MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by beders | 2026-02-23 19:38:30+00:00
As someone who is roughly in the same age group as the author and who was running a BBS, has witnessed the rise of IP4 networks, HTTP, Mosaic etc. let me provide a counter-point.

The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and there are valiant attempts, they will ultimately remain niche and have severe bandwidth limitations)

For decades ISP have throttled upload speeds: they don't want you to run services over their lines.
When DSL was around (I guess it still is) in Germany, there was a mandatory 24h disconnect.
ISP control what you can see and how fast you can see it. They should be subject to heavy regulation to ensure a free internet.

The large networks, trans-atlantic, trans-pacific cables, all that stuff is beyond the control of individuals and even countries. If they don't like your HTTP(S) traffic, the rest of the world won't see it.

So what you can own is your local network. Using hardware that is free of back-doors and remote control.
There's no guarantee for that. If you are being targeted even the Rasperry Pi you just ordered might be compromised.
We should demand from our legislators that hardware like this is free of back-doors.

As to content creation: There are so so many tools available that allow non-technical users to write and publish. There's no crisis here other than picking the best tool for the job.

In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place.
by iririririr | 2026-02-23 19:38:36+00:00
read the connected vehicle laws. the intent was to forbid Chinese components. the actual effect is that even allowing to connect your phone will require full certification, at which point the manufacturer is financially motivated to not offer options without the telemetry they can sell to equifax et al (just like happened with smart tvs). So, yes, in practice all US cars will have radios, unless you specifically order a custom model.

and yeah, your phone gives all the deniability and randon ids, etc. but if you allow apps to access location it's game over. also, just go see that google sells one option where you pay by people who saw you ad physically entered a store. (ps: sadly, I implemented the DSP side of this)
by lm28469 | 2026-02-23 19:38:44+00:00
> I never quite understood why AI and LLMs are marketed the way they are, or why the powers that be behind its massive push seem so keen on selling it as a wholesale replacement for human careers

> It really feels like all of these CEOs are just borderline running a cult at this point.

Because the people at the top of these companies have absolutely no idea about how the average human goes through life or what a normal human life even is. They don't know what having a job means, what a job is, what it means to be in charge of a family, to struggle for basic things, &c. Look at zuck presenting his ridiculous image gen ai [0], or their embarrassing "Uh HeLp Me MaKe A SaUcE FoR My KoReAn SaNdWiCh" [1], or his Wii tier metaverse that no one above the age of 13 found remotely interesting, this is what these people spent hundreds of billions on, that's what they dream about, that's the future they want even though 90% of the population does not give a single shit about it,
And then you have altman and his very unsettling takes on all kind of topics like "ai will develop bioweapons in 2027 but ai is also the solution to this problem", "humans use too much energy" or "I cannot imagine having gone through figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT” no shit my dude, a gay man who never worked a day in his life, exit scammed his way to the top and who paid for someone to incubate their offspring have no clue about what evolution should have encoded in his DNA over 300m+ years? and we have to give him $7 trillion to speed run the next stage of evolution, lol, lmao even...

Ah, and they need to raise trillions of dollars, literally, that's why they keep mentioning outrageous (but very profitable) things like curing cancer, skynet, terraforming mars and solar powered satellites datacenters even though none of these things make any fucking sense. They need the next """hypergrowth""" vector, one more scam before we eventually reach the point of no return, it's all greed and FOMO as always. One day they shill self driving cars, the next bitcoin, the next AI, always full of "in two years it'll be amazing we promise, I can't explain how or why but give me a few trillions", meanwhile it's going downhill fast for everyone outside of these echo chambers

[0] https://youtu.be/TWpg1RmzAbc?t=570
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4-9xz77tQnQ
by daxfohl | 2026-02-23 19:38:59+00:00
Possibly even more important than knowing where to hit it (what to code), is knowing where not to hit it (what not to code). Hitting the thing in the wrong place can lead to catastrophe. Making a code change you don't need can blow up production or paint your architecture into a corner.

AIs so far seem to prefer addition by addition, not addition by subtraction or addition by saying "are you sure?".

This doesn't mean that "code is cheap" is bad. Rather, it means that soon our primary role will be to guide AIs to produce a high proportion of "code that was cheap", while being able to quickly distinguish, prevent, and reject "cheap code".
by intellegix | 2026-02-23 19:39:02+00:00
Cool project. The proactive heartbeat approach is interesting -- most tools in this space (mine included) are reactive, only running when explicitly kicked off.

I built something complementary but cross-platform: an open source loop driver + council system for Claude Code CLI. Instead of a desktop UI, it's all Python/JS that wraps the CLI with NDJSON streaming. The loop handles budget enforcement, stagnation detection, and model fallback (Opus -> Sonnet), while a separate council system queries multiple models through Perplexity for architectural decisions.

Different trade-offs: yours has the proactive scheduling and messaging integrations, mine focuses on the autonomous coding loop itself with 194 pytest tests and session continuity via --resume.

https://github.com/intellegix/intellegix-code-agent-toolkit
by irishcoffee | 2026-02-23 19:39:19+00:00
> Every single documentation and commentary about this says that it is not a good idea, but it does trigger the inspiration and imagination of people of what the future is going to be. The whole conversation around this comment is that people don't get why people are excited about this.

If you have 10 minutes, here is an example of how LLM tech can trigger inspiration and imagination of people of what the future is going to be:

https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic
by WarmWash | 2026-02-23 19:39:22+00:00
Photos and "looks pretty small" are not technical parameters that you pay tens of thousands for a lab to certify.

There are a bunch of cutting edge cell technologies out there right now with gangbusters specs but have some kind of fatal flaw.

If Donut was serious they would put the full specs of the tested cell in each report, so people could have higher confidence that each tested cell is the same chemistry. VTT would have no issue weighing and measuring each cell before and after testing.
by Wobbles42 | 2026-02-23 19:39:24+00:00
All of academic publishing has fallen victim to Goodhart's law.

Our metrics for judging the quality of academic information are also the metrics for deciding the success of an academic's career. They are destined to be gamed.

We either need to turn peer review into an adversarial system where the reviewer has explicit incentives to find flaws and can advance their career by doing it well, or else we need totally different metrics for judging publications (which will probably need to evolve continuously).

We assume far too much good faith in this space.
by throwaway27448 | 2026-02-23 19:40:02+00:00
> What I ultimately learned is that in a pitched political battle, people actually damage their credibility because they're afraid to cede _any_ ground to the opposition

This could be a person making a bad argument, or it could be that the individual is the opposition trying to poison the well. Cf COINTELPRO. Largely any movement has people with insane takes, and it's impossible to tell the difference between good and bad faith actors.

That, and sometimes people just aren't trying to be persuasive at all. It's extremely rare to actually see someone persuaded about anything political without enormous amount of effort, or more realistically a change in material interests.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-23 19:40:13+00:00
> I personally have stopped publishing publicly, since my research is still on the fuzzy boundary of AI's current knowledge, my website gets scraped daily, and I don't want to contribute to paid models for zero acknowledgement or compensation.

I don't know about your works so pardon me but thinking about it, would a better solution be for gated communities at the very least, say matrix or xmpp or irc be better?

I suppose that scraping bots of matrix would be quite hard for AI companies to setup? but anyone interested in reading your contents can still find the data if they are interested plus you get the additional benefit of a community/like-minded people.
by shenberg | 2026-02-23 19:40:47+00:00
Mid-way I realized this was AI writing (took me a while), then I read a quote in the text about a comment that "The tragedy isn’t that they cheated; it’s that the system was designed to let them thrive for a decade before anyone bothered to look at the data." I didn't find this comment in EJMR, or anywhere on the internet except the OP post, for that matter.
by kypro | 2026-02-23 19:41:13+00:00
> Many of the worst present on the internet is not age gated at all, you have millions of porn websites without even a "are you over 18" popup. There are plethora of toxic forums...

This is what I find most insane about the UK's age verification law. It's literally so easy to find adult content without proving your age... You can literally just type in "naked women" into a search engine and get porn...

To call it ineffective would be an understatement. Finding adult content on the web almost just as easy as it's always been. The only thing it's made harder is accessing adult content from the normie-web – you can't access porn on places like Reddit anymore, but you can access porn on 4chan and other dodgy adult sites.

If the argument is "think about the kids" there are more effective ways to do it... Requiring device-level filtering for example would likely be more effective because it could just blacklist domains with hosting adult content unless unrestricted. It would also put more power in the parents hands about what is and what isn't restrict.
by SergeAx | 2026-02-23 19:41:18+00:00
All perceptions are very personal and anecdotal. Here's mine: I tried to rebuild a website from Hugo to Astro. Gemini 3.0 was mediocre and in the end just failed and was unable to complete the task. Sonnet did almost well. I had to flush the context once most of the job was finished, for atomic git commits and deployment scripts.
by falcor84 | 2026-02-23 19:41:45+00:00
But that's the thing - changing course is suddenly no longer hard. We've already reached a state where I can have AI generate a decent set of tests from an existing codebase (or better yet, I'd already have them ahead of time), and to then do a massive refactoring or even a full rewrite while I get a good night's sleep. There is nothing "has always been" about this.
by atleastoptimal | 2026-02-23 19:41:56+00:00
The AI bubble won't really "pop because it isn't a bubble in the traditional sense.

AI isn't being speculated on nearly as bad as crypto was in 2021, or housing was in 2007, or dotcom era businesses were in 2000.

Revenues are ballooning like crazy for AI providers. There is insane demand for AI compute, meaning valuations are justified by revenue, not chasing hyper-speculation.

What may happen is that regulatory environments make the next generation of models unviable for release (because they are too dangerous to release and no AI company wants to deal with the liability), which would lead to lower API revenues and thus a sell-off. However any API that's too dangerous to release would be extremely powerful as something the AI companies use on their own to push products/research forward, which would still increase their revenue.
by professoretc | 2026-02-23 19:42:55+00:00
Correct; the ability of a model to reproduce source material verbatim does not necessarily make the model's existence illegal. However, using a model to do just that might very well present a legal liability for the user. I would be interested to see the extent to which models can "recite from memory" source code, e.g., from the various MS code leaks. Put another way, if I'm using LLM code generation extensively, do I need to run a filter on its output to ensure that I don't "accidentally" copy large chunks of the Windows codebase?
by zahlman | 2026-02-23 19:43:08+00:00
> inline examples in the description beat external documentation every time. The agent won't browse to your docs page.

That seems... surprising, and if necessary something that could easily be corrected on the harness side.

> The schema side matters too - clean parameter names, sensible defaults, clear required vs optional. It's basically UX design for machines rather than humans.

I don't follow. Wouldn't you do all those things to design for humans anyway?
by c7b | 2026-02-23 19:43:20+00:00
My understanding is that there's more data processing required with cameras because you need to estimate distance from stereoscopic vision. And as it happens, the required chips for that have shot up in price because of the AI boom.

But I think costs were just part of the reason why Elon decided against Lidar. Apparently, they interfere with each other once the market saturates and you have many such cars on the same streets at the same time. Haven't heard yet how the Lidar proponents are planning to address that.
by OkayPhysicist | 2026-02-23 19:43:48+00:00
Are people really arguing that there are few good teachers? In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, most people can list a mix of good and bad teachers they had over their educations. The goal is just to increase the proportion of good teachers, and hopefully raise the floor of the how good the worst teachers are.

Increasing pay probably won't raise the ceiling on how good the best teachers are. If they've got that strong a passion for teaching, they're probably already doing it.
by petcat | 2026-02-23 19:44:14+00:00
Yeah it's an interesting angle in the article. The EUV light source technology is completely designed, developed, and manufactured by Cymer in California, which is a US company that ASML acquired in 2013. If export control agreements were not in place then ASML would have never been permitted to acquire Cymer. And if they are not enforced then the US would almost certainly require ASML to sell Cymer back to US ownership, TikTok-style.

The reality is that it's American technology that is used in ASML machines.
by Wobbles42 | 2026-02-23 19:44:45+00:00
There is a key distinction between white people and Koreans in this discussion that explains the double standard.

Specifically, open hatred of Koreans is not socially acceptable in contemporary western culture. Open hatred of white people is.

Humans in general seem to really like to engage in ethnic bigotry, and in present day North America and Europe, directing that at white people is the last viable outlet for that.

It can be annoying, but it's not the end of the world, and it's not likely to change any time soon. You are expected to understand this, but to never explicitly state it.
by throwawayk7h | 2026-02-23 19:45:00+00:00
Parents can't easily prevent their kids from going to those kinds of stores once they're at the age where the parent doesn't need to keep an eye on them all the time and they can travel about on their own.

The difference though is that parents are generally the ones to give their kids their phones and devices. These devices could send headers to websites saying "I'm a kid" -- but this system doesn't exist, and parents apparently don't use existing parental controls properly or at all.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-23 19:45:24+00:00
That doesn't explain away all the H-1B hires though, who move to places where the pay must be drastically higher than my asking rate. Edit: Turns out if you hire an H-1B you must pay them a higher rate, it cannot be lower just because they're H-1B, so they're definitely making way more than I would have asked for. If cost is the factor, then either HR departments are stupid, or some other shenanigans is going on.

I've also been told for a company I will not name that had I been asian they would have called me, I just assume there's an overwhelming number of asian employees, not that there's anything wrong with that, but if they're discriminating against everyone else from being hired, that's not ethical or legal in the US.
by pizlonator | 2026-02-23 19:45:25+00:00
> Except as you well know, C might not change as fast, but it does change, including the OS ABI.

I don't know that.

Here's what I know: the most successful OSes have stable OS ABIs. And their market share is positively correlated with the stability of their ABIs.

Most widely used: Windows, which has a famously stable OS ABI. (If you wanted to be contrarian you could say that it doesn't because the kernel ABI is not stable, but that misses the point - on Windows you program against userland ABIs provided by DLLs, which are remarkably stable.)

Second place: macOS, which maintains ABI stability with some sunsetting of old CPU targets. But release to release the ABI provides solid stability at the framework level, and used to also provide stability at the kernel ABI level (not sure if that's still true - but see above, the important thing is userland framework ABI stability at the end of the day).

Third place: Linux, which maintains excellent kernel ABI stability. Linux has the stablest kernel ABI right now AFAIK. And in userland, glibc has been investing heavily in ABI stability; it's stable enough now that in practice you could ship a binary that dynlinks to glibc and expect it to work on many different Linuxes today and in the future.

So it would seem that OS ABIs are stable in those OSes that are successful.
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-23 19:45:43+00:00
A possible catalyst might have been the 1993 AT&T "You Will" Ad Campaign. It was very prescient but also the joke is that the commercials ended with "and the company that will bring it to you will be AT&T", which did not pan out in the ways that ad campaign thought.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvZ-667CEdo
by umanwizard | 2026-02-23 19:45:45+00:00
Almost every major release of rust stabilizes new library methods. For example, the latest major release (1.93) stabilized Vec::into_raw_parts. This isn’t gated by an edition. So if you had a trait with a method “into_raw_parts” which you had defined on Vec, after updating to 1.93 or later your code will either fail to compile, or start running different code when that method is called.

Sorry, I meant to write “method resolution”, not inference. This isn’t the same issue as type inference (though indeed, stdlib changes can break that too)
by 0x457 | 2026-02-23 19:45:58+00:00
If you're programming for ESP, then embassy is the way to go in most cases. You don't need to learn much about lifetimes in most of the application code. Steep learning curve people refer it is "thing blow up at compile time vs runtime." It's easy to write JS or C that passes all tests and compiles and then wonderful blows up when you start using it. It just forces you to learn things you need to know at IMO right now.

My biggest problem with rust right now is enormous target/ dirs.
by insane_dreamer | 2026-02-23 19:45:59+00:00
While I applaud the efforts to make AI inference local-only, I also fail to see the need for AI inference that relies on collecting continuous information. Yes, implicit activation (i.e., keyword) results in a less effective model that doesn't automatically order eggs for me. But I don't really need the more effective model (shopping list post-it on the fridge works just fine, actually). It's a solution looking for a problem.
by drnick1 | 2026-02-23 19:46:11+00:00
> even allowing to connect your phone will require full certification

I am not sure I understand this.

I am aware that manufacturers benefit from spying on people through car telemetry, or else they would not shoulder the cost of providing a cell plan. But, I, the owner of the vehicle, have every right to literally cut the cord (or simply unplug and remove the cellular modem).

> and yeah, your phone gives all the deniability and randon ids, etc. but if you allow apps to access location it's game over.

I don't. I run GrapheneOS (fully degoogled), and the only apps allowed to access location services are OSMand and a self-hosted Home Assistant instance. Of course that does not change the fact that millions of other people are being spied on.
by iririririr | 2026-02-23 19:46:28+00:00
no my friend. i mean objectively, not some rose tinted nostalgia glasses. android2.3 allowed so much better control for people who are not installing all sort of crap apps, that the usability was something unimaginable to an android15 user. not to mention we had devices with trackballs, keyboards etc

sadly, given that both manufacturers on this duopoly are highly incentivised to push malicious apps, everything must be throw out for a cat and mouse game of sand boxing
by paxys | 2026-02-23 19:46:52+00:00
It's more than just that.

> President Trump granted a pardon to Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, who had spent four months in federal prison in 2024 for his role in the firm’s crimes. The Trump family’s crypto start-up, World Liberty Financial, has forged close business ties with Binance, and Mr. Zhao was a guest this month at a conference at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla.
by user3939382 | 2026-02-23 19:46:52+00:00
No, this is proven false by reducing this theory to the individual level. Anyone who has tried to design/imagine -> actually build something, be it an artist, architect, song writer, programmer, or otherwise, knows there is inevitably a gap between design and realization. No one involved in that process would at any point consider the gap to be part of its “purpose”.

People do hide their intentions but that doesn’t give us a license to reduce complex system dynamics to absurdities.
by falcor84 | 2026-02-23 19:47:04+00:00
It's already happening, particularly with "Ladybird Browser adopts Rust" [0] being at the top of HN today. It's now feasible to quickly iterate on a system's design with a dynamic language like Python, and then, once you're happy with the design, have AI rewrite it into something like Rust or Zig. I can even foresee a future where we intentionally maintain two parallel implementations, with machine-defined translation between them, such that we're able to do massive changes on the higher level implementation in minutes, and then once we finish iterating, have it run overnight to reimplement (or rewrite) it in the performant language. A bit like the difference between a unoptimized debugging version of a project, and the highly optimized one, but on steroids.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120899
by bawolff | 2026-02-23 19:47:07+00:00
At some point its a game and needs to be fun to play. If you are directing a group of five units that might work but if you have 200 units on the field i think it breaks down and is less fun.

> But then you (the player) shouldn't have a proper map of your own, either.

In aoe2 you don't have a full map. I imagine 0ad is similar being a clone