MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sgarland | 2026-02-26 14:37:36+00:00
Nailed it. I often cite Admiral Rickover (USN), who among many other things, said this:

"Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible."

He was seen as an asshole who was difficult to work with, and while that's true, it's also true that without his leadership, it's doubtful the Navy would have launched their nuclear power program, nor would it have been as successful. He ran a dictatorship, with an absurd amount of direct reports, very little middle management, and it was wildly successful.

> "Disagree and commit" is a good thing.

> In a healthy organization, responsible people act and are held to account by their results.

The first is only true if the second is also true, but I'm sure you know that.
by jackyinger | 2026-02-26 14:37:45+00:00
Ok, great movie. But man, I hate that this is what everyone thinks about when they think of nihilism.

It is very challenging to truly believe in nothing. I think it is much more realistic to see nihilism as a label applied to others’ belief systems that we find entirely void of valid belief.

Organizations described as Nihilistic Violent Extremists do have beliefs that motivate them, they are just vacuous beliefs in the eyes of the vast majority of human beings.

However if you can show me someone who can convincingly claim to be that they really are a nihilist I would be curious to see it.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-02-26 14:37:48+00:00
> Gig work allows these companies to offer work without commitment, while the worker may offers his labour without commitment.

This is basically a cousin to “at-will” hiring rationalization in the US. It’s nonsense in that case, and it’s nonsense with zero hour contracts. There is a little to no benefit to employees. It just puts them in an even more precarious situation. The power dynamics are not fair between them and employers, those kinds of systems are inherently lopsided. Yet proponents keep insisting it levels the playing field. I don’t get it.

It’s basically arguing for the fusion of worst parts of being a hired employee and a freelance contractor. Both have advantages, both have compromises, and these “gig economy” jobs make sure that basically none of the benefits of being a contractor exist.
by tialaramex | 2026-02-26 14:38:10+00:00
I think one place this could go, a decade or more in our future is that the electricity isn't worth metering but the fact you can have electricity is billed. Think of a typical phone service today. You don't pay to send a text or read Hacker News on your phone, but you do pay for the privilege to be able to do either of those whenever you want.

So I'm imagining instead of spending 40p per day plus 24p per kWh maybe it's £1 per day and usage isn't really metered. A few people would abuse this, but if energy is cheap enough it's barely worth caring.
by RiverCrochet | 2026-02-26 14:38:39+00:00
I do things because I like them, want them, or they give me pleasure. Motivates me just fine. Boredom is unpleasant, so I avoid it by continuing to do and learn new things. Reflection is only warranted if it seems like I'm damaging myself or those adjacent to me who contribute to my good life, which is easy to do accidentally in modern society.
by mcdonje | 2026-02-26 14:38:44+00:00
Long haul trucking should be illegal or effectively eliminated by a carbon tax. Use trains for long hauls.

He even said the problem with trains is last mile. Last mile short haul trucks can be and are electric.

It's weird he laid the groundwork for this argument, but he isn't making this argument.

Fix the infrastructure issues that make transferring from rail to truck difficult. Yes, that's challenging and expensive. Guess what else is? The status quo, and the effects of climate change.
by neop1x | 2026-02-26 14:39:05+00:00
That is a nice excuse, do you work at Google? :) I get the idea of not slowing down requests or risking availability, but don’t tell me a company as big as Google can’t design an asynchronous accounting system robust enough to handle this. We’re not talking about penny-perfect precision - blocking at 110% or even 150% of the set cap would be enough. Right now, though, there’s nothing to prevent a $5k, 20k or even higher bill surprise due to API key leaks, misuse or wrong configuration. To me, this is unacceptable and one of the reason I try to avoid using gcloud (the other one is unbearably slow gogole cloud console "webapp").
by FeloniousHam | 2026-02-26 14:39:05+00:00
I distinctly remember one Christmas in the mid-70s where my grandfather and uncles all got these ash trays shaped like a house (when you set your pipe/cigarette/cigar down the smoke coiled out the chimney). Everyone was smoking indoors, despite my grandmother was quite fussy and tidy about pretty much everything.

For that matter, my childhood art classes almost always included making an ashtray.
by saghm | 2026-02-26 14:39:22+00:00
And yet if you say that on television the administration will try to pull you off the air: https://www.npr.org/2025/09/18/nx-s1-5544559/abc-jimmy-kimme...

The parent comment is warning about the potential for a false representation of a crisis being used to grab more power; the underlying facts being inconsistent with the supposed crisis is not particularly surprising
by itishappy | 2026-02-26 14:39:34+00:00
How do you figure? There is no "right to record," nor is surveillance mentioned in the Declaration of Human Rights. In fact, it points out in Article 12 and 29 that rights and freedoms can and should be limited by law if they impinge on the rights and freedoms of others, such as those mentioned in Article 12:

> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

That doesn't seem as clear cut as you're implying.
by mushufasa | 2026-02-26 14:40:30+00:00
I doubt it. I predict in a few years, maybe sooner, one/some of the AI companies buying up the supply will either have achieved their goal or collapsed, and then the market will be flooded with a glut of memory driving prices low again. Or, conversely, the demand stays high for a sustained period of time and the suppliers just increase supply. There's no hard bill of materials/technical reasons for the memory prices to be this high, unlike 20+ years ago.
by mikkupikku | 2026-02-26 14:40:58+00:00
Can they use AI to check if their employees actually assemble the burger before slapping it into the box? I don't know why burger king and mcdonalds have this problem when every other burger shop manages it fine. Basically what I'm saying is if burger king management is concerned about customer experience, or even if they don't give a shit and just want AI on their resume, there are better approaches..
by joshstrange | 2026-02-26 14:41:22+00:00
I used to work for a company that did "Electronic Monitoring", the nice name for monitoring people with ankle bracelets. One thing that never ceased to amaze me is how almost everyone I talked to about it or showed the device (I wore one occasionally for testing purposes) assumed or asked there was a way to shock the person wearing it.

I guess on the face of it that's not a crazy thing to think but I was always struck by how "normal" people seemed to think that would be. Maybe it's TV/Movies that have done something like that and make people think it's a real thing but more importantly (disgustingly?) that it's perfectly reasonable.
by bojan | 2026-02-26 14:41:33+00:00
> Clean water to swim in? Build a pool.

Where do you find clean water to fill the pool with?

> You need industry to have a middle class.

Your average industrial assembly-line worker is _not_ middle class. They are horrible jobs no-one really wants back, or at least not for themselves.

It is very much possible to keep your air and environment clean, and still reasonably grow and remain relevant - look at France.

> You need middle class for capitalist consumption.

Again, industry workers were not middle class, and if you pay them enough to be middle class, your product's price stops being competitive.

To have middle class for capitalist consumption, you need to stop funneling literally _all the money_ to single-digit amount of people and companies, leaving everyone else poor, regardless of what they do for work.
by staticassertion | 2026-02-26 14:41:57+00:00
This is very stupid. No one wants this. People don't like false sincerity. Even when we know that it's someones job to be nice, we appreciate when it feels genuine.

If you want people to genuinely be nice, give them reasons. Make them happy. Help them stay motivated. Otherwise you cheapen "please" and "thank you" even more than is already the case and get zero value out of it because no one will appreciate it knowing that it's forced.

A world where everyone says "please" and "thank you" isn't a better world.
by joefourier | 2026-02-26 14:42:00+00:00
> No, it would have been called AI. A decade ago most people were not familiar with AGI as a term, that just got popularised because AI was taken over to be basically what we used to call ML.

Define "most people", I don't think the average user of ChatGPT is familiar with the term AGI even now, but it's been used in the AI/ML community for multiple decades. I remember reading about the distinction between general and narrow AI around 2010 as an enthusiast. "Strong" vs "weak" AI were also used although with essentially the same definition, although they're less common terms nowadays.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2026-02-26 14:42:41+00:00
Colin and Samir have some really in-depth videos with MrBeast which help document and explain his rise in fame, influence, and prominence. He's one of the most dedicated optimizers of our time, and he's been responsible for shaping the YouTube meta for years at this point. At this point a significant portion of his brain is probably fully allocated towards optimizing for the most engaging YouTube videos possible. The "24 hours with MrBeast" video helped contextualize his fame to me, it's really rock-star level. It's a shame that not many people engage with him on a more technical level, I think he would have a lot of interesting insights over which to nerd out about.
by palmotea | 2026-02-26 14:42:47+00:00
> The person you are replying to mentioned their personal experience. Have you seen this work in person? It might help to talk about those facts.

The meat of their comment wasn't the personal anecdote, it was actually on government policy:

>>> You can sum this up with: Producing stuff without polluting the environment in most cases is impossible. Reducing the pollution costs a lot of money, and can make your product non-competitive.

>>> This is why you outsource to other countries and let them do it, because you simply do not care about them living in a polluted environment. Poison Outsourcing.

This is 100% about globalization: if some countries let their rivers catch on fire, the externality lets them out-compete anyone who tries to do the process cleanly. So if you let their externality-fueled products into your country, you just can't build similar things.

If labor and environmental standards were strong and global, or countries with high standards refused to trade with countries with low standards, we wouldn't have this situation. There would be an economic motivation to develop and implement cleaner processes.
by sgarland | 2026-02-26 14:43:12+00:00
> Also, the author seems to treat the terms "consensus" and "buy-in" as synonymous.

Can you explain more? I'm not familiar with that distinction, nor that book.

EDIT: I asked ChatGPT, and it came up with this [0]. Please let me know if it's accurate (I don't necessarily dislike LLMs, I just think they're wildly oversold, and also value human input).

0: https://chatgpt.com/share/69a05ce2-95e4-8006-ae56-bd51472894...
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-26 14:43:23+00:00
>What I don't agree with, the underpayment of workers enabled by government "subsidies".

Wait a second, Isn't this just corporate welfare and goes against capitalism and supply/demand free market economics? Why should other people's taxes subsidize other people's businesses?

We're not talking about subsidizing national security industries like semiconductor manufacturing, aerospace, renewables, pharma, we're talking about subsidizing someone's cafe/fast food business so they as a business owner can pocket the profits while paying their staff below market and having the taxpayer pick up the tab.
by torginus | 2026-02-26 14:43:30+00:00
I think a very serious issue with GC is that:

- The number of edges in a graph tend to scale superlinearly with heap size, as the number of edges possible in a graph are quadratic wrt no of objects.

- Memory bandwidth hasn't been scaling very much during the past decade and a half, even compared to memory size. It's also not a thing people think about or even easy to display in any performance monitoring tool.

But considering if you had a machine 15 years ago with 4GB or ram that could be read at 15GB/s, and now you have one with 32GB that can be read at 60GB/s, it means that your bandwidth compared to heap size has halved. Considering the quadratic nature of references, the 'amplification factor', the number of times you have to revisit an already visited block of memory is higher as well.

This is in addition to the cache trashing issues mentioned in the post.

If you need to read the whole heap, this sets a lower bound on how much time the GC will take ~0.25s on the old machine, ~0.5s on the new one.

Suppose your GC triggers a memory bandwidth issue - how do you even profile for that? This is kind of an invisible resource that just gets used up.
by mrtksn | 2026-02-26 14:43:40+00:00
> Be your own boss etc..

I was on 0 hour contract with staffing agency when I first arrived to UK until I got my white collar job. It was brilliant concept, I worked as much as I wanted/needed and from my perspective it was like a job that I can work on whenever I wanted which gave me the flexibility to find and prepare for my actual job.

Other people that I worked with were mostly students, Australians(apparently they take a year or two off before/after university to travel Europe and pay for it by working in UK), immigrant doctors/engineers and other professionals in order to pay for their expenses when preparing for their exams in UK so that their qualifications are recognized.

So there's definitely a gist of reality in the advertisement. That said, I knew that I was going to get a proper job and most of the other people were in that mindset so we just made money and had great time but there were some people who did this as their main income and they were forced to move cities when shifts dry out. There were also some people who worked 16 hours a day everyday, making relatively good money but destroying their lives.

It's definitely something that must not be considered long term.
by ck2 | 2026-02-26 14:44:32+00:00
* https://arxiv.org/html/2602.06811v1/figure/SciRob_Fig1_Biomi...

* https://arxiv.org/html/2602.06811v1/figure/SciRob_Fig2_Chara...

* https://arxiv.org/html/2602.06811v1/figure/SciRob_Fig7_Discu...
by bwoud | 2026-02-26 14:44:33+00:00
Hi HN, I got tired of manually unrolling nested SPF includes to figure out which vendors are actually authorized to send email on a domain. Most checkers just give syntax validation or Pass/Fail.

I built SPF1 to instantly resolve the cryptic includes (_spf.google.com, etc.) into actual vendor names (Google, Mailchimp, Proofpoint) to easily spot unauthorized 'Shadow IT'.

It's designed to be stupidly fast (<50ms). No ads, no signup walls, just a raw lookup. Would love feedback on any major vendor signatures I might have missed.
Show HN: Simple Viewers – Tiny native macOS file viewers
by ryanlitalien | 2026-02-26 14:44:54+00:00
Hi HN,

Around summer/fall of 2025, I started using 'plan mode' quite a bit more. When I would cmd+click into a newly created markdown plan, macOS would open Xcode. This was slow, didn't have native rendered viewing, the list goes on. I started working on a markdown viewer to easily open, review plans before I sent Claude on their way. The Markdown Viewer was born! It came from inspiration from the great Preview Mac app.

For Christmas our family got a Bambu A1 3D printer (fantastic btw!) and I wanted to easily preview 3d files before opening/sending to the printer, etc. Well, I started up a 3d viewer. Yaml, CSV, Text viewers all followed.

As a responsible engineer, I started seeing patterns, so I DRY'd it up w/a core library, but was stuck with how to update each one, and to consistently get around the Apple notarizing/signing. So I created the Viewer Toolbox. The toolbox is an easy way to install and update my viewer apps. Now I can "write once, use everywhere" ;). I have a few Macs at home that I can now just click "Update" on the app and it's ready to go.

Originally, I opened up the Apple Mac Store to see if there were any quick viewers, but most were paid or had in-app purchases. I didn't think one app by itself was worth charging for, so my friend suggested I put the Toolbox up online for a price. Makes sense! So the individual apps are free, and if you want to get updates or new viewers, download the Toolbox! The individual apps will never have a paid version. This was to solve my own problem.

I was debating about writing this, but with Simon's recent blog post about his presentation app and how that Microsoft was adding markdown and AI support to Notepad, I had to launch this today.

Minor tech tangent: they're all native Swift/SwiftUI, universal binaries, no Electron, and each one is 1-2 MB. I share a small Swift package (ViewerCore) across all of them for common functionality like search, theming, and web view rendering. Simple, fast, free and portable are key here.

Hopefully this helps someone :).

Thank you!

Ryan

https://ryanlitalien.com/simple/

https://ryanlitalien.gumroad.com/l/viewer-toolbox (photos of the apps are on here)
by chiengineer | 2026-02-26 14:45:03+00:00
https://github.com/zerocool26/Unified-Correctness-Oriented-P...

- this is a new foundational idea for programming (I attempted) vs current languages

https://github.com/zerocool26/Quantum-Observability-Contract...

QOCC is a vendor-agnostic, reproducible, trace-first layer that instruments quantum program workflows end-to-end and supports contract-defined correctness + cost optimization via closed-loop compilation/search.

I made these 2 projects very recently to test stuff, test ideas, implementations things that work vs break

setup - vs code + github copilot pro plus
by WillAdams | 2026-02-26 14:45:06+00:00
One early tool in this space was Navipress (which AOL bought out and made into AOLpress) which is notable for having been used by a certain Tim Berners-Lee to write a book:

https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/821987.Weaving_the_Web
by nextlevelwizard | 2026-02-26 14:45:20+00:00
Is discount really an ad? Like if I had already made a decision to buy a thing and now I paid less for it was it really a working ad?

Also sponsored content is way different than having ads on a website or in an app or what kind of ads do you think GPT will have?

And you are definitely judging me. When people say “ads” that is pretty specific thing that they mean. If you broaden it to mean everything then I can’t argue as there is no point.

There is two options either ads (as in those things every one blocks with uBlock Origin) do not work on people OR they do work on most people but not on me, if anything they are a deterrent from buying that product.
by alphawhisky | 2026-02-26 14:45:53+00:00
>I would think that there are brownfield ex-factory sites which make more sense.

This exactly. Why are these companies not forced to develop in bigger cities that have the existing infrastructure to support them. Detroit could use all the property tax it can collect and those companies do the public little good being out in the middle of nowhere dodging taxes and regulations. Seems like an opportune chance to force them to be urban and a little more beneficial to society.
by kergonath | 2026-02-26 14:46:08+00:00
> I do remember most people not treating their inbox as an archive at the time.

Indeed. For me, the step was gmail. With its humongous 1GB of storage, that was the moment when I stopped having to delete stuff to save space. It’s funny because a lot of people I know who were already older at that point kept the habit of deleting emails, even today.
by trillic | 2026-02-26 14:46:28+00:00
Until very recently, 19 of the last 20 quarterbacks who lost their first Super Bowl never made it back to the title game (Jalen hurts in 2024 is the one).

Historically, out of 38 QBs to lose their debut, only 4 eventually won a ring (Dawson, Griese, Elway, and Manning).
by hluska | 2026-02-26 14:46:37+00:00
I really don’t see it. PBCs are dual purpose entities - under charter, they have a dual purpose of making profit while adding some benefit to society. Profit is easy to define; benefit to society is a lot more difficult to define. That difficulty is reflected at the penalty stage where few jurisdictions have any sort of examination of PBC status.

This is what we were all going on about 15 years ago when Maryland was the first state to make PBCs legal. We got called negative at the time.
by SolubleSnake | 2026-02-26 14:46:44+00:00
There's a big problem that a lot of the people in AI have spent so much time with other PhDs in the AI space and working in these professional AI labs that they've forgotten or never even seen what 'normal' businesses look like.

I saw a podcast where the main guy behind Claude Code, Boris, just casually explained that at Anthropic where there are some software developers using sometimes multiple 6 figure values in dollars PER MONTH on their tokens for running their swarms of Claude agents...that might make you some kind of productivity guru but try going to your CFO and asking for these kinds of figures from each software developer PER MONTH...they will spit coffee out in your face and burst out laughing.

It would be the equivalent of saying 'yeah we want a new CAD and design management package that we basically prompt and it does everything for us'

'How much is it?'

'Well, upwards of 7 figures per year, per design engineer, and we have about 400 design engineers'.

'You want half a billion pounds, per year, so you can all play with your imaginary friends? No...piss off and get back to work'
by drewda | 2026-02-26 14:47:16+00:00
That's exactly why the Bay Area Air Quality Management District exists (established decades before the federal EPA):

> Charged with regulating stationary sources of air pollution emissions, the Air District drafted its first two regulations in the 1950s: Regulation 1, which banned open burning at dumps and wrecking yards, and Regulation 2, which established controls on dust, droplets, and combustion gases from certain industrial sources.

> Much research and discussion went into the shaping of Regulation 2, but there was no doubt about the need for it. During a fact-finding visit to one particular facility, Air District engineers discovered that filters were used over air in-take vents to protect the plant's machinery from its own corrosive emissions! This much-debated regulation was finally adopted in 1960.

https://www.baaqmd.gov/en/about-the-air-district/history-of-...