MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hn_acker | 2026-02-05 18:26:26+00:00
The part I actually want to post is just this excerpt:

> Some years ago, I gave a speech at Consumer Reports headquarters in Poughkeepsie, trying to get them to refuse to give a passing grade to any product with DRM, on the grounds that the manufacturer could alter how that device worked at any time in the future, meaning that no matter how well a device worked now, it might turn into a pile of shit at any time in the future:

> https://www.soundguys.com/the-sonos-app-death-spiral-132873/

> They didn't take me up on this suggestion, obviously. They made the (seemingly) reasonable point that people bought Consumer Reports to find out what to buy, not to be told that they shouldn't buy anything. Every product in many key categories came with DRM, meaning that their recommendation would have had to be "just don't buy any of it."

> But today, consumer review sites do sometimes recommend nothing:

> https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-...

> And of course, there's some precedent here. Somewhere between the emergence of the evidence for seatbelts and the appearance of seatbelts in most makes and models of cars, there would have been a time when the answer to "which car should I buy?" was "don't buy a car, they're all unsafe at any speed."

> Things change. Today, every car has a seatbelt, and they'd continue to do so, even if we did away with regulations requiring seatbelts. Driving a car without a seatbelt would be as weird and terrible as using a radium suppository:

> https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/19/just-stop-putting-that-up...
by ronsor | 2026-02-05 18:26:34+00:00
Desire, convenience, and price are always in tension. Someone may desire to watch something, but it's too inconvenient. It may also be that there is not enough convenience for the price being paid. We see this issue regularly with DRM.

Do people need to watch the content? No. Are people entitled to the content? Is it "stealing" or not? That last one is probably up for date.

Regardless, the answers to those questions don't matter in the end. The public has made its demands clear time after time. The rightsholders can either deliver a convenient experience at a reasonable* price, or they can play whack-a-mole with pirates forever. Spotify managed to do it; Steam managed to do it. Only video media companies are so stubborn these days.

*There is always much debate on what constitutes a "reasonable" price, but it is certainly no more than a consumer is willing to pay. If that's less than the cost of producing the product, then perhaps the business model simply isn't viable.
by bsoles | 2026-02-05 18:26:36+00:00
I am on the same boat. I left management to go back to a senior IC role in my early 50s. I am perceived as an important contributor in my company, but I am 90% sure that no big company would ever hire me. I am also pretty sure I cannot pass LeetCode these days even though I work on implementing scientific algorithms that actually get used by major engineering/manufacturing companies around the world.
by drfuchs | 2026-02-05 18:26:40+00:00
Well, ackchyually, the first releases of FrameMaker were created on Sun 3/50 workstations with 4MB of (unexpandable, soldered-in) RAM on a 16Mhz 68020. Most customers had the same model, and could work on modestly-sized documents with ease.

But it's not a lot of space for documents of hundreds of pages, so typical customers who were using FrameMaker to write user manuals for their products had to use "book" files to tie together individually edited chapter files. Then, once in a while you'd have to push the "generate" button on the book to get all the page numbers consistent between chapters, all the cross-references updated, and generate the updated Table Of Contents, Index, etc. You're welcome.

But there's a potential degenerate case where Chapter 1 might have a forward reference to Chapter 2 ("see page 209"), but due to some editing in Chapter 2, the referenced material now on page 210. Well, in some fonts, "209" is wider than "210" (since "1" can be skinny). So, during the Generate operation, the reference becomes "see page 210". But there's some tiny chance that this skinnier text changes the including paragraph to have one less line, so there's some tinier chance that Chapter 1 takes one less page, so Chapter 2 starts one page earlier, and now the referenced material is back on page 209. So now we're in a loop.

This was such an unlikely edge case that nobody else noticed that it even existed, much less that it was detected. I didn't bother with a fancy error message; it would just give a little one-word popup: "Degenerate". Years later, mild panic ensues when a customer calls in, irate that the software is calling them a degenerate. (And it wasn't even a real example, just some other bug that triggered it.)
by FranklinJabar | 2026-02-05 18:26:42+00:00
> Taxis are a government created monopoly.

Taxi apps—uber & lyft. They moved into an area (often illegally); spent a shit-ton of money to displace local legal taxis, and then jacked up prices when the competition ceased to exist. Now I can't hail a taxi anymore if I don't have a phone.

> None of the big-box stores have created a monopoly.

They do in my region. Mom and pop shops are gone.

> Amazon unseated behemoth Walmart with a mere $300,000 startup capital.

We've been over this—they occupy different markets.

> Musk founded his empire with $28,000.

Sure. It would have been far easier to do with more capital.
by dh2022 | 2026-02-05 18:26:56+00:00
Yikes. I think the biggest news is that these data center bonds are getting investment grade. The reason for this is not because their prospects have improved [0] - the reason is because they need more investors to buy them. Pension plans who can only buy investment grade bonds may be enticed to buy these bonds. And this way these bonds will make their way in pension plans. When defaults will start happening on these bonds expect bailouts - because we need to bailout pension plans.

It is eerily similar to the mortgage crisis in 2007-2008. Low grade mortgage bonds were given AAA rating and there were too many of these which then caused the crisis.

[0] the article mentions how more Date Center recent bonds required a higher interest rate. This implies the risk increased (during the same time Feds lowered the rate), hence the prospects for Data Center bonds diminished.
by lxgr | 2026-02-05 18:27:01+00:00
Yes, but how good will the recall performance be? Just because your prompt fits into context doesn't mean that the model won't be overwhelmed by it.

When I last tried this with some Gemini models, they couldn't reliably identify specific scenes in a 50K word novel unless I trimmed down the context to a few thousands of words.

> Having LLMs use simpler tools like grep based on an array of similar search terms and then evaluating what comes up is faster in many cases

Sure, but then you're dependent on (you or the model) picking the right phrases to search for. With embeddings, you get much better search performance.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-05 18:27:15+00:00
The article buries the important part further down: These boxes are often used as botnet nodes and join residential proxy networks. The TV feature is a trojan horse to get it into your house. The high price makes it feel legitimate.

More from Krebs: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/11/is-your-android-tv-strea...
by kingstnap | 2026-02-05 18:27:29+00:00
Its kind of a suck up that more or less confirms the beef stories that were floating around this past week.

In case you missed it. For example:

Nvidia's $100 billion OpenAI deal has seemingly vanished - Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/02/five-...

Specifically this paragraph is what I find hilarious.

> According to the report, the issue became apparent in OpenAI’s Codex, an AI code-generation tool. OpenAI staff reportedly attributed some of Codex’s performance limitations to Nvidia’s GPU-based hardware.
by the_af | 2026-02-05 18:28:19+00:00
Yeah, even when humans write in this artificial, punched-to-the-max, mic-drop style (as I've seen it described), there's a time and a place.

LLMs default to this style whether it makes sense or not. I don't write like this when chatting with my friends, even when I send them a long message, yet LLMs always default to this style, unless you tell them otherwise.

I think that's the tell. Always this style, always to the max, all the time.
by stuxnet79 | 2026-02-05 18:28:30+00:00
It is estimated that all these pirate streams combined bring in more revenue than Netflix & other established media companies[1]. Margins are of course pretty incredible as capex and opex is effectively zero since the content is "free". Such a great business that it's attracted organized crime.

But on a technical level how can a federated "shadow Netflix" operate out in the open and pull in that kind of revenue without ringing all kinds of alarm bells. They need infrastructure and obviously storing/streaming copyrighted content is against the policy of virtually every cloud provider. I also doubt these guys are bootstrapping & setting up their own datacenters. I would love a speculative analysis on how all of this works that goes in the weeds.

[1] https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/iptv-market...
by fantasy905 | 2026-02-05 18:28:59+00:00
I don’t think most successful products were “validated” in advance in the way blog posts describe. What usually gets validated early is not demand, but whether the founders can consistently get someone to say yes.
Code, MVPs, and even competition are secondary. Distribution comes first, and it’s almost always messier and more manual than the advice suggests. Most validation looks like pushing something imperfect until either people start pulling it, or you give up.
In hindsight we call that validation. At the time, it mostly feels like guessing with feedback.
by tipsytoad | 2026-02-05 18:29:26+00:00
While I large agree, when I rely too much on agentic llm usage I come away feeling that I haven’t really learnt much over the session, and the code wasn’t really “mine”. It’s also easy to let your skills atrophy over time if you’re not careful, and for the hardest / interesting problems I often turn the llm off entirely and write out the code by hand, and come out a lot happier than just guiding Claude
by mothballed | 2026-02-05 18:29:46+00:00
Not to make it out to be some paradise, but illegal immigration isn't a crime in Argentina or Brazil. Argentina doesn't enforce it, and in fact I have read court cases of people criminals arriving illegally with fake passport and granted citizenship.

If you are illegal, you can literally show up fresh off of jet and on day one in .ar, file a court case for citizenship, have a lawyer run down the clock for a few years (by constitution in argentina illegal residence and subsistence for a few years = citizenship), and all the meanwhile they are legally barred from deporting you.
by IhateAI | 2026-02-05 18:29:49+00:00
Any self respecting engineer should recognize that these tools and models only serve to lower the value of your labor. They aren't there to empower you, they aren't going to enable you to join the ruling class with some vibe-rolled slop SaaS.

Using these things will fry your brain's ability to think through hard solutions. It will give you a disease we haven't even named yet. Your brain will atrophy. Do you want your competency to be correlated 1:1 to the quality and quantity of tokens you can afford (or be loaned!!)?

Their main purpose is to convince C-suite suits that they don't need you, or they should be justified in paying you less.This will of course backfire on them, but in the meantime, why give them the training data, why give them the revenue??

I'd bet anything these new models / agentic-tools are designed to optimize for token consumption. They need the revenue BADLY. These companies are valued at 200 X Revenue.. Google IPO'd at 10-11 x lmfao . Wtf are we even doing? Can't wait to watch it crash and burn :) Soon!
by k310 | 2026-02-05 18:30:03+00:00
I ignore AI.

There's a myth that someone, some thing, some "Deus ex Machina" or even Deus "has all the answers". In truth, every moment presents us with questions, and if all we want is answers from a machine [0] we will be slave to that machine, whereas if we think things out, we learn and grow from that process, and create meaning in that moment.

What is "meaning"? In the context of "stories" I read: “Stories create meaning as they touch our knowledge, experience, and as we process them with our minds and emotions.”

We can seek meaning from outside sources, but that's a failure mode. We create meaning with our lives, and in a deep philosophical sense, our lives create meaning for the universe of which we are a part, not separate.

I found an HN post rather interesting:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46825716

Hey, ChatGPT: Where Should I Go to College?

My reply is:

> This begs the question "Why go to college at all?"

> Top engineers at Anthropic, OpenAI say AI now writes 100% of their code [1]

Since this is an evolving (or devolving) situation, let me suggest finding some work where creativity and empathy are exercised.

Also, a job making changes that you can't trust to AI [2] which might destroy your systems with a panic or hallucination.

Again, a work in progress, and who knows, even CEO's might be at risk [3] given that there aren't that many business strategies to adopt, and follow-through on them is highly people-dependent. (my comment in that thread)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_of_Time_(The_Twilight_Zon...

[1] https://fortune.com/2026/01/29/100-percent-of-code-at-anthro...

[2] https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/i-destroyed-months-of-yo...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46762844#46775608
by throwawayqqq11 | 2026-02-05 18:30:12+00:00
Which is true for all propaganda outlets.

But to put it with John Steward, what if reality itself has a left leaning bias?

What if left leaning people have empirically broader empathy [0] which could imply that right leaning people have in tendency worse personalities. I guess you would attest yet another biased article here.

[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10281241/
by lynguist | 2026-02-05 18:30:15+00:00
I’m so jealous of you. You can just go and make a product as if it was software, with no “respect” to boundaries and restrictions, even though you’re not even in the lamp business. And then you have a China contact, and China can just manufacture anything as if it was software, but it’s a real life physical object. And the commitment, the fearlessness, the rudeness of just making it work.

I believe people like you will become very rich (because you’re so compatible with money making), but I have a prejudice that you lack depth in your understanding and intentions.

I almost never feel jealous but while reading your blog I could feel this feeling of freedom of creating that I seek and I couldn’t help but. Congratulations.
by munificent | 2026-02-05 18:30:22+00:00
I found the bit about using an agent to produce a minimal repro case interesting.

I'm very much on the side of "artisanally writing all code by hand" in terms of preference, but I have to admit that sometimes it puts me in a bind where there's stuff I wish I could do but don't because it's too time-consuming for the value provided. Isolating repro cases sometimes falls into that bucket.

This seems like a good use case for AI. Even if the resulting code isn't great, as long as it repros the issue and is fairly small, it's fine. It's eventually throwaway code anyway. At best, it will be harvested for a test case, but otherwise it's gone once the bug is fixed.
by thaack | 2026-02-05 18:30:25+00:00
Afrobeat (of which Fela Kuti pioneered) and Afro-rock are genuinely some of the coolest fusion genres to ever exist.

If you need an introduction, the Nigeria 70 compilation is a great place to start:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upN0WEbFmUY&list=OLAK5uy_nQZ...
by idle_zealot | 2026-02-05 18:30:37+00:00
> It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power.

They do feel that way, but I think they're wrong. Pervasive soft power is a lot better for building stable systems of oppression than more overt shows of force. They're either really bad at, or not interested in (probably both) building anything. I don't think this period of brutal oppression they're gearing up for is going to last very long. People in the US react very poorly to roving bands of State goons.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-02-05 18:30:40+00:00
Just some anecdata++ here but I found 5.2 to be really good at code review. So I can have something crunched by cheaper models, reviewed async by codex and then re-prompt with the findings from the review. It finds good things, doesn't flag nits (if prompted not to) and the overall flow is worth it for me. Speed loss doesn't impact this flow that much.
by mannanj | 2026-02-05 18:30:45+00:00
Does anyone else think its unethical that large companies, Anthropic now include, just take and copy features that other developers or smaller companies work hard for and implement the intellectual property (whether or not patented) by them without attribution, compensation or otherwise credit for their work?

I know this is normalized culture for large corporate America and seems to be ok, I think its unethical, undignified and just wrong.

If you were in my room physically, built a lego block model of a beautiful home and then I just copied it and shared it with the world as my own invention, wouldn't you think "that guy's a thief and a fraud" but we normalize this kind of behavior in the software world. edit: I think even if we don't yet have a great way to stop it or address the underlying problems leading to this way of behavior, we ought to at least talk about it more and bring awareness to it that "hey that's stealing - I want it to change".
by sharts | 2026-02-05 18:30:46+00:00
This is obvious for anyone that understands sales and marketing. The real question isn’t whether this was true—the question is why does anyone expect this revelation would change anything?

They made their wealth. They bought their politicians. In the worst possible case for them they would pay some fee that amounts to absolutely nothing making a dent in their personal day to day lives as a consequence of their actions.

It’s the cost of doing business these days. Do the wrong thing so long as you make more than enough money to cover the penalty fee.

Nothing to see here.
by 3acctforcom | 2026-02-05 18:30:49+00:00
The lowest grade I got in my business degree was in the "IT management" course. That's because the ONLY acceptable answer to any business IT problem is to move everything to the cloud. Renting is ALWAYS better than owning because you transfer cost and risk to a 3rd party.

That's pretty much the dogma of the 2010s.

It doesn't matter that my org runs a line-of-business datacentre that is a fraction of the cost of public cloud. It doesn't matter that my "big" ERP and admin servers take up half a rack in that datacentre. MBA dogma says that I need to fire every graybeard sysadmin, raze our datacentre facility to the ground, and move to AWS.

Fun fact, salaries and hardware purchases typically track inflation, because switching cost for hardware is nil and hiring isn't that expensive. Whereas software is usually 5-10% increases every year because they know that vendor lock-in and switching costs for software are expensive.
by mikkupikku | 2026-02-05 18:31:16+00:00
I fully expect this to get ignored like all the other similar revelations. Heads should roll, literally, but nothing will happen. Does anybody have any earnest hope for reform? Even in Europe where the public is supposedly keyed in, and where there is some political traction for getting away from American companies, nobody seems to take the idea of banning these corporations seriously.
by shaftway | 2026-02-05 18:31:20+00:00
I feel like there are some key differences between the companies though.

The second one outlined for Meta is:

> Heavily-redacted undated internal document discussing “School Blasts” as a strategy for gaining more high school users (mass notifications sent during the school day).

This sounds a lot like Meta being intentionally disruptive.

The first one outlined for YouTube is:

> Slidedeck on the role that YouTube’s autoplay feature plays in “Tech Addiction” that concludes “Verdict: Autoplay could be potentially disrupting sleep patterns. Disabling or limiting Autoplay during the night could result in sleep savings.”

This sounds like YouTube proactively looking for solutions to a problem. And later on for YouTube:

> Discussing efforts to improve digital well-being, particularly among youth. Identified three concern areas impacting users 13-24 disproportionately: habitual heavy use, late night use, and unintentional use.

This sounds like YouTube taking actual steps to improve the situation.
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-02-05 18:31:58+00:00
That's not urban planning. That's local gov't creating incentives through legislation and regulation. Urban planning means actually planning roads and distribution of utilities and schools and medical services and shopping areas and town squares and parks and so on. The town takes charge of its own future. Developers must then fit within this scheme. Instead, today we leave it up to developers to design roads and build wherever they want. It's a disaster.

And in many cases, single family homes are perfectly fine. You don't build skyscrapers in the Catskills. So they're not the issue. The issue is how they're arranged. Look at how old towns, even in the US, were or are constituted (at least those that have remained unscathed by Robert Moses-style mutilation). Plenty of single family homes arranged around a discernible town center. Walkable. The density consists of building around a town center instead of building willy-nilly along a road, because some strip of farmland has come up for sale. (This has the incidental defect of building on fertile land, now lost permanently to residential space.)