MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by earonesty | 2026-02-08 16:41:40+00:00
This is faked. There are no details in the post about how the bot was set up. Clearly there are no e-commerce systems that have MCP tooling that allow arbitrary 80pct discounts without explicit permission from the owner.

Any advice or requests for more details are deleted by the moderator.

This is a "set up", designed by the owners of the subreddit to make people who don't know how AI and tooling work afraid of AI. Clearly the author is colluding with the moderators to prevent difficult questions or concerns.
by Dansvidania | 2026-02-08 16:42:47+00:00
Hold up. This is a funny comment but thinking should be free. It’s when they are trying to sell you something (looking at you “all the AI CEOs”) that unsubstantiated claims are problematic.

Then again the problem is that the public has learned nothing from the theranos and WeWorks and even more of a problem is that the vc funding works out for most of these hype trains even if they never develop a real business.

The incentives are fucked up. I’d not blame tech enthusiasts for being too enthusiastic
by mark_round | 2026-02-08 16:42:50+00:00
If you'd like to experiment with running your own AS in private address space, connecting to a friendly network of geeks over wireguard tunnels, check out DN42 https://dn42.dev/Home.

It's a great way to explore routing technologies and safely experiment with your own AS, running the same protocols as the "real" Internet, just in private space.

If you do get set up, give me a shout (https://markround.com/dn42), I'd be happy to peer with you if you want to expand beyond the big "autopeer" networks :)
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-02-08 16:42:51+00:00
The last 10ish years of his intellectual life were unfortunately not great.

He took the wrong positioning on the war in Ukraine. Along with others.

And it looks here like he made a series of personal relationship mistakes.

The man can't speak for himself anymore, but it's not a good look and I don't think his partner has done him any favours here by deflecting responsibility.

Clearly awful mistakes were made.
by api | 2026-02-08 16:42:52+00:00
One of the crazy things about these files is: it’s clear that the root motivation for a huge number of these guys is just to get with very young girls (and sometimes boys).

Nothing sophisticated. Nothing inspired. Just what the most atavistic parts of the brain stem want.

They were billionaires and high ranking academics and politicians. They could have done so many things but that’s where a huge portion of their energy went. It was clearly one of the most important things to them.

Makes me think of the paperclip maximizers idea. We are paperclip maximizers. This is how a paperclip maximizer would behave. They could extend health and life and explore the universe, but paperclips. Must make paperclips.

I also get the impression that the reason a lot of these guys are attracted to authoritarian right wing ideology, neo-monarchism, etc. is the same. It’s because it would let them have little girls without pesky enlightenment notions like rights or woke nonsense about equality getting in the way.

Gotta make paperclips. Burn the world to make paperclips.
by opto | 2026-02-08 16:43:02+00:00
Replying for anyone reading this comment: Le Guin was a Daoist, but also, and concurrently, an anarchist. So much of her writing, especially The Word for World is Forest, parts of Earthsea, The Dispossessed, is informed by her anarchism. Very often you find Le Guin exploring ideas of an anarchist response to colonialism, or just enjoying setting out an anarchist society and imagining how it might work, how it would unfold, the challenges it would face, and the solutions people might try.
by andyfilms1 | 2026-02-08 16:43:20+00:00
I don't think he's missing the point at all. A band saw is an immutable object with a fixed, deterministic capability--in other words, a tool.
An LLM is a slot machine. You can pull keep pulling the lever, but you'll get different results every time. A slot machine is technically a machine that can produce money, but nobody would ever say it's a tool for producing money.
by almosthere | 2026-02-08 16:44:26+00:00
So,... isn't it illegal to do that. If someone in the Philippines does not have a CA/AZ/Whatever driver's license - then Waymo is breaking the law. It's probably worse than that.

It also proves that Waymo's capabilities are overstated. I keep getting pushback when I complain about specific situations in this forum about how Waymo thinks about complex situations - and this entire time, it may have been humans navigating them.
by MontyCarloHall | 2026-02-08 16:44:30+00:00
For those not getting this immediately (I sure didn't):

_____________
sequence 1 2 2 1 1 2 1 2 2 1
run lens 1 2-- 2-- 1 1 2-- 1

Read out the bottom sequence of run lengths, and be amazed that it's the same as the first 7 digits as the top sequence. Extend the bottom to continue to recapitulate the top sequence, and add terms to the top sequence accordingly to reflect the run lengths in the bottom sequence. Repeat infinitely.
by arjie | 2026-02-08 16:45:31+00:00
My wife and my dad enjoy assembling furniture (the former free style, the latter off the instructions). I like the furniture assembled but I cannot stand doing it. Some of us are one way and others are the other way.

For me, LLMs are joyful experiences. I think of ideas and they make them happen. Remarkable and enjoyable. I can see how someone who would rather assemble the furniture, or perhaps build it, would like to do that.

I can’t really relate but I can understand it.
by burnerToBetOut | 2026-02-08 16:45:38+00:00
> …How do you keep architectural
> intent explicit…
> …
> …without slowly drifting into a
> system you no longer fully understand…?

One way some of the more mature shops I've worked at have solved the understandability problem (for human devs) is with visual modeling.

Visual modeling doesn't necessarily mean by-the-book UML, of course. Even junior devs understand simple misshapen boxes, lines and arrows on a white board.

You'd be amazed at how effective even imperfectly-drawn visual models are at keeping meatbags' memories on track with how the system hangs together.

In a brick and mortar dev shop, ideally you want a large whiteboard that's conveniently positioned somewhere that every team member can glance at at any time.

I know it works wonders for me, anyway. In fact, just yesterday I added a PlantUML-backed visual model generating skill to the coding CLI I've been using lately. They get output to a uml folder at the root of my projects.

> …I’m curious how others handle this in practice…

I'm banking on good old fashioned UML defined as machine-readable text files as one way to remind coding agents of architectural intent in my AI coding-assisted projects.
by notahacker | 2026-02-08 16:46:35+00:00
the "we didn't know" trope is actually somewhat believable in the cases of people that casually met a socialite at the behest of others. Less so in the case of somebody like Chomsky who was getting emails from Epstein asking him about how to defend himself in the media and responding with commentary about "the hysteria that has developed about the abuse of women"

The nicest spin you can put on it is that it wouldn't be the first time that Chomsky had endorsed something without too much scrutiny because it aligned with his personal beliefs about who were motivated to manufacture lies, and the others involved politics rather than paedophiles
by bambax | 2026-02-08 16:46:38+00:00
The talent of Epstein was to offer to each prominent people things they cared about. To Chomsky it was "linguistics"; to Jack Lang (a very public figure, former Cultur Ministry, who just resigned from his position yesterday because of the scandal) it was to make an "art foundation" of some sort, and a movie about his (Lang's) life work.

Bezos paying tens of millions to Trump's current wife to make a "documentary" about her hats is similar. The only difference is, Bezos is not (yet?) accused of statutory rape. But the idea is the same.

You never "bribe" people up front, offering them money in a direct, obvious quid pro quo. You're sincerely excited to contribute to their pet project.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-08 16:47:12+00:00
I don't know as of when. But I have no problem listing one movie after another for the 70's, 80's, 70's, 200x but since then it's been longer and longer between movies that stand out.

Oppenheimer and 'Don't look up' are the exceptions. Everything everywhere all at once was mentioned here but I found it pretty thin and predictable.
by thunfischtoast | 2026-02-08 16:47:33+00:00
This has been a common pattern for me before LLMs, when my work required constantly rebuilding models or doing small deployments where each task/try took more than ~20ish seconds and less than say 3 minutes. It's enough to pull you out of it but not enough to make a proper break or switch tasks.

I suffered from the problems you describe, grabbing a browser window or my phone which would usually take my attention much longer than the task and it left me burned out at the end of the day.

There are some helper tools, like blocking "interesting" pages (like HN, reddit) on the browser, putting the phone in the bag at the end of the room or using a pomodoro timer so sequence proper breaks. But at the end the only thing that really helped is getting into meditation: I try to use these little interruptions of flow as a opportunity to bore myself. Try to reframe boredom from being an annoyance that needs to be fought to a chance to relax your brain for a couple of seconds and refocus.

The want to grab the phone is hard at the start, but it gets better very soon when you manage to push through the discomfort in the first days.
by blks | 2026-02-08 16:48:02+00:00
I don’t think it’s correct to claim that AI generated code is just next level of abstraction.

All previously mentioned levels produce deterministic results. Same input, same output.

AI-generation is not deterministic. It’s not even predictable. And example of big software companies clearly show what mass adoption of AI tools will look like in terms of software quality. I dread if using AI will ever be an expectation, this will be level of enshittification never before imagined.
by neomantra | 2026-02-08 16:48:13+00:00
That's precisely how I refactored dank-extract from dank-mcp and finally got dank-data to archive CT canna-data every Sunday at 4:20pm Pacific.

[1] https://github.com/AgentDank/dank-extract

[2] https://github.com/AgentDank/dank-data
by dwringer | 2026-02-08 16:48:42+00:00
While this is certainly very true, I find coding through an LLM to require far less effort dedicated to this cognitive switching than does writing in some programming language, primarily because I no longer have to load the mental context for converting my high level human instructions to code that a programming environment actually supports. The mental context seems more lightweight and closer to the way I think about the problem when I'm not sitting at the computer actively working on it. If an idea comes to me while I'm away from the computer I can momentarily sit down, type in whatever I just thought of, and get going almost immediately. I think it also saves a huge amount of cognitive load and stress (for me) involved with switching around between different programs and languages, an unfortunate fact of life when dealing with legacy systems.
by bonsai_spool | 2026-02-08 16:49:00+00:00
I wish authors would use their own voice instead of an LLM, especially in a rhetorical piece. I like the history of science, and might have otherwise read the authors' paper, but the use of LLM-isms throughout this page makes me worry that the arxiv submission will show the same lack of care/effort.

Here's the manuscript at any rate, somewhat hard to find on the webpage:

Convergent Discovery of Critical Phenomena Mathematics Across Disciplines: A Cross-Domain Analysis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22389
by mattmanser | 2026-02-08 16:49:03+00:00
Don't be stupid, if an AI can figure out how to arrange code, it can also figure out how to pick the right architecture choices.

Right now millions of developers are providing tons of architecture questions and answers. That's all going to be used as training data for the next model coming out in 6 months time.

This is a moat on our jobs as deep as a puddle.

If you believe LLMs will be able to do complex coding tasks, you must also concede they will be able to make the relatively simpler architecture choices easily simply by asking the right questions. Something they're already starting to be able to do.
by keybored | 2026-02-08 16:49:14+00:00
More AI Inevitablism Soothsaying.[1]

> I shipped more code last quarter than any quarter in my career. I also felt more drained than any quarter in my career. These two facts are not unrelated.

I’m gonna be generous (and try not to be pedantic) and assume that more-code means more bugfixes and features (and whatnot) and not more LOC.

Your manager has mandated X tokens a day or you feel you have to use it to keep up. Huh?

> I build AI agent infrastructure for a living. I'm one of the core maintainers of OpenFGA (CNCF Incubating), I built agentic-authz for agent authorization, I built Distill for context deduplication, I shipped MCP servers. I'm not someone who dabbles with AI on the side. I'm deep in it. I build the tools that other engineers use to make AI agents work in production.

Oh.

> If you're an engineer who uses AI daily - for design reviews, code generation, debugging, documentation, architecture decisions - and you've noticed that you're somehow more tired than before AI existed, this post is for you. You're not imagining it. You're not weak. You're experiencing something real that the industry is aggressively pretending doesn't exist. And if someone who builds agent infrastructure full-time can burn out on AI, it can happen to anyone.

This is what ChatGPT writes to me when I ask “but why is that the case”.

1. No, you are not wrong

2. You don’t have <bad character trait>

3. You are experiencing something real

> I want to talk about it honestly. Not the "AI is amazing and here's my workflow" version. The real version.

And it will be unfiltered. Raw. And we will conclude with how to go on with our Flintstone Engineering[2] but with some platitudes about self-care.

> The real skill ... It's knowing when to stop.

Stop prompting? Like, for

> Knowing when the AI output is good enough.

Ah. We do short prompting sessions instead.

> Knowing that your brain is a finite resource and that protecting it is not laziness - it's engineering.

Indeed it’s not this thing. It’s that—thing.

> AI is the most powerful tool I've ever used. It's also the most draining. Both things are true. The engineers who thrive in this era won't be the ones who use AI the most. They'll be the ones who use it the most wisely.

Of course we will keep using “the most powerful tool I’ve ever used”. But we will do it wisely.

What’s to worry about? You can use ChatGPT as your therapist now.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46935607

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163821
by morshu9001 | 2026-02-08 16:49:53+00:00
It was never relevant, LLM or not. When reviewing junior SWEs' code pre LLMs, I didn't care about 75% of the style guide. I cared if they were using the DB wrong or had race conditions or wrote code I couldn't read.

In other comment, meant that other reviewers who used to nitpick have stopped for whatever reason, maybe because overall people are busier now.
by 47282847 | 2026-02-08 16:50:04+00:00
I am not a fan of any person as idol or hero, we are all children of the same flesh, but I am a fan of Chomskys work and thought processes. But even if you disagree on his positions, any involvement in Epsteins narcissistic games just don’t fit his life story and his writings at all, whereas it makes perfect sense to me that he and his wife fell for it and really assumed good faith. Which is, ultimately, at the core of his belief system and transpires from all his writing. I did in the past, until I got hit hard by how cruel and dark some people can be who I considered to be close friends. So, overall, I totally believe them, I wish them all the best to recover, from deep in my heart, and I am certain they will learn a hard lesson from this, and will try to make up for their mistake of putting too much trust in other people’s hands. Which is sad but the reality of the broken state of humans who have survived unspeakable cruelty in their childhood and have not received the necessary support to process it. Like Epstein and Trump, to only name two.

(For transparency: I met Chomsky twice.)
by jqpabc123 | 2026-02-08 16:50:11+00:00
Do they force it out of the people involved?

Yes, in a manner of speaking.

Government has lots of coercive tools at it's disposable. For example, search warrants and incarceration.

If you refuse to hand over your keys, government can easily nullify you or your relatives ability to make use of them and make your life really bad in the meantime.

Keepjng money from government is yet another crypto myth that doesn't hold up very well in many cases.
by woeirua | 2026-02-08 16:50:12+00:00
You only feel that way about power tools because the transition for carpentry happened long ago. Carpenters viewed power tools much as we do LLMs today. Furniture factories, equivalent of dark agentic code factories, caused much despair to them too.

Humans are involved with assembly only because the last bits are maniacally difficult to get right. Humans might be involved with software still for many years, but it probably will look like doing final assembly and QA of pre-assembled components.
by HPsquared | 2026-02-08 16:50:22+00:00
Phase transitions are a really nice way to explain to someone how a complex system can appear to flip from one state to another. Especially the importance of looking at the right variable. If you look at water at 99°C or 101°C (at standard pressure) it appears like a sudden change. But if you consider energy balance, it's not like it just flips. Energy input, on the other hand, shows gradual change of phase as more energy is supplied. But then you can also have superheated water in the microwave and it's just waiting to (partially) boil... So many analogies.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-02-08 16:50:23+00:00
That is exactly my experience. Every single time I get an LLM to write some code for me, it saves me no time because I have to review it carefully to make sure there are no mistakes. LLMs still, even after work has been done, completely make up methods and syntax that doesn't exist. They still get logic wrong or miss requirements.

Right now the only way to save time with LLMs is to trust the output and not review it. But if you do that, you're just going to produce crappy software.
Show HN: VibeBox – an ultrafast macOS sandbox for AI agents
by robcholz | 2026-02-08 16:50:29+00:00
Hi HN! I built VibeBox because running agents locally was either risky, or endlessly interrupted by “allow/deny” prompts. I want agents to run commands, edit files, and execute code freely without touching my real machine.

VibeBox runs the agent inside a fully isolated Linux VM via Apple’s Virtualization Framework, so the host stays sealed off while the agent can work without permission spam.

GitHub: https://github.com/robcholz/vibebox

What it does:

> One command drops you into a Debian VM that mounts your project read-write

> Configuration is simple: vibebox.toml sets CPU/RAM/disk and mounts.

> Warm startup is typically < 6 seconds on my M3, so jumping in/out is fast.
by cline6 | 2026-02-08 16:50:31+00:00
The reason this analogy falls down is that tools typically do one thing, do it extremely well, are extremely reliable. When I use a table saw, I know that it's going to cut this board into two pieces, exactly in this spot, and it'll do that exactly the same way every single time I use it.

You cannot tell AI to do just one thing, have it do it extremely well, or do it reliably.

And while there's a lot of opinions wrapped up in it all, it is very debatable whether AI is even solving a problem that exists. Was coding ever really the bottleneck?

And while the hype is huge and adoption is skyrocketing, there hasn't been a shred of evidence that it actually is increasing productivity or quality. In fact, in study after study, they continue to show that speed and quality actually go down with AI.
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-02-08 16:50:33+00:00
<< You're always hit hardest when it's your idols

Honestly, the reactions I am seeing suggest exactly this issue. I personally like the guy and have some level of respect of the work he has done over the course of the years, but I see no need to automatically defend him from scrutiny.

This is the part that annoys the crap out of me in today's environment -- and if more people had more sense, it would annoy them too. Sufficiently radioactive accusation is enough to make person not available for public consumption. Like.. if he he guilty ( there is a good evidence suggesting that ), charge him and see where it lands.

Prevalence of a court of public opinion indicates a real problem with real courts.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-08 16:50:47+00:00
They could have made it as simple as "if you don't respect DNT you go to jail" instead they were bribed by American corporations to adopt the American-style legalism we suffer from here.

There is another interpretation of privacy which is "freedom from harassment" and American internet companies want nothing less than the right to harass you and interrupt you from cradle to grave: if they want to build dossiers, it is to harass more profitably.

Until GDPR web professionals fought tooth and nail to keep modal dialogs out of web applications, mostly successfully. Since the GDPR makes the first interaction you have with a web site harassment it breaks the dam for further harassment. Now the average blog pops up three modal dialogs asking for your email address before you can even read anything, often one modal dialog makes it impossible to close the others.

No wonder the world is overrun with right-wing populism. Thanks, EU.
by energyscholar | 2026-02-08 16:50:55+00:00
The propagation time is the interesting part. Critical slowing down was in physics textbooks by the 1970s. Ecology didn't import it until 2003 — via a chance conversation at a conference bar. Cardiology took until the 1990s. The FDA approved the resulting cardiac test in 2001.

That's not normal diffusion. Those are 30-year gaps for math with direct life-safety applications. The paper asks why, and finds structural explanations in how we organize knowledge.
by bwfan123 | 2026-02-08 16:51:19+00:00
> are not doing the science correctly

What do you mean ? These are top-notch mathematicians who are genuinely trying to see how these tools can help solve cutting edge research problems. Not toy problems like those in AIME/AMC/IMO etc. or other similar benchmarks which are gamed easily.

> that others (e.g. FrontierMath) already did everything they claim to be doing

You are kidding right ? FrontierMath benchmark [1] is produced by a startup whose incentives are dubious to say the least.

[1] https://siliconreckoner.substack.com/p/the-frontier-math-sca...

Unlike the AI hypesters, these are real mathematicians trying to inject some realism and really test the boundaries of these tools. I see this as a welcome and positive development which is a win-win to the ecosystem.
by andout_ | 2026-02-08 16:51:48+00:00
I work at Encore so I'm biased.

We've had a bunch of people migrate over from Heroku in the last couple years, especially after they killed the free tier.

The main difference from other alternatives is that you don't write any infrastructure config - you just declare what you need in your code (databases, cron jobs, pubsub, etc) and Encore handles provisioning it in your AWS/GCP account (works locally as well where local is 1:1 to your prod env). So there's no Terraform to maintain or Docker setup to mess with.

If you're looking to move off Heroku it's pretty straightforward, most folks get their app running in an afternoon. Happy to help if you run into anything: https://encore.cloud