MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pjm331 | 2026-02-01 19:53:34+00:00
> Re: security, I think I need to make an AI credential broker/system. The only way to securely use agents is to never give them access to a credential at all. So the only way to have the agent run a command which requires credentials, is to send the command to a segregated process which asks the user for permission, then runs it, then returns status to the agent

This is a problem that model context protocol solves

Your MCP server has the creds, your agent does not.
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-01 19:53:48+00:00
This is a neat idea but there are so many variables here that it's hard to make generalizations.

Empirically, a top level orchestrator that calls out to a planning committee, then generates a task-dag from the plan which gets orchestrated in parallel where possible is the thing I've seen put in the best results in various heterogeneous environments. As models evolve, crosstalk may become less of a liability.
by coldtea | 2026-02-01 19:53:53+00:00
>You misinterpret, the implication of quality is that having read a book is not indicative of value, someone could have a high metric "I read 10 books a year" but they're all short, low quality romance novels. Whereas someone could clam "I read no books a year" but they're a grad student with no time for novels.

I'd argue thataA grad student "with no time for novels" would still be if not functionality illiterate, at least uncultured, in my book (pun intended).

But that aside, such going "case by case", is not helpful. This is an aggregate statistics. If 50%+ of the population "didn't read a single book" this doesn't break down to lots of grad students with no time for reading or similar cases, but more like a major decline in functional literacy.

Having them reading "10 mediocre books a year" would have been a major improvement.
by comex | 2026-02-01 19:54:22+00:00
The thing is, HTML5 is far more technically capable than Flash ever was. It was competitive even at the time: Flash's main thing was 2D vector graphics, but iOS Safari has supported both Canvas and SVG since at least 2010, possibly from day one.

But the creation tools and the culture never really lined up the same way, and developers focused on creating apps instead.

For non-games, HTML has always been technically superior. iOS Safari may have a long history of rendering bugs, but it beats Flash/AIR, which always looked very out-of-place even on desktop.

I do wonder what would have happened in an alternate universe where either Flash or HTML5 took off on mobile instead of apps. We would have both the upsides of openness, and the downsides of worse performance and platform integration and the lack of an easy payment rail. Pretty much the same situation we still see on desktop today.

We wouldn't have had the same "gold rush" from the early App Store, which happened in large part because of the ease of making money. There would probably be more focus on free stuff with ads, like Android but more so.
by scoperesolution | 2026-02-01 19:54:24+00:00
Nobody has mentioned the dramatic increase of non-white immigrants and illegal aliens since 1985, the Reagan amnesty act, migration under the last three United States presidents. Learning to read proficiently requires participation of the child's parents to enforce good habits, etc. Do you really think these kids are even speaking english when they get home from school-- hell no, their speaking their native laguage with their parents.

Import the third world, become the third world.
by Merrill | 2026-02-01 19:54:36+00:00
Very interesting that it did so well. Although it did leave out the point that reading and interpreting documents could also be done by an expert in the first paragraph as well as the idea that not just words but language are used in technical communications by the various symbolic systems.

I think that sophisticated verbal communications can be learned by verbal means, and that the reading of literature is not essential. Non-literate cultures have maintained traditional folk songs, storytelling and epic poetry.

Corporate managers and salespeople are often highly verbal, but not necessarily highly literate. Consider how the written Response to an Request For Proposals is not enough for important opportunities, but must be simplified to a set of slides delivered by a silver-tonged senior salesperson. This provides a better match to the input characteristics of the customer's decision makers.
by bitwize | 2026-02-01 19:54:41+00:00
Well that sounds disappointing. These days you're probably better off just running Linux or NetBSD on your old Amigas. But the ability to run true multiuser Unix on cheap desktop hardware was probably immensely valuable to businesses at the time, so it might've been worth it, even if you forgo much of the Amiga's Amiganess. The Tandy Model 16 family was not an Amiga by any stretch, but they had 68000 CPUs and were Unix capable in the form of Xenix. So they ran a lot of small business back office stuff until well into the 90s I'm guessing, despite first coming out in 1982.
by al_borland | 2026-02-01 19:54:57+00:00
They didn’t have much of a choice. In that time people had already developed jail breaks and Cydia, an app store in its own right, was thriving.

Before Apple’s App Store launched, my iPhone was running all sorts of other apps and alternative launchers.

Apple had to move fast to keep things from getting too out of control.

Over the years, as the vulnerabilities in the OS were closed and iOS added features, the need or desire to bother with jailbreaks and 3rd party pirate app stores dropped. I haven’t thought about it in many years.
by riversflow | 2026-02-01 19:55:36+00:00
I have no idea. A wild guess is that it might have to do with my setting option that preserves the last camera mode on re-launch, but I was never able to replicate a crash. I have not gotten a camera crash since I upgraded to iOS26. It only happened a few times, but once is too much.

The only issue I have with the camera now is that under low light conditions and fog, it will refuse to focus on a distant subject unless I cover the LIDAR.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-01 19:55:37+00:00
> you can use your own literacy skills to confirm that my point (1) above is the correct understanding

It’s not. I know the 23 Wall guys. They’re constantly surveying their clients for obvious reasons about everything they’ll answer.

In this case, they’re surveying the family offices of billionaires. About, among other things, what makes them special. And what makes other non-billionaire special people special.

The original language correctly conveys this.
by verdverm | 2026-02-01 19:55:57+00:00
The underlying models are impressive, be it Gemini (via direct API calls, vs the app or search), I would include alpha-go/fold/etc in that classification

The products they build, where the agentic stuff is, is what I find unimpressive. The quality is low, the UX is bad, they are forced into every product. Two notable examples, search in GCloud, gemini-cli, antigravity (not theirs technically, $2B whitelabel deal with windsurf iirc)

So yes, I see it as perfectly acceptable to be more skeptical of Google's take on agentic systems when I find their real world applications lackluster
by delusional | 2026-02-01 19:56:06+00:00
`perf` to get go from the "it's stuttering" to "it's spending a very long time in the gpu driver". GDB and printf debugging to get to "the sort in the driver is taking a long time because there are an excessively large amount of TTM buffer objects, not because we are calling it too much". I could have made that leap faster, and I will the next time, but this time that step took me a couple of hours. From there it was a question of who is making those buffer objects, and so it was back to GDB to find nothing in sway/wlroots.

That was where I sort of ran out of good ideas. I have never worked with Wayland before. I figured it's a "protocol" so it must have a way to inspect it, and it does. `WAYLAND_DEBUG=1` allows you to dump the wayland messages, which I then manually inspected to find a discrepancy between allocations and dealloctions. That's a client (aka firefox) bug, so I looked through their issue tracker where I found a somewhat similar bug[1]. I reported my findings there.

Since then I've checked out the firefox code (which I've also never worked with before). Back in GDB and the logs, and I think I know what's going wrong. You can read the bugzilla for that though.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1999636
by yardstick | 2026-02-01 19:56:32+00:00
I don’t think it’s a silly question.

Before mobile phones, there were public phone booths. Along motorways there were often call boxes. There’s little to none of that anymore.

Also before mobile phones, if you had an accident in a remote area you were at the mercy of someone passing by and noticing you. Today, modern cars can call 911 on your behalf along with your location without you even being conscious. Or if you don’t have a car that does this, then your cell can be used. Let’s not also forget iPhones calling for help when they detect you had a fall at home.

Yes emergencies existed before mobile phones. I contend that the use of mobile phones has led to better outcomes when an emergency happens. I also admit mobile phones will have caused some of those emergencies (distracted driver etc).
by csa | 2026-02-01 19:56:58+00:00
> And if no one reads the original material, the class discussion is a complete waste of time, with everyone bringing up the same trite points, and the whole exercise becomes a facade.

If reading an AI summary of readings is all it takes to make an exercise a facade, then the exercise was bad to begin with.

AI is certainly putting pressure on professors to develop better curricula and evaluations, and they don’t get enough support for this, imho.

That said, good instruction and evaluation techniques are not some dark art — they can be developed, implemented, and maintained with a modest amount of effort.
by saltcured | 2026-02-01 19:57:02+00:00
I think the "genie" that is out of the bottle is that there is no broad, deeply technical class who can resist the allure of the AI agent. A technical focus does not seem to provide immunity.

In spite of obvious contradictory signals about quality, we embrace the magical thinking that these tools operate in a realm of ontology and logic. We disregard the null hypothesis, in which they are more mad-libbing plagiarism machines which we've deployed against our own minds. Put more tritely: We have met the Genie, and the Genie is Us. The LLM is just another wish fulfilled with calamitous second-order effects.

Though enjoyable as fiction, I can't really picture a Butlerian Jihad where humanity attempts some religious purge of AI methods. It's easier for me to imagine the opposite, where the majority purges the heretics who would question their saints of reduced effort.

So, I don't see LLMs going away unless you believe we're in some kind of Peak Compute transition, which is pretty catastrophic thinking. I.e. some kind of techno/industrial/societal collapse where the state of the art stops moving forward and instead retreats. I suppose someone could believe in that outcome, if they lean hard into the idea that the continued use of LLMs will incapacitate us?

Even if LLM/AI concepts plateau, I tend to think we'll somehow continue with hardware scaling. That means they will become commoditized and able to run locally on consumer-level equipment. In the long run, it won't require a financial bubble or dedicated powerplants to run, nor be limited to priests in high towers. It will be pervasive like wireless ear buds or microwave ovens, rather than an embodiment of capital investment.

The pragmatic way I see LLMs _not_ sticking around is where AI researchers figure out some better approach. Then, LLMs would simply be left behind as historical curiosities.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-01 19:57:09+00:00
> Nobody has mentioned the dramatic increase of non-white immigrants and illegal aliens since 1985

Genuine question: do we have data for native-born non-Hispanic Americans?

This could be an artifact of immigration. Anecdotally, I think we have a divide driven by class-based device access (poorer kids are on their devices and social media more than rich kids and more than anyone was in the 80s).
by smeej | 2026-02-01 19:57:24+00:00
The HTC One smartphone came with a programmable IR port. All you had to do was determine the TV brand (easy if you can see it), then point the top of the phone at the TV pushing the "power" button until it went off. Then you knew you had the right configuration.

I mostly used it for turning volume down in waiting rooms or at bars, but a bar was also where I figured out most of their TVs tend to be set to the same control because they had a few with their sensors in a line where I was sitting and they all went off together while I was programming it.

One of the phone features I miss most, after the 3.5mm jack. Nobody needs to hear loud daytime TV in a waiting room.
by ixxie | 2026-02-01 19:57:50+00:00
I've recently become curious about the scene, and discovered quite a bit going on. It seems most tech coops are operating more like agencies, taking on client work. Haven't seen many developing products.

Here is a great list of tech coops: https://tech-coops.xyz/

Here is a new but somewhat active matrix channel where some tech coops folks hangout: https://matrix.to/#/#techcoop:autonomic.zone We plan to have an informal call to chat there on 22nd of February at 17:00-18:30 UTC.

Here is a Discourse forum for tech coops: https://community.coops.tech/
by riedel | 2026-02-01 19:58:01+00:00
This is very much fun. Since I do not know what I am doing I simply ran Gemini on it to add a beat to pyramid song demo [0]. Is there music repls with LLM assistants built-in?

[0] https://strudel.cc/#Ci8vICJQeXJhbWlkIFNvbmcgKFJhdyBBYnN0cmFj...
by GreenDolphinSys | 2026-02-01 19:58:36+00:00
Well, it's hard to break bread with someone who you fundamentally disagree about things like humans rights issues with. Family or not. You don't just skip over that, and in fact why should you? Having blood relations means you have to sit and eat with someone who thinks you or people you know shouldn't exist or shouldn't be allowed to have the same rights as other people? I'm very glad that we've normalized not glossing over this kind of stuff anymore, because of "family".

"our hacker-minded spaces"

Spaces full of people.

"once clean, apolitical world-of-mind"

This only ever existed for select few people.
by GorbachevyChase | 2026-02-01 19:59:41+00:00
So when 5G was being deployed to the city I was working for and I could see permits, it struck me as really peculiar just in terms of economics because the density of towers needed is extremely high compared to the previous generation. As a user, I really can’t tell a difference in quality of service. So it seemed like an extremely large capital investment for no gain, which makes me think that the purpose of 5G is some dual use that is not public knowledge. That the intent was to create a high accuracy tracking system for us seems plausible to me given how much money is funded into other surveillance activity.
by Keloran | 2026-02-01 20:00:26+00:00
Location: Darlington, UK

Remote: Preferred

Willing to relcocate: No

Technologies: Go, Rust, Typescript, Swift

Resumé/CV: https://keloran.dev/post/cv

Email: jobs.at.develbox.info

--

I am a software engineer with 25+ years experience,

recently I have been keeping myself relativly sane by building https://interviews.tools an interview planning site and its companion apps for iOS (native swift) https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/interviews-tool/id6756259187
Interviews.tool and Android (native kotlin) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tools.intervie...

source of all of those is available on github https://github.com/keloran

I have also built various tools over time for example https://flags.gg which is a feature flag system with a ton of native sdks, https://github.com/flags-gg

--

I don't mind doing technical tests but I hate technical interviews (where people have to watch me type) really if you want to know what kind of code I can produce look at my github repos, there is easily 100-200k lines of code
by blue_pants | 2026-02-01 20:00:26+00:00
Yes, but when you connect your phone to a Nebula network, and go to http://media-server in your browser, the DNS won't resolve it to your desired node, because the phone client (same on desktop) didn't update DNS of the phone, so you'll have to use node's IP address.

That's what I've read (when evaluating Nebula), at least.
by binaryturtle | 2026-02-01 20:00:32+00:00
I wish there was an easy solution like this for smoking "neighbours". Some sort of detection device that instantly closes my windows automatically and then "explodes" a nasty "stinking bomb" outside (e.g. automatic opening of a container with butyric acid or similar), so it smells worse than their smoke. Eventually their brains would connect smoking with nasty stinking and stop doing it.

But I wouldn't know where to start. :-\
by jofla_net | 2026-02-01 20:00:46+00:00
I had a very similar story related to this as well.

For the longest time I always assumed RF remotes were the ancient ones, as growing up, we had an old large Magnavox console tv, with just such a remote.
As time progressed we went to IR, which was, as I'll explain below, a welcome relief!

The tv was positioned in a basement room, just under my bedroom. Every few months I would be rustled from my sleep, at 4AM, to come downstairs to the tv turned on, blaring full volume and on channel 99 (static). This continued for a while until I realized that my father, who is HAM operator, and an early riser, would somehow be injecting into the remote sensor on certain frequencies occasionally. Needless to say it was thusly unplugged afterwards!
by r0ze-at-hn | 2026-02-01 20:01:06+00:00
> Benjamin, compared muscle stem cells isolated from young and old mice and discovered that a protein called NDRG1 increased dramatically with age—reaching levels 3.5 times higher in old cells than in young cells.

So ERa down-regulates NDRG1 and there is less Era activation when we age. causation/correlation.
by ninth_ant | 2026-02-01 20:01:35+00:00
I think you have some potential opportunities here either in doing something in the spaces of technical education or podcasting/newsletter.

Could definitely imagine a weekly podcast where you cover the weeks risc-v developments and add some context from your experience and knowledge. Or a course targeted at getting new developers up to speed.

Either way the existing types of knowledge and work you do could work as marketing opportunities for those paid avenues.

Best of luck if you do
by fastball | 2026-02-01 20:02:15+00:00
I suppose part of the problem is that I don't understand why "Voiden" in the first place, but if we assume Voiden is a good name:

The logo neither says "voids" nor "API tool". It is a blocky infinity symbol that to me means nothing in-context. Also the duotone and slight asymmetry (of a normally symmetric symbol) gives hints of duality/gemini, which also means nothing to me in the context of what the tool is and the name that it has.
by biglyburrito | 2026-02-01 20:02:51+00:00
"We will probably see fewer full-stack engineer openings and more roles for back-end and front-end engineers."

That doesn't appear to be the case now, well after the ascent of AI began. Job descriptions indicate that employers believe AI allows your average engineer to fulfill the responsibilities of front-end engineer, backend engineer, system architect and (to a lesser degree) DevOps.
by Bengalilol | 2026-02-01 20:03:42+00:00
I second everything except the fact that Adobe was behind Flash, which IMO is what killed it in the first place (with ten years of hindsight, I can say this confidently). I still do creative, non-standard work, but in a free way using pure vanilla JS (using Haxe).
Adobe's mistake was keeping the system proprietary instead of letting it be free. Since then, I've left that ecosystem and what a relief!

(I know I'm mixing different levels here, and my personal experience isn't really an argument).

ps: HTML scope is way more advanced than whatever Flash could have been.
by hombre_fatal | 2026-02-01 20:03:48+00:00
1. Wordle's word list is going to be a lot more curated than TFA's word list because people want to guess words they use or have heard of, not "aahed".

2. Only a tiny group of people care to "card count" Wordle to rule out words that have already been played because they think that sort of min/maxing is fun. Most people don't even think about that, so whether Wordle reuses words every few years is trivial to them.
by rendx | 2026-02-01 20:04:12+00:00
I would go further and claim that anyone who sees themselves as "apolitical" just basically thinks their own opinion is the only true way to see things "rationally" (and as such "fact" and not an opinion; nothing to be "political" about), and everyone else is just plain wrong/mistaken. Since they're not ready to admit this to themselves and others, they hide behind the "apolitical" label. Otherwise they would see that their own opinion is a "political statement" on equal basis as others. It doesn't even make a difference if you voice it or not.

This strategy works poorly to avoid conflict and friction (life), since one just shifts conflict to reappear elsewhere. Hence the often claimed need to self-isolate "for mental health" to avoid getting in contact with... positions such as one's own, and half-suppressed anger at all those that just don't see what is RIGHT.

Hint: It doesn't work.
Ask HN: How are you dealing with anxiety with layoffs?
by throwaw12 | 2026-02-01 20:05:25+00:00
Software industry is different today, then 4 years ago.

4 years ago, engineers, even when laid off, could write code and maintain a legacy software for small agencies.

Today, you can't charge for 2 weeks of work, because work is done in 2 hours with AI agents.

Expectations became much higher, you must produce a lot of impact and output to be competitive. Problem with that is, while producing output, there is no attachment to the work you are producing, its one prompt away, in 85% of cases, and you are in next project. Jumping from one project to another, everything is prompt away

How are you preparing for the future with higher expectations and higher competition?
by torginus | 2026-02-01 20:05:41+00:00
Thanks for the answer, that sounds reassuring. I have another question, from what you said, it sounds like you remove restrict from the whol argument, but technically, afaict, the Rust borrow rules still prevent anything inside those structs getting aliased, with the exception of the stuff inside UnsafeCell<> (even with Rc<> the underlying value cannot be aliased, only the reference counter).

Does Rust/LLVM track aliasing to this degree, or is it all or nothing, like if you have a UnsafeCell anywhere, the whole type is excluded from restrict?
by constantcrying | 2026-02-01 20:05:49+00:00
Why do you think that it is a given that politicians perform better in school? Here in Germany many prominent politicians were academic failures or dropouts.

We had student council elections, where the candidates were listed by degree and the semester, the trend was overwhelmingly that the candidates were in semesters after the usual graduation date, often having studied for more then 5 years.