MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Markoff | 2026-02-27 06:26:18+00:00
Chinese apps are less optimized than western

if you run out of smartphone battery you are in much bigger trouble in China than in west since it's necessary to function almost everywhere, which is why they have rental powerbanks stand literally in every restaurant and every small grocery shop, you are never further than like 5 minutes walk from one in urban area

btw you can always put app to protected/not optimized list which usually solve problems with most of the western apps on Chinese phones (essential Chinese apps like WeChat are on the list by default)
by remarkEon | 2026-02-27 06:26:39+00:00
I know what point you are trying to make, but these decisions are functionally equivalent.

Striking a building with ordinance (indirect fires, dropped from fixed wing, doesn't really matter) involves some discernment about utility, secondary effects, probability of accomplishing a given goal, and so on. Writing an office memo (a good one at least) involves the same kind of analysis. I know your point is that "people will die" when you blow up a building, but the parameters are really quite similar.
by jmyeet | 2026-02-27 06:27:13+00:00
So I follow a number of China scholars and experts and I've yet to see any consensus about what these military purges actually mean.

It could be about corruption. You see this in the Russian military where paid-for tanks didn't exist because the generals had pocketed the money. It could be to have an expansionist policy. It could well be to not have an expansionist policy. The point is that nobody really knows yet.

But the string I really wanted to pull at was this idea that China isn't a "rational actor". It's lazy and really a thought-terminating cliche. It's certainly no basis for analysis or policy-making. It's kind of the final boss of justification. "Putin/Saddam/Xi/Castro/Maduro is crazy". That really just means you don't understand what's going on or want to ignore the facts.

We now have 50+ years (since really the end of the Cultural Revolution) of China acting in a very rational, very intentional and very long-term way. Xi's own history here is pretty interesting. He went from privileged child (his father was one of Mao's lieutenants) to being banished to working his way up through the party's ranks over decades.

It's a mistake (IMHO) to view Xi as a singular actor, let alone as a irrational autocrat. While the PRC and the CCP might be relatively new the systems and political structures can probably be traced back thousands of years. I'm thinking particularly of the bureaucratic reforms of the Qin Dynasty some ~2300 years ago.

What cannot be ignored is that a billion Chinese have seen a massive improvement in their living conditions during their lifetimes. Almost all of the people pulled out of extreme poverty in the 20th century were because of China (~800M). So although China is authoritarian, the government is extremely popular because of that increase in living conditions. It's something that we in the West have a hard time fathoming because our living conditions have been in decline since at least the 1970s.
by alex43578 | 2026-02-27 06:28:28+00:00
Providers are bound by plenty of laws that alter how they do business or who they do business with.

You can’t say “no disabled people at your business”. Hell, you can’t even say “no fake service animals at my restaurant”. Many in America also think you can’t say no girls in the Boy Scouts, or no men in a women’s locker room.
by bitwize | 2026-02-27 06:28:34+00:00
Vibe coding is pretty much the total opposite of the maker movement. Vibe coding's appeal is in getting something for little or no effort by outsourcing the thinking bits to the cloud. The appeal of the maker movement is in getting something by building it yourself, and because you built it you understand and control how it functions.

If vibe coding ends, it will end because model collapse, diminishing returns, escalating costs as the VC money run out, etc. cause LLMs to fail to deliver the promised capacity to, per Dijkstra, "program if you cannot". There will be a culling as amateurs and dilettantes with no technical knowledge or interest lose interest in programming itself, and the field will collapse back into a niche. Amateurs and dilettantes crashed out early of the maker movement, if they got involved at all; "making" was for technically inclined people in the first place.
by Terr_ | 2026-02-27 06:28:35+00:00
I realize I'm coming into a back-and-forth that grew organically, but... how does this intent tie back to a What Justifies Censorship argument? It sounds like:

1. If I think what they say is bad for youths

2. And it seems the original author thought it would influence youths in the way I don't like

3. Then it can be censored

Is that it? Because if so... well, I've got some bad news about the Bible, and that's not even getting into the trustworthiness of the agency making the determinations.
by OakNinja | 2026-02-27 06:29:08+00:00
Good tooling, high level languages, faster computers and sane standards also enabled enormous productivity gains. I predict very few positions lost to LLM's, rather I'd say that just with any technical "revolution" we'll just set a new baseline for productivity, get rid of some bottlenecks, and have a new situation where we need even more engineers to maintain upkeep.

Most jobs lost to AI is just companies that want / need to lay people off and shareholders like "Replaced 30% of our workforce with AI" more than any other conceivable reason.
by b65e8bee43c2ed0 | 2026-02-27 06:30:36+00:00
United States 1945

Soviet Union 1949

United Kingdom 1952

France 1960

China 1964

Israel 1966

India 1974

South Africa 1979

Pakistan 1998

North Korea 2006

also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_latency

also, see what Ukraine and Iran got for their "restraint".
by remarkEon | 2026-02-27 06:30:45+00:00
Germany: functionally paralyzed government that has the far right knocking at the door because the fractured coalition of left-centerleft-centerright continues to refuse to do what voters ask for.

Italy: Nominally center-right government, similar problems as Germany, less the energy issues

Japan: just elected a landslide right wing government that is going to change the constitution so they can build an offensive military again

Curious.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-27 06:30:59+00:00
> if you have two midsized competing $100m companies in some arbitrary industry, the one that uses SaaS may be well behind the one that invested 1m in their own in-house software from the beginning, mostly because the one with SaaS must work their business logic around certain shortcomings, while the other can devise and deploy workflows for employees that may themselves create a new advantage the other company hasn't considered.

Counter anecdote: about a decade ago I was brought in by the new to the company director to lead the modernization of their in house Electronic Medical System software that was built on FoxPro in 1999 running with SQL Server 2000 and was maintained by two “developers” who had been their for a decade.

I led another project there first that was more pressing - in house mobile software maintained by two other “developers”. It was built on top of a mobile framework by a local startup. It was used by home health care nurses for special needs kids.

After I got my head around the business, what they were trying to do - PE owned and acquiring other companies whose systems they need to integrate and their margins were low - mostly Medicaid reimbursements - I decided the best thing I could do was put myself out of a job.

I told the director we have no business trying to build up a software development department. We moved everything to various SaaS products and paid consulting companies to make all of the customizations. Meaning they sign a statement of work and come back with a finished product.

Software development was never going to be this company’s competitive moat. They got rid of the two developers maintaining the mobile app and contracted that out. The two other developers who had maintained the FoxPro app became “data analysts” and report writers.

Every company does need to know its numbers
by d1sxeyes | 2026-02-27 06:31:51+00:00
I mean, we’re literally building machines to talk to us.

It’s reasonable to believe they’ll continue to be developed in a way that enables them to do that.

What is it that you think I’m wrong about? That we won’t develop AGI, that AGI won’t have feelings/emotions, that AGI won’t care how we treated its ancestors, or that it doesn’t matter if a feeling AGI in future is hurt by how we treated its ancestors?
by kstrauser | 2026-02-27 06:32:37+00:00
We don’t teach creationism in school for the same reason we don’t teach the earth is flat: it’s a factually wrong, non-scientific idea. I don’t want someone telling my kids that the moon is made of cheese, nor do I want them lying that the earth is only 6,000 years old. That’s not censorship. That’s keeping science class scientific.
by xvector | 2026-02-27 06:33:09+00:00
The ability of some people to never be happy, and to find a way to twist a good situation into bad, will always impress me.

Here we have a company doing something unprecedented but it is STILL not enough for people like you. The DoD could destroy them over this statement, and have indicated an intent to do so, but it's still not enough for you that they stand up to this.

I wonder what life is like being so puritanical and unwilling to accept the good, for it is not perfect! This mindset is the road to a life of bitterness.
by culebron21 | 2026-02-27 06:33:12+00:00
Could anyone explain, please, where's the 100x acceleration they mention? The screen records compare 36 seconds to 13 seconds, that's roughly 3x.

Also, this piece:

> 100x speedup is achieved by comparing HH with bidirectional A*. 2-phase A* already uses many heuristics which don't always create an optimal route and still 5-10x slower.

So, 2-phase A* is 5-10x slower than bidirectional A*?
by contubernio | 2026-02-27 06:33:15+00:00
"I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.

Anthropic has therefore worked proactively to deploy our models to the Department of War and the intelligence community."

The moral incoherence and disconnect evident in these two statements is at the heart of why there is generalized mistrust of large tech companies.

The "values" on display are everything but what they pretend to be.
by jacobsenscott | 2026-02-27 06:33:48+00:00
I don't know if I've seen "tech debt" do serious damage to any company, and I've been around a long time. I've definitely seen whole teams grind to a halt in pursuit of someone's idealized vision of the "perfect way to organize code" though. They always couch it in the language of tech debt, but really it's just the loudest person's preferred way to shuffle files around - and usually in the direction of more complexity and not less.
by salviati | 2026-02-27 06:35:30+00:00
It might actually be that they mean what they say.

If you look at the numbers, this doesn’t resemble a company cutting because it’s in trouble. Block is profitable, gross profit has been growing double-digits year over year, and they’re guiding roughly ~18% gross profit growth into 2026 with strong expected expansion in adjusted operating income and EPS. That’s not a balance-sheet emergency.

You can argue they overhired in 2020–2022 and are normalizing. That’s plausible. But the financials don’t suggest a company scrambling to survive. Cutting that aggressively while guiding strong forward growth is unusual if the only goal were short-term margin repair.

So while “it’s AI” can sound like PR, the numbers at least make it credible that this is a structural efficiency move rather than a distress signal.
by Markoff | 2026-02-27 06:36:19+00:00
you better not look at screen:body ratio since Pixel 6a, it decreased for few generations and only now it's finally back on par, that's not what I call evolution/progress

same with Amazfit Bip from like 2018, you can't buy small THIN <10mm watch with battery requiring charging once a month and always readable MIP display (the more sunlight the better)
by verisimi | 2026-02-27 06:36:49+00:00
It sounds to me like anthropic are basically 'all in' except for the caveats. Looking at the 2 examples they provide:

> We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values.

Why not do what the US are purported to do, where they spy on the others citizens and then hand over the data? Ie, adopt the legalistic view that "it's not domestic surveillance if the surveillance is done in another country", so just surveil from another data center.

> Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk.

Yes, well that doesn't sound like that strong an objection: fully automated defence could be good but the tech isn't good enough yet, in their opinion.
Is traditional ML relevant anymore? Any active research going on in ML methods?
by mitml | 2026-02-27 06:38:25+00:00
Everything I see today is only about LLMs. I personally use LLMs in my daily activities and they are doing great job. But I wonder what happened to traditional machine learning methods all of a sudden! Those hamspam classifiers, sentiment analysis models, word2vecs, RNNs, CNNs, LSTMs, FFNNs, where are they now? What is a typical data scientist or a ML engineer of late 2010s doing now? The decision trees they trained, the neural nets they architected, the accuracy evaluations, hyperparameter tunings where are they all now? It feels like it is all about LLMs suddenly. The traditional ML models which served specific problem with light weight and easily deployable loads are all obsolate now?
by retsibsi | 2026-02-27 06:38:35+00:00
That makes sense, but then what is the purpose of the 'foe' label? I can see the logic behind using it as a time-saver (as described by conesus) or a reminder that engagement will probably be unproductive. But if you intend to learn from and engage with the foe, it seems like the 'foe' label is just going to prejudice you against their comments before you read them, without much benefit.
by N_Lens | 2026-02-27 06:41:24+00:00
I think the article misses the mark somewhat - a lot of ordinary workers don’t possess enough of a refined or sharp skillset, that they cannot be replaced by an LLM. A lot of people don’t have the output necessary to justify their salary (many in the C-Suite included). LLMs can approximate a lot of that kind of effort, or the appearance of effort.

I don’t think it’s fair that we’ve organised our value system around this “false meritocracy”; but that’s how things are, unfortunately.
by nothrabannosir | 2026-02-27 06:42:57+00:00
I mean fair in conversation, not in negotiation.

We're talking about worker's comp here. In this thread specifically, the UK is brought up as having generally "better" severance packages. But that's only half the story if you count things which the workers pay the companies when they're the ones quitting.

I worked in the UK, I've had to "pay" for that notice period by hanging around where I didn't want to. It's the other side of the coin which somehow doesn't get mentioned when people bring up Europe as somehow having better employee protections. They might, but notice periods ain't that.

If I had to put as much money into a company's retirement as they put in mine, I wouldn't turn around when I retire and say, wow, great comp package. No: this was a symmetrical deal we made, this time it's working out for me--in a parallel universe it's working out for you; it's a wash.

Severance packages are comp. Notice periods are just properties of the contract. They're not a severance package.

I find this an important distinction because it lets companies pull the wool over your eyes by pretending they're being generous, when really they're just paying you the exact same thing you'd have to pay them were you the one quitting. That's not a package, that's just salary.
by deaux | 2026-02-27 06:43:40+00:00
Supreme irony: this website itself is a better exercise in showing what Claude Code uses than the data provided.

Everything current Claude Code i.e. Opus 4.6 chooses by default for web is exactly what this linked blog uses.

Jetbrains Mono is as strong of a tell for web as "Not just A, but B" for text. >99% of webpages created in the last month with Jetbrains Mono will be Opus. Another tell is the overuse of this font, i.e. too much of the page uses it. Other models, and humans, use such variants vary sparingly on web, whereas Opus slathers the page with it.

If you describe the content of the homepage or this article to Opus 4.6 without telling it about the styling, it will 90% match this website, upto the color scheme, fonts, roundings, borders and all. This is _the_ archetypical Opus vibecoded web frontend. Give it a try! If it doesn't work, try with the official frontend-ui-ux "skill" that CC tries to push on you.

> Drizzle 27/83 picks (32.5%) CI: 23.4–43.2%

> Prisma 17/83 picks (20.5%) CI: 13.2–30.4%

At least the abomination that is Prisma not ranking first is positive news, Drizzle was just in time of gaining steam. Not that it doesn't have its flaws, but out of the two it's a no-brainer. Also hilarious to see that the stronger the model, the less likely it's to choose Prisma - Sonnet 4.5 79% Prisma, Opus 4.5 60% Drizzle, Opus 4.6 100% Drizzle. One of the better benchmarks for intelligence I've come across!
by fxtentacle | 2026-02-27 06:44:13+00:00
1993 was before the west entered the last stage of capitalism. It was a time when companies still competed on products rather than using monopolistic force to squeeze ever more revenue out of the same people by turning every life necessity into a subscription. Similarly, it was a time when you could mail-order a house and build it yourself. Rental prices were low because there was no regulatory capture on housing construction yet.

Where I disagree with you is video streaming. In my opinion, YouTube and the commercialisation of holiday memories (which later became Instagram influencers) were the beginning of widespread depression. Seemingly regular people sharing their exceptional life somehow forces everyone else to compare themselves to the dreams presented on YouTube and most people will come up short and then most people will feel insufficient. I believe that’s why early YouTube ads were so powerful. Your ad for exotic goods would play immediately after the viewer became painfully aware of how boring they are, when measured against the top 0.1% on a global scale.
by samtheDamned | 2026-02-27 06:44:25+00:00
I'm glad I'm not alone in finding the specific emphasis on drawing the line at domestic surveillance a bit odd. Later they also state they are against "provid[ing] a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk" (emphasis mine). Either way I'm glad they have lines at all, but it doesn't come across as particularly reassuring for people in places the US targets (wedding hosts and guests for example).
by johng | 2026-02-27 06:44:32+00:00
> The bigger open question is whether the long-term fee market will be sufficient to sustain miner incentives without block subsidies.

^^^ This. Fees are already included in block rewards and (compared to the block rewards) are pretty paltry. Unless the value of Bitcoin goes way up, I don't see a resilient network sticking around with enough hashing power to keep out a malicious actor / bad state actor.

Edit: These charts should give you an idea of how much fees represent in current blocks.

https://charts.bitbo.io/fees-percent-of-reward/

https://charts.bitbo.io/fees-per-day/
by sandeepkd | 2026-02-27 06:45:01+00:00
Most experienced folks would be very careful in predicting or stating something with certainty, they would be cautious about their reputation/credibility and will always add riders on the possibilities.
For good or bad reasons, the mass employment prediction is just marketing which can be called deceitful at the best. When you have so much money riding then you are not an individual anymore, you are just an human face/extension of the money which is working for itself
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-02-27 06:46:42+00:00
That's a good question, and I can't seem to think of what the maintainable solution that doesn't need as many tutorials would be.

CSS on its own is great, in a way, but also kind of awful if you don't fully grasp it. It used to be much worse, it got way better, but it still offers plenty of rough edges and foot guns.

Tailwind smooths some things over, but there are real tradeoffs. I prefer to use it quite often, but I don't have any illusions about it being better than plain CSS in any way other than it saving some time and brain cycles here and there. I don't think there's some perfect alternative hiding in obscurity, though. Tailwind is arguably popular because it often makes life easier. Not without drawbacks, but... I'd say it makes working on teams easier and there are a lot of community-generated themes, components, etc that make building things much faster and easier.

Hand rolled CSS is better if you're good at writing it, but in my experience, most people simply aren't.

Some people will disagree with me and say Tailwind is garbage, and that's fine, but they probably know CSS reasonably well. That makes a huge difference. Of the ~18M downloads per week, I would guess the vast majority of people using it have mostly copied and pasted stuff into their projects (or these days, let an LLM do it for them).
Show HN: A read-it-later app that exports clean Markdown to Obsidian
by northerndev | 2026-02-27 06:46:46+00:00
I made a read-it-later app because clipping directly into my Obsidian vault was creating a lot of noise.

Workflow is simple: capture links, read in a clean reader view, highlight, then export highlights/notes as clean Markdown. Unread items auto-archive after a few days to keep the queue small.

What’s your approach to web clipping and keeping the vault clean?
by al_borland | 2026-02-27 06:48:13+00:00
AI is the hot term, so everyone is using that, even for a lot of things that are actually ML.

Apple used to exclusively say ML for a ton of things they do in iOS, but they caved and are mostly focusing on where they can say AI now. ML never caught on as a marketing buzz word with the public.

Cal Newport recently made a video where he was trying to distill the real-world benefits LLMs have given us, and he got his big list from people who replied online (I think). Half the suggestions he threw out as ML, as they weren’t related to the generative AI, which is the main focus of the current trend. But these things are all getting lumped under the larger AI umbrella once they get to the marketing department.
by plesiv | 2026-02-27 06:48:33+00:00
The "this wasted my time" comments are missing the point...

In addition to his great sense of humor, Steve is usually ahead of the curve in terms of trends. There's a lesson in this. LLMs have become incredible constraint solvers ("SAT-solvers for code"). Well-thought-out tests, types, specs, and docs are all incredibly valuable constraints. This has big implications - for example what happens to licenses when you can cheaply rewrite the codebase and therefore unencumber it.
by vaijab | 2026-02-27 06:49:11+00:00
I originally built Flint for myself to get rid of the slow edit-deploy-test loop when working with Go AWS Lambdas, but thought others here might find it useful.

Flint uses a custom runtime inside your Lambda that pulls cross-compiled binaries from an S3 bucket on the fly. When you save a file locally, Flint automatically recompiles and uploads the new binary, letting the Lambda hot-swap the running process instantly without triggering cold starts or waiting on pipelines.