MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jcgrillo | 2026-02-20 23:38:17+00:00
Well, that unlimited damage scenario is one that I'd need to see a successful demonstration of before I'll worry about it. Like, sure, if we end up building some computer program that allows a bored kid to do real damage then I'll eat my words but we're nowhere near there today, and for all anyone actually knows we may never get there except in fiction.

Not unlike nuclear weapons, this space is fairly self-regulating in that there's very, very high financial bar to clear. To train an AI model you need to have many datacenters full of billions of dollars of equipment, thousands of people to operate it, and a crack team of the worlds leading experts running the show. Not quite the scale of the Manhattan Project, but definitely not something I'll worry about individuals doing anytime soon. And even then there's no hint of a successful test, even from all these large, staffed, funded research efforts. So before I worry about "damages" of any magnitude, let alone billions of dollars worth, I'll need to see these large research labs produce something that can do some damage.

If we get to the point where there's some tangible, nonfiction threat to worry about then it's probably time to worry about "safety". Until then, it's a pretend problem which serves only to make AI seem more capable than it actually is.
by paxys | 2026-02-20 23:38:33+00:00
AI "recording" software has never been tested in court, so no one can say what the legality is. If we are having a conversation (in a two party consent state) and a secret AI in my pocket generates a text transcript of it in real time without storing the audio, is that illegal? What about if it just generates a summary? What about if it is just a list of TODOs that came out of the conversation?
by WalterBright | 2026-02-20 23:38:38+00:00
googling "how many lives has tesla autopilot saved?" produces:

It is impossible to determine the exact number of lives saved by Tesla Autopilot, as "avoided accidents" are difficult to quantify, but Tesla reports that its vehicles with Autopilot engaged are significantly safer than the U.S. average, with one crash recorded for every 6.69 million miles driven in Q2 2025. Conversely, independent trackers have identified over 65 deaths involving Autopilot or FSD as of October 2025.

Key Safety Data and Context:

Safety Claim: Tesla's Q3 2025 Safety Report indicates that Autopilot technology results in an accident frequency nine times lower than the US national average.

Fatalities: Data compiled by TeslaDeaths.com reported 65 fatalities linked to Autopilot through October 2025, with federal investigators having verified dozens of these cases.

Comparison: As of Q2 2025, Tesla recorded one crash for every 6.69 million miles with Autopilot, compared to 1.26 million miles without it, and a U.S. national average of one crash every 702,000 miles.
by krick | 2026-02-20 23:39:07+00:00
Well, if it's true it's the first instance of good news I've heard in a while. But as far as I've checked, all local hobby groups still were defaulting to Facebook as the main (an often only) source of updates, events and general coordination. At least, it was a major source of friction for me until quite recently, as I never joined that thing and could only participate if somebody told me personally.
by snicky | 2026-02-20 23:39:47+00:00
I agree with you in general, but come on - learning is easier (unless you need to dive into highly specialized stuff), writing shorter chunks of code is faster, simple photo editing ("remove this and that from the background") doesn't need any skills now. Image generation isn't terribly too if you put some effort and don't stick with the same 3-4 drawing styles that all the cheapskate companies use.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-20 23:39:49+00:00
You have not read all that I have written.

Not all "processing" has the same purpose and the different methods of processing should not be confused. There are 2 broad classes of "processing" that are very different. The methods of processing that extract the most useful components of the sources of food are never bad by themselves, even if the availability of pure nutrients allows their bad use by choosing unbalanced recipes.

Such processing that is not bad unless its products are misused includes the extraction of oils from seeds or fruits, the grinding of seeds into flour, the filtration of the proteins from milk into protein concentrate, the precipitation of proteins and fat from milk into cheese, and so on.

The methods of processing that are bad and the only that should be called "ultra-processing", cause irreversible degradation of the food, by either mixing various food ingredients and additives into an unbalanced and unhealthy combination and by various treatments, e.g. heating, frying, boiling etc. whose effects cannot be undone to make again a healthy food.

Only the 2nd kind of processing methods must be avoided, and the way to do this is by cooking yourself, because the food that is either completely unprocessed or it has been processed only with methods of the 1st kind cannot be eaten directly, with the exception of some fruits and vegetables that have a too low content of nutrients to be able to sustain human life.

In theory, an industrial producer of food could use methods of food processing equivalent with a home cook and make healthy food. Unfortunately, this almost never happens, because it is much more profitable to make tasty but unhealthy food.
by api | 2026-02-20 23:39:58+00:00
Mine is just bizarre. I logged in a few months ago just to peek and it was AI generated conspiritainment brain rot about aliens and the Illuminati and Nazi UFOs. I found it kind of hilarious but also horrifying. Lots of fake archaeology pics, very obviously AI.

Different people seem to get different forms of brain rot. Last my wife checked it was political rage bait. My mom gets AI cat video slop.
by soulofmischief | 2026-02-20 23:40:16+00:00
I think both of you are projecting an aggression tone onto my words. Poe's law, maybe.

It shouldn't offend you that I don't personally enjoy continued small talk and prefer to form deeper connections at the risk of losing superficial connections, by not engaging in drawn-out progressive disclosure.

You're making assumptions about our compatibility without knowing much about me at all. But, this was my point: Now I know that we don't need to continue the discussion and we can both spend our energy elsewhere.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-02-20 23:40:26+00:00
This is one of the things that drives me nuts about certain conservatives here in Canada who have been crying that Carney just "needs to make deal" (on some realpolitik basis) -- that would have been completely insanely bad bargaining. Everyone knew this court date was coming (and also that there's midterms this year). Why on earth would Canada show its belly to Trump when Trump himself was potentially about to be de-fanged? Why ink an unfavourable deal and then find two years later that we're stuck with it while the US political arena has changed?
by godelski | 2026-02-20 23:40:46+00:00
In other industries there are professional engineers. People who have a legal accountability. I wonder if the CS world will move that way, especially with AI. Since those engineers are the ones who sign things off.

For people unfamiliar, most engineers aren't professional engineers. There are more legal standards for your average engineer and they are legally obligated to push back against management when they think there's danger or ethics violations, but that's a high bar and very few ever get in legal trouble, only the most egregious cases. But professional engineers are the ones who check all the plans and the inspections. They're more like a supervisor. Someone who can look at the whole picture. And they get paid a lot more for their work but they're also essential to making sure things are safe. They also end up having a lot of power/authority, though at the cost of liability. Think like how in the military a doctor can overrule all others (I'm sure you've seen this in a movie). Your average military doctor or nurse can't do that but the senior ones can, though it's rare and very circumstantial.
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-20 23:41:11+00:00
> You have not shown how a large scale collection of neural networks irrespective of their architecture is more deterministic

Its software. Without an external randomness source, its 100% deterministic excluding impacts of hardware glitches. This...isn’t debatable. You can make it seem non-deterministic by concealing inputs (e.g., when batching multiple requests, any given request is “nondeterministic” when viewed in isolation in many frameworks because batches use shared state and aren’t isolated), but even then it is still deterministic you are just choosing to look at an incomplete set of the inputs that determine the output.
by pavlov | 2026-02-20 23:41:20+00:00
My Facebook is honestly nice, it’s the most relaxing social media for me.

The promoted posts are books and artists and occasional gym content. Ads are relevant or at least not annoying (SuitSupply seems to think I’m their ideal customer, and I don’t mind looking at their handsome models in this season’s knitwear). The people I know post mostly about meaningful or harmless stuff.

But it’s probably like this because I joined over ten years after everyone else did. I didn’t activate my Facebook account until 2018 when I got a job at FB and it was mandatory. Then I found out that it was actually a good way to curate a set of people from my youth that I genuinely wanted to reconnect with.

That’s probably what made the difference compared to many whose FB social graphs were built up early and never pruned.
by ajime | 2026-02-20 23:41:32+00:00
Launching next generation edge computing CI/CD platform

We are building Ajime (https://ajime.io) to provide a zero-config and pipeline building, Ajime is a CI/CD drag and drop experience for edge computing & robotics. Just link your GitHub repository, we handle the build and deployment of CUDA-ready containers, manage your cloud/on-prem databases and compute resources (provide also fast hosting), and provide secure, fleet connectivity over the cloud. Easy like building lego.

Whether you’re deploying to an NVIDIA Jetson or Raspberry PI or any other linux based SOM, Ajime automates the entire pipeline—from LLM-generated Dockerfiles with sensor drivers to NVIDIA Isaac Sim validation. We’re in private beta and looking for engineers to help us kill the “dependency hell” of robotics DevOps. Check out the demo and join the waitlist at ajime.io.
Stripe closed our non-profit's account with 0%
by littlesteps | 2026-02-20 23:41:40+00:00
I'm writing in desperation after our non-profit organization's account, Little Steps Foundation, was suddenly closed by Stripe. They are now holding $5,398.92 in crucial donation funds, and we've only received automated, nonsensical replies.

We are a registered non-profit that raises funds for our charity work through Meta ads (Facebook/Instagram). Our account has a perfect record, which makes this situation completely baffling.

The core of the problem: Stripe claims a "high volume of unauthorized charges," but our own data, exported directly from the Stripe Dashboard, proves this is impossible.

Here is a summary of our account's lifetime stats:

- Total Transactions Processed: 1,074
- Total Disputes (Chargebacks): 0
- Total Refunds: 0
- Early Fraud Warnings (EFWs): 0
- Overall Fraud Rate: 0.00%

How can an account with a 0% fraud rate across 1,000+ transactions be flagged for unauthorized charges? It makes no sense.

The timeline of events shows a clear system failure:

1. Feb 19: Stripe requests identity verification, giving a deadline of March 1.
2. Feb 20: We successfully complete the verification.
3. Minutes later: The system claims the verification request "expired" on Feb 19 (a day before the deadline) and immediately closes our account.

This proves the decision was triggered by a software bug, not a legitimate risk assessment.

We have already sent a detailed appeal to support@stripe.com and heretohelp@stripe.com with a full dossier of evidence (all the CSVs and screenshots), but we are posting here hoping to get the attention of a human at Stripe who can actually review our case and see the obvious mistake.

Any advice or help from the community would be greatly appreciated. We just want our funds released so we can continue our charity work.
Show HN: Local AI document intelligence – no cloud, runs on your machine
by bommavj | 2026-02-20 23:41:55+00:00
I got tired of uploading sensitive documents to cloud AI services, so I built UniDocVerse — a fully local AI document analysis platform.

Everything runs on your machine:
- Local LLM via Ollama (Mistral 7B)
- PostgreSQL + pgvector for semantic search
- Tesseract OCR for scanned documents
- 10-agent LangGraph pipeline for document analysis
- Supports 20+ document types

Available as macOS DMG (notarized), RPM, and DEB packages.

Free 1-month trial. Happy to answer technical questions.
by 7777777phil | 2026-02-20 23:42:09+00:00
Even a16z is walking this back now. I wrote about why the “vibe code everything” thesis doesn’t hold up in two recent pieces:

(1) https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-saaspocalypse-paradox/

(2) https://philippdubach.com/posts/the-impossible-backhand/

Acharya’s framing is different from mine (he’s talking book on software stocks) but the conclusion is the same: the “innovation bazooka” pointed at rebuilding payroll is a bad allocation of resources. Benedict Evans called me out on LinkedIn for this take, which I take as a sign the argument is landing..
by alephnerd | 2026-02-20 23:42:24+00:00
Both AI Fanatics and AI Luddites need to touch grass.

We work in Software ENGINEERING. Engineering is all about what tools makes sense to solve a specific problem. In some cases, AI tools do show immediate business value (eg. TTS for SDR) and in other cases this is less obvious.

This is all the more reason why learning about AI/ML fundamentals is critical in the same way understanding computer architecture, systems programming, algorithms, and design principles are critical to being a SWE.

Given the number of throwaway accounts that commented, it clearly struck a nerve.
by lich_king | 2026-02-20 23:42:42+00:00
Vulnerability research is exciting and profitable, but it has three problems. First, it's mentally exhausting. Second, the income it generates is very unpredictable. Third, it's sort of... futile. You can find 1,000 vulnerabilities and nothing changes.

So yeah, it's the domain of young folks, often from countries where $10k or $100k goes much farther than in the US. But what happens to vulnerability researchers once they turn 35? They often end up building product security programs or products to move the needle, often out of the limelight because they no longer care about getting applause or Twitter mentions. And they're the ones who write checks to the young uns to test these defenses and find more bugs.

The fact that the NSA or the SVR now need to pay millions for a good weaponized zero day is a testament to this "boomer" work being quite meaningful.
by mullingitover | 2026-02-20 23:43:21+00:00
> But morals don't run the world - interests do.

> As such, Iranian leadership will have to give up their nuclear ambitions if they wish to offramp.

It's not remotely in Iran's interests to give up on its nuclear program. Probably the best thing that could happen for their security would be an above ground nuclear weapons test to get everyone off their back.

It's not like surrending their program is going to save them, just ask Gadaffi about how it worked out for him. Oh wait.

Also, it's not like they're the ones starting the nuclear race in the region: that one's on Israel.
by w10-1 | 2026-02-20 23:43:41+00:00
Speculation and concern from a naive observer:

Is it polymarket presenting this ability to detect insiders? Or is someone trying to sell the service of detecting insiders to those wanting to know if bets are on equal footing? (or wanting to follow insiders? or wanting to hide your identity by making multiple accounts? Are there per-account fees, when polymarket might encourage people to make multiple accounts?)

Regardless, polymarket seems to be on balance corrupting, by monetizing and normalizing use of inside information, which violates agency principles. It's not clear that it really offers hedging or predictive benefits.

When trading firms do better (after data discovery and analysis), there's some evidence they're better than other firms, and you can trust them with some money. But when there's a public prediction market, the only benefit is to the insiders.
by godelski | 2026-02-20 23:43:54+00:00
> I absolutely do not want to gatekeep beginners from being able to publish their work on the open internet

FWIW there is no barrier like that for your physical engineers. Even though, as you note, professional engineers exist. Most engineers aren't professional engineers though, and that's why the barrier doesn't exist. We can probably follow a similar framing. I mean it is already more common for licensing to be attached to even random software and that's not true for the engineer's equivalents.
by janice1999 | 2026-02-20 23:44:19+00:00
The problem is that the effort required to understand the quality of a project has also gone through the roof (and not just due to the number of them). Good looking READMEs and docs, large test suites, well constructed code - LLMs can generate credible versions that take time to digest and understand the limitations of. AI is fantastic at faking the outward signals of a good project and hyping it up. I've lost count of the projects that appear here and on Reddit that initially look good but fall apart once a domain expert spends the time to dig into it.
by EvanAnderson | 2026-02-20 23:44:53+00:00
> I want a "phone", i.e., small form factor computer, that can run something like NetBSD, or Linux. But I have no intention of using it for commercial transactions. Mobile banking is not why I want to run a non-corporate OS

> I want to use it for recreation, research and experimentation

I am a firm believer that phones are personal computers and should have all the end user freedom we have come to expect from personal computers. I am totally behind what your saying. (The amount of irrational anger that wells up in me when I hear someone make the argument that phones are somehow not general purpose personal computers and shouldn't provider their owners software freedom would astound you.)

Personally, I opt out of services that require the use of phone "apps" and any potential attestation they provide. Unfortunately, I just offload those needs onto my wife and her iPhone.

Want to go to a concert in a TicketMaster venue? You have to have a phone. Pay to park in some places requires a phone. Mobile ordering for some restaurants requires a phone.

I don't think it should be this way, but it is. I think we need consumer regulation to insure software freedom on phones and curtail awful user hostile "features" like remote attestation.

Until that happens (if it ever does) there is a realpolitik with needing corporate phones for some activities that can't be denied.
by woodruffw | 2026-02-20 23:45:23+00:00
In practice this isn’t as big of a hurdle as you might expect: Python is fundamentally dynamic, but most non-obfuscated Python is essentially static in terms of callgraph/reachability. That means that “this specific API is vulnerable” is something you can almost always pinpoint usage for in real Python codebases. The bigger problem is actually encoding vulnerable API information (not just vulnerable package ranges) in a way that’s useful and efficient to query.

(Source: I maintain pip-audit, where this has been a long-standing feature request. We’re still mostly in a place of lacking good metadata from vulnerability feeds to enable it.)
by rrix2 | 2026-02-20 23:45:42+00:00
it's becoming ever more clear to me that i'll have at least two devices: one running software i trust, one running software corporates trust, with a very narrow pipeline connecting the two, if it all. my demon-haunted device can stay offline in my bag and get hotspot'd in to my trustworthy device as necessary.

not happy about it, but i don't see a path forward that lets one participate in the wider ecosystem and maintain their own sovereignty and sanity.
by theturtletalks | 2026-02-20 23:45:55+00:00
How about Pi terminal agent, it's been my favorite terminal agent after trying CC, Droid, Opencode, Codex, Gemini, Amp. Just because you don't find valuable new side projects made using AI, doesn't mean they don't exist.

There's more projects I suspect are made predominantly using AI, but I don't want to speculate.
by rsynnott | 2026-02-20 23:45:58+00:00
The EU has a weighted mean tariff of about 1.3%. Prior to ol' mini-hands, the US had a weighted mean of 2.4%; it now has a weighted mean of about 8% (or, well, did until this ruling, who knows now). China is 2.1%. A couple of countries in South America have very high tariffs, but you'd expect that; high tariffs are normally a marker of a developing economy.

The idea that the EU is high-tariff, while popular on the internet, is simply not supported by the facts.
by godelski | 2026-02-20 23:46:50+00:00
> it's one thing to disclose the issue to the authorities, it's another to go to the press and trumpet it on the internet.

At least in the US there is a path of escalation. Usually if you have first contacted those who have authority over you then you're fine. There's exceptions in both directions; where you aren't fine or where you can skip that step. Government work is different. For example Snowden probably doesn't get whistleblower protection because he didn't first leak to Congress. It's arguable though but also IANAL
by lysace | 2026-02-20 23:47:45+00:00
It's a manual javascript imitation. Not sure why they felt this was needed. The original source code isn't really involved.

This is the most commented HN posting on this from that time (2019):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249373

IMHO this should have been (something along the lines of) GNUstep + TimBL's original code (https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb) + Emscripten + getting Emscripten to work with ObjC. Now, that would have been cool.
by spystath | 2026-02-20 23:49:01+00:00
There is an implicit shame in disgrace but faceless entities have no shame. They'll just put out another press release written in corporate newspeak by an LLM and move on withe the plans anyway. This is standard Google behaviour. They do it with Chrome, they do it with Android, they'll keep doing it with all their captive markets. I fear that in practice even having an "advanced flow" will make little difference as some applications will refuse to work if you have it enabled anyway (in the same vein if debugging is enabled, for example).

Nothing about Android is open except the absolutely minimum amount of linux kernel that's required to boot the thing. Then it's blobs and restrictions all the way to the screen.
by hedayet | 2026-02-20 23:49:51+00:00
A counter-intuitive take: Facebook may actually do better as a business as high-resistance users leave (for the same reason spammers keep their messages intentionally faulty).

From an optimization standpoint, knowledgable, hard-to-rile-up users are mostly noise. As they churn, the remaining user base becomes more homogeneous and easier to optimize for engagement and ads. Churn effectively acts as a filtering mechanism.

So what looks like decline from the outside may just be the system converging on the segment it extracts the most value from. From Facebook’s perspective, that’s not collapse - it’s specialization.