MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dylan604 | 2026-02-06 15:49:14+00:00
> If I can do it, anyone can.

This is such a normie perspective and shows just how unfamiliar you are with addiction. Yes, some people can avoid becoming addicted. Yes, some addicts can break the habit and detox and stay clean. At the same time, a larger number of addicts can detox but relapse in a relatively short time. There are also addicts that have not yet admitted they have a problem, and there are addicts that are okay with being an addict. Just because you have the emergency stop button that you can hit does not mean everyone else is the same way. Your lack of empathy is just gross
by dns_snek | 2026-02-06 15:50:23+00:00
> HTTP/1.1 alone is a trivial protocol

Eh? CWE-444 would beg to differ: https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/444.html

https://http1mustdie.com/

> the alternative is trusting the client's much more complicated TLS stack and its HTTP stack.

An attacker doesn't get to attack client's HTTP stack without first piercing protection offered by TLS.
by krschacht | 2026-02-06 15:50:24+00:00
I think I see the problem… and a possible solution.

I think the main problem with attempting to document this is that the system would not be running off of it. Your infrastructure document is automatically read and drives the deploy (or whatever). But if you want to make a change to a human’s responsibilities, you don’t get the simplicity of updating your organization documentation and clicking “execute.” So this new documentation you propose would always be lagging documentation rather than the actual driver of organizational behavior.

But! What if it was? What if all the managers in an organization were AI systems? They would read diff in the org chart and it initiated the communication to the respective human employees.

I could imagine testing this in a coffee-shop level business right now in which the LLM is probably capable of all the strategy and management decisions needed to effectively run it, operating within the constraints of policies and procedures all cleanly laid out in documentation.
by ajross | 2026-02-06 15:50:26+00:00
Responding to the headline and not the article substance: no, the SaaS crash is a crash because valuations are speculative and have been very high. Security price motion is only very loosely coupled to fundamentals in the short term, and this moment in history is both highly volatile and unanimously held to be overpriced. Ergo, crash.

That doesn't speak to the fundamentals, with which I only sort of agree. There are SaaS products that just grease inter-human interactions that would be hard to manage otherwise, and these are dead in the water. There are others that manage data human beings will always need to be able to understand, even if the AI is doing the work[1], which are much safer.

[1] Like bug trackers. We all love to hate Jira, but even if you have an army of Claudes doing your coding and testing for you someone somewhere needs to know what still needs to be fixed before shipment.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-06 15:50:44+00:00
> One of the things about this whole death of SAAS [...]

If I purchase a swarm of domain-specific agents I am still purchasing software.

If I am building my own agents that I am monetizing I am still indirectly purchasing compute.

If I am purchasing Cursor licenses on a subscription I am still paying for code (some my say software) as a service.

The thing is, Agents are SaaS but not all SaaS is agents.

> But like, how are IFTTT and zapier doing

Zapier is on track to exit this year - they have a GAAP revenue of around $300M in FY25 and $400M at FY26 at a $5B valuation. They can justify a $6B-7B IPO.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-02-06 15:50:58+00:00
That's not wrong, but it's a selective take. The entire economy operates like an addiction machine, using proven psychological techniques to modify individual and collective behaviours and beliefs.

It's not just social media. It's gaming, ad tech, marketing, PR, religion, entertainment, the physical design of malls and stores... And many many more.

The difference with social media is that the sharp end is automated and personalised, instead of being analysed by spreadsheet and stats package and broken out by demographics.

But it's just the most obvious poison in a toxic ecosystem.
by sebiw | 2026-02-06 15:51:06+00:00
> helping organizations build and deploy enterprise-grade AI in a secure and trusted way

> Enterprise Account contracts will no longer be offered to new customers

Seems contradictory or I just don't understand how they do product management.

My opinion: Heroku had its time but then stagnated heavily in keeping up with what was going on around it. With the rise of Container as a Service platforms there now were a multitude of more cost-efficient and flexible alternatives which were comparable to the service Heroku offered.
by ebiester | 2026-02-06 15:51:10+00:00
I'd like you to go look at PRINCE2 and SSADM. Or read the original Royce paper - https://www.praxisframework.org/files/royce1970.pdf was written explicitly to term this Antipattern "Waterfall." (Note that Royce marks it as an antipattern.)

I discussed some of this in https://www.ebiester.com/agile/2023/04/22/what-agile-alterna... and it gives a little bit of history of the methods.

We are nearly 70 years into this discussion at this point. I'm sure Grace Hopper and John Mauchly were having discussions about this around UNIVAC programs.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-02-06 15:51:52+00:00
Epstein emails make me realise that Young Bill Gates probably had more influence than all the politicians and old Bill Gates combined over the current course of history. This explains the current obsession with Sam Altman.

Actually I'm optimistic that spending less attention on these politicians (or even reading/writing [company emails future or past])

but more on making Richard Scarry's proto-dreams a bit more concrete would help us go a long way towards teaching 5yr old kids these days how to organise a quiet revolution when they reach 12 :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Late_the_Sweet_Birds_San...
by billy99k | 2026-02-06 15:52:03+00:00
"If you’re largely getting your news from Twitter, you might not even know that Trump is unpopular, because you wouldn’t even see a lot of the backlash."

You can't go anywhere without seeing someone say something bad about Trump. However, all other platforms are heavily biased toward the Left, which isn't real life either.

Even posting a hint of right-leaning ideas on Blue sky or most subreddits and you're account is instantly banned. When these bans don't happen on platforms like Twitter, the percentage of right-wing content is higher.

This tells you more about the current state of social media platforms (the Left supports banning and censorship). Sites like CNN removed their comment sections, but most left-leaning websites heavily censor them as well.

Left-wing popularity can't survive without censorship.
by hbn | 2026-02-06 15:52:05+00:00
I think you're giving Duolingo too much credit.

Their lessons aren't bad because they want to stop you from being proficient in the language; they're just uninspired and unchallenging. Their gamification is nonsense and totally non-addictive. No one is addicted to Duolingo, otherwise they'd be doing hours of lessons every day.

People just don't want to break their streak - that's the reason they continue to use it. It's an obligatory thing you do once a day, it takes 2 minutes, and they get to show you an ad.

I've used it for a couple years learning Spanish, essentially because it introduces me to new words I'm otherwise not encountering in my regular Spanish usage, and that's all I need it for. Duolingo actually used to be better, and I was paying for it for a couple years. But they did a giant AI overhaul last year that made the content worse overnight. The stories are regularly nonsense because they're LLM-generated and seemingly not vetted properly. And they somehow even broke the TTS which hasn't been able to say certain consonant sounds for months now. But I digress.
by mbreese | 2026-02-06 15:52:14+00:00
This is not a bad overview of DNS from a theoretical perspective. It’s also pretty well written and has good examples and figures.

What I think is missing is a bit more of the “in practice” side. If the author was surprised about TTL values, I doubt they have much experience with some of the other pitfalls, so I’m not surprised (not a knock on the author). But there is a reason why the phrase “It’s always DNS” exists.

As an example, it could be helpful to mention that ISP DNS resolvers (or any caching resolver in the path) could decide to ignore the TTL. In this case, your 360 sec TTL might not get updated for an hour or a day or longer. This can be infuriating to troubleshoot.

A section on troubleshooting might also be beneficial. But this mainly consists of checking results from different resolvers in your path - does it work with a local resolver? Your ISPs DNS? The authoritative server?
by CGMthrowaway | 2026-02-06 15:52:21+00:00
Every marginal dollar* taxed is a dollar politicians don't have to scrounge from a wealthy donor, in order to get that politician's pet interests achieved. You are saying MORE taxation means less wealthy donor influence on private citizens. And parent is saying LESS taxation means less policy influence on private citizens.

Here's what I say: how about both? Or neither? I think the scope of the problem is defined too narrowly so far in this particular thread.

*Or say, 10 dollars, since a donor's dollar is leveraged
by afavour | 2026-02-06 15:52:28+00:00
The 10000ft perspective on AMP was correct, the lived reality was awful. And the technical implementation used can't be divorced from everything that surrounded it: Google's place in the industry with regard to search engines, ads, etc.

In this specific example there is a very big difference between producing a format for use in a first-party app vs trying to replace standards for content used across the web.
by cityofdelusion | 2026-02-06 15:52:37+00:00
Is this accurate? I've been coding UIs since the early 2000s and one-way data binding has always been a thing, especially in the web world. Even in the heyday of jQuery, there were still good (but much less popular) libraries for doing it. The idea behind it isn't very revolutionary and has existed for a long time. React is a paradigm shift because of differential rendering of the DOM which enabled big performance gains for very interactive SPAs, not because of data binding necessarily.
by ajross | 2026-02-06 15:53:23+00:00
> if you spend months writing a tight spec, tests and have a better version of the compiler around to use when everything else fails.

Doesn't matter because your competitors will have beaten you to market. That's just a simple Darwinian point, no AI magic needed.

No one doubts that things will be different in the coming Claudepocalypse, and new ideas about quality and process will need to happen to manage it. But sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that our stone tools are still better is just a path to early retirement at this point.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-06 15:53:34+00:00
> It is annoying to see a complex field as law being judge by stock prices of some SaaS products

They're not judging the whole field of law, they're judging the SaaS products themselves. In fact, relevant expertise from humans has probably become more valuable not less, as a result of general AI worflows replacing bespoke SaaS.
by bondarchuk | 2026-02-06 15:53:46+00:00
I fundamentally don't think governments should do a careful cost-benefit analysis of everything in society and then ban it if it falls on the wrong side. Just on basic principles of personal freedom. That's why the "addiction" framing is so important, because it implies that citizens don't have agency, and so justifies the authoritarian intervention.

PS if we apply your analysis to video games they surely would have been banned too.

Edit: by the way I remember back in the day we searched for "addicting flash games" and it was seen as a positive ;p
by AndrewDucker | 2026-02-06 15:53:47+00:00
But without knowing which stocks dropped, how can we make that link?

In another submission, Amazon, Oracle, Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet are all dropping. Are we supposed to think of them as SAAS companies now?

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/ai-sell-off-stocks-amazon-or...
by tvpartscanada | 2026-02-06 15:53:56+00:00
Why Choose Our TV Main Boards for Your Repairs?
Wide Range of Brands: We provide main boards for all TV brands in Canada, including Samsung, Toshiba, LG, and more, ensuring you find the perfect match for your model.
Quality Assurance: All our TV main board replacement parts undergo strict quality checks to guarantee excellent performance and longevity.
Fast Delivery Across Canada: We offer quick shipping services to get your main board for TV to you without delays.
Expert Support: Our team is always ready to assist you in finding the correct parts and troubleshooting issues.
by psychoslave | 2026-02-06 15:54:01+00:00
That's still less leaned toward blatant lies like "yes, here is a list" and a doomacroll size of garbage litany.

Actually "no, this is not something within the known corpus of this LLM, or the policy of its owners prevent to disclose it" would be one of the most acceptable answer that could be delivered, which should cover most cases in honest reply.
by boring-human | 2026-02-06 15:54:17+00:00
> In my opinion this is equivalent to telling people not to learn to drive five years ago because of self driving

Self-driving has different economics. We're reading tea leaves, true, but it's also true that software has zero marginal cost and that $20K pays for an engineer-month in SF.

> Every single line of code produced is a liability.

Do you have a hard spec and rock-solid test cases? If you do, you have two options to a working prototype: 2-6 engineer-years, or $20K. The second option will greatly increase in quality and likely decrease in price over the next few years.

What if the spec and the test cases are the new software? Assembly programmers used to make a somewhat parallel argument to the one you're making now - every instruction is a (performance) liability.

> without humans in the loop

There will be humans, just fewer and fewer. The spec and test cases are AI-eligible too.

> safe, secure, and compliant software

I'm not sure humans' advantage here is safe, if it even exists still.
by inanutshellus | 2026-02-06 15:54:36+00:00
I've flipped that switch for book adaptations.

I let go of fanboying on what Hollywood "did to" the story and instead just decided to be thankful something I love was given a new medium / audience / interpretation... and voila! now I have two things to love.

It's still fun to point out where things could've been done differently, but instead of actually disliking the film(s) because of those things, it's just another mechanism that lets me talk to my friends about something. Much more fun than riding home in silence in any case. ;)
by _alternator_ | 2026-02-06 15:54:45+00:00
I read the whole thing somewhat critically, but at the end it became clear that the core issue I had with this post were explained in a caveat at the end: the author assumes that AI capabilities won’t improve much beyond the current state of the art.

If you replace this assumption with “we’re going to see the same magnitude improvement in the next six months that we saw in the last six months” then the post is already outdated. You can’t hire new people fast enough to effectuate this strategy before you’ll have to change course.

Instead, I’d propose allowing a bit more anarchy in your teams, letting people know that it’s OK to take the initiative, even if it means stepping on each others toes. Management should be clear that critical risks need to be mitigated (eg no security vulns, no prod outages) and be strict about those (to the point where you can say ‘yolo pushing a prod outage will affect your bonus and be added to your HR record’), but otherwise let people—anyone—code.
by bodiekane | 2026-02-06 15:54:46+00:00
Seems like the main reason it's gone up all these years is "Early adopters successfully evangelized to get more mainstream bigger-fools to buy from them at elevated prices".

At this point, Bitcoin is fully mainstream and the biggest fools have bought in. People hoped that the Trump election would mean a new giant pot of dumb money (government/tax dollars) would buy bitcoin, but now that they've realized Trump will just issue his own crypto memecoins that bet is unwinding.

I don't see where the buying is going to come from in the future. Every cab driver and retiree and stay-at-home-mom already knows about bitcoin. Maybe Tether prints another imaginary 10 billion dollars to buy bitcoin and prop up the price though, so it could still maintain for a while.
by skeledrew | 2026-02-06 15:55:05+00:00
I'm getting pretty tired of seeing call-outs like this. What happened to suggesting viable solutions to the issues? This is something that many people want, as shown by the steep rise in popularity, and saying "stop using this thing; it isn't safe" will likely just be ignored by many benefiting. Bring solutions to the table that'll mitigate the problems, without nerfing the tool into abandonment.
by ura_yukimitsu | 2026-02-06 15:55:20+00:00
You're misrepresenting both what the article says and what I wrote.

The article explicitly mentions that the jobs aren't clearly labeled so they couldn't weigh their options beforehand, that concerns raised by the workers are being dismissed by management, and that several workers have developed mental health problems.

I'm not arguing that these women should be "protected" by taking their jobs away or that they can't make their own choices; of course they're weighing their options and deciding accordingly (the article even mentions that some of them decided to leave). But it's not unreasonable to critique a system where the only choices they have are all horrible in (often more than) one way or another.
by thwarted | 2026-02-06 15:55:44+00:00
No, deterministic means that given the same inputs—source code, target architecture, optimization level, memory and runtime limits (because if the optimizer has more space/time it might find better optimizations), etc—a compiler will produce the same exact output. This is what reproducible builds is about: tightly controlling the inputs so the same output is produced.

That a compiler might pick among different specific implementations in the same equivalency class is exactly what you want a multi-architecture optimizing compiler to do. You don't want it choosing randomly between different optimization choices within an optimization level, that would be non-deterministic at compile time and largely useless assuming that there is at most one most optimized equivalent. I always want the compiler to choose to xor a register with itself to clear it if that's faster than explicitly setting it to zero if that makes the most sense to do given the inputs/constraints.
by epistasis | 2026-02-06 15:55:57+00:00
> they don’t even think we should be allowed to argue for more housing. They don’t think we are even entitled to a fair hearing. We should all recognize that silencing your political rivals is beyond the pale and that complaints like this one, even if they end up going nowhere, can have a chilling effect on activists and ordinary people who want to exercise their rights.

Don't worry, there are sooo many free speech absolutists that will come out of the woodwork to protect this dastardly attempt to stifle speech through abuse of legal procedures.

No? Where did all those absolutists go?
by uyzstvqs | 2026-02-06 15:56:04+00:00
Not a Trump-supporter nor anti-Trump. It's fine to name a government program after the administration which built it, like the Eisenhower Interstate System or how Obamacare became a common name.

What detestable is when dictators consider themselves a supreme leader of a country, like in North Korea and Iran, and they put up statues and portraits all over the place to mark the entire country as theirs.
by a_better_world | 2026-02-06 15:56:08+00:00
former practicing scientist at an institute whose name you would recognize.

The field may not be fully constrained by ethics, which is just a way of saying that the work is done by people and people have varying ethical bounds, but from what I saw many of my colleagues were highly ethics driven.

I remember one Russian colleague who smuggled blood products out of Russia so they could be tested for HIV. Because the Russian government refused to help these patients. The man risked his life to help HIV sufferers.

Ethics is best when matched with courage, if a person is willing to put their life on the line for their beliefs.

Also noting that in the western world, experiments generally need approval of an ethics board before proceeding. That board's sense of ethics might make different judgments than you on, for example, mice experiments, but there is a big difference between "not constrained" and "some of the constraints are different than what I would choose".

where in this case, the ethics boards decided that provided a certain risk/reward barrier is crossed, and that the animals are otherwise treated well, sacrificing mice to improve human health is just fine.

That is an ethics based decision that was debated for a long time. And maybe should continue to be debated, there is real value in your stance that all beings are sentient and this demands a level of care.
by el_benhameen | 2026-02-06 15:56:39+00:00
I like using it to listen to narrated versions of New Yorker articles.

Except I can’t tell it “I like narrated versions of New Yorker articles”. I can search by publisher, or I can browse narrated stories that are selected “for you” (none of which are of interest to me), but I can’t just search for “narrated stories AND New Yorker”.

And when I do finally find one, if I don’t finish in one session, there is zero context from the previous session when I return to the app—it has forgotten that I ever started listening to the story. I then need to go through the process of finding it again and trying to remember where I left off.

Yet another Apple app designed by idealists and tested and refined by nobody who actually uses the app.
by Bender | 2026-02-06 15:56:50+00:00
Just my experience but I have never found the medical industry useful for health. I have found they mostly tinker with feedback loops to give the illusion of health.

Eating right, exercise, supplementation of the things I am missing from my diet, clean air, avoiding chronic stressful situations and people are the only things I have found to benefit me. But that's just my own anecdotal experience. (n=1)
by xXSLAYERXx | 2026-02-06 15:57:05+00:00
When I first started at Big Saas Co i was 42 and most of engineering ICs were late 20s early 30s. The founder, who was at least 65, came over to me and asked how old I was. When I replied 42 he muttered "you're too old" and walked off. Welcome to big SAAS!

Funny thing is I got the job because of my experience with CSS. All the young kids couldn't center a div as the saying goes.
by YetAnotherNick | 2026-02-06 15:57:05+00:00
SaaS is generally defined as cloud based software. What has it do with easier replacement by AI?

In fact it should be opposite. Local utility software has higher chance of being replaced by AI as then you wouldn't worry about server and state and all the complexities of storage.

Also the article mention stock drop of "technology companies", which is basically stock drop of top 5 companies, like Nvidia and Apple, which is not even related to SaaS.