MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gniv | 2026-02-27 08:38:56+00:00
Very insightful on how this corruption develops:

"How can a group hold a worldview so at odds with the wider culture and
not appear to be greatly conflicted by it? The answer may lie in the distinction
between particularism and universalism. An individual develops social identities
specific to the social domains, groups and roles – and accompanying subcultures
– that he or she occupies (e.g. manager, mother, parishioner, sports fan).
[...]

In the case of corruption, this myopia means that an otherwise ethically-minded
individual may forsake universalistic or dominant norms about ethical behavior
in favor of particularistic behaviors that favor his or her group at the expense of outsiders.
[...]

This tendency to always put the ingroup above all others clearly paves
the way for collective corruption."
by libraryofbabel | 2026-02-27 08:39:19+00:00
I’d rather talk about the history of steam engines than AI today, so: let’s just say it sounds like at some time in the past you saw a clunky inefficient Newcomen steam engine pumping water out of a coal mine, and you hated it, and now you think that’s all steam engines are or can be or can do: they’re loud and annoying and they’re just for pumping coal mines. Then one day someone tells you they’re powering mechanized looms in cotton mills and you flat out deny it and you don’t even want to go into the mill to take a look, because you hated that first steam engine so much.

It’s right there. You can go and see it any time, doing the things you don’t think it’s capable of doing. Just a little curiosity is all you need.
by dvdkon | 2026-02-27 08:39:55+00:00
Visual Basic (and other 90s visual GUI builders) were great simple options for making GUI apps, but those GUIs were rather static and limited by today's standards. People have now gotten used to responsive GUIs that resize to any window size, easy dynamic hiding of controls, and dynamic lists in any part of the GUI; you won't get them to come back to a platform where their best bet at dynamic layout is `OnResize()` and `SubmitButton.Enabled = False`.
by asdff | 2026-02-27 08:40:17+00:00
The fact that the current iphone is how much more performant than a 3gs and we are doing what exactly different with it? Still scrolling instagram, text, whatsapp, maps, shitty mobile web, literally nothing has changed about how we use these devices. Nothing. These things should be like camels and have the battery last for weeks by this point. The hell is all that power even going toward? These phones are like Hummers. Just wasteful.
by Certhas | 2026-02-27 08:40:52+00:00
I love Makie but for investigating our datasets Python is overall superior (I am not familiar enough with R), despite Julia having the superior Array Syntax and Makie having the better API. This is simply because of the brilliant library support available in scikit learn and the whole compilation overhead/TTFX issue. For these workflows it's a huge issue that restarting your interactive session takes minutes instead of seconds.
by TonyStr | 2026-02-27 08:42:10+00:00
This is my concern as well. IMO, one of the great aspects of HN is the semi-anonymity (no profile pics, names are just strings that you probably don't memorize unless you see the same name often, no visible upvotes, etc.). This makes us take the comments and submissions at face value, evaluating the content rather than relying on past experiences with the author, or other people's evaluation of it (upvotes).

I feel that any system which injects opinions into comments/submissions before you read and process it, work against the principles of Hacker News. A system like this might be great for a community full of trolls, but another one of Hacker News' strengths is it's heavy moderation. I see maybe <5% troll/bad-taste comments, and most of those are already flagged and [dead].
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-02-27 08:42:24+00:00
I mean yeah but it's not up to a comment-tone-fixer-upper to decide that, the ideal is some kind of neutrality for the sake of decorum, and one of the major issues that's causing political divide and (worse) movements towards extremism is that the two sides can't have a reasonable debate.

A tool like this COULD work, but I think the issue with this one is that it's built on top of an existing LLM with heaps of internet debate and their underlying ideals and what is and isn't acceptable baked in.

What a tool like this needs is heaps of honestly / fairly judged comments and feedback, and an extensive test suite that ensures neutrality by, for example, taking the same comment and like in this case changing names around - if it treats both sides the same then it passes.
by hdgvhicv | 2026-02-27 08:42:26+00:00
I laughed at all those except Quantum Computing and Small Nuclear reactors which I did t have a timeframe for. I suspect that small nuclear will have been overtaken by renewables.

AI concerns me, it feels like it will come faster and at least as impactful on workers as the Industrial Revolution. The latter at least occurred over centuries and didn’t apply globally at the same time.

Is this round hype? Probably. Are we heading for a y2k crash? Probably.

However those who laughed at the dotcom boom and doubled their holdings in department stores and blockbuster video didn’t do well in the long run.
by helaoban | 2026-02-27 08:42:38+00:00
Nothing to do with it. Terms are re-negotiated all the time, end user agreements and terms of service change all the time. And adherence to contract law is tested in court, not on paper. Besides, the US Federal government is not bound by same contract law as regular companies.

It's PR management. US military says it used Claude in Venezuela (I don't think it's even been disclosed exactly what they used it for), people hear "US military uses Claude to kill people", cue panic.
by psychoslave | 2026-02-27 08:42:41+00:00
$5000 is enough to make a living in several countries.

On a global scale, likely less than 10% of the world's population has ever been able to save $5,000 at any point in their life, with the vast majority concentrated in high-income countries. In low- and middle-income countries, this is a rare achievement limited to a small, affluent minority.
by spacecash21 | 2026-02-27 08:42:47+00:00
Haven't consider this kind of functionality yet, but I think this is the kind of functionality we need in the product that is being built.
I believe maildir is a better format for email cold storage. But ability to import .mbox - a real world need. Added it to the TODO list.

Current short term roadmap, with random priorities:
- Outlook oath fix
- Linux release
- .mbox import
- search improvements, to have more powerful search

Love your use case of replying to emails from the past.
by imtringued | 2026-02-27 08:43:08+00:00
I wish I knew what to pay attention to. I've always had trouble with that. I spent 2024 and 2025 learning how neural networks and transformers work. The conclusions of that learning are pretty sobering. Everything uses transformers and despite all the novel architectures that have come out in those years, transformers are still the best and I'm not sure how to come to terms with that.

Does it mean that researchers wasted their time on useless dead end architectures, or are they ahead of the curve and commercial companies are slow to adopt them?

Even the coding agents are more primitive than expected.
by Megranium | 2026-02-27 08:43:57+00:00
I honestly don't share the nostalgia.

I enjoy having a computer that allows me to create all kinds of things that weren't possible in 1993 ... mash together all kinds of audio, video, text ... put it in a backpack, bring it somewhere, perform on stage, with an 800$ laptop. Amazing.

I'm one of those "Encarta kids" who dug through Encarta for nights on end while the parents were out, and still spend slow Sundays reading random Wikipedia articles.

Having the archives that have been created since 1993, whether Wikipedia, Youtube (to me still one of the most amazing music discovery tools I've ever encountered), Archive.org, Google Scholar, Zenodo, at my fingertips has probably widened my personal horizon beyond imagination. Not sure who I'd be without it.

So even sadder to see it all drown now in AI slop ...
by ValentinPearce | 2026-02-27 08:44:30+00:00
I remember a few years back when Jon Blow (Braid, The Witness) did a few talks about the fact that the biggest progress in recent years had been in hardware performance, making lazy software development standard since the hardware made it so easy to ignore any limitations.

I'm not as much of a fan these days but I do hope these limitations have the effect of improving best practices.
by OJFord | 2026-02-27 08:44:35+00:00
That's an incomplete story though, 'revenue has plummeted due to LLMs', 'revenue is from people sponsoring the project', so... what, people that formerly liked and sponsored Tailwind stopped, figuring they can just ask AI now?

Bit surprised that would have happened in significant volume (I'd have thought the LLM using non-sponsors would have far more overlap with the prior non-sponsors) but maybe.
by anigbrowl | 2026-02-27 08:45:54+00:00
And if they don't?

Your post seems a little naive to me, a lot of people are just not interested in putting in the work or confronting their own confirmation bias, and there's an oversupply of bad actors who will deliberately generate fake imagery for either deception or exhaustion. Many people are just not on quest for truth and are more interested in the activation potential of images or allegations than in the factual reliability.
by psyklic | 2026-02-27 08:45:55+00:00
The hypothetical you state only matters once you have a game! The biggest risk by far is not AI assets -- it's finishing the game.

So if AI increases your odds of finishing, go for it. Then once you have a game, more people will care about whether it's good than whether you used AI assets. I suspect there will be lots of interest in how you incorporated AI, maybe even moreso than otherwise. You could alternatively use the AI assets as placeholders and intend later to replace them with hand-drawn, if desired.

When I made games, I had zero interest in making assets but wanted to understand every detail about graphics engines. I just grabbed random mediocre assets from online. I would have definitely used AI to make assets but done the coding myself.
by figmert | 2026-02-27 08:46:34+00:00
One of my use-cases previously has been enforcing ultimate or fully trust of a gpg signature.

tmpfifo="$(mktemp -u -t gpgverifyXXXXXXXXX)"
gpg --status-fd 3 --verify checksums.txt.sig checksums.txt 3>$tmpfifo
grep -Eq '^\[GNUPG:] TRUST_(ULTIMATE|FULLY)' $tmpfifo

It was a while ago since I implemented this, but iirc the reason for that was to validate that the key that has signed this is actually trusted, and the signature isn't just cryptographically valid.

You can also redirect specific file descriptors into other commands:

gpg --status-fd 3 --verify checksums.txt.sig checksums.txt 3>(grep -Eq '^\[GNUPG:] TRUST_(ULTIMATE|FULLY)')
by simoncion | 2026-02-27 08:46:52+00:00
> Try introducing DPA invocation into your analogy and let's see where it goes!

When I introduce that, I see Anthropic's management getting Tiktok'ed.

It can be true that Anthropic's products are essential for national defense and also true that the management of the company are a supply chain risk.

Is any of that true? Well, so much of what has been done in the name of "national defense" & etc over the past many decades has clearly not been done for reasons that are true, so -when it comes to "national defense"- I don't think that the truth actually matters much at all.
by Slaboli | 2026-02-27 08:46:57+00:00
Thank you for the perspective. You’re right that strangers lack the emotional context. I think my paralysis comes from over-optimizing the variables and ignoring the 'bitter pills' you mentioned. I am currently trying to build an MCDM model as you suggested, but I find myself biased toward weighting 'safety' vs 'career stability' differently every day. Did you find that your priorities changed once you actually arrived at your new destination, or did your initial weighting hold true over the decades?
by Cthulhu_ | 2026-02-27 08:47:47+00:00
I really wonder why breakfast is the way it is, because since it's the first meal of the day, you'd think a big breakfast (e.g. dinner) would make sense as you need the calories during the (work)day. But maybe breakfast is relatively light because a lot of people have some digestive issues or sensitive stomachs in the mornings.
by robot-wrangler | 2026-02-27 08:48:42+00:00
Not an expert, and not sure how but lazy BDD's fit in specifically, but I thought BDD's are already the gold-standard data structures in most model checkers and assumed they were at the limit of possibilities for performance. Can anyone comment whether that's true, whether it means this kind of implementation is already standard in other programming languages for sets/bools? What about infrastructure with fast set operations like redis?
by mbuda | 2026-02-27 08:49:06+00:00
Hi all! I'm Marko, CTO at Memgraph, and the author of this post.

The post argues that the GraphRAG pipeline can be expressed as a single database query rather than a chain of application-layer steps. The idea is to keep components such as retrieval, expansion, ranking, and final context assembly within the database query plan.

I go through:
* what I mean by GraphRAG in practice;
* why "single-query" execution can reduce moving parts;
* why can that help with latency/cost by returning only the final payload;
* and how it can make tracing/debugging easier by returning the context plus the path used to assemble it.

The post also contrasts this with Python-orchestrated pipelines and touches on agentic pipeline selection (called Agentic GraphRAG). Happy to answer technical questions or discuss where this breaks down.
by keeda | 2026-02-27 08:49:23+00:00
Yeah and until ChatGPT I thought even 50 years was optimistic, which is why current days feel like SciFi! However, at its essence, the current AI revolution has been driven primarily by a few key algorithmic breakthroughs (cf the Bitter Lesson), which are relatively easy to scale up through compute.

On the other hand, the constraints on robotics are largely supply chain-related. The current SOTA for dexterity in robots requires motors, which require powerful magnets, which require Rare Earth Elements, which are critically supply-constrained.

To be precise, the elements are actually abundant in the Earth's crust, just that extracting them is very expensive and extremely toxic to the environment, and so far only China has been willing to sacrifice its environment (and certain citizens' health), which is why it has cornered the market. Scaling that up to the required demand is a humongous logistical, political and regulatory hurdle (which, BTW, is why I suspect the current US adminstration is busy gutting environmental regulations.)

Now there may be a research prototype somewhere in some lab that is the "Attention Is All You Need" equivalent of actuators, but I'm personally not aware of anything with that kinda potential.
Show HN: I Created an Interactive Resume Space Invader Game
by breezk0 | 2026-02-27 08:49:28+00:00
Stack: WASM + Rust + Macroquad

I saw that a company had posted a cool job ad where you had to apply directly via a REST API. That gave me the idea to gamify my resume as well.

Since I was bored, I vibe coded a bit and voilà, the result was ready.

I think it's something new and fun that might put a smile on people's faces.

(Please don't spam my email address, but feel free to send me an email with your high score if you want!)
by gambiting | 2026-02-27 08:49:33+00:00
Look I'm not going to disagree, obviously - but even in those times, you could argue that helping the department of war in some ways will contribute to deaths you might not necessarily want to be a part of. Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is still widely discussed today for a myriad of reasons, as is conventional bombing of cities in both Nazi Germany and Japan. We can both agree that fighting nazis is a good thing while at the same time having moral objection to participating in the war effort.

And I think the stakes have changed today - it's one thing to be making bombs which might or might not hit civilians, it's another to be making an AI system that gives humans a "score" that is then used by the military to decide if they live or die, as some systems already do("Lavender" used by the IDF is exactly this).

Even with the best intentions in mind, you don't know how the systems you built will be used by the governments of tomorrow.
by wastemaster | 2026-02-27 08:49:35+00:00
Author here. We run AI voice agents across a European hotel network. This post covers 6 months of call data and one change (removing the IVR) that revealed something we didn't expect — our old phone system was silently filtering out callers before they ever reached the AI, making our metrics look better than they were.
Happy to go deep on the voice pipeline, language detection, or anything else.
Full product overview: https://github.com/polydom-ai/una-by-polydom
by hdgvhicv | 2026-02-27 08:49:35+00:00
Harder than someone else. A bodybuilder and a normal person ham swing a hammer just as efficiently as each other.

Dexterity is more important - after all you may have the stamina to bang in 1000 nails in an hour. I have a nail gun. What’s important is we can control where the nails go.
by lebovic | 2026-02-27 08:50:25+00:00
Yeah, values on their own don't lead to positive outcomes. I agree that many groups that are driven by ideals have still committed horrible acts.

I do think that they're acting with positive intent, though, and are motivated by trying to make the transition to powerful AI go well.

Many folks on HN seem to assume the primary motivation is purely chasing more money, which certainly isn't the case for for many – but not all – people at Anthropic.

That doesn't guarantee a good outcome, and there's still a hard road ahead.
by miroljub | 2026-02-27 08:50:42+00:00
While many praise them for sticking to their values, it's also worth mentioning that their values are not everyone's values.

Of all major LLMs, Claude is perhaps the most closed and, subjectively, the most biased. Instead of striving for neutrality, Anthropic leadership's main concern is to push their values down people's throats and to ensure consistent bias in all their models.

I have a feeling they see themselves more as evangelists than scientists.

That makes their models unusable for me as general AI tools and only useful for coding.

If their biases match yours, good for you, but I'm glad we have many open Chinese models taking ground, which in the long run makes humanity more resistant to propaganda.
by wohoef | 2026-02-27 08:50:55+00:00
Anthropic's two demands are:
1. No domestic mass surveillance
2. No autonomous killing

I'm wondering if 2. was added simply to justify them not cooperating. It's a lot easier to defend 1. + 2. than just 1.
If in the future they do decide to cooperate with the DoW, they could settle on doing only mass surveillance, but no autonomous killings. This would be presented as a victory for both parties since they both partially get what they wanted, even though autonomous killing was never really on the table for either of them. Which is a big if given the current administration.
by weinzierl | 2026-02-27 08:51:34+00:00
The 68000 was introduced in 1979, to me it is part of the 80s.

But you are making a good point. Maybe the distinction between 8/16/32/64-bit isn't really helpful. I loved the Amiga but I loathed all the XT/AT segmented memory bitplaned VGA 16-bit stuff. That to me is the deep dark ages.
by Joel_Mckay | 2026-02-27 08:52:05+00:00
Julia collapses entire programming paradigms into single character syntax, and often will transparently handle clean parallelism or cluster instance batching.

https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/mathematical-operati...

Go is similar in many ways, but takes a performance hit in areas like Garbage collection.

The Julia community is great, and performance projects may also be compiled into a binary image. =3
by AlecSchueler | 2026-02-27 08:52:46+00:00
> Of all major LLMs, Claude is perhaps the most closed and, subjectively, the most biased. Instead of striving for neutrality, Anthropic leadership's main concern is to push their values down people's throats

It's this satire? Let us know when Claude starts calling itself MechaHitler or trying to shoehorn nonsense about white genocide into every conversation.
by Slaboli | 2026-02-27 08:52:56+00:00
Thank you! I appreciate the honesty. That is the one variable that haunts me.
My parents are actually encouraging me to go; they think the quality of life in Europe, the experience is worth the distance, especially given our local economic instability. Also, I am currently unemployed at home, which adds a layer of 'stagnation' to the closeness.

Did you move back because you felt lonely abroad or because your family actually needed you there?
by d--b | 2026-02-27 08:53:00+00:00
Owning it doesn’t make it less of a shit move.

Canning people when you do well is just a way to milk the cow that others raised for you. Plus it shows a blatant lack of imagination and foresight.

I just hope the remaining employees realize they’re in an ejectable seat and stop working for people like that. It’s only a matter of time the founders sell to Bending Spoons for a final paycheck and everyone else is out.