MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by A_D_E_P_T | 2026-02-06 10:29:58+00:00
Not really, because aristocrats and monarchs don't seek power in most systems; rather, they're simply born into it. Those modes of government don't actively select for the power-hungry.

(Granted, in e.g. the Ottoman Empire and Imperial China, it was frequently the case that there were dozens of princelings who were, de facto, pitted against each other in contests for the throne. That definitely selected for ambition, brutality, and a willingness to get one's hands dirty.)
by ColinWright | 2026-02-06 10:30:31+00:00
This is a fascinating experiment! I've just been reading the first few paragraphs of the paper ... easily readable, intended to be accessible by anyone.

In Gauss's time mathematicians would solve problems, publish the solutions in an encrypted form, and then challenge their contemporaries to solve the problems.

Here the authors of a paper on the arXiv say:

"To assess the ability of current AI systems to correctly answer research-level mathematics questions, we share a set of ten math questions which have arisen naturally in the research process of the authors. The questions had not been shared publicly until now; the answers are known to the authors of the questions but will remain encrypted for a short time."

Tao says:

"... the challenge is to see whether 10 research-level problems (that arose in the course of the authors research) are amenable to modern AI tools within a fixed time period (until Feb 13).

"The problems appear to be out of reach of current "one-shot" AI prompts, but were solved by human domain experts, and would presumably a fair fraction would also be solvable by other domain experts equipped with AI tools. They are technical enough that a non-domain-expert would struggle to verify any AI-generated output on these problems, so it seems quite challenging to me to have such a non-expert solve any of these problems, but one could always be surprised."
by LiamPowell | 2026-02-06 10:31:29+00:00
I'm not arguing that LLMs are at a point today where we can blindly trust their outputs in most applications, I just don't think that 100% correct output is necessarily a requirement for that. What it needs to be is correct often enough that the cost of reviewing the output far outweighs the average cost of any errors in the output, just like with a compiler.

This even applies to human written code and human mistakes, as the expected cost of errors goes up we spend more time on having multiple people review the code and we worry more about carefully designing tests.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-06 10:31:46+00:00
He got off way too light.

In a way it doesn't surprise me one bit. In a world in which everybody is told they're important you get people who actually believe that they are more important than others to a degree they start seeing them as NPCs. And you don't actually care about NPCs getting inconvenienced or even killed as long as you are marginally safer yourself. I've seen someone wearing a t-shirt that said 'I'm a big deal'. I kid you not.
by nworley | 2026-02-06 10:32:05+00:00
This is exactly what set me off in trying to figure out the visibility gap.

What’s strange is that we’re moving into a world where recommendations matter more than a click, but attribution still assumes a traditional search funnel. By the time someone lands on your site, the most important decision may have already happened upstream and you have no idea.

The UTM case you mentioned is a good example: it only captures direct "AI to site" clicks, but misses scenarios where AI influences the decision indirectly (brand mention to later search to visit). From the site’s perspective tho... yeah it looks indistinguishable from organic search. It makes me wonder whether we’ll need a completely new mental model for attribution here. Perhaps less about “what query drove this visit” and more about “where did trust originate.”

Not sure what the right solution is yet, but it feels like we’re flying blind during a pretty major shift in how people discover things.
by tavro | 2026-02-06 10:32:21+00:00
cool!

> I avoid software that I know to be problematic. Also, I firewall off all outgoing network traffic by default, and whitelist very sparingly.

how do you stay informed about what software is problematic? what are examples of addresses you whitelist? if you feel comfortable sharing.

> For my smartphone, I run a bare minimum of apps and refuse to install new ones without an extremely good reason. I also pipe all smartphone data through a VPN I run at home, specifically so that I can run it through my firewall and make the block-by-default policy I mentioned above cover the phone as well.

what would be an example of "an extremely good reason"? what VPN solution do you have?

:o)
by balamatom | 2026-02-06 10:32:56+00:00
>kaavidi

This is an interesting word. Halfway across the Alpo-Himalayan backbone the word for this tool is "kobilitsa", cognate to "kobila" (female horse) and I always figured it was a metaphor for the arched form of the bar (and probably referring to how women were stuck with the task of fetching water with it).

But now it seems the word "kaavidi" has reached our ancestral lifestyle all the way from the Indian lands! And the transformation it underwent was more due to how people "normalize" foreign words; same linguistic churn that gives us backronyms and false etymologies (see also "eggcorn"). Whoa

I presume linguists have already studied the naming of household implements when deriving Proto-Indo-European. I've never encountered much literature on the subject, nonetheless I find the subject rather fascinating.
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-02-06 10:33:05+00:00
I don't think this will be an issue, given history. COBOL was developed so that someone higher up could use more human language to write software. (BASIC too? I don't know, I wasn't around for either).

More modern-day, low/no-code platforms are advertised as such... and yet, they don't replace software developers. (in fact, some projects my employer does is migrating away from low/no-code platforms in favor of code, because performance and other nonfunctionals are hidden away. We had a major outage as a result when traffic increased.)
by rldjbpin | 2026-02-06 10:33:53+00:00
not quite as technically rich as i came to expect from previous posts from op, but very insightful regardless.

not ashamed to say that i am between steps 2 and 3 in my personal workflow.

>Adopting a tool feels like work, and I do not want to put in the effort

all the different approaches floating online feel ephemeral to me. this, just like for different tools for the op, seem like a chore to adopt. i like the fomo mongering from the community does not help here, but in the end it is a matter of personal discovery to stick with what works for you.
by rob74 | 2026-02-06 10:33:55+00:00
Related to "Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green" - Soviet designers apparently reached the same conclusion, but they applied it to aircraft cockpits instead of control rooms and used a slightly more blueish color: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/16434/why-are-r...

Interestingly enough, Soviet control rooms (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ab/Co...) were the color of Western aircraft cockpits, and vice versa...
by input_sh | 2026-02-06 10:34:29+00:00
For the same reason they use "tokens" instead of kilobytes: so that you don't do the conversion yourself and realise that for example spending a million "tokens" on claude-opus-4.6 costs you anywhere from $10 (input tokens) to $37.5 (output tokens). Now, 1 million tokens sounds pretty big and "unreachable" until you realise that's about 4 megabytes of text. It's less than three floppy disks of data going back and forth.

Now let's assume you want to send a CD worth of data to Opus 4.6. 700 megabytes * $10 (price per million input tokens) / 4 (rounding down one megabyte to roughly 250k "tokens") = $1750. For Opus 4.6 to return a CD amount of data back to you: $37.50 * 700 / 4 = ~$6.5k.

A terabyte worth of data with a 50:50 input/output ratio would cost you $5.7 million. A terabyte worth of data with a 50:50 input/output ratio on gpt-5.2-pro would cost you $25.2 million. (Note: OpenAI's API pricing still hasn't been updated to reflect 5.3 prices.)

So we get layers upon layers upon layers upon layers upon layers of obfuscation to hide those numbers from you when you simply subscribe for a fixed monthly fee!
by nilslindemann | 2026-02-06 10:34:33+00:00
Yes, is it now?

https://fingerprint.com/
https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/

I don't have Firefox or another browser installed right now, but the last time I checked, every browser was detected, especially on the first link.

Further, When I used Tor, a few sites, like Google, showed me Captchas for a while afterward, when using my _normal_ browser.

Further I heard that sites like PayPal are giving me black karma when I try to avoid Fingerprinting by using e.g. Tor.
by psychoslave | 2026-02-06 10:36:07+00:00
>The fix was to use GCC as an online known-good compiler oracle to compare against.

>This was a clean-room implementation (Claude did not have internet access at any point during its development); it depends only on the Rust standard library.

How does one re-conciliate both of this statements? Sure one can fetch all of gnu.org in local, and a model which already scrapped the whole internet somehow already integrated it in its weights, didn’t it?

The worldwide median household income (as of 2013 data from Gallup) was approximately $9,733 per year (in PPP, current international dollars).
This means that $20,000 per year is more than double the global median income.

A median Luxembourg citizen earns $20,000 in about 5 to 6 months of work, a Burundi one would on median need 42.5 months, that is 3.5 years.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
by actionfromafar | 2026-02-06 10:36:21+00:00
In theory, born into it. That was just a foil to put an air of legitimacy over the institution.

In the real world, there was (and is!) an incredible power game over who decides over what, who gets to live, who must abdicate, how much the real power lies with the King and how much with aristocracy or the Church and so on. It's a constant rebalancing of power factors.
by dns_snek | 2026-02-06 10:37:12+00:00
Remote Code Execution (RCE) is a type of vulnerability. Intentionally running code from a developer you trust is not a vulnerability.

An auto-update mechanism only becomes an RCE if it allows unauthorized third parties to execute code on your machine by failing to verify that the code comes from a legitimate source.

> you just need the key

Secrecy of cryptographic keys is the basis of all cryptography we use. There's no "just", you need the key and you don't have it.
by ryan-c | 2026-02-06 10:37:14+00:00
I'm using an M3 Ultra w/ 512GB of RAM, using LMStudio and mostly mlx models. It runs massive models with reasonable tokens per second, though prompt processing can be slow. It handles long conversations fine so long as the KV cache hits. It's usable with opencode and crush, though my main motivation for getting it was specifically to be able to process personal data (e.g. emails) privately, and to experiment freely with abliterated models for security research. Also, I appreciate being able to run it off solar power.

I'm still trying to figure out a good solution for fast external storage, I only went for 1TB internal which doesn't go very far with models that have hundreds of billions of parameters.
by tavro | 2026-02-06 10:37:28+00:00
haha. :-)

> Don't do anything secret on the computer

i think that might be unavoidable.

> Assume every system on Earth is breached

you probably say this jokingly, but this is not a bad take. or rather, "assume every system on earth can/will be breached". that is a good motivation to improve the security for your system, if you have the resources to.

:o)
by andmarios | 2026-02-06 10:38:03+00:00
The model seems to have some problems; it just failed to create a markdown table with just 4 rows. The top (title) row had 2 columns, yet in 2 of the 3 data rows, Opus 4.6 tried to add a 3rd column. I had to tell it more than once to get it fixed...

This never happened with Opus 4.5 despite a lot of usage.
by scott_w | 2026-02-06 10:39:39+00:00
And, as others point out for manual workers, they don't fully recover. As it's their job, many professional athletes will perform while partially injured and exacerbate it. And it's not even professionals! One of the older men in my tri club has a permanent Achilles injury now in his 60s because of an injury sustained when he was younger. The doctor told him to rest for a month to let it properly heal. That weekend he was running a sub-30 10k at the local league competition!
by Kim_Bruning | 2026-02-06 10:39:45+00:00
So asking an LLM to work from memory will get you the general vibe of the thing from sources. The vibe as a vibe is actually very useful! It's a new variant of counting google hits for a term. But it doesn't really tell you more than that; and you can't treat it as fact.

Same as with a smart person working from memory. They're smart, and their memory is good, but they could misremember after all. [1]

If you ask your LLM to execute a search for you, congrats, you're one step further, now it can summarize the search results for you. But now you're back at the point you were before LLMs existed and we all relied on google. Just because google says something, doesn't mean it's true.

Now both you and the LLM need to go work through the sources and figure out what's actually going on.

The "ChatGPT says it's clearly absurd..." is missing the word "...because..." , and roughly a paragraph of support

[1] (Before you complain: I'm not anthropomorphizing. You're anthropocentrizing! )
by endymion-light | 2026-02-06 10:40:07+00:00
I love doing a personal side project code review with claude code, because it doesn't beat around the bush for criticism.

I recently compared a class that I wrote for a side project that had quite horrible temporal coupling for a data processor class.

Gemini - ends up rating it a 7/10, some small bits of feedback etc

Claude - Brutal dismemberment of how awful the naming convention, structure, coupling etc, provides examples how this will mess me up in the future. Gives a few citations for python documentation I should re-read.

ChatGPT - you're a beautiful developer who can never do anything wrong, you're the best developer that's ever existed and this class is the most perfect class i've ever seen
by Ayaz_Saifi | 2026-02-06 10:42:09+00:00
Ayaz
Role: Software Engineer / Backend / Full-Stack
Location: India (open to remote & relocation)
Experience: Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, Microservices, Cloud, ML

I’m a Computer Science undergrad (AI/ML specialization, graduating 2026) with hands-on experience building distributed systems and backend services.

At JPMorgan Chase (virtual internship), I built a real-time financial transaction system using Spring Boot, Kafka, and H2, designing REST APIs and async producers/consumers for low-latency processing. I’ve also worked on a cloud-native microservices e-commerce platform with Kubernetes, gRPC, Prometheus/Grafana, PostgreSQL/Redis, and Terraform.

I enjoy working on backend systems, distributed architectures, and data-driven products. Comfortable with Java, Python, JavaScript, Docker, Kubernetes, and basic frontend (React).

GitHub: https://github.com/Ayazsaifi200

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayazsaifi

Email: ayazzssaifi@gmail.com

resume : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zKHm7niY0Qp_jY614Cz_6AqRA-z...
by godelski | 2026-02-06 10:43:19+00:00
> you lay out a huge specification that would fully work through all of the complexity in advance, then build it.

This has never happened and never will. You simply are not omniscient. Even if you're smart enough to figure everything out the requirements will change underneath you.

But I do still think there's a lot of value into coming up with a good plan before jumping in. A lot of software people like to jump in and I see them portray the planning people as trying to figure everything out first. (I wonder if we reinforce the jumping in head first mentality because people figure out you can't plan everything) A good plan helps you prevent changing specs and prepares you for hiccups. It helps by having others but basically all you do is try to think of all the things that could go wrong. Write them down. Triage. If needed, elevate questions to the decision makers. Try a few small scale tests. Then build out. But building out you're always going to find things you didn't see. You can't plan forever because you'll never solve the unknown unknowns until you build, but also good prep makes for smoother processes. It's the reason engineers do the math before they build a bridge. Not because the math is a perfect representation and things won't change (despite common belief, it's not static) but because the plan is cheaper than the build and having a plan allows you to better track changes and helps you determine how off the rails you've gone.

It is also perplexing to me that people think they can just plan everything out and give it to a LLMs. Do you really believe your manager knows everything that needs to be done when they assign jobs to you? Of course not, they couldn't. Half the job is figuring out what the actual requirements are.
by ramon156 | 2026-02-06 10:43:38+00:00
> A few years ago I submitted a full TypeScript rewrite of a text editor because I thought it would be fun. I hope the maintainers didn't read it. Sorry.

Love the transparency. To be fair, rewrites are almost impossible to review. Anything >5k diff takes at least multiple review cycles. I don't know how some maintainers do it while also working on the codebase themselves
by Msurrow | 2026-02-06 10:43:42+00:00
I’m calling it consultant speak because your response to an argument is to bring up something else, instead of actually responding.

The same with this last reply; you can keep throwing out new points all you want, but thats not going to make you correct in the original question.

Saying or implying that one software has a “principle” risk of vulnerabilities that another software doesn’t is plain and simply wrong.

And that has nothing to do with all the other stuff about layered defence, vpns, enterprise security, chatty protocols or whatever you want to pile on the discusion.
by netdevphoenix | 2026-02-06 10:44:38+00:00
Waiting until the moment they get good enough is not a smart thing to do either. If you are a farmer and know it is going to snow, at some point in the next 5 months, you make plans NOW, you don't wait until the temperatures drop and you see the snow falling. Right now, people are waiting for the snowfall before moving their proverbial chickens indoors
by notahacker | 2026-02-06 10:44:51+00:00
Being brought up believing you have a divine right to rule and a duty to enlarge your kingdom isn't a selection effect, but worked to pretty much the same outcome in terms of brutality. Even in European states where there were pretty straightforward primogeniture rules of succession, you ended up with hundreds of years of "legitimate" inheritors displaying fondness for foreign military expeditions and tactical ploys to acquire tendentious claims to other territory, and as soon as a direct adult male descendant from a single wife wasn't available succession selected for ambition and ruthlessness considerably more than a parliamentary system.
Show HN: Post-Mortem of a Day with Claude Code – What the Session Logs Revealed
by seanlf | 2026-02-06 10:44:52+00:00
I analysed the JSONL session logs from 8 Claude Code sessions across a day of building a side project. I expected planned sessions to be more efficient, but not 3x

https://seanfloyd.dev/blog/claude-code-post-mortem
by organicUser | 2026-02-06 10:45:13+00:00
well, if in this period it is a matter of cost, tomorrow won't be anymore. 4GB of RAM in the 80s would have cost tens of millions of dollars, now even your car runs 4 gb memory only for the infotainment systems, and runs dozens GBs of RAM for the most complex assistants. So i would see this achievement more as a warning, the final result is not what's concerning, it is the premonition behind it
by miyuru | 2026-02-06 10:45:51+00:00
This is what I experienced as well.

these are some ticks I use now.

1. Write a generic prompts about the project and software versions and keep it in the folder. (I think this getting pushed as SKIILS.md now)

2. In the prompt add instructions to add comments on changes, since our main job is to validate and fix any issues, it makes it easier.

3. Find the best model for the specific workflow. For example, these days I find that Gemini Pro is good for HTML UI stuff, while Claude Sonnet is good for python code. (This is why subagents are getting popluar)
by yieldcrv | 2026-02-06 10:46:05+00:00
Why is Yegge so.... loud?

Like, who cares? Judging from his blog recount of this it doesn't seem like anybody actually does. He's an unnecessarily loud and enthused engineer inserting himself into AI conversations instead of just playing office politics to join the AI automation effort inside of a big corporation?

"wow he was yelling about agent orchestration in March 2025", I was about 5 months behind him, the company I was working for had its now seemingly obligatory "oh fuck, hackathon" back in August 2025

and we all came to the same conclusions. conferences had everyone having the same conclusion, I went to the local AWS Invent, all the panels from AWS employees and Developer Relations guys were about that

it stands to reason that any company working on foundational models and an agentic coding framework would also have talent thinking about that sooner than the rest of us

so why does Yegge want all of this attention and think its important at all, it seems like it would have been a waste of energy to bother with, like in advance everything should have been able to know that. "Anthropic! what are you doing! listen to meeeehhhh let me innnn!"

doesn't make sense, and gastown's branding is further unhinged goofiness

yeah I can't really play the attribution games on this one, can't really get behind who cares. I'm glad its available in a more benign format now
by wtcactus | 2026-02-06 10:46:20+00:00
> It's not an unachievable dream. It's a trade-off made by people who may or may not have made the right call.

In my experience at work. Anything that demands too much though, collaboration between teams and enforcing hard development rules, is always an unachievable dream in a medium to big project.

Note, that I don't think it's technically unachievable (at all). I just accepted that it's culturally (as in work culture) unachievable.
by lp4v4n | 2026-02-06 10:47:07+00:00
I always laugh when libertarians propose all kinds of mechanism to prevent the concentration of power in the public administration but at the same time see no problem with a few individuals concentrating exponentially the most important and corrupting of the powers: wealth.

God forbid a representative being reelected but there is no problem with a billionaire destabilizing dozens of democracies and around the world.

Libertarianism is just the blind worship of people who have money.
What causes surprise infra costs in your org?
by frmalmaty | 2026-02-06 10:47:16+00:00
Hi folks — I’m doing a short, anonymous research survey on what drives unexpected infrastructure spend and which capabilities teams actually value (e.g., cost attribution, $/route, before/after impact, guardrails, standard fixes).

If you’re in enterprise architecture / platform / FinOps-adjacent roles, I’d really appreciate your input.

Survey (5–7 min): https://tally.so/r/zx77eR

Happy to share aggregated results back to the sub once it’s done. Contact details are optional at the end.

Thanks!