MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by graemep | 2026-02-06 09:59:13+00:00
> TV news/documentary broadcasts have a "fairness doctrine" in most of the democratic world [1], meaning both sides of political discussions must be presented.

That is the problem. Most discussions have more than two sides. There are lots of shades of opinion and nuances. Showing just two viewpoints might not be quite as bad as the "memes" and straw man arguments that dominate social media, but it is well down the same road.
by rmunn | 2026-02-06 09:59:16+00:00
Wealth per se has nothing to do with longevity, as a minute's thought will make plain. What wealth does do is enable certain things that help with longevity, such as better medical care. If you're using wealth as a measure, you need to realize that it's only a proxy, and you'll get better data by looking at the actual behaviors that it's a proxy for.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-02-06 09:59:20+00:00
> fraud prevention doesn't have such requirements around secrecy around the fact that it even exists

This is a tricky one, I really really dislike that accounts can be deleted with no recourse under the banner of fraud prevention.

But, OTOH, the best way to stop fraud is to prevent the fraudsters from knowing how you've detected them. It's not an easy problem.
by prmoustache | 2026-02-06 09:59:21+00:00
you can do it with ffmpeg but the most user friendly way is to use obs.

https://obsproject.com/kb/virtual-camera-guide

https://usercomp.com/news/1413136/ffmpeg-virtual-camera-guid...

I used that back in the days in 2019 / early 2020 when it was not yet possible to share your screen on msteams under wayland in chrome and firefox.
by cheesepaint | 2026-02-06 09:59:24+00:00
I really do not think much will change. In 10 years, computers will still look kinda like today and will be used like today. AI will be used to make drafts, but nothing more. For everything else, they are way too unreliable.

People hate to change habits, and many here overestimate the willingness and ability of, especially, older people to change how they use technology.
by ETH_start | 2026-02-06 09:59:38+00:00
Adaptation does not require mass retraining into new professions; it happens through task simplification, AI-augmented shallow competence (less qualified people can do more advanced work), partial work, income stacking, and lower subsistence costs. As automation advances, less-automatable sectors (personal services, care, local physical work) see wage pressure rise, consistent with Say’s Law, because yes, what people save at restaurants, is spent instead at barbers, massage therapists, nail technicians, etc.

As for the gains from robotics, they go just as much to workers as to investors. Remember, investors are competing with each other, so they have to keep cutting prices. And that means workers see their wages buy more goods and services, given those goods and services cost less to buy. When wages buy more, that's effectively the opposite of inflation. In inflation-adjusted terms, that equates to a wage hike.
by PostOnce | 2026-02-06 09:59:41+00:00
That's irrelevant in this context, because it's not "get the humans to make a working product OR get the AI to make a working product"

The problem is you may pay $20K for gibberish, then try a second time, fail again, and then hire humans.

Coincidentally yes, I am aware, my last contract was building out a SCADA module the AI failed to develop at the company that contracted me.

I'm using that money to finance a new software company, and so far, AI hasn't been much help getting us off the ground.
by Dominik1001 | 2026-02-06 10:00:00+00:00
Unfortunately, IMO Google's high lock in also due to the whole environment including Google Signup, makes it really hard for people to switch.

Proton is nice, however, the high encryption component also makes it super hard to enable use cases like agentic email. That I see as a blocker for them to become really relevant.

I'd love to have a privacy-first modern mail provider, that is no Big Tech and doesn't participate in the attention economy.
by rob74 | 2026-02-06 10:00:08+00:00
> I have mass-tested these systems so that you don’t have to, and I have the scars to show for it, and I am here to tell you: GitHub Actions is not good.

> Every CI system eventually becomes “a bunch of YAML.” I’ve been through the five stages of grief about it and emerged on the other side, diminished but functional.

Ah yes, misery loves company! There's nothing like a good rant (preferably about a technology you have to use too, although you hate its guts) to brighten up your Friday...
by astrange | 2026-02-06 10:00:08+00:00
> The result is a fuzzy reproduction of the training input, specifically of the compilers contained within.

Is it? I'm somewhat familiar with gcc and clang's source and it doesn't really particularly look like it to me.

https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler/blob/main/s...

https://llvm.org/doxygen/LoopStrengthReduce_8cpp_source.html

https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/gcc/gimple-ssa...
by planckscnst | 2026-02-06 10:00:58+00:00
I think this is a valuable direction for research to take. I suspect human emotion is represented in the training data and that there is some underlying model representing human emotional systems present within current LLMs. If we can understand how the model affects response given certain qualities in provided stimuli, then we can effectively use this embedded model to improve our understanding of both LLMs and Humans and also get more productive output from LLMs.
by imtringued | 2026-02-06 10:02:19+00:00
The absurdity behind Bitcoin is that Bitcoin proponents basically think money that should emulate the dysfunctional real estate market.

Basically the premise is that you need to get in early or you're screwed forever. So what do you do? You create an asset where you are the one who gets to be first this time and gets to screw over others.
by robocat | 2026-02-06 10:02:41+00:00
> because the US

Reducing the root cause to the US is ludicrous. Cuba had agency and their government made some horrific choices for their citizens.

I was there about 20 years ago and it was the most depressing place I've ever visited: the authoritarianism and corruption and tragedy was so visibly prevalent . . . even to a tourist. It was frightening because problems are usually better hidden from foreigners.

Summarising a complex situation as though it has one simple cause is a human sign of ignoring complexity or systems.

Yes, the impact of US political choices was deeply hideous. That doesn't excuse the Cuban government from their choices about how to deal with that.
by bsgeraci | 2026-02-06 10:04:57+00:00
Feel free to use what I am building but I also think more people just need to try and build something. We are almost in a star trek style world where you are talking to a computer to make a holo deck promgram :) sorry for the trekkie talk.

My recommendation with testing out hands free agentic, know it is not fully hands free. I find my self babysitting alot of terminals going at once, like having a bunch of interns or junior devopers.

It is important to plan plan plan.

I want to eventually switch and play with self hosted models but for most agentic stuff Claude is killing it in terms of results.
by imtringued | 2026-02-06 10:05:01+00:00
Money is supposed to be a cheap lubricant and not something that becomes more expensive over time until no one can afford it.

Edit:

Imagine if the lubricants in your car get more expensive and you can't afford them anymore, then your car stops working, then you lose your job, you lose your apartment/house.

Now imagine if someone made a universal lubricant that society both runs and depends on. If society runs out of lubricant because it is too expensive, then everything will fail. Having society overflow with excess lubricant will cause issues, but it will still work better than without.
by int_19h | 2026-02-06 10:05:41+00:00
Antigravity (and Gemini in general) is not on par with the rest when it comes to agentic coding.

Between Codex and Claude, Codex will have much more generous limits for the same price, especially if you use top-of-the-line models (although for your task, Sonnet might actually be good enough).
by socalgal2 | 2026-02-06 10:06:01+00:00
I'm going to take the downvotes but at what point should something like this be taken down? Some of you might say "never" but come on, the thing was started in 1962. If you wanted info on anything back then you had to go to the library and cross your fingers they had a book for whatever you wanted to know.

That world is long gone. Today we have Wikipedia, Our World in Data, and every government in the world has web pages from every agency.

I loved the World Factbook. I can also see that it's out lived its purpose.
by okanat | 2026-02-06 10:06:03+00:00
What I mean is all of those things are more of the same things we did since 90s.

It is better and higher performing hardware but until Rust and Zig arrived, the most popular ways of designing system-level software stayed the same. RTOSes work the same as how they work in late 90s / early 00s. C ABI is still the majority of communication interface. Interacting with OS using system calls stayed the same. After virtual memory and paging no big change in OS design happened. Main programming design patterns in C and C++ also stayed the same.

One area that stayed interesting is GPU programming. Nowadays CPUs basically provide us a PDP-11 simulator. Most of the time you don't need to recompile programs to harness most of the gains from a CPU. GPUs expose more of their internal hardware detaila than CPUs and unlike CPUs you need to recompile programs (which is what a GPU userspace driver does) to use newer models.
by duskdozer | 2026-02-06 10:07:43+00:00
- scroll speed - unsure of ulterior motives, but i've seen this even on some foss things. i think some people just think it looks cool/modern/"responsive"/whatever

- back - hijacking it seems fairly common on malicious/dark-pattern sites to try to trap you on them. not sure why because you can just leave and it seems it would obviously piss someone off

- analytics paths - not everyone may know about/how to use regex rules for it or may use something else that doesn't support it (the stripped down ublock for chrome? i don't know if it can or not). sites seem to do this with malicious js code as well, presumably to prevent blocking
by 1718627440 | 2026-02-06 10:07:48+00:00
C is super close to the hardware in that it works exactly like the abstract C machine, which is kind of a generalization of the common subset of a lot of machines, invented to make it portable, i.e. viable to be implemented straightforwardly on various architectures. For example pointer provenance makes it work on machines with segmented storage, these can occur anywhere, so there is no guarantee that addresses beyond a single allocation are expressible or meaningful.

What makes C feel free for programming is that instead of prescribing an implementation paradigm, it instead exposes a computing model and then lets the programmer write whatever is possible with that (and also what is not -- UB). And a lot of higher level abstractions are quickly implemented in C, e.g. inheritance and polymorphism, but then they still allow to be used in ways you like, so you can not just do pure class inheritance, but get creative with a vtable, or just use another vtable with the same object. These are things you can't do when the classes are a language construct.
by p_zuckerman | 2026-02-06 10:07:49+00:00
That resonates. The lock in feels less about email itself and more about identity and defaults across the Google ecosystem.

The point about encryption limiting agentic is interesting. It does seem like a real tension between strong privacy guarantees and server-side intelligence.

Do you think this is a fundamental limitation of E2EE email, or more a product/architecture choice that could be worked around with different trust models or client-side approaches?
by freakynit | 2026-02-06 10:08:18+00:00
I think this all comes down to information.

Most prompts we give are severely information-deficient. The reason LLMs can still produce acceptable results is because they compensate with their prior training and background knowledge.

The same applies to verification: it's fundamentally an information problem.

You see this exact dynamic when delegating work to humans. That's why good teams rely on extremely detailed specs. It's all a game of information.
by user34283 | 2026-02-06 10:08:57+00:00
When I tried 5.2 Codex in GitHub Copilot it executed some first steps like searching for the relevant files, then it output the number "2" and stopped the response.

On further prompting it did the next step and terminated early again after printing how it would proceed.

It's most likely just a bug in GitHub Copilot, but it seems weird to me that they add models that clearly don't even work with their agentic harness.
by almara | 2026-02-06 10:08:58+00:00
Some interesting math here.

You’ve got ~170k possible words and a pure higher/lower signal, so with perfect play it’s just binary search. Number the words 1 to 170k, guess the middle, then keep halving the range. In binary terms, each guess is basically telling you whether the next bit is 0 or 1.

Since log₂(170,000) ≈ 17.4, you need at most 18 guesses. On average it’s a bit less: about half the words take 18 guesses, a quarter take 17, an eighth take 16, etc. So the expected number of guesses works out to 17.

All of that assumes you know the exact ordering of the dictionary, of course. Once you don’t, it stops being optimal and starts being human. That’s where the difficulty actually comes from.
by control-f | 2026-02-06 10:09:34+00:00
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by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-02-06 10:09:34+00:00
> This is an "in distribution" test. There are a lot of C compilers out there, including ones with git history, implemented from scratch. "In distribution" tests do not test generalization.

It's still really, really impressive though.

Like, economics aside this is amazing progress. I remember GPT3 not being able to hold context for more than a paragraph, we've come a long way since then.

Hell, I remember bag of words being state of the art when I started my career. We have come a really, really, really long way since then.
by NexAIOS | 2026-02-06 10:11:21+00:00
Thanks — I think you're right that emotional dynamics are already latent in training data. The question is whether we can make that implicit model explicit and architectural, so it's auditable and controllable rather than emergent and opaque.
That's what HEART attempts: rather than hoping the LLM has internalized useful emotional patterns, we create an explicit 18-dimensional state that actively modulates retrieval and reasoning. The tradeoff is added complexity, but the gain is transparency — you can trace exactly how emotional state influenced a decision.
Curious whether you think the interpretability benefits outweigh the engineering overhead, or if there's a lighter-weight approach that could get similar results.
by turbocon | 2026-02-06 10:11:23+00:00
Interesting, I actually learning the Shoelace Bow (surgeons)[1] from this site a couple years ago and it's my go to now for any shoelaces that don't lock tight or that I really need to stay tied (think running or backpacking)

[1] https://www.animatedknots.com/shoelace-bow-knot-surgeons
by astrange | 2026-02-06 10:11:51+00:00
> What would be more impressive is for it to have made a compiler for a well defined language that isn't very close to a popular language.

That doesn't seem difficult as long as you can translate it into a well-known IR. The Dragon Book for some reason spends all its time talking about frontend parsing, which does give you the impression it's impossible.

I agree writing compilers isn't especially difficult, but it is a lot of work and people are scared of it.

The hard part is UI - error handling and things like that.
by internet_points | 2026-02-06 10:12:01+00:00
Even today in the United States people voted for someone who actively tries to dismantle the legal system, pushes for more control in the hands of the executive powers, uses the military against its own citizens, constantly questions election integrity, emphasizes loyalty over free speech, encourages a "Great Leader" cult of personality, attacks political opponents with all possible means, promotes isolationism, militarizes law enforcement, the list goes on. All these are hallmarks of totalitarianism – which is what 1984 is all about.
by spockz | 2026-02-06 10:12:29+00:00
It is rare for our run of the mill Java apps to however, we notice it with:

Integration of code quality gates, documentation checks, linting, cross architecture builds, etc.

Most of this can be solved by doing the builds in a docker image that we also maintain ourselves. Then what remains is the interaction between the ci config for matrices, the tasks/actions to report back quality metrics, the integration with keyvaults to obtain deploy time secrets, etc.

Then there are the soft failures, missing a cache key causing many packages to be downloaded over and over again, or the same for the docker base images, etc.

We fix this for our 1000+ microservices, across hundreds of teams by maintaining a template that all services are mandated to use. It removes whole classes of errors and introduces whatever shenanigans we introduce. But it works for us.

If GHA, Azure Pipelines, etc., would provide a way of running builds locally that would speed up our development greatly.

Until then we have created linting based on CUE to parse the various yamls, resolving references to keystores, key ids, templates, etc., and making sure they exist. I think this is generic enough to open source even.
by scott_w | 2026-02-06 10:13:07+00:00
Because that's not how corporate maths works. The comparison is not "what is the cost of this vs our current revenue?" The calculation is "what could that engineer be doing instead and what is that worth vs fixing this issue?"

Will fixing this issue bring in more revenue than ignoring it and building a new feature? Or fixing a different issue? If the answer is "no" then the answer is that it doesn't get fixed.
by pas | 2026-02-06 10:14:02+00:00
... it's not at all costs though, that would be easier, because then the situation would be more obvious (legibility is important, so is plausible deniability)

so of course "growth hackers" (or whatever the folks responsible for growth are called nowadays... other than CFOs and CEOs), simply they are the ones whose judgement and "worldview" regarding whose responsibility is to manage the negative consequences of their increased revenue is very skewed, in other words they mostly have elaborate self-serving explanations (excuses)

and many times that overlaps various user freedom arguments, arguments against paternalism, etc...
by fzeroracer | 2026-02-06 10:15:13+00:00
Are you just completely unaware with what's going on in the US or something? The reason why we're here is because of corruption within private companies leading to mass accumulation of wealth which has reality-bending effects on politics. Trump and the cronies is as much a symptom as it is a cause; related to the way billionaires bought literally all of news and social media over 30 years and weaponized it for their own personal propaganda.

You're not going to solve this problem with a 'strong justice system', you're going to solve it by making sure no one can get that wealthy in the first place. I mean we're literally in a topic about Jeffry Epstein who is so deeply connected to everything that it would make your average TV show seem like a hack.
by whatever1 | 2026-02-06 10:16:09+00:00
It is absolutely correct, hence why limited terms are a prerequisite for functioning democracies.

An ill intentioned participant in power will not have unlimited time to do that much damage. A good intentioned participant will not have too much time to become corrupted.

The downside is that a good intentioned ruler, may not have enough time to accomplish their good vision. But my thesis is that is a reasonable price to pay to avoid the opposite. A malicious ruler with infinite time to complete their destructive plan.
by zelos | 2026-02-06 10:16:16+00:00
It's been many years since I read 1984, but this seems wrong:

"To Orwell, it must have seemed that neither time nor
fortune could budge Stalin, but that he would live on forever with ever
increasing strength. - And that was how Orwell pictured Big Brother."

Wasn't the point in 1984 that Big Brother isn't real? So there was no central dictator, just the system.
by M95D | 2026-02-06 10:16:46+00:00
I never used ATA Security commands with NVME or SSDs, but I did use them with spinning rust ATA and SATA drives. I even had a BIOS module added into the firmware of the motherboard to manage ATA Security [0].

I have a few comments to make:

1)

Erase operation is in fact a succession of two commands: ATA Security Erase Pepare and ATA Security Erase Execute. No other command can be sent between these two, so any disk access by the OS after the first command would cause the second to fail.

2)

ATA Security commands are usually blocked ("frozen") after boot if the drive has no password or was password-unlocked. That means the drive will not accept commands to set/change password or erase until power-cycled. That is a full power cut, not just a reset-drive command.

This feature prevents a virus from passwording or erasing your drive. Yes, it can still crypto-lock or erase your drive via ordinary disk writes, but that takes hours for the whole drive, while ATA Security Erase or setting a password takes a millisecond or so.

The ATA Security Freeze command is sent to the drive either by the BIOS/UEFI (my BIOS didn't do this, but probably all laptops have it as part of their BIOS/UEFI Security features), by a BIOS module (my desktop BIOS didn't have it), by the operating system as part of drive encryption features, or by an antivirus. Also, the drive firmware may have a timer to automatically freeze ATA Security commands after a timeout if it doesn't receive the explicit command from the host.

Power cycling by putting the system to sleep and then wake up will NOT work, because if the drive is locked with a password, it needs to be unlocked BEFORE the firmware/ACPI gives control back to the operating system. Otherwise, the OS would no longer be able to access the disk after wake up. So, the BIOS/UEFI/ACPI, if it supports ATA Security at all, will automatically freeze ATA Security commands again during wake-up, just as it did during cold boot.

In conclusion, the dive must be physically unplugged from power and then hot-plugged. Or start the computer without it, and hot-plug it after boot.

3)

Many (most?) USB adapters don't support ATA commands at all. They'll just emulate a USB mass storage with no direct access to the drive. What you need is an adapter that supports UAS (USB Attached SCSI). And even then, I'm not sure ATA Security commands have a SCSI equivalent so they can be translated.

The best option here is to hot-plug into a real SATA port on the motherboard or PCI/PCIe controller. NOT via USB.

[0] https://www.fitzenreiter.de/ata/ata_eng.htm