MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by taftster | 2026-02-11 01:56:45+00:00
Well, I mean, the first part is a song by Don McLean called American Pie. You might know that, unsure that everyone will pick it out though.

One of the most famous play choices at karaoke bars these days too. I think because the song is a long story, of sorts? But it's a terribly long song and I will leave to take a smoke break anytime it gets chosen. You're going to be there for a good 10 minutes before it concludes.

So maybe the AI prompt was something like, "take CVE-2026-24061 and compose a song lyric in the style of American Pie by Don Mclean". I wonder if you would get similar results with that prompt.
by phire | 2026-02-11 01:57:30+00:00
> You weren't downloading videos over 56k dialup

Sure you could.

Not so much in the 90s; But during 2003/2004, with a 56k modem, an unlimited dialup plan, a second phone line, software to redial when the internet dropped, and bittorrent: I was managing to download roughly 150-200MB of data per day (sometimes more)

I could download one of those 350 DivX/Xvid rips every second day. At one point, someone was posting 60MB .rmvb encodes of Stargate SG1. From memory, the quality wasn't great, but I could download 2-3 per day.

I wish I still had some of those 60MB .rmvb encodes, just so I could see exactly how bad the quality was. But I deleted them all, and they seem to have disappeared from the internet.

The "RealMedia Variable Bitrate" codec was essentially a prototype of H.264 (which is still widely used today) but predating it by a year or two.
by ajkjk | 2026-02-11 01:57:34+00:00
> I doubt anyone could make a reply to this comment that would make me feel any better about it.

I am also a complex number skeptic. The position I've landed on is this.

1) complex numbers are probably used for far more purposes across math than they "ought" to be, because people don't have the toolbox to talk about geometry on R^2 but they do know C so they just use C. In particular, many of the interesting things about complex analysis are probably just the n=2 case of more general constructions that can be done by locating R inside of larger-dimensional algebras.

2) The C that shows up in quantum mechanics is likely an example of this--it's a case of physics having a a circular symmetry embedded in it (the phase of the wave functions) and everyone getting attached to their favorite way of writing it. (Ish. I'm not sure how the square the fact that wave functions add in superposition. but anyway it's not going to be like "physics NEEDS C", but rather, physics uses C because C models the algebra of the thing physics is describing.

3) C is definitely intrinsic in a certain sense: once you have polynomials in R, a natural thing to do is to add a sqrt(-1). This is not all that different conceptually from adding sqrt(2), and likely any aliens we ever run into will also have done the same thing.
Show HN: Prompt Fatigue CC status line – Know when to stop prompting
by bartekfi | 2026-02-11 01:58:32+00:00
Claude Code is fun, but at some point it becomes a slot machine.

At 10pm it's more hope and less intention, and the prompts become are lazy.

This tool reads your cc history, uses simple heuristic to see if you are prompting or grunting. When your brain is fried just rest.
by Zacharias030 | 2026-02-11 01:59:07+00:00
Parent comment has the rhythm of an AI comment. Caught myself not realizing it until you mentioned it. Seems like I am more in tune with LLM slop on twitter, which is usually much worse.
But on second sight it's clear and it also shows the comment as having no stance, and very generic.

@dang I would welcome a small secondary button that one can vote on to community-driven mark a comment as AI, just so we know.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-02-11 01:59:31+00:00
Unfortunately my understanding is that he originated the vision-only approach while at Tesla. As in, he's the one who sold Musk on the idea in the first place.

I don't have time to dig up the citation that someone pointed me towards, but it's out there and can be found. Which is a bummer, because I've learned a lot from his videos and writing and have a lot of respect for his work.
by aatd86 | 2026-02-11 01:59:43+00:00
Maybe it is a notation issue.

What is a negative number? What is multiplication? What is a complex "number"?
Complex are not even orderable. Is complex addition an overloading of the addition operator. Same with multiplication?

What i squared is -1 ? What does -1 even mean? Is the sign, a kind of operator?

The geometric interpretation help. These are transformations. Instead of 1 + i, we could/should write (1,i)

The AI might be clearer: https://gemini.google.com/share/6e00fab74749

A lot of math is not very clear because it is not very well taught. The notations are unclear.
For instance, another example is: what is the difference between a matrix and a tensor? But that is another debate for anyone who wants to think about it. The definition found in books is often kind of wrong making a distinction that shouldn't really exist more often than not.
by ubixar | 2026-02-11 01:59:55+00:00
The most interesting thing about this analysis isn't that hyperbolic growth appears in arXiv "emergent capabilities" papers - it's that the actual capability metrics (MMLU, tokens/$) remain stubbornly linear.

The singularity isn't in the machines. It's in human attention.

What we're witnessing isn't AGI appearing, but Kuhnian paradigm shifts happening at digital speed. The "emergence" papers aren't documenting new capabilities - they're documenting a scientific community's gestalt switch, their collective belief that the curve has bent. Once enough people believe the singularity is imminent, that belief itself becomes the driver: funding follows, talent follows, compute follows.

Thomas Kuhn would recognize this. Scientific revolutions don't occur because the data demands it - they occur because the old paradigm becomes untenable under the weight of anomalous observations and the new one offers a compelling narrative. We've just compressed that process from decades to months.

The linear capability growth is the reality. The hyperbolic attention growth is the story we're all collectively telling ourselves.
by Quarrel | 2026-02-11 02:00:21+00:00
What an amazing bug. I probably spent my first 10 years on the internet just using telnet. They were wild times. You could log ethernet traffic and see passwords. Towards the end of those we started to have a few more single-user machines, but the vast majority were old school many many user machines, where "root" was thought to be tightly restricted (of course, even then, in practice it wasn't if you were in the know).

Anyway, just wild seeing this:

> telnet -l 'root -f' server.test

or

> USER='-f root' telnet -a server.test

Survive 11 years.
by mananaysiempre | 2026-02-11 02:00:45+00:00
Please take this in the spirit in which I’m writing it (i.e. please recognize the occupational disease of “bugs everywhere” and only mock it in moderation; I do appreciate the post itself):

- The Firefox browser on my Android tablet is, apparently, close enough to a desktop that I have no problem reading your blog post. The nag feels unnecessary, especially given it obscures part of the header.

- The lightweight-markup parser seems to have gotten confused around the phrase “tests and whiteboarding”.
by krinchan | 2026-02-11 02:01:01+00:00
I feel like we work at the same place. IT Husbandry/Debt Paying/KTLO whatever you call it is being ground into dust. Especially repetitive stuff that I originally would've needed a week to automate and never could get to the top of the once quarterly DevOps sprint...bam. GitHub Action workflow runs weekly to pull in the latest OS images, update and roll over a smoke test VM, monitor, roll over the rest or rollback and ping me in Slack. Done in half a day.

I've got a couple Claude Code skills set up where I just copy/paste a Slack link into it and it links people relevant docs, gives them relevant troubleshooting from our logs, and a hook on the slack tools appends a Claude signature to make sure they know they weren't worth my time.

That said, there's this weird quicksand people around get in where they just spend weeks and weeks on their AI tools and don't actually do much of anything? Like bro you burned your 5 hour CC Enterprise limit all week and committed...nothing?
by robocat | 2026-02-11 02:01:07+00:00
Not really.

One dichotomy categorisation I personally look for in people is: * likes heirachy versus * dislikes heirachy.

I suspect heroes are mostly relevant if you are a heirachy lover? I also believe that heirachy lovers are more likely to believe in evil puppetmaster conspiracies (anti-heroes if you will).

It is a lot harder to find heroes if you dislike authority because your heroes are more likely to avoid heirachical status ladders?
by tokyobreakfast | 2026-02-11 02:01:34+00:00
An RCE in GNU's telnetd has no relationship to the sunsetting of telnet. Something could equally likely happen with SSH (but not really because the OpenBSD folks are paranoid by nature).

Apple removing the telnet client from OS X was a stupid move. How can you call yourself UNIX and not have a telnet client? It's like removing grep or ed.
by lachieh | 2026-02-11 02:02:13+00:00
Hey! I'm an the Tambo team so I'll chip in. There isn't really any reason we couldn't support A2UI. It's a great way to allow models to describe generative UIs. We could add an A2UI renderer.

The way we elevator-pitch Tambo is "an agent that understands your UI" (which, admittedly, is not very descriptive on the implementation details). We've spent the time on allowing components (be that pre-existing or purpose-built) to be registered as tools that can be controlled and rendered either in-chat, or out within your larger application. The chat box shouldn't be the boundary.

Personally, my take on standards like A2UI is that they could prove useful but the models have to easily understand them or else you have to take up additional context explaining the protocol. Models already understand tool-calling so we're making use of that for now.
by willmarquis | 2026-02-11 02:03:04+00:00
What's interesting about this raise is the framing: 'we didn't need to raise capital to support the business.' That's remarkably rare for a hardware company, especially pre-IPO.

The real thesis validation here isn't just product-market fit - it's that integrated hardware/software infrastructure can have better unit economics than the traditional model of 'Dell boxes + VMware licenses + storage vendor + network vendor + 3 years of integration work.' When you own the full stack from firmware to hypervisor, you can make tradeoffs that commodity integrators can't.

This mirrors what hyperscalers learned 15+ years ago: custom silicon (Google TPUs, AWS Nitro, Azure smart NICs) exists because known integration points let you optimize globally. Oxide is essentially selling that capability to enterprises stuck between 'can't use public cloud' and 'can't afford a hyperscaler-style infrastructure team.'

The $200M from existing investors only is notable because it signals the business metrics actually support the vision. Most infra startups at this stage are still hunting for product-market fit.
by grouchy | 2026-02-11 02:03:05+00:00
There's overlap for sure. I'd say we've built a more drop-in solution. We actually migrated to AG-UI events under the hood, and we have plans to expand cross-compatibility across standards.

The major difference is we provide an agent. You don't need to bring your own agent or framework. A lot of our developers are using our agent, really happy with it, and we have a bunch of upcoming features to make it even better out of the box.
by tripdout | 2026-02-11 02:03:18+00:00
Not the original commenter, but I noticed it too. I guess it's hard since AI is trained on human content, so presumably humans write like this too, but a few that stood out to me:

> Five entire countries vanished from GreyNoise telnet data: Zimbabwe, Ukraine, Canada, Poland, and Egypt. Not reduced — zero.

> An attacker sends -f root as the username value, and login(1) obediently skips authentication, handing over a root shell. No credentials required. No user interaction.

> The GreyNoise Global Observation Grid recorded a sudden, sustained collapse in global telnet traffic — not a gradual decline, not scanner attrition, not a data pipeline problem, but a step function. One hour, ~74,000 sessions. The next, ~22,000.

> That kind of step function — propagating within a single hour window — reads as a configuration change on routing infrastructure, not behavioral drift in scanning populations.

(and I'm not just pointing these out because of the em dashes)

GPTZero (which is just another AI model that can have similar flaws and is definitely not infallible, but is at least another data point) rates my excerpts as 78% chance AI written, 22% chance of AI-human mix.

To me at least, the article still seems to be majority human-written, though.
by avaer | 2026-02-11 02:04:27+00:00
When the GPT-5 router architecture was introduced I worried that OpenAI would use the technology as a pretext to mislead or defraud users by substituting in worse quality when they could get away with it and then "blame it on the AI" when they got too agressive.

I don't know if we're there yet but these reports do not fill me with hope.
by cofunctor | 2026-02-11 02:05:35+00:00
One nice way of seeing the inevitability of the complex numbers is to view them as a metric completion of an algebraic closure rather than a closure of a completion.

Taking the algebraic closure of Q gives us algebraic numbers, which are a very natural object to consider. If we lived in an alternative timeline where analysis was never invented and we only thought about polynomials with rational coefficients, you’d still end up inventing them.

If you then take the metric completion of algebraic numbers, you get the complex numbers.

This is sort of a surprising fact if you think about it! the usual construction of complex numbers adds in a bunch of limit points and then solutions to polynomial equations involving those limit points, which at first glance seems like it could give a different result then adding those limit points after solutions.
by csa | 2026-02-11 02:05:40+00:00
> You quoted "reasonable", but nothing what you said has any effect on reasonableness.

Being notified that you are or have been breaking the law and being told that there will be severe consequences if you don’t stop seems reasonable to me.

It may not be how we do it in the west, but it’s hard to argue that this can’t be perceived as reasonable.

Let me give you an example that opened my eyes. It’s one of many, but it’s one that you may have heard of.

Michal Fay was caned in Singapore in the 1990s. I was so put off by this, that I swore never to go to Singapore. I thought that the punishment far exceeded that which could be justified by the crimes he committed (petty stuff like vandalizing cars).

Then, within a 6 month period, I met two families who lived as expatriates in Singapore at the same time, one in the same community.

They all said that MF was a pariah. They also both said that he and his family had been given gradually escalating warnings over a short period of time, with the next to last one being “MF needs to leave Singapore now”, and the last one being “you (his family) and MF need to leave Singapore now”. Apparently the job was too good, so the family stayed. We know the rest of the story.

A decade later, I met a woman who worked in Singapore at the time, and she expressed similar sentiments.

While I still think the punishment was excessive (even reduced to 4 lashings instead of 6), I lost all pity for MF and his family. They knew what was coming, and they either didn’t understand the culture they were in, or they didn’t believe what they were told.

I’ve see similar types of policing (with warnings and an explanation of potential consequences) happen in Japan, China, and South Korea. IMHO, it works the way they want it to (mostly as an early deterrent, with very little prosecution actually taking place). This is one reason why there is such a high success rates of criminal convictions in places like Japan — if they make the effort to book you, they have overwhelming evidence, usually collected when the criminal has been warned.

We may not like the laws, we may not like the punishments, but we shouldn’t be surprised by the outcomes.

> If someone warns you that they're going to murder you if you post another 5 comments on HackerNews, and keeps you up-to-date with every comment you make, nothing about those warnings makes the subsequent murder after your 5th comment more reasonable than if they hadn't given those warnings.

Great strawman.

Posting on HN is not against the law (at least where I am).
by macintux | 2026-02-11 02:06:07+00:00
There are other threads for articles inspired by it. Those with comments:

Parsix - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27166162

TypeScript - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28425435

C - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44507405

Without comments:

Non-blank strings in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34947030

Email type in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34946791

Java - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29250169
by Barrin92 | 2026-02-11 02:06:09+00:00
the argument isn't that flat organizations don't work, but that they're even more insidious than actual hierarchies. Zizek gives two great examples of the startup and the modern family. In the startup your boss is still your boss, except officially he's your friend, so you can't even hold him accountable, because there are no bosses. (political analog, traditional socialist parties, we're all comrades so better don't think anything wrong)

In the non-hierarchical family you aren't just ordered to dress up and go see grandma, you're guilt tripped into feeling bad about not seeing grandma, until you do it out of "your own volition". In the non-hierarchy you're not just supposed to be outwardly obedient but free on the inside, you're supposed to be obedient on the inside too. They work well, really well. Unlike the traditional hierarchy the tyranny is absolute because it has no borders and doesn't have to acknowledge itself.

>However the problems with traditional hierarchies are so well known

exactly, because they're visible. Valve, despite its utopian conditions, is weirdly enough, very secretive
by danieltanfh95 | 2026-02-11 02:06:30+00:00
"good type systems" in Python and Javascript has a escape hatch via dicts/objects, and are frankly, not "good" compared to FP via haskell etc, but it is realistic, reliable, open and consistent, which is exactly my point!

You could spend more time understanding Pydantic before you make this comment however.
by grouchy | 2026-02-11 02:07:09+00:00
Yeah, we've been following it closely. We already support the majority of the MCP spec and plan to add support for UI over MCP.

But our use case is a little different. MCP Apps embed interfaces into other agents. Tambo is an embedded agent that can render your UI. There's overlap for sure, but many of the developers using us don't see themselves putting their UI inside ChatGPT or Claude. That's just not how users use their apps.

That said, we're thinking about how we could make it easy to build an embedded agent and then selectively expose those UI elements over MCP Apps where it makes sense.
by snazz | 2026-02-11 02:08:44+00:00
Am I the only one who feels like it isn't the responsibility of backbone ISPs to filter traffic like this? In the case of a DDoS situation I could get behind it, but in this case I feel as though it's not Cogent's problem if I want to use telnet from a device on Charter's network to a Vultr VPS, even if it may be ill-advised.

(Of course, the article only speculates that this traffic filtering is what's going on; there isn't any hard proof, but it feels plausible to me.)
by bmurphy1976 | 2026-02-11 02:08:49+00:00
I haven't read the article yet but this conversation reminds me of Docker. Lots of people "didn't get it." I told them at the time: if you don't get it you aren't ready for it yet so don't worry about it. When you do need it, you'll get it and then you'll use it and never look back. Look at where we are with containers now.
by slg | 2026-02-11 02:09:10+00:00
The first lady originally came to the US on a tourist visa before getting work as a model and eventually applying for a green card several years later. Musk came to the US on a student visa for a program that he never actually enrolled in. Even if you want to argue its "race-neutral", it's certainly not "proximity to the president neutral" so it still is very much "Gestapo-like behavior".
by Curiositiy | 2026-02-11 02:10:26+00:00
Spain just naturalized 500k illegals. Europe can't do good enough shit for the citizens.
So ofc you have to tackle the evol US banking cartels. TOP priority.'

There are days i wish some FAB-5000 would land in Brussels, both to flatten all things EU-related and quite some of the trenched in Muslims too.
by dgfl | 2026-02-11 02:11:00+00:00
You seem to be familiar with the field, yet this is a very strange view? I work on exactly this slice of solid state physics and semiconductor devices. I’m not sure what you mean here.

The way we construct Hamiltonians is indeed somewhat ad hoc sometimes, but that’s not because of lack of fundamental knowledge. In fact, the only things you need are the mass of the electron/proton and the quantum of charge. Everything else is fully derived and justified, as far as I can think of. There’s really nothing other than the extremely low energy limit of QED in solid state devices, then it’s about scaling it up to many body systems which are computationally intractable but fully justified.

We don’t even use relativistic QM 95% of the time. Spin-orbit terms require it, but once you’ve derived the right coefficients (only needed once) you can drop the Dirac equation and go back to Schrödinger. The need for empirical models has nothing to do with fundamental physics, and all to do with the exorbitant complexity of many-body systems. We don’t use QFT and the standard model just because, as far as I can tell, the computation would never scale. Not really a fault of the standard model.
by roywiggins | 2026-02-11 02:12:28+00:00
The rest of it seems to be substantially edited by an LLM too, or at least it's composed much like LLM outputs often are these days: “not a gradual decline, not scanner attrition, not a data pipeline problem, but a step function.”

"Not X, not Y, not Z" is a common LLM tic, and there's a few more like it in there.
by jleyank | 2026-02-11 02:13:47+00:00
The housing crisis won’t be properly solved until the job site crisis is solved with it. There’s a whole lotta land suitable for housing, but most of those parcels lack modern, stem jobs. Until that’s solved, via remote or satellite work, the jobs will be where housing is expensive, and the lesser cost housing will be the province of retirees or the tech-poor.
by tokyobreakfast | 2026-02-11 02:14:13+00:00
Two wrongs don't make a right.

Apple still includes uucp for some unknown reason.

The saving disk space argument makes no sense because telnet was one of the smaller binaries in /usr/bin.

Telnet continues to be widely used for select use cases and being told we're naughty by not including it feels punitive and just adds extra steps. What are you supposed to do, trash a $1m piece of industrial equipment because Apple wants to remind you Telnet is insecure?

New devices are still being released with Telnet where SSH is impractical or unnecessary.
by marcus_holmes | 2026-02-11 02:16:01+00:00
I think you were incredibly lucky to get to write code that you enjoyed writing.

Most of the commercial code I've written, over a 30+ year career, has been shite. The mandate was always to write profitable code, not elegant code. I started (much like the OP) back in the 80's writing code as a hobby, and I enjoyed that. But implementing yet another shitty REST CRUD server for a shitty website... not so much.

I totally see a solution: get the LLM to write the shitty REST CRUD server, and focus on the hard bits of the job.