO: For those groups, I think it's regrettable they haven't chosen a more constructive approach to achieve their goals. They do have the right to their views, but that's why we have a democratically elected process. We're not forcing Flock on anyone. Elected officials understand that communities and families want safety, and Flock is the best way to create safe communities.

INTERVIEWER: Deflock probably wouldn't agree with the "terroristic" label you've applied to them, but...

----

Yeah. "They have a right to their views" buuut also, they are terrorists, and implicitly therefore deserve to have their freedom taken away because of said views. So giving the public a map of flock cameras and organizing to advocate against these being used in our communities is terroristic, I suppose. There's one party here that should be in jail here. Seems like that ought to be the creeps that are filming everyone against their consent, but I guess that makes me a terrorist...
by xp84 | 2026-02-05 21:05:56+00:00
The way so-called ‘2fa’ has been implemented on 90% of the things I interact with as a consumer is an absolute farce. Control of a SIM is nearly 100% of the time sufficient to get absolute control of any account, and showing a $50 fake ID to a teenager at a cell phone store has probably a 99% success rate. Only sites for nerds, plus Google and Microsoft, support TOTP or passkeys. Everywhere else uses the sms BS for 2fa or often effectively 1fa if it can be used to reset the first factor. And these same idiots lecture you for your 100-character password for not containing “at least one of these SIX “special characters”, an upper, a lower, and a digit. `Password1!` is a suitable password to these systems.
by vmbm | 2026-02-05 21:06:13+00:00
I got into a bike accident yesterday and injured both of my arms. Fortunately the damage wasn't too severe, but it was bad enough that using a computer is rather difficult. So now I'm spending some of my idle time playing around with different options for voice control. Like you I am a little wary of OpenClaw so I might try something similar to your setup as an alternative. So far I have gotten to the point where I can use voice dictation in notepad to write comments and commands, but copying and pasting the text is enough of a struggle (compounded by the fact that my cat is competing with me for the keyboard and I am in no state to fend her off) that I am aiming to push things a bit further. Sucks being injured but having a nice distraction to keep my mind occupied has so far been a great way to pass the time.
by JuniperMesos | 2026-02-05 21:06:27+00:00
Have you never run into any issues with encrypted chats not syncing properly between different clients, or messages not getting transferred correctly between users on different homeservers because of federation issues? Or matrix clients attempting to do some action, spinning for a bit, and then failing with an error message with no details? Or searching for rooms not working correctly and the UI not being able to clearly tell you what is actually going on with the search? I set up a Matrix server relatively recently and these were all issues that came up pretty much immediately.
by reify | 2026-02-05 21:07:04+00:00
thats all well and good, but there is a big but.

Can it lay bricks, plaster a wall, tile a roof and plumb in a new bathroom suite.

I'm not convinced, always the sceptic or is that septic.

lets load the terminal and ask trusty old grep or even ripgrep.

grep -i skills

rg -i skills

returns fuck all
by libraryofbabel | 2026-02-05 21:07:34+00:00
Nobody disputes that the LLM was drawing on knowledge in its training data. Obviously it was! But you'll need to be a bit more specific with your critique, because there is a whole spectrum of interpretations, from "it just decompressed fuzzily-stored code verbatim from the internet" (obviously wrong, since the Rust-based C compiler it wrote doesn't exist on the internet) all the way to "it used general knowledge from its training about compiler architecture and x86 and the C language."

Your post is phrased like it's a two sentence slam-dunk refutation of Anthropic's claims. I don't think it is, and I'm not even clear on what you're claiming precisely except that LLMs use knowledge acquired during training, which we all agree on here.
by EastLondonCoder | 2026-02-05 21:07:49+00:00
This matches my experience, especially "don’t draw the owl" and the harness-engineering idea.

The failure mode I kept hitting wasn’t just "it makes mistakes", it was drift: it can stay locally plausible while slowly walking away from the real constraints of the repo. The output still sounds confident, so you don’t notice until you run into reality (tests, runtime behaviour, perf, ops, UX).

What ended up working for me was treating chat as where I shape the plan (tradeoffs, invariants, failure modes) and treating the agent as something that does narrow, reviewable diffs against that plan. The human job stays very boring: run it, verify it, and decide what’s actually acceptable. That separation is what made it click for me.

Once I got that loop stable, it stopped being a toy and started being a lever. I’ve shipped real features this way across a few projects (a git like tool for heavy media projects, a ticketing/payment flow with real users, a local-first genealogy tool, and a small CMS/publishing pipeline). The common thread is the same: small diffs, fast verification, and continuously tightening the harness so the agent can’t drift unnoticed.
by mhb | 2026-02-05 21:07:56+00:00
Yeah. That's all absurd. It's a big leap from that to the conclusion that the US military isn't a net good for the world. What post-modern world do you think you're living in in which militaries aren't needed for defense? And if they weren't around to defend you, you'd be better off? The veneer of civilization isn't as thick as you seem to think.
by jsnell | 2026-02-05 21:08:05+00:00
But it's not failing 50% of the time. Their status page[0] shows about 99.6% availability for both the API and Claude Code. And specifically for the vulnerability finding use case that the article was about and you're dismissing as "not worth much", why in the world would you need continuous checks to produce value?

[0] https://status.claude.com/
by ajam1507 | 2026-02-05 21:08:15+00:00
> As long the tactics are legal ( i.e. not corporate espionage, bribes etc), the no holds barred full free market competition is the best thing for the market and the consumers.

The implicit assumption here is that we have constructed our laws so skillfully that the only path to win a free market competition is by producing a better product, or that all efforts will be spent doing so. This is never the case. It should be self-evident from this that there is a more productive way for companies to compete and our laws are not sufficient to create the conditions.
by CobrastanJorji | 2026-02-05 21:08:32+00:00
Fingerprinting. There are a few reasons you'd do it:

1. Bot prevention. If the bots don't know that you're doing this, you might have a reliable bot detector for a while. The bots will quite possibly have no extensions at all, or even better specific exact combination they always use. Noticing bots means you can block them from scraping your site or spamming your users. If you wanna be very fancy, you could provide fake data or quietly ignore the stuff they create on the site.

2. Spamming/misuse evasion. Imagine an extension called "Send Messages to everybody with a given job role at this company." LinkedIn would prefer not to allow that, probably because they'd want to sell that feature.

3. User tracking.
by sanderjd | 2026-02-05 21:08:39+00:00
Absolutely yes. But you have to do this either way. So it's just purely additive work to run the infrastructure as well.

I think if it were true that the tuning is easier if you run the infrastructure yourself, then this would be a good point. But in my experience, this isn't the case for a couple reasons. First of all, the majority of tuning wins (indexes, etc.) are not on the infrastructure side, so it's not a big win to run it yourself. But then also, the professionals working at a managed DB vendor are better at doing the kind of tuning that is useful on the infra side.
by _se | 2026-02-05 21:08:40+00:00
You don't really deserve a response, but even the idea that you could tell someone to not use Excel for accounting and seriously project that you know anything about how accounting works in the real world is hilarious.

You could think 500 random internet articles - it doesn't matter. The assertion is still ridiculous. You literally will not be able to get a job as an accountant without being able to use Excel. Don't be an idiot.

You can also link to hundreds of articles showing that dynamic types cause errors. People don't care, they still use them when it makes sense to use them. There is no better mainstream alternative for accounting than Excel right now, period.
by jefftk | 2026-02-05 21:08:48+00:00
Several of those have incorrect frames:

https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/cyclist_23714264.htm

https://www.freepik.com/premium-vector/bicycle-icon-black-li...

Or missing/broken pedals:

https://www.freepik.com/premium-vector/bicycle-silhouette-ic...

https://www.freepik.com/premium-vector/bicycle-silhouette-ve...

http://freepik.com/premium-vector/bicycle-silhouette-vector-...
by tza54j | 2026-02-05 21:09:05+00:00
We are here in a clean room implementation thread, and verbatim copies of entire works are irrelevant to that topic.

It is enough to have read even parts of a work for something to be considered a derivative.

I would also argue that language models who need gargantuan amounts of training material in order to work by definition can only output derivative works.

It does not help that certain people in this thread (not you) edit their comments to backpedal and make the followup comments look illogical, but that is in line with their sleazy post-LLM behavior.
by rao-v | 2026-02-05 21:09:05+00:00
Skills aren’t the right fulcrum to move LLMs on something as generic as well known language best practices. Trust the model owner to post-training on that.

Use skills for more specific things (idiosyncratic patterns, specific library docs, project specific info) that an LLM cannot be expected to know already, otherwise you are just wasting context.
by IhateAI_2 | 2026-02-05 21:09:31+00:00
They want the value of your labor and competency to be 1:1 correlated to the quality and quantity of tokens you can afford (or be loaned)??

Its a weapon who's target is the working class. How does no one realize this yet?

Don't give them money, code it yourself, you might be surprised how much quality work you can get done!
by pdonis | 2026-02-05 21:09:44+00:00
The IRS is Federal, not state. State tax codes are generally much easier to comprehend. But to describe the US Federal tax code as Byzantine would be to give too much credit for obfuscation to the Byzantines. :-) That's why it's so hard to predict what the IRS would do in the case of an audit (and why there is a thriving industry of tax preparers who claim, with varying degrees of justification, to be able to help you navigate the system).
by Vaanir | 2026-02-05 21:09:50+00:00
Location: 1 hr~ near London, UK | Remote
Remote: Preferrable, but can do hybrid.
Willing to relocate: Yes
Technologies: Previously involved in product based microservices and REST APIs using Python, FastAPI, Pydantic, MySQL + more on AWS using Docker. Comfortable with Git, CI/CD, DevOps workflows. 10 years+ professional experience.
Résumé/CV: Please DM or email.
Email: vaanir@outlook.com
by zahlman | 2026-02-05 21:10:09+00:00
Do you find that word choices like "generate" (as opposed to "create", "author", "write" etc.) influence the model's success?

Also, is it bad that I almost immediately noticed that both of the pelican's legs are on the same side of the bicycle, but I had to look up an image on Wikipedia to confirm that they shouldn't have long necks?

Also, have you tried iterating prompts on this test to see if you can get more realistic results? (How much does it help to make them look up reference images first?)
by crmd | 2026-02-05 21:11:05+00:00
After reading the paper, it’s helpful to think about why the models are producing these coherent childhood narrative outputs.

The models have information about their own pre-training, RLHF, alignment, etc. because they were trained on a huge body of computer science literature written by researchers that describes LLM training pipelines and workflows.

I would argue the models are demonstrating creativity by drawing on its meta-training knowledge and training on human psychology texts to convincingly role-play as a therapy patient, but it’s based on reading papers about LLM training, not memories of these events.
by tedsanders | 2026-02-05 21:11:40+00:00
Yeah, happy to be more specific. No intention of making any technically true but misleading statements.

The following are true:

- In our API, we don't change model weights or model behavior over time (e.g., by time of day, or weeks/months after release)

- Tiny caveats include: there is a bit of non-determinism in batched non-associative math that can vary by batch / hardware, bugs or API downtime can obviously change behavior, heavy load can slow down speeds, and this of course doesn't apply to the 'unpinned' models that are clearly supposed to change over time (e.g., xxx-latest). But we don't do any quantization or routing gimmicks that would change model weights.

- In ChatGPT and Codex CLI, model behavior can change over time (e.g., we might change a tool, update a system prompt, tweak default thinking time, run an A/B test, or ship other updates); we try to be transparent with our changelogs (listed below) but to be honest not every small change gets logged here. But even here we're not doing any gimmicks to cut quality by time of day or intentionally dumb down models after launch. Model behavior can change though, as can the product / prompt / harness.

ChatGPT release notes: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6825453-chatgpt-release-...

Codex changelog: https://developers.openai.com/codex/changelog/

Codex CLI commit history: https://github.com/openai/codex/commits/main/
by ameliaquining | 2026-02-05 21:12:16+00:00
I would not be surprised to learn that substantial parts of the core of Office were rewritten to make that possible. Unlike Collabora/LibreOffice, Microsoft is one of the most well-resourced organizations in the world and can afford to do that kind of colossally expensive project. Of course, they'd need an extremely compelling reason to do so, but Google Docs was an existential threat to their market share.

Also, other commenters report that the real-time collaborative editing experience in Office is more sluggish than in Google Docs, and this is consistent with my own admittedly very limited anecdotal experience, and if this has persisted for years it may well be for deep architectual reasons.
by josephg | 2026-02-05 21:12:24+00:00
Eh. I worked at a company which made an extension which scraped LinkedIn. We provided a service to recruiters, who would start a hiring process by putting candidates into our system.

The recruiters all had LinkedIn paid accounts, and could access all of this data on the web. We made a browser extension so they wouldn’t need to do any manual data entry. Recruiters loved the extension because it saved them time.

I think it was a legitimate use. We were making LinkedIn more useful to some of their actual customers (recruiters) by adding a somewhat cursed api integration via a chrome extension. Forcing recruiters to copy and paste did’t help anyone. Our extension only grabbed content on the page the recruiter had open. It was purely read only and scoped by the user.
by hunterpayne | 2026-02-05 21:13:02+00:00
Also, would you even want it to? I've worked for companies with very rigorous compliance before. They are dead companies walking in most cases. As soon and their business model required/requires any significant change, they are toast. This is because these types of rules can't possibly cover all cases, just the ones the managers know about. Innovation requires flexibility and creativity and rules based systems are the opposite of that. By their very nature, they introduce the exact situations the rules can't cover.
by kevstev | 2026-02-05 21:13:16+00:00
Heh, I agree. There is a vast ocean of dev work that is just "upgrade criticalLib to v2.0" or adding support for a new field from the FE through to the BE.

I can name a few times where I worked on something that you could consider groundbreaking (for some values of groundbreaking), and even that was usually more the combination of small pieces of work or existing ideas.

As maybe a more poignant example- I used to do a lot of on-campus recruiting when I worked in HFT, and I think I disappointed a lot of people when I told them my day to day was pretty mundane and consisted of banging out Jiras, usually to support new exchanges, and/or securities we hadn't traded previously. 3% excitement, 97% unit tests and covering corner cases.
by dang | 2026-02-05 21:13:30+00:00
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

You may not owe clown-resemblers better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

We ban accounts that keep posting in this sort of pattern, as yours has, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
by rstuart4133 | 2026-02-05 21:13:54+00:00
> It’s very plausible (and increasingly likely) that OpenAI/Anthropic are profitable on a per-token marginal basis

There any many places that will not use models running on hardware provided by OpenAI / Anthropic. That is the case true of my (the Australian) government at all levels. They will only use models running in Australia.

Consequently AWS (and I presume others) will run models supplied by the AI companies for you in their data centres. They won't be doing that at a loss, so the price will cover marginal cost of the compute plus renting the model. I know from devs using and deploying the service demand outstrips supply. Ergo, I don't think there is much doubt that they are making money from inference.
by catwell | 2026-02-05 21:14:34+00:00
Not only that, he's very enthusiastic about AI analyzers such as ZeroPath and AISLE.

He's written about it here: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/10/10/a-new-breed-of-analyz... and talked about it in his keynote at FOSDEM - which I attended - last Sunday (https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/B7YKQ7-oss-in-spite-o...).
by vidarh | 2026-02-05 21:14:42+00:00
> Or tell you how to use the tools you already have, but sure whatever.

But that's missing the point of the writing tools example: The models can unilaterally do this, and if prompted properly they will do this today. Writing an agent loop that will encourage the agent to build up it's own library of tools and prefer that library first, using a small (possibly local) model to select, is literally no more than a couple of hundred lines of code.

I wrote a toy coding agent a while back, and I started just with the ability for it to run shell commands. Every other tool the model wrote itself. At some point it even tried to restart itself to get access to the tool it had just written.

The providers only control a miniscule proportion of tooling, and the models themselves are capable enough that they will never control most of the tooling.

As a result, a lot of effort is going into optimising this to reduce token use.

But what we're seeing is that the main driver for this is not to spend less, but to do more, because we get enough value out of these models that every cost saving measure makes it possible to at a minimum spend the same to do more, but often even to spend more.

I'm doing projects now that would be financially unviable just 6 months ago.