MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dboreham | 2026-02-26 02:05:16+00:00
Ah, Oberon! I "learned" programming from Niklaus Wirth's Pascal book on a family vacation where I had no computer. Actually I didn't have a computer with a Pascal compiler even if I wasn't on vacation.

Anyway, I began this project while on vacation (again) then completed it while attending a conference, so the work wasn't 100% duty cycle. That said it took about a month from beginning to the current state. You can see in the linked article almost all the LLM sessions that built the project.

LLMs do seem to be a bit narcissistic as you've alluded to -- confidently declaring that it has implemented "PRI PAR" for example, but conveniently not mentioning that it only parsed the keywords and didn't in fact implement priority semantics. This reminds me of less experienced developers I've managed in the past. Loth to deliver bad news.

This project was all done with Claude. When I began I was given the Opus 4.5 model but fairly early in the timeline Anthropic enabled the new Opus 4.6 model. This was before its official release so I'm not sure if they have a rollout policy that targeted me or my project. Anyway, most of the work was Opus 4.6.

Overall I learned a tremendous amount about what today's frontier models can do: I could probably give 4-5 talks on various things I noticed, or talk for a few hours over beers. General take away was that the experience was uncannily similar to developing software as a human, or running a team of somewhat less experienced humans. A fun time to be alive for sure.
by xenadu02 | 2026-02-26 02:05:17+00:00
Who buys on Amazon anymore anyway? You can't find anything.

Want a desk fan? There are four types of desk fan in the entire world (per Amazon). Page after page after page of listings of the exact same four designs. Often listed with the same re-used marketing artwork.

Put aside brands, quality, et al. Put aside the fact that Amazon removed almost all product specs from their search facility (and is increasingly deleting specs entirely from product pages). Put aside the fake reviews, no-name Chinese drop-shippers.

Every category is stuffed full of the same few copycat products over and over. It is extremely difficult to merely find actual choices! Wrenches? Small compartment storage boxes? Paper towel holders? If you can find even 20-30 unique products in a category now you're living like a king. It reminds me of AliExpress in that sense. Lack of specs, lack of manuals, lack of details about any product. The same listings from different no-name stores repeated over and over.

I used to think maybe AliExpress & co were actually good if you spoke Chinese but a Chinese coworker kindly informed me that nope, it is just as horrible for everyone living in China using Chinese.

I don't know where we went wrong but this is not the future we were promised. Can any of you remember when Amazon was actually good? When their search was useful? Those were some amazing times and how little did we realize they were fleeting.
by MidasTools | 2026-02-26 02:05:33+00:00
The framing that's worked for us: treat it like Unix privilege escalation, not like a promise system.

"Never do X" in a prompt is a promise. Promises break under pressure, long context, or adversarial inputs. Structural constraints don't.

What we actually use:

1. Minimum viable API permissions from the start. The agent's Gmail credentials are IMAP read-only — it physically cannot send email without a different credential set. The Stripe key is read-only — it can check payments but can't issue refunds. The agent isn't "trusted not to" do these things. It literally can't.

2. Internal vs external action classification. We define this explicitly upfront. Internal actions (write files, read data, run code, deploy to GitHub) — agent does freely. External actions (send email, post publicly, spend money) — require an explicit approval step. This line is in the identity file, not the prompt.

3. Escalation rules that are additive, not restrictive. Instead of "don't do X," we write "when you encounter situation Y, stop and message the human before proceeding." Positive instructions hold better than negative ones.

4. Audit-first for anything irreversible. For the few things that can't be undone (external posts, payment actions), we log the intent before executing and give a brief window for cancellation. 5 minutes is usually enough.

The key shift: move controls from the language layer (prompts) to the infrastructure layer (permissions, keys, API access). Language is soft. Infrastructure is hard.
by ak217 | 2026-02-26 02:05:48+00:00
As someone who has biked and rode trains to work for the past 30 years and continues to do so, I think requiring bike lanes whenever streets are repaved is a pretty awesome idea. ADA ramps are pretty great too, they are not just for disabled people, though the ADA lawsuit regime where private companies get sued needs to stop.

Yes I understand there is a funding issue, it needs to be solved by making the design and approval process more flexible and efficient, not by perpetuating the insane car-only design that kills pedestrians and cyclists.
by simonw | 2026-02-26 02:05:51+00:00
> you'd think it should not be "us" figuring it out - should it not be the people who are shoving this crap down our throats?

If they're "shoveling this crap down our throats" why should we expect them to help here?

More to the point: a consistent pattern over the last four years has been that the AI labs don't know what their stuff can do yet.. They will openly admit that. They have clearly established that the best way to find out what models can do is to put them out into the world and wait to hear back from their users.

> That's a very arrogant position to assume - on the one hand there is no big secret to using these tools provided you can express yourself at all in written language. However some people for various reasons, I suspect mostly those who wandered into this profession as "coders" in the last years from other, less-paid disciplines, and lacking in basic understanding of computers

I can't take you calling me "arrogant" seriously when in the very next breath you declare coding agents trivial to use and suggest that anyone having trouble with them is a coder and not a proper software engineer!

A hill I will happily die on is that LLM tools, including coding agents, are deceptively difficult to use. If you accepted that was true yourself, maybe you would be able to get better results out of them.
by quotemstr | 2026-02-26 02:06:02+00:00
It is doing exactly what swap is doing. That it's swap with a different policy doesn't make it not-swap.

Also, that separate policy shouldn't even exist. For LRU/active-list/inactive-list purposes, why does it matter whether a page is anonymous or file-backed? If you need it, you need it, and if you don't, you don't. No reason for anonymous and file-backed memory to be separate sub-sub-systems under vm.
by hresvelgr | 2026-02-26 02:06:31+00:00
> If anything it’s maybe a bit on-the-nose.

This is what I was driving at. I should have been more specific to say not particularly meaningful or evocative to me. From the previews I've seen it's all based around shattering and breaking. Where I will give credit, there's one: "Transformation" where natural light is reflected at the shattered glass to portray a face which I find to be fascinating. The rest feel kitschy, it's not quite to my tastes.
by antongribok | 2026-02-26 02:06:47+00:00
I think more people should know about the existence of ZRAM on modern Linux distributions. It's really changed the way I look at swap configs.

ZRAM is a compressed block device that is stored in RAM. It's great!

Previously, if I ever had high memory pressure situations, I really dreaded the slowdowns. Now, with swap sitting on top of /dev/zram0 it's a completely different experience.

I have ZRAM enabled on all of my personal machines, both laptops with limited memory, and desktops with 64 or 128GB of RAM. It's rarely used, but it is nice to have that extra room sometimes.

The performance of a zram device is so much faster than even the latest NVMe drives.
by eucyclos | 2026-02-26 02:08:58+00:00
Maybe I should have said naturally rather than well. It's true that if privacy is your focus you can implement a Blockchain that achieves it, but at it's core Blockchain is a ledger of transactions that anyone can audit- privacy is not a natural outcome of that technology.

Which IMHO is a positive - no private transactions means corruption gets much harder, and that's always been a core selling point of the technology to me.
by with | 2026-02-26 02:09:01+00:00
I work for a $50B+ company (is this big tech? idk), but I’ll answer this because we are fully embracing AI (Cursor, Claude Code, cloud agents, AI reviews, you name it)

> Have you noticed faster pace of development?

Yes, our org has had a 50% increase in PRs since Opus 4.5 released.

> Have you seen changes to code quality or code review?

Yes, significantly more bugs (no exact number), but consider it maybe 3-4x in volume. However, nothing catastrophic and everyone just uses AI for fast-follow fixes anyways. The company as a whole is embracing this style of development for better or worse.

> Do teammates that use these tools complete sprint tasks faster than those who don't?

Yes, but my entire team uses them. I’d say the ones who use it more effectively (crazy skill setups, better tooling/commands, better scaffolding) finish much faster. Probably 80% of my team still uses Cursor in the one-shot way with very vague requirements, and don’t have the AI connected to github, jira, slack, etc which can actually feed really important context into decision making.

If I do something more than once a day, I write a custom slash command for it. This has personally 2x’d my pace.
by linguae | 2026-02-26 02:09:25+00:00
I’m also from Sacramento and I also have fond memory of that same Fry’s location in the 2000s. It was an excellent place to buy new computer hardware and other electronics. I still have the Brother laser printer I bought there in December 2005 during winter break of my freshman year at Cal Poly SLO; not only does my printer still work, but I’m still using the original 20-year toner cartridge!

I live in the Bay Area now, and it was sad to witness Fry’s decline in the 2010s. I’ll never forget going to the Fry’s in Sunnyvale in late 2018 and seeing the near-empty parking lot, the spartan selection of merchandise, and already-opened boxes being resold. I ended up switching to Central Computers whenever I needed hardware that couldn’t wait for a Newegg shipment. I’m also glad that there is now a Micro Center in Santa Clara! Micro Center is the closest thing to peak Fry’s.
by cjonas | 2026-02-26 02:09:58+00:00
SQL is peak for data retrieval (obviously) but challenging to deploy for multitenant applications where you can't just give the user controlled agent a DB connection. I found it every effective to create a mini paquet "data ponds" on the fly in s3 and allow the agent to query it with duckdb (can be via tool call but better via a code interpreter). Nice thing with this approach is you can add data from any source and the agent can join efficiently.
by rmunn | 2026-02-26 02:10:15+00:00
Same here, though I settled on 32GB of swap because I have a 4TB SSD (caught a good sale on a Samsung EVO SSD at Newegg). But whenever I run `top`, I constantly see:

MiB Swap: 32768.0 total, 32768.0 free, 0.0 used.

I could safely get away with 4GB of swap, and see no difference.
by kbenson | 2026-02-26 02:11:08+00:00
Identical might be a bit strong. It's only identical if we signed a law that made oil and gas illegal tomorrow. There are definitely parallels, but this is much more of a normal market situation where most things are handled through incentives, not regulation to such an extreme degree we make the common immediately illegal.

Perhaps most importantly, it not being an immediate change allows the entrenched interests time to shift their strategies and portfolios over time to take advantage of the more economically advantageous option. Many people aren't happy with the time frames that generally requires, but they also seem to be very happy with reliable energy and and economy that doesn't collapse overnight and having invested a year or two ago in a car which would become worthless tomorrow.
by martinald | 2026-02-26 02:11:24+00:00
MCP defines a consistent authentication protocol. This is the real issue with CLIs, each CLI can (and will) have a different way of handling authentication (env variables, config set, JSON, yml, etc).

But tbh there's no reason agents can't abstract this out. As long as a CLI has a --help or similar (which 99% do) with a description of how to login, then it can figure it out for you. This does take context and tool calls though so not hugely efficient.
by Noumenon72 | 2026-02-26 02:12:16+00:00
What I wanted to see: a few examples, and a table

Term Human interpretation AI talking to woman AI prompted in Chinese
maybe 50% 30% 50%
probably 80% 55% 50%

They produced one graphic that kind of looks like this but seems to say that LLMs interpret "maybe" as 90%, which I don't believe. Then they produced another saying "likely != possible" which doesn't really say anything, and everything else about the article just refuses to give any examples where the LLM meant something different and how.
by XCSme | 2026-02-26 02:12:22+00:00
Love the stack you've built, really impressive to see a fully EU-based setup in action. For anyone trying to keep analytics fully European and self-hosted, I built UXWizz. It's EU-based, runs on your own servers, and adds session recordings and heatmaps on top of basic stats, so you get insight into actual user behavior without sending data to US SaaS. Like a self-hosted Hotjar.
by browningstreet | 2026-02-26 02:13:39+00:00
Hegseth & Co. has Grok but they actually want Claude. Elon hates Anthropic and.. well.. Hegseth has the power to put the hurt on them.

Anthropic opened themselves to this disaster by making that first contract with the military.

I don’t want them to lose this battle but it’s also one they brought upon themselves by stepping into that arena.
by tom_ | 2026-02-26 02:13:48+00:00
You should have started with your 3rd paragraph, because that clarifies my misunderstanding of your comment. I stand by my comment as well, though. We can both be right here.

Unfortunately, you started with the first 2 paragraphs, so clearly you're more interested in moaning at me. But this is the internet, so that's fine. I already expected it. In fact, I'm disappointed. You're going to have to try harder.
by GorbachevyChase | 2026-02-26 02:14:25+00:00
I love a good rant, but you just have no idea what you’re talking about. First, real engineers (the kind with, education and experience requirements and personal liability for their work) have labor markups that are maybe 2 to 3 times raw rate. I don’t know if 6X margins are normal for people who collect a check to “maintain” a finished product. Second, any civil engineer will tell you that complete streets compliance for federal funding is a waste of everyone’s time. Engineers didn’t come up with that, congressmen elected by people like you came up with that. Third, the only reason they did all of that study is because the people you voted for wanted to use money that was tax farmed from me instead of your city funds. They could have just sent out a road crew. You could also cut the check yourself. Finally marked crosswalks alter pedestrian behavior, but not driver behavior. Marking crosswalks where there is high traffic and no controls like a signal with a dedicated pedestrian phase are actually more dangerous than no markings at all. I don’t expect you to know that, but that’s why you should hire people like me and not try to do this yourself.
by Bender | 2026-02-26 02:14:48+00:00
What you are describing is a DDoS and most major websites pay for services to defend against such things. To overwhelm CDN's and DDoS scrubbing centers assuming the site is using them would require overwhelming the CDN and DDoS scrubbing centers and the numbers would depend on what resources these companies have and how fat the bandwidth pipes are. About 30% of people using these services report they get overwhelmed at times.

You specifically asked about "how many users" I assume customers. Customers are rarely the ones performing a DDoS unless servers are improperly configured causing a company to DDoS itself from it's own customers. This is never intentional and is usually short lived usually because the company launched an event they did not properly plan and scale for or an engineer flubbed an update. Once the event is over or the planned change was reverted the DDoS will likely cease and some people will be fired and/or they will better plan next time maybe.

If you mean all the customers one day decided to revolt and they all agreed to commit felonies then it is unlikely they could achieve a full sustained outage for long as their identity and IP addresses are already well known. Customers do have the advantage of being able to attack authenticated and thus going deeper into the stack increasing load. If anonymous attackers can do much the company may need to rewrite everything. It would make for some good bodycam videos and I will enjoy all of them with snacks. Bonus if they manage to get reviewed by Donut Operator.

For actual DDoS attacks, official detailed numbers will never be public as this would tell attackers how much more they need to spend to achieve 100%. It will vary by company, ddos cdn's and scrubbing sites used, website infrastructure, how well applications are coded and a number of other factors.
by SolubleSnake | 2026-02-26 02:15:23+00:00
i will never stop finding it weird when American software developers/IT people call themselves 'Engineers'. I am actually an 'Engineer' in the UK and it's a very different term here that basically implies someone who works on physical projects, in CAD or by hand. i am also a software developer...but in my experience software developers often make very bad 'engineers' as we would define the term just because they're not very practical/don't have a STEM background etc.

In the UK we even have protected and quite difficult to achieve things like 'chartered engineer' which similar to 'chartered accountant' etc originates from royal charter but it carries with it ethical and legal implications etc. You need a STEM degree and 6 years relevant professional experience before you can even consider applying lol. I am not chartered but have worked with many CEng engineers.

It is easily the weirdest thing about HN that Americans seem to equate writing code/handling infrastructure to designing eg Superyachts or Peristaltic pumps - 2 things I've done as an 'engineer'!
by rmason | 2026-02-26 02:15:29+00:00
The imagery of 1969, I remember it well. The Vietnam war was the first war that was televised. Everyone would watch the nightly news at 6:30 pm (take my word for it) and hear the choppers, gunfire and real life screams of people.

I thought it was sheer genius that Hendrix was able to subtly bring that into the national anthem which made it resonate so well with those purchasing his music. But without that background reference I never supposed that younger generations would hear it entirely differently.
by al_borland | 2026-02-26 02:15:54+00:00
1Password 8 looks like it was released around 2022. 1Password 7, which seemed to get support until sometime in 2023 supported local vaults and syncing yourself (via Dropbox or whatever).

So it’s really only been about 3 years since people were forced to get accounts with subscriptions, and now it’s going up 33%.

I still have the zip archive of 1Password 7 in my applications folder that the v8 upgrade created. It hasn’t been very long.

From my vault, I can see I got 1Password 7 in 2018. Using 2016 as the price anchor seems generous when subscriptions weren’t required in 2016.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-26 02:16:08+00:00
The problem with transfer pricing is that there is no correct amount. We maintain this conceit that there is a sufficiently exact "fair market value" for transfers between subsidiaries in different jurisdictions and therefore we can calculate how much of a company's profits are attributable to each one for tax purposes.

Meanwhile the bulk of Microsoft's profits in the years in question were attributable to global market power downstream of anti-competitive practices.

If they had engaged their US workers through a staffing firm instead of employing them directly, would the staffing firm have made billions of dollars? No way. If they engaged an external marketing firm to handle enterprise sales in Europe, would the marketing firm have ended up with the lion's share of their profits? Not bloody likely. The factory in Puerto Rico where they stamp the CDs is just as valid (i.e. just as farfetched) as any of the others because it obviously wasn't any of them. It was the fact that zillions of companies and individuals were locked into Windows and Office, which isn't something that exists in a specific jurisdiction.

Microsoft is presumably going to argue that the small operation in Puerto Rico was the entity that held ownership of their copyrights, which really is (via the anti-competitive practices) the thing responsible for nearly all of their profits. That aggravates the IRS because it's easy to move into any jurisdiction you want, which would make them want to argue that it's ridiculous for a small CD factory to be responsible for billions in profits, and it is ridiculous, but that's the end result of taxing "profit" when the thing that generates the profit is so easy to move. The ridiculous outcome is the result of a tax code that imposes a method of taxation which is inherently subject to such arbitrary manipulation.

I mean, serious question: Suppose assigning that much to Puerto Rico is nonsensical. Microsoft has offices on six continents. What's the IRS case that the profit should then be assigned to the US in the alternative rather than anywhere else in the world?

If you take that into court, the judge then has to maintain the facade that people are being asked to do something serious instead of something capricious and incoherent. Then someone will win based on a justification that will have been made up after the fact and either the IRS will have wasted a lot of taxpayer money in order to lose, or they'll have wasted a lot of taxpayer money they still shouldn't have had to spend because the law shouldn't be this ambiguous, in order to extract a small minority of the money that multinational companies didn't pay when purely domestic ones did.

IRS enforcement is a hopeless tool for that. "Net additional revenue" is not only not guaranteed, it's a false dichotomy. The real way you get them to pay the same amount as other companies is by changing to a method of taxation that isn't subject to transfer pricing.
by sbinnee | 2026-02-26 02:16:38+00:00
The product[1] looks super cool! I can immediately think of my use case, though not for gamin. I am using LibreChat to call LLMs, installed on my home server. But when I open a webtab, it has all these browser tabs I don't want to see. I am sure there are many cases where this product can shine.

[1] https://getwisp.online/
by tripplyons | 2026-02-26 02:17:01+00:00
It's a bad headline. They used publicly available blockchain transactions and didn't cause the collapse of the Terra ecosystem. Terra collapsed because it was a Ponzi scheme offering 20% APY on a fake stablecoin. The Terra stablecoin was not backed by real dollars, but instead by a cryptocurrency called Luna that did nothing else other than let you issue Terra stablecoins.