MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nerdsniper | 2026-03-06 18:28:11+00:00
Slightly out of my depth, hopefully others weigh in.

Getting a very good lockdown mode requires both owning the entire stack (Apps + OS + Silicon) and being willing to sacrifice repairability (swapping chips/cameras/displays/touch controllers is a good way to help hack into a phone), and willingness to spend a lot of money on something that few people would actually pay for. Apple is the only company that's even positioned to take on this challenge.

AndroidOS has to work with a bunch of core functionality chips that Google/Samsung don't make. Having a bunch of different code paths/interfaces for a bunch of different SoC's, cellular modems, touch controllers, and cameras is not a winning recipe for security. Both Google and Samsung also use their own SoC's (Google Tensor G5, Samsung Exynos) but Samsung also uses a lot of Qualcomm Snapdragons ... and if you're using someone else's SoC there's no chance in hell of coming up with a proper "Lockdown Mode". Samsung or Google might be able to come up with a fully integrated solution someday, each have invested in parts of this. Beyond SOC's, Samsung has their custom silicon which helps them lock down security for their combo touch/display controller. Samsung has also invested a lot into customizing their Knox Secure Folder solutions (and everything else branded "Knox" as well, which is all mostly industry-leading for Android options). Google has the Pixel with their own Titan M2 security chip, and obviously they own the OS.

But it's a lot of work when so much of your engineering is dealing with changes that other companies are making. Google has to keep up with Samsung's hardware changes, because the tail wags the dog there, and Samsung spends a lot of engineering time figuring out how to deal with / customize / fork changes to AndroidOS that Google pushes (while the dog still wags the tail, too). Both have to deal with whatever Qualcomm throws at them for cellular modems, and it required a monumental effort/expense from Apple to only just recently bring up a replacement for Qualcomm's modems.
by chillacy | 2026-03-06 18:28:12+00:00
I've found this to be true so far, junior engineers with AI can be super productive but they can also cause a lot of damage (more outages than ever) and AI amplifies the sometimes poorly designed code they can generate.

I suspect a lot of it best practices will be enforcing best practices via agents.md/claude.md to create a more constrained environment.
by garethsprice | 2026-03-06 18:28:23+00:00
The headline says these workers "might be bad at their jobs," but considered in the context of Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" thesis - that a huge chunk of white-collar work is pointless make-work for surplus labor - then in a hierarchy that rewards BS-fluency (which Littrell speculates), they are actually _good_ at their jobs.

The study measures analytic thinking as a proxy for performance, but that is only the right metric if the organization rewards individuals on the basis of their ability to make good decisions. Which anyone who has spent time in a corporate setting will know is often far from the route to success in such a setting, regardless of what the organization would say.

If your role has no concrete output and your organization rewards BS-fluency, you need a jargon that performs productivity without being too specific - so this argot isn't useless, it maintains a hierarchy that the BS-fluent can be promoted through. Not so much a rising tide but a blocked toilet backing up through the org chart. And BS-receptive workers are more satisfied with their jobs, because by their organization's actual values (versus whatever might be written in the mission statement), they're succeeding.

The BS-intolerant and analytically competent are less satisfied because they're the ones running into the blockers that the BS is covering for - or working through them only to discover that there's no tangible work to do under all the jargon.

The takeaway for me is: if you're interviewing somewhere and the hiring manager starts talking about "actualizing synergistic paradigms" instead of telling you concretely what the team shipped last quarter, it is likely one of those organizations. Places that can tell you plainly what they do are the places where your work will matter.
by NicuCalcea | 2026-03-06 18:28:28+00:00
Of course, both are better.

A lot of Americans probably won't be able to commute on a bicycle, but could easily use one for shorter trips like visiting friends, doing groceries, getting a burger, etc.

Even with commutes, there are lots that could be done on a bicycle. I briefly lived in the US and had a 6-mile (~10 km) commute. It was an unpleasant experience because there was exactly zero cycling infrastructure along the way, but otherwise it was a brief 25-minute trip, shorter than any of the commutes I've had in Europe. Not a single one of my American colleagues, all of whom lived locally, cycled or took a bus.
by jason_oster | 2026-03-06 18:28:28+00:00
This confuses the economics of open source. It's easier to contribute changes upstream than maintaining a fork. A smart business decision is using permissively licensed software that is maintained by other teams (low maintenance cost) while contributing patches upstream when the need arises (low feature cost).

Bringing a fork in-house and falling behind on maintenance is a very bad idea. The closest I've ever come to that in industry was deploying a patch before the PR was merged.
by _dwt | 2026-03-06 18:28:39+00:00
I think this is coming, alongside professional licensure for "software engineers". Every public-facing project will need someone to put a literal stamp of approval on the code, and regardless whether Claude or Codex wrote the bulk of it, it'll be that person's head on a pike when something goes wrong.

This isn't what many of us probably would have wanted, but I think the public blowback when "AI-coded" systems start failing is going to drive us there. (Note to passing hype-men: I did not say they will fail at higher rates than human-coded systems! I happen to believe this, but it is not germane to the argument - only the public perception matters here.)
by egl2020 | 2026-03-06 18:28:49+00:00
"You can learn anything now. I mean anything." This was true before before LLMs. What's changed is how much work it is to get an "answer". If the LLM hands you that answer, you've foregone learning that you might otherwise have gotten by (painfully) working out the answer yourself. There is a trade-off: getting an answer now versus learning for the future. I recently used an LLM to translate a Linux program to Windows because I wanted the program Right Now and decided that was more important than learning those Windows APIs. But I did give up a learning opportunity.
by qzx_pierri | 2026-03-06 18:29:09+00:00
>Then, if the content is for adults and you're not one, your parents can configure your device not to display it.

That would require people to be a responsible adult and actively parent their kids.

It's ironic, because people in this country identify with how hard they grind at work, but refuse to put a fraction of that effort into being an involved parent.

It's easier to just let the government ruin everyone else's good time online.

In return, the parents:

1. Get the illusion that their kids are safer (they aren't)

2. Get a clear conscience, and feel better mentally equipped to run on their corporate hamster wheel
by nlh | 2026-03-06 18:29:35+00:00
This has been a fallacy for as long as businesses have been built, and it will still be a fallacy in the AI era.

Ideas are cheap and don't need to be protected. Your taste, execution, marketing, UX, support, and all the 1000 things that aren't the code still matter. The code will appear more quickly now: You still need to get people to use it or care about it.

I've found almost without fail that you have more to gain in sharing an idea and getting feedback (both positive and negative) before/while you build the thing than you do in protecting the idea with the fear that as soon as someone hears it they'll steal it and do it better than you.

(The exception I think is in highly competitive spaces where ideas have only a short lifetime -- eg High Frequency Trading / Wall Street in general. An idea for a trade can be worth $$ if done before someone else figures it out, and then it makes sense to protect the idea so you can make use of it first. But that's an extremely narrow domain.)
by reducesuffering | 2026-03-06 18:29:45+00:00
> Stop burning everything! Fossil fuel, wood, plastic, garbage.

I don't understand the wood argument. Isn't it widely accepted we need to do burns to manage forests? Wood is a short-term cycle of carbon. It releases when it burns but frees up space to capture it right after. When people live on rural plots and trees fall, should they burn for heat (and lessen needing other energy sources) or let it decompose and cause the same thing? It's not the same as extracting deeply embedded carbon sources that won't make it to the atmosphere if untouched (fossil fuels)
by crazygringo | 2026-03-06 18:29:45+00:00
I don't know why you're being downvoted, but it's exactly this.

Pre-emojis, there were so many times I misinterpreted a text, or had a text misinterpreted. Something that is obviously a joke or sarcasm or teasing with non-verbal communication, can come across as an insult without it. When somebody adds a wink emoji or similar at the end, it changes everything.

Emoji are fantastic at communicating tone and attitude alongside the text itself. They're not a 1-1 correspondence with non-verbal communication, or a perfect replacement, but they vastly improve the chances that something playful isn't misunderstood in a negative way.
by hyperman1 | 2026-03-06 18:29:48+00:00
There is also the signalling when a new, truly meaningless fragment pops up. The bigwig says it first, then his direct reports, then their underlings, etc.

So by using such a phrase, underlings signal both how close they are to bigwigs by knowing such a phrase first, and also demonstrate a vote for alignement, by quoting some phrases more and others less. Bigwigs raise status of underlings by repeating and expressing interest in their new phrases.

These phrases come and go in waves. Underlings laughing with them basically signal they are not worthy of attention in the political melee.
by HanClinto | 2026-03-06 18:29:50+00:00
I've been tinkering with the same thing -- wanting to set up a little server so that we can all play together as a family. We've enjoyed Diablo 2, Minecraft, and Terraria as a family, but I feel like it would be fun to set up a little UO server. I'd really like to find a good tutorial for how to set up a chill / casual-friendly server (I like there to be some grind, but I don't want it to feel like "stock" UO) -- so something with accelerated skill gains and whatnot.

I don't know if there are "family-friendly" presets for such things, but so far Copilot has been reasonably helpful at helping me along -- I just don't have it all working yet. If you have any resources you come across, I would be interested in comparing notes. :)
by pvillano | 2026-03-06 18:29:55+00:00
I put 50% of the blame on GitHub, and 50% of the blame on postinstall. A cache is expected to have no observable effects other than increased storage usage and decreased download time. A package cache must not be able to inject malware.

GitHub could

1. Call the Actions Cache the "Actions key-value database that can be written to by any workflow and breaks the idempotence of your builds" (unlikely)

2. Disable install scripts (unlikely)

3. Make an individually configured package cache unnecessary by caching HTTP requests to package repositories [^1]

4. Make the actions cache versioned as if it were a folder in the repo itself. This way, it can still be an arbitrary build + package cache, but modifications from one branch can't change the behavior of workflows on another branch.

[1]: Assuming most of the work saved is downloading the packages.
by nickstinemates | 2026-03-06 18:29:59+00:00
I've been programming for literally my entire life. I love it, it's part of me, and there hasn't been more than a week in 30 years that I haven't written some code.

This is the first time that I feel a level of anxiety when I am not actively doing it. What a crazy shift that I am still so excited and enamored by the process after all of this time.

But there's also the double edged sword. I am also having a really hard time moderating my working hours, which I naturally struggle with anyway, even more. Partly because I am having so much fun and being so productive. But also because it's just so tempting to add 1 more feature, fix one more bug.
by hinkley | 2026-03-06 18:30:14+00:00
At this point about 80% of my interaction with AI has been reacting to an AI code review tool. For better or worse it reviews all code moves and indentions which means all the architecture work I’m doing is kicking asbestos dust everywhere. It’s harping on a dozen misfeatures that look like bugs, but some needed either tickets or documentation and that’s been handled now. It’s also found about half a dozen bugs I didn’t notice, in part because the tests were written by an optimist, and I mean that as a dig.

That’s a different kind of productivity but equally valuable.
by jdpage | 2026-03-06 18:30:23+00:00
The canonical Boolean values in FORTH are 0 and -1 (that is, all bits set). IIRC the point of that is to unify the bitwise and logical operators, though, not detect bitflips.

Also, at the machine code level, a Boolean controlling a branch or a while loop often doesn't ever make it out of the flags register, where it'll only be a single bit anyway because that's how the hardware works. Not really changeable in software.
by 9rx | 2026-03-06 18:30:50+00:00
> Animal agriculture is around 15% of global emissions

The majority of which is methane, which only has a 7-12 year life. Which means — unless for some reason you started eating way more animals than you did yesterday — that your emissions today simply replace your emissions from 12 years ago. In other words, it is a stable system, unlike carbon, which basically sticks around forever.
by badc0ffee | 2026-03-06 18:30:52+00:00
IIRC "smileys" were what you got from fonts like Wingdings, and I believe those were short-lived. You could type :) and MS Word or Outlook, for example, would "helpfully" give you the Wingdings happy face, which would show up as a J for anyone who didn't have that font.

:-) and friends were "emoticons" for decades.
by eth0up | 2026-03-06 18:31:00+00:00
@Arainach - Because the option to reply is disabled:

I am not sure, as I haven't used that app. What I can say, which may or may not be relevant to you is as follows:

1) Open any Google based device and do the equivalent of /Settings/System/DeveloperOptions/RunningServices/GooglePlayServices

You can peruse around just Running Services if you please, and see plenty there, but be sure to view Show Cached Processes too.

Under Play Services, you will see approximately 24 services, some reasonable, some not. Crisis Alert, Emergency Services, Vestiges of Contact Tracing rebranded, etc.

Try using Google Maps without BT and WiFi scanning, and just pure GPS. Maps won't work.

Try disabling Google Play services, or Play Store and watch Fdroid apps break, and the phone malfunction.

2) Go to /Settings/Apps/See All/Show System and behold a plethora of verified shitware, much of which cannot be removed even through ABD.

Then ask yourself Why? Most of these services are unnecessary. You, presumably, purchased, rather than leased or rented your device. So why can you cannot decide what runs on it? Many do not care. I do. I get zero reimbursement for this data mining shitware.

...or me, I say, if they need that shitware running so badly, buy their own phone and stick it where ever they want, but not on my person. We have entered a paradigm where everyone thinks Because They Can, they can just do whatever they choose on the devices of others. And what happens? We get stronger and stronger devices while the landfills engorge with waste, so that we can support a metadata whorehouse on our personal devices. If you support that, I do not oppose you, I oppose it on my system, as do others, which are the type of people I tend to direct such comments to.

No offense was intended. A comment above drops in merely to say Open Cam 'kinda sucks'. I do not downvote it, nor do I agree. I just carry on.
by roxolotl | 2026-03-06 18:31:07+00:00
How’s it compare to 2000 though? Tech was ascendant in 2008 so not surprised to hear it didn’t do too badly then and in 2020 while people panicked tech again had a much easier time keeping people on remotely.

EDIT: posted below as well https://xcancel.com/JosephPolitano/status/202991636466461124...

There’s a longer term graph in the thread. We’ve got a long way to go before we hit 2000 numbers which is what I’d expected.
by labcomputer | 2026-03-06 18:31:30+00:00
Err... "Most" is doing some heavy lifting here. 51% of parents do use parental controls on their kid's tablets, and 47% on smartphones.

And there's no breakdown by age. Kids don't magically become able to handle the uncensored internet the day they turn 18.

Did it ever occur to you that parents who don't use restrictions maybe have kids that are almost 18? Or parents of kids who have shown themselves to be responsible? Or that the parents use other methods to restrict use (like only allowing supervised use with the parent for very young children)?
by kermatt | 2026-03-06 18:31:42+00:00
I can't speak to the time frames for the article, but I know that the current administration and its policies had a significant negative impact on our business across CY2025.

I ran the team that maintained our business analytic data, and was also on weekly calls where feedback from our clients about the situation was discussed. There was direct correlation between uncertainty and both a decline in new job postings, as well as a lack of renewing existing job contracts.

When comparing our numbers to those of our publicly traded competitors, all the data showed the same trends.
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-03-06 18:31:51+00:00
By being a distraction to the administrations immigration and deportation efforts

Vaccines don’t cause autism

But Oprah and Jenny McCarthy spread enough bullshit that it led to more cases of children dying because they were out there distracting from the real problem which is not enough vaccination

Real job losses come from company heads fundraising on the promise of automation and then with that additional capital they lay people off

in the same way funding funds research and development or offshoring fund “efficiency improvements” and the externalities of that are higher unemployment
by brynet | 2026-03-06 18:31:52+00:00
I didn't say Loogson the company was dead, or that LoongArch was either. I said the predecessor Loongson/Godson CPUs are, like the 2E and 2F, which were MIPS-compatible. They're not manufactured anymore, and were practically unobtainium when they were.

LoongArch is not MIPS, despite it having similarities. It's a new platform/ISA and requires a completely different toolchain and new OS port.

It is not at all "new MIPS-family hardware is being made today" like you originally wrote, and it has little to no relevance to SGI hardware.
by seneca | 2026-03-06 18:32:18+00:00
> It was always "criminals only"

This is absolutely false. It was always mass deportation of all illegal immigrants. The "worst of the worst" rhetoric is new.

Here's a source, but there are many: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/9/trump-lays-out-agen...

> Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Trump reiterated his intention to deport every person who had entered the US without authorisation.
by benvan | 2026-03-06 18:32:20+00:00
Regarding the metrics:

- Claude (via Hubspot MCP) was paginating over contacts, at 40s per 800 contacts and ~150k tokens (triggering compaction)
- full run was 120 of these loops @ 80 minutes and 18M tokens

- Claude + Max was 1 `max search hubspot --filter` command piped to sort | uniq -c
- plus 1 `max search gdrive` query matching each of the results of the previous query, piped to sort | uniq -c
- The rest of the tokens were spent producing an output from 20 words + 20 numbers

(Both of these calculations ignore cached tokens)
by sdf2df | 2026-03-06 18:32:23+00:00
Ok fella. But show me something then. This is all talk.

Personally I have been able to produce a very good output with Grok in relation to a video. However, it was insanely painful and very annoying to produce. In retrospect I would've much preferred to have hired humans.

Not to mention I used about 50 free-trial Grok accounts, so who knows what the costs involved were? Tens of thousands no doubt.
by lunias | 2026-03-06 18:32:26+00:00
People like to get worked up about this topic haha. All I'm sayin' is, it might get a lot hotter. Or maybe it will get cooler? I think it's important to put things in context because it's not some monotonically increasing function even if there is a local trend. I'm pro doing what we can to correct our impact on the environment; I'm even pro going beyond and attempting to control for other non-human externalities. My point is actually that nature doesn't care, but I think we should. Although, even if we try our hardest, we still might not like the outcome.
by myrmidon | 2026-03-06 18:32:28+00:00
> Why do 90% of Americans have AC while only 20% of Europeans do?

Maybe because the majority of Europe is closer to Canada, latitude-wise, than to Phoenix, AZ, and there is simply less demand? Less wealth is certainly a factor, too, especially considering how the warmest nations in Europe all tend to be weaker economically.

> Why does US have ~4 heat related deaths per million while Europe has ~235 per million?

Maybe its just the higher life expectancy increasing susceptibility? Everyone has to die of something at some point.
by theamk | 2026-03-06 18:32:29+00:00
This seems like a pure theater, which provides no functional security?

Surely human will simply use a debugger. Open inspector and find the object in DOM. Or open JS console and find it using a single command.

Not to mention that "difficulty level" thing is pretty absurd too. Your main protection is obscurity - the idea is that humans won't look at DOM. For that, you don't need multiple operations, just put it in any random attribute or a JS comment. Maybe add 1 operation like "base64" for the happiness.

(If this is a joke, please disregard the message above)
by iso1631 | 2026-03-06 18:32:34+00:00
44% is "about half"

If you had 1000 coins and put them into two piles one of 440 and one of 560 it would be "about half"

But if your argument is that only 154 million people support this government and that's fine because if it was 174 million there'd be a problem, then sure.
by sulam | 2026-03-06 18:33:00+00:00
Over time periods in excess of 10K years this is a reasonable caveat. For more human-oriented timelines, there's no negative feedback mechanism I'm aware of that would do anything close to producing an actual oscillation.

Edit: I'd be happy for you to educate me how I'm wrong btw, since that would mean I've missed something significant, which would make me happy! So please do tell me if you know of such a mechanism.
by Frannky | 2026-03-06 18:33:15+00:00
This is my experience too. Also, the ones not striving for simplicity and not architecting end up with giant monsters that are very unstable and very difficult to update or make robust. They usually then look for another engineer to solve their mess. Usually, the easy way for the new engineer is just to architect and then turbo-build with Claude Code. But they are stuck in sunk cost prison with their mess and can't let it go :(