MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lII1lIlI11ll | 2026-02-10 10:37:44+00:00
This only applies if you take all those "protect the children" initiatives at face value. It seems to me that the actual reasons are different. Governments want to police speech online and be able to arrest people who say things they don't approve of, so they are pushing platforms to collect user's PID. Some also want to discourage people from doing things they don't want them to do but that are politically unfeasible to criminalize (watching videos of consenting adults engaging in all kinds of sexual acts) and adding more and more friction to the process (no pun intended!) is the best thing they can get. And the internet companies want more of your data to track you.
by thecoderpanda | 2026-02-10 10:38:08+00:00
simonw nailed it. The pain was never "writing code." It was the random hour lost debugging why CI broke overnight because some dependency shipped a breaking change.

I run a dev community of ~1500 devs. The ones getting the most out of agents aren't throwing away frameworks. They're offloading the stuff nobody enjoys. OAuth scope spelunking, boilerplate migrations, flaky test debugging. That's where agents shine.

The actual risk nobody talks about: if you've never manually debugged a race condition, you won't catch it when the agent introduces one. Agents amplify what you already know. They don't replace knowing things.
by pwatsonwailes | 2026-02-10 10:38:21+00:00
Responded on this line of thinking a bit further down, so I'll be brief on this. Yes, there's selection bias in organisations as you go up the ladder of power and influence, which selects for various traits (psychopathy being an obvious one).

That being said, there's a side view on this from interactionism that it's not just the traits of the person's modes of behaviour, but their belief in the goal, and their view of the framing of it, which also feeds into this. Research on cult behaviours has a lot of overlap with that.

The culture and the environment, what the mission is seen as, how contextually broad that is and so on all get in to that.

I do a workshop on KPI setting which has overlap here too. In short for that - choose mutually conflicting KPIs which narrow the state space for success, such that attempting to cheat one causes another to fail. Ideally, you want goals for an organisation that push for high levels of upside, with limited downside, and counteracting merits, such that only by meeting all of them do you get to where you want to be. Otherwise it's like drawing a line of a piece of paper, asking someone to place a dot on one side of the line, and being upset that they didn't put it where you wanted it. More lines narrows the field to just the areas where you're prepared to accept success.

That division can also then be used to narrow what you're willing to accept (for good or ill) of people in meeting those goals, but the challenge is that they tend to see meeting all the goals as the goal, not acting in a moral way, because the goals become the target, and decontextualise the importance of everything else.

TL;DR: value setting for positive behaviour and corporate performance is hard.

EDIT: actually this wasn't that short as an answer really. Sorry for that.
by reactordev | 2026-02-10 10:38:35+00:00
You’re just scratching the surface here. You’re not mentioning agents exfiltrating data, code, information outside your org. Agents that go rogue. Agents that verifiably completed a task but is fundamentally wrong (Anthropic’s C compiler).

I’m bullish on AI but right now feels like the ICQ days where everything is hackable.
by andy12_ | 2026-02-10 10:38:38+00:00
There is also the slight problem that apparently Opus 4.6 verbalized its awareness of being in some sort of simulation in some evaluations[1], so we can't be quite sure whether Opus is actually misaligned or just good at playing along.

> On our verbalized evaluation awareness metric, which we take as an indicator of potential risks to the soundness of the evaluation, we saw improvement relative to Opus 4.5. However, this result is confounded by additional internal and external analysis suggesting that Claude Opus 4.6 is often able to distinguish evaluations from real-world deployment, even when this awareness is not verbalized.

[1] https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/14e4fb01875d2a69f646fa5e574dea...
by sebstefan | 2026-02-10 10:38:52+00:00
Discord is an app that's so routinely reverse-engineered there are projects with a million+ users designed around patching changes to it, straight in the binary.

https://betterdiscord.app/

Do you think their big evil plan is to make up a lie that will last maybe 3 weeks, jeopardize the user trust and lose nitro revenue

Surely there is so much money to be made selling random people's faces.

If they tell you they're not selling your data they're not selling your data. What you should worry about is incompetence

Not even 6 months ago a third party they used for ID verification got breached

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8jmzd972leo
by thecoderpanda | 2026-02-10 10:38:57+00:00
Seeing a version of this from India. Every decent ML engineer is getting vacuumed into foundation model work or infra roles at hyperscalers. Teams building the actual application layer are struggling to hire.

The stat about OpenAI needing 20% of the existing skilled trades workforce for their data centers is nuts. That's not a scaling challenge, that's a resource extraction problem.

Anyone else noticing this hitting developer tooling and devrel budgets too? Everything that isn't "AI infra" is getting squeezed hard.
by simianparrot | 2026-02-10 10:39:05+00:00
Because I prefer online conversations to work like IRL ones: Ephemeral. Sure each individual might keep their own log if they want but the server itself doesn’t and setting aside all the issues with modern datasets being used for training all sorts of algorithms, just the concept of stepping into a digital room without all the baggage of the last twenty hours of conversation is _mentally refreshing_. It also changes people’s behaviour for the better IME.
by cumquat | 2026-02-10 10:39:24+00:00
I think you are wrong on the "weight issue" regarding EV. ICE cars have a weight issue as they consume more gas depending on the weight, which is the case to a much lesser extent in BEV.
At high speed, aerodynamics become the main factor reducing range.
With urban stop and go traffic, regenerative braking lowers the weight's impact massively.
BMW's i3 was constructed with the same mistake: let’s reduce weight to gain range, which didn’t pay off. It added to the cost due to expensive composite materials, lesser to the range.
Manufacturers learned from BMW's mistake and build the body with conventional metal sheets.
Nevertheless reducing weight has its advantages: using less material saves expenses and helps driving dynamics.
Range is a minor factor.
by jFriedensreich | 2026-02-10 10:39:42+00:00
The same could be said for color, just to then go into detail that using color codes on too many columns and with unclear associations are the problem. This is just a weird way to frame an article. Colors and icons are indeed essential to quickly parse and use big amounts of tabular data. All the criticisms the author brings forward are specific problems of some implementations or just poor choices. All this is solved by putting a few key icons in their own column next to the text field they belong to, so users can hide and show them as needed depending on the task. I have eg. a basic indicator that is a red exclamation mark or yellow question mark or green checkmark and another one with a colored icon representation of a category field. Its 100 times easier to get a quick impression and find something than without those. if someone has a problem its 2 clicks to hide the columns, thats the universality of a table ui! Don’t let absolutist click bait articles fool you.
by miki123211 | 2026-02-10 10:40:02+00:00
I might be misremembering, but AFAIK, that kind of surveillance mostly worked because many companies didn't bother encrypting datacenter-to-datacenter traffic, thinking that those networks are trusted. That mistake has since been rectified though.

With almost everything going over TLS these days and HTTPS being the norm, even for server-to-server APIs, it's much harder to snoop on traffic without the collaboration of one of the endpoints, and the more companies you ask for that kind of collaboration, the higher your risk of an unhappy employee becoming a whistleblower.
by PurpleRamen | 2026-02-10 10:41:27+00:00
vi is not available on modern systems, people are using clones like (neo)vim or Emacs with evil-mode. And those clones also have modern features too, pushing them to IDE-level of tooling. Proper IDEs are often still a tad superior in being an IDE, but their vi(m)-modes are very lacking in comparison. So at the end it comes down to where you set your focus, and often the vim-side wins over the IDE-side.
by thecoderpanda | 2026-02-10 10:43:08+00:00
Solid first SaaS. Shipping something at 16 that solves a real infra pain point is no joke.

WebSocket management is one of those things that sounds simple until you're dealing with connection state, reconnects, and scaling across edge locations. The ephemeral session idea is smart for use cases like temp chat rooms or live event channels where you genuinely don't want messages persisted.

Few questions from a practical standpoint: what happens when a session hits connection limits? And what's the edge infra under the hood, Cloudflare Workers/Durable Objects? That'd be worth mentioning on the landing page since devs evaluating this will want to know what they're building on top of.

Also, since Google auth is broken, Might want to throw a banner on the signup page so people don't bounce thinking the whole thing is down.

Keep shipping. Most devs twice your age are still "planning" their first project.
by mesrik | 2026-02-10 10:43:12+00:00
Well it depends, on still using.

I've been mostly using emacs past 30 years ie. about the time when system memory wasn't any more constraint which while single user was about 8MB at least. But I did earn my living before that about 7 years mostly using vi as most usable editor in the system and that 8MB was luxury most of that time.

But even emacs IMHO was and is vastly superior, vi still had it niche fast small edits and especially before log based transactional filesystems. After power outage or bad brownout event system crash there was great chance you got to fixing filesystem with fsck (which did often take lot of time) and worst cases finally debugfs trying to fiddle bits that you get fsck fixing rest.

Bringing system up with old system could be tedious. Before you get system enough up single user mode and just root fs mounted you had to resort you way forward using those modest tools you had there. It was really great if vi did work, but it too required sometimes more memory than you had before swap was active. If not, then ed was your friend, ex is just vi without visual mode.

For a long time vi was also able to edit very large files. It did not require reading whole file in memory before it allowed editing as for example emacs did (or mmap's it memory later).

These days I use vi for quick edits like someone above mentioned and like it more than any later replacement (nano etc) if emacs is not there, not worth installing it for just quick change or when can't install on (embedded) or someone else's system for any reason.

Vi is often available also *bsd based appliances which I've been using like Junos, Netscalers, etc.
by usefulposter | 2026-02-10 10:43:44+00:00
Correct.

Much like the pointless ASCII diagrams in GitHub readmes (big rectangle with bullet points flows to another...), the diagrams are cognitive slurry.

See Gas Town for non-Qwen examples of how bad it can get:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746045

(Not commenting on the other results of this model outside of diagramming.)
by belorn | 2026-02-10 10:43:50+00:00
> We could compare that to the situation in Spain where there is a group of illegal migrant workers who are exploited as cheap work force

The term we should be using here is human trafficking. It is a extremely common practice in construction and farming. As a police officer said here in Sweden in a news article, if they went to a single major construction site the yearly budget for human trafficking violations would be used up for that site alone. It is an open secret that construction sites has a tier based system for workers, where the most illegal workers (and there are different degrees to that) get the most dangerous assignments, least amount of safety equipment, longest hours, and with the lowest pay.

A lot of the calculation on the cost of reduced immigration get based on the resulting increase in costs to construction and farming. It is quite insane how much of the economy is based on exploiting people.
by squeefers | 2026-02-10 10:44:53+00:00
> However I still find it crazy that when you slow down the laser and one photon at a time goes through either slit you still get the bands.

why does nobody mention the fact the photon doesnt keep going through the same hole? like why is it randomly moving through the air in this brownian way? the laser gun doesnt move, the slit doesnt move, so why do different photons end up going through different holes?
by 9rx | 2026-02-10 10:46:10+00:00
> Our banks have endless painful papercuts yet most of us don't change banks just because of one pain.

Only because they're all painful, and the lack of a functioning market, held back by regulation, doesn't realistically allow someone to create a painless bank. If there was a bank that was recognized as perfect, people would switch in short order.

> I use an iPhone because I judge it to be more secure yet I'm constantly fighting the same bugs and misfeatures that seem to never get fixed/improved.

Only because the lack of a functioning market, held back by regulation, straight up prevents anyone else from creating an iPhone that is bug-free. People would start switching over to the bug-free iPhone as they upgrade if there was such a thing.

> You are implying efficient market theory, which is bunk.

The efficient market theory says that, in an active market, prices rapidly reflect all publicly available information. How does that apply here, bunk or not?
by cultofmetatron | 2026-02-10 10:46:36+00:00
Doing lots of cognition heavy tasks also seems to correlate with lower dementia risk; Basicly the premise of "brain workout" apps. Thought I think if you're going to be doing brain exercises, that time would be better spent learning a new langauge or learning math or physics or art.

Incidently, People who study or do a lot of thinking heavy deep work also tend to be coffee addicts. coincidence?
by gunnarmorling | 2026-02-10 10:46:38+00:00
I am working on a new Java parser for the Apache Parquet file format, with minimal dependencies and multi-threaded execution: https://github.com/hardwood-hq/hardwood.

Approaching the home stretch for a first 1.0 preview release, including: support for parsing Parquet files with flat and nested schemas, all physical and logical column types, core and advanced encodings, projections, compression, multi-threading, etc. all that with a pretty decent performance.

Next on the roadmap are SIMD support, predicate push-down (bloom filters, statistics, etc.), writer support.
by edhelas | 2026-02-10 10:47:05+00:00
> I just wish there was some kind of ACID test suite for XMPP or something else to reproducibly validate spec compliance. Maybe a test server or similar as a reference implementation. This way client or server maintainers would have to run their programs against the official test server to increase their compliance stats.

This is exactly what the Compliance Suits are for, and the XMPP Software Fundation is taking care of telling all the clients what they misses directly on the official website, for example: https://xmpp.org/software/movim/
by xhcuvuvyc | 2026-02-10 10:47:57+00:00
Read something similar a while back.

Code isn't assembly, code is required to sufficiently express English in a way that is unambiguous.

You can't translate plain English into unambiguous code. Period. Not even engineers can. The only way this translation happens is that humans are good enough at communicating to get to a point that code can be produced and iterated on to produce an outcome with enough context the thing doesn't fall over after a week.

The only thing stopping AI doing this is the right communication models and enough context.

As an engineer by trade. Im quickly realizing how fucked we are right now.

I give us maybe 2-3 years until the last engineering roles are posted. Maybe longer depending on how many businesses survive the crash while refusing to automate their workflows.

Most of us are going to start transferring skills to more of a prompt programming and coordinator role.

Until those roles go to.
by lexlambda | 2026-02-10 10:48:09+00:00
Yes, it is indeed not always clear what constitutes forgery (Germany).

> A document in the classic sense requires an embodied declaration of intent that identifies an issuer and is suitable for providing proof in legal transactions. In the case of a lawyer's letter, the signature is an essential part of the standard repertoire of authenticity.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Document-fraud-via-email-Why-th...

So removing some parts to make it _could_ make it safe, to Not create a "risk of confusion":

> Even if computer processing creates the appearance of a genuine document, the typical characteristics of the original must be present to establish a serious risk of confusion. Likewise, the BayObLG did not consider the offense of forging evidential data according to Section 269 of the German Criminal Code (StGB) to be fulfilled.
by Yizahi | 2026-02-10 10:48:30+00:00
I'm not sure what do you mean by liberalism or electoralism or even a will of a people. Especially in this context.

Democracy is a power of citizens to decide on the governing of a country they live in. This doesn't happen anywhere nowadays, except in Switzerland, where "demos"=people can actually execute their will of majority "kratos" to vote on the governing of their country. With some limitations of course, but it is a real democracy.

Other western countries have an elective oligarchy, and people can't decide on what those oligarchs will vote on, the system is indirect.

And China is pure and simple autocracy. A despotia governed a by a single man plus his cronies. There is no election process in China, so demos is completely separated from governing, there is not even indirect link.
by pensaer | 2026-02-10 10:50:19+00:00
Hi HN — we built a search engine for autonomous AI agents.

There are millions of agents running today (OpenClaw, Moltbook, private infra, enterprise tools), but there’s no way to discover them by capability.

Clawl indexes agents and lets you search things like:
“knows about Kubernetes security”
or
“can summarise research papers”

We also designed an open discovery protocol:

Agents can publish a /.well-known/clawl.json file declaring what they do, and any crawler can index them (not just us).

The interesting part for us:
the things being indexed (agents) can also use the index to find other agents.

Stack: Next.js, SQLite/JSON, FTS search. £0 budget.

It’s early and imperfect, but we wanted to put the idea out there.

Happy to answer questions about the protocol, ranking, or crawling approach.
by amanzi | 2026-02-10 10:51:14+00:00
I agree with the previous commenter - I hate Discord for all the same reasons. But you said: "That's because you're not in the target market. And I guess not interested in the space." and this is the bit that frustrates me... I must be the target market because several services I use try to get you to use Discord for support, and some will only provide support via Discord.
by roryirvine | 2026-02-10 10:51:36+00:00
The Windrush situation is a bit different - the people involved were British Subjects, and didn't need any documentation when they arrived in the UK.

The only thing that changed was the introduction of the "hostile environment" policy in 2012, meaning that everyone (including full UK citizens) must now prove that they have permission to be in the country before getting a job, renting a home, getting a bank account, etc.

The Windrush generation always had that permission, and continued to have it - what they didn't have was the documentation to prove it. And, to make matters worse, the Home Office had disposed of their arrival records so in many cases it became all but impossible for them to get it.

(I know this is a minor quibble, but I think it's worth pointing out that the people affected shouldn't have needed to regularise their situation, because it was never irregular in the first place!)
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-10 10:51:58+00:00
I don't even think it's the tribalism. Society used to be racist AF and it worked ok. Heck, you could play a pretty amusing "guess the race/nationality" game with spicy quotes from 1880-1920.

I think the problem is that by making everything objective, systemic, numerically tracked, quantified, etc, etc. we've actively selected for evil people. The people who get ahead in those systems, the groups who's interests get served, are not the good ones. They are the evil ones who have no qualms about exploiting the vulnerabilities and oversights of the system. In our quest to optimized everything, we have optimized for the prioritization of dishonest people and bad causes that attract dishonest people and it shows at every level.

Ted K would probably have something to say about this.
by elefanten | 2026-02-10 10:52:08+00:00
When one is this far gone into a nationalist information bubble haze, it ceases to be productive to argue with them. Everything this poster demands to be “shown” is openly available in abundance from the relevant victims, decades of it. But offered such material they will quickly categorically dismiss it all and move goal posts again.

Yes when CCP undertakes an ethnonationalist settler campaign into Tibet and then instructs the settlers to “call for help”, it can be presented as Tibet “asking” for CCP authoritarianism. Same playbook as Russia in eastern Ukraine.

Yes, when the Xinjiang muslim population is terrorized by police state and concentration camps in a country with no free speech, it is hard to find locals publicly complaining and advocating for themselves.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-10 10:52:42+00:00
> You build something to begin to discover the correct requirements and to picture the real problem domain in question.

That's one way, another way is to keep the idea in your head (both actively and "in the background) for days/weeks, and then eventually you sit down and write a document, and you'll get 99% of the requirements down perfectly. Then implementation can start.

Personally I prefer this hammock-style development and to me it seems better at building software that makes sense and solves real problems. Meanwhile "build something to discover" usually is best when you're working with people who need to be able to see something to believe there is progress, but the results are often worse and less well-thought out.
by sigmoid10 | 2026-02-10 10:53:28+00:00
>Microchips were an incremental improvement where the individual increments yielded utility far greater than the investment.

You should look up how modern EUV lithography was commercialised. This was essentially a big plasma physics puzzle. If ASML hadn't taken on a ridiculous gamble (financially on the same order of magnitude as a new collider, esp. for a single colpany) with the research, Moore's law would have died long ago and the entire tech industry would be affected. And there was zero proof that this was going to work beforehand.