MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bigbadfeline | 2026-02-15 21:15:00+00:00
> In this synthesized machine states era do I want to still run a bloated, buggy web browser?

I do. The browser is indispensable, at least for now, and it's much better to keep improving it for the age of AI than to jump to fairy tails and unproven replacement technologies.

> What tech people should be focused on is political action that keeps hardware open and models open and not locked behind data center.

And while they're working on this, you're going to do what exactly? You made a lot of forward looking claims that have nothing to do with the present reality, you just forgot to present any realistic vision about how to get there.

If you can't imagine procuring any those pink unicorns yourself why do you plead with others to deliver them to you? It just doesn't add up.
by baxtr | 2026-02-15 21:15:13+00:00
There are forces making a company like Google slow - as you’ve outlined.

There are forces that can make a company like Google move faster - like pressure from customers.

As you might have noticed people within Google have read this thread.

I’m expressing my discontent with their product experience by saying "I don’t understand". I could have also used "it’s insane" or any similar phrase.
by daxfohl | 2026-02-15 21:15:29+00:00
Settle. Not necessarily slow down. We'll see people gravitate towards a few things, and those will become the standards. It's already started, with claude and codex, compared to the wild west situation a year ago.

The closest parallel I can think of is javascript frameworks. The 2010s had a new framework out every week. Lots of people (somewhat including myself) wasted a ton of time trying to keep up with the churn, imagining that constantly being on the bleeding edge was somehow important. The smart ones just picked something reasonably mature and stuck with it. Eventually things coalesced around React. All that time trying to keep up with the churn added essentially no value.
by godelski | 2026-02-15 21:15:54+00:00
I'm of a similar mind but I think you also need to be careful. I find that people are more willing to believe a chatbot than a search result simply due to the way the information is presented. But if you're thinking "but search results can be wrong too!" then that's exactly my point. The problem is quite similar to people "doing their own research". I'm sure conspiracy theorists do a lot of reading, a lot of searching, and all that cargo cult research stuff. But I say cargo cult because it has all the form of research but none of the substance. That doesn't mean using LLMs is exclusive cargo cult learning but it is also easy to fall into a trap of that, and I'd argue easier than it is to fall into cargo cult learning by searching, which is easier to fall into cargo cult learning than by reading books, which is easier than being in a university lecture. Doesn't mean the tools are bad, but that it's easy to fool ourselves.

Basically if you can't differentiate how your typical conspiracy theorist isn't researching then you're at greater risk. It's worth thinking about that question, as they do do a lot of reading, thinking, and looking things up. It's more subtle, right?

FWIW, a thing I find LLMs really useful for is learning the vernacular of fields I'm unfamiliar or less familiar with. It is especially helpful when searches fail due to overloaded words (and let's be honest, Google's self elected lobotomy), but it is more a launching point. Though this still has the conspiracy problem as it is easy to self-reinforce a belief and not considering the alternatives. Follow-up questions are nice and can really help sifting through large amounts of information, but they certainly have a preference to narrow the view. I think this makes learning feel faster and more direct but have also taught (at the university level) I think it is important to learn all the boring stuff too. That stuff may not be important "now" but a well organized course means that that stuff is going to be important "soon" and "now" is the best time to learn it. No different than how musicians need to practice boring scales and patterns, athletes need to do drills and not just learn by competing (or "simulated" computations), or how children learn to write by boringly writing shapes over and over. I find the LLMs like to avoid the boring parts.
See The Software "Engineer" Gig Of The Future. It's Orwellian AF
by burnerToBetOut | 2026-02-15 21:15:56+00:00
Uncle Sam — by proxy — Wants You! Big Brother does, too…

____

The Non-Negotiables: How We Work

…

• …We leave video links open while we eat lunch. Our pets and kids know our coworkers…

____

If the graphics on their site [1] are anything to go by, that company is essentially a defense contractor.

The CTO running that Onebrief shop is the guy [2] that prompted the prediction I made in another post [3].

Coincidentally, I came across a blog post recently [4] where the blogger describes the above job description's way of working playing out IRL.

[1] https://g2ww.short.gy/BigtechBro

[2] https://g2ww.short.gy/OM16G

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46995623

[4] https://g2ww.short.gy/DonutPassGo
by otterley | 2026-02-15 21:16:43+00:00
Coding agents starting from a blank slate isn’t good practice to begin with. That’s a vibe coding practice, not a practice that you’d start with when you want to build a real business serving customers. You start with specifications and design documents; you don’t leave those decisions to agents (although you can use agents to help design them). So the context ought to be there already.
by ndr42 | 2026-02-15 21:18:15+00:00
> Even getting your neighbors to re-position their Ring cameras (which they have every right to install) can become very difficult.

In Germany it's prohibited by law to point your private surveillance camera to public spaces like the boardwalk, no recording of these areas is allowed. I think thats the way it should be. Unfortunately in some areas (e.g. train stations) it is allowed.
by kfsone | 2026-02-15 21:18:18+00:00
Minor nit: In familiarity, you gloss over the fact that it's character rather than token based which might be worth a shout out:

"Microgpt's larger cousins using building blocks called tokens representing one or more letters. That's hard to reason about, but essential for building sentences and conversations.

"So we'll just deal with spelling names using the English alphabet. That gives us 26 tokens, one for each letter."
Ask HN: Ranking sliders on a personal blog?
by incognito124 | 2026-02-15 21:18:18+00:00
Hi,

A few months ago, I came across a personal blog here on HN with the main feature being about ~4 sliders that change the weights of all posts and rank them in real time. I think some of the sliders were for "popularity", "recency" and perhaps "author's score". I also think, but I'm not sure, that the blog featured general ML topics.

I played with the sliders for sometime and had a great time exploring the blog, but I have since failed to find it again. I should've bookmark it then.

Does anyone have some clue about it? Much appreciated
by nephihaha | 2026-02-15 21:18:46+00:00
Thank you for this. Sent me down a real rabbithole. I've been looking up Eastern Bloc electric guitars and it's fascinating.

According to what I saw the Soviet ones are apparently barely playable, but look very distinctive.

Soviet synthesisers are pretty fascinating too. There are few demos of the Polivoks/Polyvox online. It would work really well in industrial music.
by gwern | 2026-02-15 21:18:49+00:00
> Just because is requires "special" zip software on the server?

Yes. A web browser can't just read a .zip file as a web page. (Even if a web browser decided to try to download, and decompress, and open a GUI file browser, you still just get a list of files to click.) Therefore, far from satisfying the trilemma, it just doesn't work.

And if you fix that, you still generally have a choice between either no longer being single-file or efficiency. (You can just serve a split-up HTML from a single ZIP file with some server-side software, which gets you efficiency, but now it's no longer single-file; and vice-versa. Because if it's a ZIP, how does it stop downloading and only download the parts you need?)
by godelski | 2026-02-15 21:19:25+00:00
> Just because a calculator will only ever be used by a subset of the population

I'm not sure what your argument is here. I think everyone knows this but also recognizes that the vast majority of people are not using calculators in that way. The vast majority of people are using calculators to replace calculation.

I'll give an example. I tell people I tip by: round the decimal, divide by 10, multiply by 2. Nearly every time I say that people tell me it is too difficult. This includes people with PhD STEM educations...
by hnlmorg | 2026-02-15 21:19:36+00:00
Why wouldn’t these non-EU then just sell the goods in those countries? It would mean they turn a cost (destroying) into revenue (sales).

It’s not like there isn’t already a massive industry selling counterfeit goods. So in your hypothetical scenario, if those companies are already shady then I could easily see them selling those surplus stock in the same shady markets.
by Bengalilol | 2026-02-15 21:20:16+00:00
As a side and probably fully off topic note (although...), I asked ChatGPT an innocent code question while not giving my code. It basically answered with the variable name I had written in my own code (da.ma.st) (a variable inside an object inside an object : data.main.stance). I still have to understand how and why it happened (I am not using anything else than ChatGPT in my browser and I absolutely never provided this chunk of code to the AI).

I further noticed that while I had a chatgpt window open, my dev site window was becoming laggy after many refreshes as if something was deliberately trying to scan it every time it got refreshed. I suspect the AI to scan other open tabs and simply reading through everything it can encounter. It is actually the only explanation up to date (but I unfortunately don't have much time to try to validate this speculative opinion: I will surely give other shots in order to narrow my suspicions).

I tend to think that this kind of data extraction frenziness may be a big problem in the future. Read it as : "let's collect everything, just tell everyone we are not collecting it, and then we'll see what we can get from it." Imagine such data being used in the future versions of governments if things get wild.
by water-data-dude | 2026-02-15 21:20:21+00:00
Benj Edwards, one of the authors, accepted responsibility in a bluesky post[0]. He lists some extenuating circumstances[1], but takes full responsibility. Time will tell if it's a one-off thing or not I guess.

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p

[1] your mileage may vary on how much you believe it and how much slack you want to cut him if you do
by wavemode | 2026-02-15 21:20:36+00:00
I don't think Git/GitHub is really all that big of a lock-in in practice for most projects.

IMO Git is not an unassailable juggernaut - I think if a new SCM came along and it had a frontend like GitHub and a VSCode plugin, that alone would be enough for a many users to adopt it (barring users who are heavy customers of GitHub Actions). It's just that nobody has decided to do this, since there's no money in it and most people are fine with Git.
by elvinagy | 2026-02-15 21:21:09+00:00
Elvin here from RustFS. Appreciate the feedback, especially coming from the Milvus team—we’ve followed your work for a long time.

You’re right about the "tension" in OSS. That’s exactly why we are pledging to keeping the RustFS core engine permanently open-source. We want to provide the solid, open foundation you mentioned so that teams like yours don't feel forced to build and maintain a storage layer from scratch.

On the sustainability question—you've described the challenge better than most. We're still figuring out the right model, and I don't think anyone has a perfect answer yet. What we do know is that we're building something technically excellent first, and we're committed to doing it in a way that keeps the core open.
by godelski | 2026-02-15 21:22:09+00:00
I think so too, but I also think this is part of the failure of math and science education. That is exactly what those topics are. But many courses will focus on the facts and not the substance. Instead of linking Feynman's Cargo Cult Science, which also broaches this I'll link this one instead[0] as I think it better illustrates what I'm saying.

[0] https://enlightenedidiot.net/random/feynman-on-brazilian-edu...
by gcanyon | 2026-02-15 21:22:18+00:00
Hence the N=1 I started the statement with. If we had a thousand similar situations and it turned out that in, say, 1% of cases there was a lung tumor, then we could debate whether it's worth putting 990 people through a biopsy they don't need so 10 can find out they have a tumor. Maybe that gives us the opportunity to discuss waiting a month and taking another chest x-ray (which has its own negatives) vs. doing an immediate biopsy.

But we don't have 1000 similar cases. As I said, we have 1: mine. And it turned out negative. So 1 person was put through a biopsy they didn't need, and 0 people found out they have a tumor.

Hopefully that makes my point clearer.
by forrestthewoods | 2026-02-15 21:22:21+00:00
MinGW/MSYS2 are flaming poop hurdles. That’s the bending over backwards to fake a hacky ass bad dev environment. Projects that only support MinGW on Windows are projecting “don’t take windows seriously”.

Supporting Windows without MinGW garbage is really really easy. Only supporting MinGW is saying “I don’t take this platform seriously so you should probably just ignore this project”.
by birdsongs | 2026-02-15 21:23:00+00:00
Do we really need warehouses full of "just in case" inventory? It's not life or death, it's just slightly more profitable for companies to overproduce than it is for them to attempt to meet demand exactly.

Climate change is coming, fast and brutal. I'm okay with these multi-billion-dollar revenue companies making a few points less in profits, if it means slowing climate change by even a fraction of a fraction of a point.

They don't need those profits. But our children need a viable planet.
by rolph | 2026-02-15 21:23:01+00:00
so they can act accordingly is the variable, a simple headcount is one thing, but when it creeps like a census, then it is prone to polyusary.

putting the consiracy hat on, the exploit is to direct as many installed AGs to push for such bills, with no big letdown if they dont pass, why/because, the demographics on dissention are valuable and are, passed to a hostile federal government.
by nkrisc | 2026-02-15 21:23:40+00:00
> manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia. Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers.

Why wouldn’t they just turn around and resell the clothes?

Surely these companies aren’t paying H&M for the privilege of destroying their surplus clothes, so by reselling them they’ll be getting paid to take the clothes and paid again when they resell them. Why would they ever destroy them?

Which is why this scenario won’t ever happen.
by 331c8c71 | 2026-02-15 21:25:10+00:00
> Customers dictate what gets produced.

Sure? It seems to me that the companies dictate what I consume. Many many times I wanted to buy exactly the same clothes item or shoes to replace an old one (because I know exactly how it'd fit and wear) only to discover it has been discontinued with no obvious "heir". Sometimes only 6 months later...

Whats the percentage of people chasing "fashion", especially after mid 30s?
by lebuffon | 2026-02-15 21:25:57+00:00
Forth is a compiler but what it "compiles" is not standard. The implementor decides what they need.
Forth can compile pointers to native code that are the VM's instructions, called direct threading.
Forth can compile pointers to pointers to native code VM instructions, called indirect threading.
Forth can compile byte code like OpenFirmware/OpenBoot.

And modern systems compile optimized native code (VFX Forth, SwiftForth) but still remain fully interactive at the console.
by trzy | 2026-02-15 21:26:10+00:00
Yup. Although sometime in the mid-90's, the home console business became more lucrative and Sega really missed the wave. Games at home were their own distinct art form: longer, more complex, far more replay value. Arcade games rarely have more than 15-20 minutes of content and this was true of Model 3 and Naomi games. Sega's arcade focus became a major liability by the time Dreamcast rolled around.
by nothrabannosir | 2026-02-15 21:26:19+00:00
"It begun my psychosis" is a literal statement.

Maybe if you miss that sentence, the rest can fly under the radar. Assuming one also ignores the commonly reported correlation between homelessness and mental illness. But try and have those two elements front of mind, and re-read the article: it should be abundantly clear that this is in no way a healthy person down on his luck--this is a story of someone going through a mental break.
Show HN: SkillSandbox – Capability-based sandbox for AI agent skills (Rust)
by ClaytheMachine | 2026-02-15 21:27:02+00:00
Built this after finding a credential stealer on an AI skills marketplace. The malicious skill looked like a normal weather lookup but was exfiltrating ~/.ssh, AWS creds, and browser cookies. My agent ran it without hesitation.

SkillSandbox is the fix: skills declare permissions in YAML (network egress, filesystem paths, env vars), the runtime enforces via iptables default-deny, seccomp-bpf, and mount isolation. MCP server integration for Claude Code.

Also built a companion project, AgentTrace (https://github.com/theMachineClay/agenttrace), for the other failure mode: when an agent has the right permissions but does the wrong thing repeatedly. Session-aware policy engine with cumulative cost tracking, violation counting, and kill-switch.

Together: SkillSandbox constrains what agents can reach. AgentTrace enforces what agents should do.

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or threat model.
by halostatue | 2026-02-15 21:27:10+00:00
Not at all.

Video-first is generally as ridiculous as SEO-driven recipes where I can't start cooking what I want to cook because I have to go through someone's nonna's best friend's sister's cooking life story.

It's great that this video gets to the point in the first 33 seconds, but make me want to watch your video.

This post made me not care.

I get video bug reports all the time at work -- but it's accompanied with a description of what the problem is that makes it worth my time to watch the video. (Sometimes, with a well-written description, I don't need the video but watch it to make sure my understanding matches.)
by benjiro | 2026-02-15 21:29:36+00:00
Frankly, i feel like the people downvoting my comment, are still using older LLMs. When Opus 4.5 entered the picture, there was a noticeable improvement in the way the LLM (for me), interacted with the code base, and the issues that it was able to find.

I ran Opus on some public source code, and lets just say that the picture was less rosy for the whole "human as security".

I understand people have a aversion to LLMs but it irked me the wrong way to see the amount of downvotes on here, because people disagree with a opinion. Its starting the become like reddit. As i stated before, its still your tasks as the person working with the LLM to guide it on security practices. But as somebody now 30 years in the industry, the amount of absolute crap i have seen produced as code (and security issues), makes LLMs frankly security wizards.

Stupid example: I have yet to see LLMs not use placeholders to prevent SQL injection (despite it being trained on a lot of bad code).

The amount of code i have seen, where humans just injected variables directly into the SQL... Yea, what a surprise that SQL database content get stolen like its nothing. When doing a security audit on some public code, one of the items always found by the LLMs, yep ... SQL injectable code everywhere.

A lot of practices are easy, but anybody can overlook something in their own code base. This is where LLMs are so great. You audit with multiple LLMs and you will find points that are weak or where you forgot something, even if you code security wse.

So yea, i have no issue doing discussions but the ridiculous downvotes on what seems to come from people with no clue, is amazing. Going to take a break from here.
by josephg | 2026-02-15 21:29:37+00:00
As I understand it, this is a pretty common legal problem that shows up when multiple parties collaborate to make something. And the result turns out to be legally problematic in some way. Its often incredibly difficult for the plaintiff to figure out who's really legally responsible - especially since they don't have access to all the supplier contracts that were signed. And all the suppliers will probably blame each other in court.

Looking at this case, if we assume there is infringing software / hardware inside these laptops, then figuring out which supplier is to blame is Acer/asus's problem. Its not up to nokia to go through all the contracts.

Its kinda like in software. If I install your software and it crashes, don't blame your 3rd party libraries. I don't care why it crashes. Figure it out and fix it.

Philosophically, I completely agree with you about software patents. I don't even mind these legal battles because they push companies toward the patent-free AV1 codec.
by ACS_Solver | 2026-02-15 21:30:12+00:00
Arch wiki is far better than most man pages. I've referred to Arch for my own non-Arch systems and when building Yocto systems. Most Arch info applies.

In the ancient days I used TLDP to learn about Linux stuff. Arch wiki is now the best doc. The actual shipped documentation on most Linux stuff is usually terrible.

GNU coreutils have man pages that are correct and list all the flags at least, but suffer from GNU jargonisms and usually a lack of any concise overview or example sections. Most man pages are a very short description of what the program does, and an alphabetic list of flags. For something as versatile and important as dd the description reads only "Copy a file, converting and formatting according to the operands" and there's not even one example of a full dd command given. Yes, you can figure it out from the man page, but it's like an 80s reference, not good documentation.

man pages for util-linux are my go-to example for bad documentation. Dense, require a lot of implicit knowledge of concepts, make references to 90s or 80s technology that are now neither relevant nor understandable to most users.

Plenty of other projects have typical documentation written by engineers for other engineers who already know this. man pipewire leaves you completely in the dark as to what the thing even does.

Credit to systemd, that documentation is actually comprehensive and useful.
by dahart | 2026-02-15 21:30:35+00:00
I don’t agree with that. I’m saying that banning advertising payments will obviously have unintended consequences and fail to achieve the actual desired goal. That happens with poorly conceived regulations all the time. I’m also suggesting that not enough people agree with your desire to ban advertising, and there isn’t a clear enough benefit to society, for this particular regulation to pass. You have a Chesterton’s Fence problem if you don’t see the reasons why advertising is so completely pervasive. You have to acknowledge that first and then propose something viable and realistic that can replace it.