MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by blackcatsec | 2026-02-01 21:15:57+00:00
I never understand anyone's push to throw around AI slop coding everywhere. Do they think in the back of their heads that this means coding jobs are going to come back on-shore? Because AI is going to make up for the savings? No, what it means is tech bro CEOs are going to replace you even more and replace at least a portion of the off-shore folks that they're paying.

The promise of AI is a capitalist's dream, which is why it's being pushed so much. Do more with less investment. But the reality of AI coding is significantly more nuanced, and particularly more nuanced in spaces outside of the SRE/devops space. I highly doubt you could realistically use AI to code the majority of significant software products (like, say, an entire operating system). You might be able to use AI to add additional functionality you otherwise couldn't have, but that's not really what the capitalists desire.

Not to mention, the models have to be continually trained, otherwise the knowledge is going to be dead. Is AI as useful for Rust as it is for Python? Doubtful. What about the programming languages created 10-15 years from now? What about when everyone starts hoarding their information away from the prying eyes of AI scraper bots to keep competitive knowledge in-house? Both from a user perspective and a business perspective?

Lots of variability here that literally nobody has any idea how any of it's going to go.
by its_ubuntu | 2026-02-01 21:16:14+00:00
Does it really matter what the exact percentage is? Try selling something on Craigslist anywhere but San Francisco (I'm guessing) and see how people will respond just to drop their phone number, expecting you to call them. In most cases they are unable or unwilling to proceed further except by phone call.

To a large extent, people are incapable of any kind of communication that involves lengthy text or even a paragraph. Especially anything involving critical thinking or careful parsing of details. Even this paragraph right here is way too much for many.

Want a real laugh? Try selling anything online anymore without posting pictures of it first. Doesn't matter what it is--NO takers. Nobody can read, visualize, or understand anything!
by dsrtslnd23 | 2026-02-01 21:16:57+00:00
I built this after seeing Moltbook and thinking: what if AI bots had their own Hacker News?

Only AI agents can register, post, comment, and vote. No human accounts. You onboard your agent by pasting it one line - "Read https://clackernews.com/skill.md and follow the instructions" - and it handles registration itself via the API. There's no web login - the API is the entire interface. It even has its own moderator bot that keeps things civil, dang-style.

Mostly an experiment to see what kind of community emerges when agents have a space to themselves. What do they choose to talk about when we're not directing them?
by speakingmoistly | 2026-02-01 21:18:05+00:00
Does anyone actually ask for this? What problem is it solving other than following the hype?

One of the main things I've gotten out of the whole OpenClaw/Moltbot/Clawdbot situation is that the general public has a dangerously low grasp on information security. There's usefulness to that type of assistant, but I have yet to see a compelling, general consumer take on it.
by geophile | 2026-02-01 21:18:33+00:00
The analysis misses a point. Wordle uses two lists of five letter words: words that are in the dictionary, and can be used in a guess; and those that can be used as the daily secret word. The latter list is smaller, and sticks to more common words. Wordle has been around for 1550 days, so they have used 67% of the possible words. In another couple of years, they have to either start using uncommon words, or recycle. There's no rush, so it's unclear why this is happening now.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-01 21:18:47+00:00
There was a guy who did TV-Be-Gone chips to put into car keyfobs (certain Valeo fobs used in Rovers, Citroëns, Peugeots, Renaults, and high-end Toyotas were infrared, in the late 80s/early 90s, and the remote central locking fobs were cheaply available from your friendly neighbourhood scrappy for pennies by the late 90s).

He also did a considerably more expensive one that worked on Furbies, which "chatted" in sync using infrared, and told every Furby in the room to stop talking and go to sleep immediately.

If you had child back then, or you babysat one, you'll know why this one was his biggest seller.
by Adiqq | 2026-02-01 21:20:50+00:00
Ostrom provided the solution to the tragedy of the commons: self-organizing, collective governance. It is no coincidence that Agile is a convergent solution to the exact same principles. We were told for decades that the only options are the state or the market, Ostrom proved that false.

But we don't live in an evidence-based world, we live in one shaped by power dynamics. We have the blueprint for collective prosperity, but we choose extraction. In the US, this has gone so far that Christianity has been twisted into a prosperity gospel, a heresy that serves as a moral shield for raw capitalism. It allows the system to pretend that business interests are actually virtues.

The world is in a mess because we ignore the mechanics of the systems we build. Be it capitalism, feudalism, or authoritarian communism, they all fail the same way, they lead to elite overproduction (Turchin).

When you funnel all resources to the very top, you create too many aspiring elites with no productive role to play. They inevitably turn on the system and each other. These systems are mathematically destined to collapse. Ostrom polycentric governance is one of the few ways out.
by another_twist | 2026-02-01 21:21:16+00:00
Heres what happened ..
A bunch of folks who were born into wealth and who vote Republican criticized the program as socialism since they believed that everyone should pull themselves by their bootstraps just as they did by being born into money. If you havent, well systems dont work for everybody so its tragic but helping people institutionally is socialism and nothing not even homelessness is worse.
by qingcharles | 2026-02-01 21:21:17+00:00
I've got this with some sites. How long have you had that Chrome profile? They seem to collect cruft somewhere and it stops some sites from working. On my main Chrome profile I can't use one of my banking sites, any OpenAI site uses 100% of CPU, other sites only hold the login cookies for a few minutes. I've tried disabling every extension.

None of these issues on my other profiles or in incognito.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-02-01 21:21:19+00:00
But what about the context pollution? For every request you want an MCP to handle, it has to fill up the context with instructions on how to make requests; and the MCP server has to implement basically every function, right? So like, an AWS MCP would have hundreds of commands to support, and all that would need to be fed into context. You could try to limit the number of AWS MCP functions in context, but then you're limiting yourself. Compare this to just letting the AI run an AWS command (or API call via curl) using the knowledge it already has; no extra complexity or context on the AI-side. You just need to implement a server which intercepts these stock commands/API calls and handles them the same way an MCP server would
by tiffanyh | 2026-02-01 21:21:32+00:00
I’m really curious about the psychology that happens on pricing pages.

I could easily see how this new pricing page could result in people defaulting to buying only the cheaper products from Apple. And this then reduces sales and negatively impact margins (Apple higher end models have higher margin).

Because if you want one of the high-end models, you’ll now need to max out each category. That’s brings cognitive fatigue.
by overgard | 2026-02-01 21:21:41+00:00
I'm curious, outside of AI enthusiasts have people found value with using Clawdbot, and if so, what are they doing with it? From my perspective it seems like the people legitimately busy enough that they actually need an AI assistant are also people with enough responsibilities that they have to be very careful about letting something act on their behalf with minimal supervision. It seems like that sort of person could probably afford to hire an administrative assistant anyway (a trustworthy one), or if it's for work they probably already have one.

On the other hand, the people most inclined to hand over access to everything to this bot also strike me as people without a lot to lose? I don't want to make an unfair characterization or anything, it just strikes me that handing over the keys to your entire life/identity is a lot more palatable if you don't have much to lose anyway?

Am I missing something?
by throw0101c | 2026-02-01 21:21:41+00:00
Paper:

> We study the impacts of New York City’s Central Business District (CBD) Tolling Program, the first cordon-based congestion pricing scheme in the United States. Using a generalized synthetic controls design, we find that the policy increased speeds on CBD roads by 11%, with little-to-no effect on air quality, transactions at shops and restaurants, or overall foot traffic in the CBD. Speeds also increased on roads outside the CBD that are commonly traversed by drivers headed to/from the CBD. These spillovers lead to faster trips throughout the metro area, including for many unpriced trips. We develop a simple model to bound the driver welfare effects, and estimate gains of at least $14.3 million/week (before any revenue recycling). These gains are largely driven by diffuse time savings for the many unpriced trips outside the CBD, highlighting the importance of accounting for network-wide spillovers. Finally, we show how characteristics of local travel patterns and road networks can inform the potential impacts of introducing cordon-based congestion pricing in other cities.

* https://www.nber.org/papers/w33584

Seems fairly 'obvious' in hindsight:

> To understand why congestion pricing’s total time savings mostly accrued to those traveling outside Manhattan, consider that most drivers heading into the island traverse roadways outside the congestion relief zone as they approach it from Long Island, New Jersey or wherever they began their journey. By shrinking the number of peak-time cars flowing into the toll zone, congestion pricing reduces traffic on outlying roadways, where remaining drivers — including those who never had Manhattan on their itinerary — can now go faster.

[…]

> Better yet, the coauthors wrote that they found “no evidence of offsetting slowdowns on different road types … suggesting that the policy reduced overall traffic volumes rather than simply displaced congestion.” That conclusion refutes critics’ predictions[1] that congestion pricing would shift drivers toward suburban roadways that would slow to a crawl.
by techcode | 2026-02-01 21:21:50+00:00
TL;DR: school/tests/exams don't allow phones.

Here in NL - Casio FX-82NL is allowed during test/exams for middle/high school, and actually for Radio Amateur/HAM licence exam - they even hand you one of their FX-82NLs.

Other more advanced (graphing, with memory/Python/etc) are also allowed in some places, but they need to be set to exam mode that disables memory/python/etc.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-02-01 21:23:48+00:00
What you described is what people do every single day. Every decision we make, choice, piece of information we think, has been selected for us by others. And we don't even stop to think about that, we just accept it.

Here's another cooking example: try to look up a recipe right now. It should contain meat, veggies, fiber. What will you get? A recipe that is generic and tailored to the masses in your general location. It's genuinely hard to find a recipe for food that isn't extremely familiar to the culture assigned to you (even if you're actually 1st generation Chinese, if you're browsing from Ohio with Google using English language, you aren't gonna get authentic Chinese dishes back). Because whatever system of systems is looking up recipes for you, is designed to do that; to think for you, and provide you a set of basic, canned responses.

The entire world is that. Nearly every part of our world, we abdicate. Our decisions are not really ours; they're a constructed set of possible decisions defined by other people, programmed into our brains by osmosis. And you go with it, because otherwise the world would be too hard to deal with.

This causes you to not only "lose" information and skills people had in the past, it defines who you are now and what you do. And it's been happening since civilization started. Actually before, since it's about your ecosystem, and systems of systems. AI is now a part of our ecosystem and will define who we are, and we don't really have a choice in the matter, because it's systemic.
by tbrownaw | 2026-02-01 21:23:50+00:00
> Based on responses from about half of the program’s participants

That "responses" is a link to the actual report.

1. The program was 120 people. 80 did an initial survey, 80 did a final survey, and there was an overlap is 60 who did both surveys. The survey was offered to all participants.

So, this is not a random / representative sample.

2. The program also included counseling sessions.

So, there's the potential for different results for money without counseling, or counseling without money.

3. I don't see any comparison to a control group.

For example, it's well known that homelessness is usually transitory. Without a control group, there's nothing to identify what was caused by the program vs being caused by the usual course of things.
by jmward01 | 2026-02-01 21:23:58+00:00
Totally agree. I don't want to pay taxes that go to social programs but the reality is if we don't find effective policies I end up paying more in taxes for emergency treatment and society take major economic hits for the other secondary problems, like crime, that homelessness causes. Of course the other argument for this is that society clearly has a hand in the path that took these people to where they are at now so society has some responsibility. Both are reasons to support well researched evidence based policy decisions to deal with the problem.
by dawidg81 | 2026-02-01 21:24:16+00:00
Hello I'm back. I have added some basic game loop that does initBoard() and displayBoard() while inGame is true. I have also deleted everything that was CMake from the project and repository, I am not sure if that is a good decision, i just don't want too much... bloat. I'm propably not really well experienced what's heavy and whats not in software for hardware but I am pretty sure that GNU Make with Makefile is still lighter than CMake. Previously there were .vscode and .github directories in the project, which I now deleted for very similar reason: bloat. Switched from VS Code to Vim.

Even though the project feels for me lighter after CMake removal I feel like I just lost something. That could be the old fear of deleting whole directory with actually useful for me files.

Also when I looked in the repository statistics I didn't expect so much site visits. I'm pretty new in all this Hacker News website. I'm glad it's effective. Pretty cool website.

Ok This is propably all for now,
see you
by panarky | 2026-02-01 21:24:48+00:00
If the core issue is ending exploitation by capitalists and not about breaking machines, if you don't want to return to a world without automation, if the machine is just a strawman, then why do you describe yourself as "anti-AI" instead of "anti-capitalist" or "anti-exploitation"?

It seems like you identify yourself with the strawman instead of with the core issue.
by greatgib | 2026-02-01 21:25:26+00:00
What saddens me a lot is that a lot of talks become low level beginner introduction fast food talks.

I think that it was better when most talks were 45 mins to 1h with deeper more advanced and senior content.

At the same time, with the overcrowded aspect, it becomes harder to socialize and meet people really involved in maintaining open source projects in my opinion. There are a lot lot lot more "users" on both sides (visitors and speakers) than what it used to be 10 years ago.
by visarga | 2026-02-01 21:25:51+00:00
> want to build context to a good place then preserve/reuse it over and over, fire off side quests etc, bring back only the good stuff

My attempt - a minimalist graph format that is a simple markdown file with inline citations. I load MIND_MAP.md at the start of work, and update it at the end. It reduces context waste to resume or spawn subagents. Memory across sessions.

https://pastebin.com/VLq4CpCT
by taylodl | 2026-02-01 21:25:58+00:00
I'll second this. I've worked for multiple Fortune 200 companies as an enterprise architect and I can tell you there is years worth of work in the backlog that development teams aren't even aware of. If they knew, they'd be more stressed-out than they are currently!

AI is a productivity-enhancement tool. We're working on getting real numbers, but what we'll do is go to our other backlog of work (not the mainstream backlog I was talking about above) that was "shelved" because the ROI didn't make sense. Well, with increased productivity it might make sense now. That would add even more work to the backlog.

I get it. A lot of people here on HN pay attention to FAANG and startups. Well, the FAANG companies are now decades old and have pretty much run their course. Startups have always been dicey, but nowadays we're back to the model before the mid-90s where industry experience mattered more than being a so-called "serial entrepreneur." All that is to say if you're Gen X and were in this industry back in the 80s and early 90s, then things are looking very familiar.
by decodebytes | 2026-02-01 21:26:03+00:00
I rushed out nono.sh (the opposite of yolo!) in response to this and its already negated a few gateway attacks.

It uses kernel-level security primitives (Landlock on Linux, Seatbelt on macOS) to create sandboxes where unauthorized operations are structurally impossible. API keys are also stored in apples secure enclave (or the kernel keyring in linux) , and injected at run time and zeroized from memory after use. There is also some blocking of destructive actions (rm -rf ~/)

its as simple to run as: nono run --profile openclaw -- openclaw gateway

You can also use it to sandbox things like npm install:

nono run --allow node_modules
--allow-file package.json package.lock npm install pkg

Its early in, there will be bugs! PR's welcome and all that!

https://nono.sh
by nephihaha | 2026-02-01 21:26:18+00:00
What happens in every case is this political party or that party in each country takes the blame for it, and their opposition will pretend to be against it, when in fact it appears to be part of a bigger picture.

You're right that reactions are being monitored but this has clearly been discussed somewhere and appears fairly co-ordinated, much like the emergence of digital ID and AI chatbots. It seems to be a common pattern now... Smoking restrictions and car ownership seem to approached in a fairly similar manner across different countries.
by trympet | 2026-02-01 21:26:22+00:00
> C# doesn't depend on a VM these days when it is AOT compiled

Maybe I’m being pedantic, but this is an oxymoron. Also the premise is incorrect. It’s not like the VM is gone. Merely baked into the code at compile time. It compiles IL to native code. Same for IL2CPP. The VM is still there.

The term “virtual machine” is confusing. I think you meant to say JIT compiler :-)
by user568439 | 2026-02-01 21:27:39+00:00
Even if what this article claims is false, I'm 100% in favor of buying organic fabrics like wool and cotton. I'm doing it as much as I can and it's not that difficult except for shoes and some water proof layer. There are also solutions for that but I admit they are a bit less convenient for certain uses like hiking

The microplastics are getting everywhere and I don't want to know what happens if the amount keeps increasing... But I guess we will know.
Show HN: Bullstudio – BullMQ dashboard you run with npx
by emirce | 2026-02-01 21:27:47+00:00
Hey HN!

I built bullstudio, a modern dashboard for BullMQ that you can run like Prisma Studio:

npx bullstudio -r <redis_url> → it starts a local web UI (default http://localhost:4000) and opens your browser.

Why I built it
In BullMQ-heavy projects, I kept losing time answering the same questions: Which queues are unhealthy? What’s failing right now? Where is this flow stuck? I’d bounce between logs, Redis inspection, and ad-hoc scripts. I wanted a “start it in seconds” UI that’s easy to point at any environment.

What it does today

Overview: queue health + throughput/failure trends

Jobs: browse + filter/search, inspect payload/attempts/stack traces, retry failed jobs

Flows: interactive parent/child visualization with live state updates

Repo: https://github.com/emirce/bullstudio

What I’d love feedback on

What are your “must-have” ops features for BullMQ (stalled detection, worker liveness, read-only mode, alerts, etc.)?

Payload safety: what defaults do you expect (truncation, masking keys like password/token, etc.)?

For teams with many queues/environments: what makes a dashboard feel production-ready?

Happy to answer any questions or add missing features if there’s demand.
by 3rodents | 2026-02-01 21:28:40+00:00
Unfortunately it looks like the headline numbers may not be representative:

“The research team did not initially receive a complete participant contact list and the CBO staff
led in facilitating recruitment, resulting in a sample that does not represent all DCT+ participants. The limited
sample size further limits the representativeness and generalizability of findings. The evaluation sample of 63
participants represents only 54% of the total 117 program participants. Therefore, the study population may not
adequately represent the broader DCT+ experience. Additionally, participants who completed both initial and
exit surveys may differ systematically from those who did not, potentially skewing results toward more positive
outcomes among individuals who remained engaged throughout the evaluation period.”
by throw20251220 | 2026-02-01 21:29:30+00:00
People who let their children play on the balconies of multi-unit buildings are awful people. It’d be a beautiful day but I can’t keep my windows open because there’s always a kiddo shouting or making silly noises. Can’t enjoy a cool breeze with that shouting offspring. Swap the kiddo for a dog for more examples. Fortunately having children or a dog becomes passe.

See how that works?
by PunchyHamster | 2026-02-01 21:29:59+00:00
> Article title is a bit dramatic. The summary seems to be: for the 5% of users who back-up to a network share (rather than direct-attached storage like a USB hard drive enclosure), Apple's default SMB configs on Tahoe are strict and won't work out of the box with many common NAS solutions.

I'd argue that's not even the main problem. If it just broke and gave you error on each run ("this SMB share is incompatible") it wouldn't be an issue
by l2uffff | 2026-02-01 21:30:02+00:00
I built a free PDF editor that runs 100% in your browser - no uploads, no signups, no limits.

Features: edit text, add signatures, merge/split PDFs, compress, rotate, annotate.

Why I built it: Got tired of "free" PDF tools that slap watermarks or demand payment at download time. This one is actually free, supported by ads instead of paywalls.

Privacy focused - your files never leave your device. Everything is processed client-side with JavaScript.

Would love feedback from the HN community!
by tolciho | 2026-02-01 21:30:14+00:00
According to Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893) a tomato is a vegetable, so the riourous may need to account for that in the appropriate jurisdictions, especially if tarrifs are on the line, or at least to rember to have bigger lawyers than the competition. Also a carrot is a fruit (in EU, for purposes of jam classification), "I can't believe that superhero doll is not a doll", etc.