MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lotsofpulp | 2026-02-27 14:50:33+00:00
It was mostly a joke about the flippant way your comment added in "keep your family and friends close" after moving to highest cost places in the world.

First, many people may not want to move, even if their kids or siblings move. Other people have friends and family too.

Second, many people may not have the skills or drive to get the "median" paying job necessary to live the desired quality of life.

Third, many people and/or their family may not be healthy enough to afford dual high income households.

Obviously, earning a lot of money while spending minimally is a path to success, and obviously moving to the Bay Area and NYC is one of the higher probability routes to success and upward movement (at least financial), but it's not without other costs.

For those with the desire to attain that financial success, I encourage them to follow the playbook. But I would not expect them to keep friends and family close.
by intrasight | 2026-02-27 14:50:36+00:00
> The web was a mistake

I wouldn't say that. The web had done way more good than harm overall. What I would say is that embedding the internet (and its tracking and spyware and dark patterns that have gain prominance) into every single application that we use is what is at fault.

The web browser that we built in 1990 was all on-premise obviously. And it had a very different architecture than HTTP. There were two processes. One used TCP/IP to mirror the plant computerss model into memory on the workstation. The other painted the infographics and handled the user navigating to different screens. The two processes used shared memory to communicate. It was my first job out of university.
by dzonga | 2026-02-27 14:50:36+00:00
Straight from the horses mouth:

>> yes we over-hired during covid because i incorrectly built 2 separate company structures (square & cash app) rather than 1, which we corrected mid 2024. but this misses all the complexity we took on through lending, banking, and BNPL. and that we’re now targeting $2M+ gross profit per person, 4x our pre-covid efficiency, which stayed flat at ~$500k from 2019 until 2024. we have and do run an efficient company... better than most.

https://xcancel.com/jack/status/2027290756793135253

I.E OVER-HIRED
by celsoazevedo | 2026-02-27 14:50:40+00:00
I had a part-time job as cleaner when I was younger. We used Henry hoovers. They were used and sometimes abused 5 days a week... during the almost 3 years I was there, I think I only saw hoses and the floor head breaking.

So after going through a few hoovers at home from different brands, I bought a Henry for £100 3 years ago. The nose/hose detached after a few months. Not ideal, but I've fixed that in minutes with a bit of superglue. No other issues since then, no indications that it's about to fail.

I don't know if quality is still exactly the same as before, and they're certainly a bit heavier and noisier than some alternatives, but if you want something that lasts, get a Henry, not a Dyson.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-27 14:50:48+00:00
> notice I’m trying to avoid debating generic phrases

You’re missing the forest for the trees. Take the tariffs as analogy. Specifying the laws invoked to effect the tariffs is more precise, but less complete than describing Trump, Bessent and Navarro’s motivations and theories.

Same here. We can wax lyrical about the DPA and specific statutory authorities and how they may be litigated. Or we can look at the actual power structures. The former is precise but inaccurate. The latter is the actual dynamic.

> terms such as “power” that probably won’t advance mutual understanding

If terms like power and influence don’t make sense to someone, they’re going to be lost in any political discussion. But particularly under this administration.

There aren’t legal analytic fundamentals driving why Trump hates windmills or Biden pardoned his son, these were expressions of Presidential power and preference. The legality was ex post facto.
by erikgahner | 2026-02-27 14:50:57+00:00
I wouldn't call this a minor detail (i.e., nitpicking), and it is worth pointing out again and again when these studies get public attention.

We should encourage stronger research designs (including A/B tests) if we care about the impact of AI use on mental health outcomes. A study like this one cannot say anything about the effect at all (it is even possible that AI use will have a positive impact on mental health).
by Tade0 | 2026-02-27 14:51:01+00:00
In Poland this default was changed some time ago. Specifically trucks are not allowed to overtake on two-lane highways and express roads:

https://trafficban.com/news.1590.html

There's an exception made for cases where there's a vehicle on the right lane going much slower than the speed limit for trucks.

The public broadly agrees that this move was beneficial, as the miniscule benefit of some trucks arriving 15min earlier overall was not worth slowing down everyone else, particularly light commercial vehicles.
by StephenSmith | 2026-02-27 14:51:02+00:00
I find this language fascinating. On one hand, the Department of "War" gives the department an underlying, unspoken goal that it should be involved in war with something. On the other hand, it's very easy to fund the Department of "Defense;" of course we need more money to defend our country. Don't we want to be safe! It's much less attractive to fund the Department of "War"
by ToucanLoucan | 2026-02-27 14:51:02+00:00
My reaction is that depressed people are, for whatever reason you described, more likely to use generative AI. I can think of a bunch of reasons, most tied to executive function in some way, but like, are we really surprised that people who are struggling to find pleasure/accomplishment/meaning in general life find AI appealing? You get to just play with it continuously, it always answers your messages, it always encourages you to keep talking, keep interacting with it, and it will make things for you for no greater cost than the asking.

I don't think this is a mark against those users to be clear, I see this as largely the same chicken-egg relationship you find between depressed people and video games. It's also subject to the same kinds of abuses on the part of the merchant, things like in-game purchases that are particularly attractive to people with executive function issues, and why the predominant "whales" of the video game industry and especially the mobile game industry are people who are already struggling. I think AI is going to end up in a similar position because like, again, not trying to be shitty, but if your life kind of broadly sucks, I'm sure playing in an AI chatbox all day where something that sounds vaguely human will validate whatever you say, make stuff for you at request, and never challenge you in the slightest is quite attractive to you. And, thinking through it further, these systems also adapt to their users, learn how to engage with them better, as many products have before them that have trapped the neurodivergent into problematic usage scenarios.

I don't judge the people, but I am incredibly suspicious of the businesses behind these and other products that seem almost designed to attract neurodivergent people. If you design a machine that gives dopamine on demand, you can't really be shocked when people who are dopamine‑starved use it a lot. Potentially to a harmful extent.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-02-27 14:52:08+00:00
No (1). I believe that it's "Dutch" in the same sense as "Pennsylvania Dutch" (2) - i.e. an American version of "Deutsch", actually German.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_baby_pancake

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Dutch
by salawat | 2026-02-27 14:52:09+00:00
Rubber duck debugging is a null-llm offloading to your gray matter for the other half of interlocution. A fancy way of recruiting your other brain matter into the problem solving process. Perhaps by offloading to a non-null LLM, there is decreased activation/recruitment of brain regions in the problem solving process, leading to network pruning over time. Particularly in the event you take the position that the "tool" isn't something worthy of having it's inner state reacted to and modeled via mirror networks.

But what do I know man, I'm just a duck on the Internet. On the Internet, no one knows you're a duck.

Quack.
by chistev | 2026-02-27 14:52:13+00:00
I think it was earlier this week, or maybe last week, that someone on one of the frontpage posts recommended "The History of English Podcast".

I haven't finished the first episode yet, but it's already seeming promising and I know I'm going to continue with it.

In that first episode (which is basically an introduction), the host explains that the history of the English language can be divided into three periods: Old English, Middle English, and New English.

After establishing that there are three periods, he asks where we think Shakespeare falls, and I immediately thought it had to be Middle English.

Then the host proceeded to say he wouldn’t be surprised if most listeners guessed Old or Middle English—and that he wouldn’t be surprised at all if nobody guessed correctly. Because Shakespeare’s plays are actually classified as New English!

I smiled in surprise.

But he explained that if you can more or less understand the English being written or spoken, then it still falls under New English. The King James Version of the Bible is considered New English too.

Keep in mind, Shakespeare wrote his plays between 1589 and 1613.

The King James Bible was published in 1611.

So when I opened that link in this thread’s header and realized I couldn’t understand a damn thing, it all suddenly made sense!
by mbellotti | 2026-02-27 14:52:18+00:00
I'm probably too late to the party for this comment to matter but: what the AI community pushes as "Safety" isn't actually Safety. Read Sidney Dekker. Read Nancy Leveson. Read Jens Rasmussen. Safety is not building perfect technology that never makes a mistake.

When I was working in defense technology I had two questions for engineers when we talked about Safety:

1) Can the operator assess the risk of using this technology?
2) If something goes wrong during operations, can the operator mitigate the risk?

The degree to which either of those statements is true is a measure of how safe that technology is. Technology that is simple to understand and executes deterministically every single time and where it is obvious if it is malfunctioning and the operator has enough time to either correct it or stop it, is generally perceived as safe. Technology that hides what it is really doing, confuses the operator about what the effects of operating it might be, and either executes faster than the operator can respond or specifically prevents the operator from responding, is more likely to trigger negative safety outcomes.

The problem the AI industry faces is that tricking the operator into thinking the technology is doing something it is not is explicitly part of their business model. Read any of the mentioned authors (Dekker is probably the best starting point) and it will become obvious why AI Safety is impossible when AI is dependent on pretending to "think" and "reason". In order to be safe they would have to abandon that. If they abandon that, they will be unable to raise the capital they need to keep the bubble from bursting. The technology will survive, maybe with another AI winter, but many of the businesses will not.

So they will abandon the lip service about Safety instead, but then that was never real Safety to begin with. Real Safety is not about zero risk. It is just as impossible to have zero risk as it is to have 100% uptime. Real Safety is about how the technology is designed to manage risk as part of an overall system.
by vonneumannstan | 2026-02-27 14:52:32+00:00
I think the comment was a roundabout way of saying this is a clear market failure. There are more societally important things these people could be doing instead of shaving another ms off a transaction or finding minuscule option pricing inefficiencies. That the market is not correctly remunerating those options is the failure.

> For example, the tariff tantrums caused by trump proposing 100%+ china tariffs where he crashed the markets last spring, leading to a moderation in policy.

"Akshually traders are good bcuz they crash the market when the president does insane things" is not the own you think it is.
by 827a | 2026-02-27 14:52:46+00:00
Reading comprehension check: I did not say that it reduced the risk of armed conflict. I said that it reduced the death and human suffering from armed conflict.

Between the years of 1850-1950, an estimated 150M humans died (and many more permanently disabled) due to armed conflict (~1.5M/year). Between 1950-today: closer to 10M (~132k/year). The majority of those came from the Vietnam and Korean wars. If you limit the window to after 2000: only ~2M deaths, or ~78k/year. We carry bigger sticks than ever, and those sticks allow us to execute more strategic, incapacitating strikes, or stop conflict from even happening in the first place.
by varispeed | 2026-02-27 14:53:03+00:00
> A one-person company who consults for multiple clients, provides their own equipment and sets their own working hours (I have literally worked with people like this) do not fall into IR35. Whether they speak in RP, Cockney, Geordie or Scouse has no bearing on this. How much money they earn has no bearing on whether they fall into the scope of IR35.

You are misunderstanding what IR35 is: the rules bite because the person doing the work has a material interest in the company that contracts to provide it, and then each engagement is assessed in isolation for deemed-employment status; you are conflating that trigger with the status test itself, and “multiple clients / own equipment / flexible hours” is not some automatic escape hatch, nor does the number of clients change the outcome of a given engagement’s assessment.

> This is only part of it. Other criteria include right of substitution, ability to set working hours and location. Clearly a consultancy firm that provides services by multiple workers for multiple clients is very different from an individual who:

Large consultancies routinely embed the same named individuals at the same client for years, on client kit, during client hours, with no practical substitution, and no one performs a hypothetical employment test on the firm itself. The difference is not the day-to-day reality of the work, which can be identical. The difference is that IR35 is only activated when the company supplying the labour is owned by the person doing the labour. That asymmetry is deliberate.

> Because they're two completely different types of contract and working arrangements.

They are not “completely different” in substance. You can have the same embedded role, same hours, same client equipment, same multi-year engagement. The decisive difference is ownership of the supplying company. The regime is constructed so that when the worker owns the company, a deemed-employment test is imposed; when external shareholders own it, it is not.
by brookst | 2026-02-27 14:53:32+00:00
I mean that’s just adulthood.

There are outcomes where the US government seizes the company. Not super likely, not impossible.

It would be naive to write a statement that a future event will never happen, under any circumstances. People who make that mistake get lambasted for hypocrisy when unforeseen circumstances arise.

I see recognition that making absolute statements about the future is best left to zealots and prophets. Which to me speaks of maturity, not duplicity.
by saas_dev | 2026-02-27 14:53:39+00:00
I wrote this after noticing how “validation” often turns into collecting supportive anecdotes. The post breaks down 7 common cognitive biases (confirmation, optimism, planning fallacy, sunk cost, survivorship, overconfidence, availability) and a simple anti-bias workflow: fake-door tests, prepayment, a negative-signal checklist, and kill criteria. If you’ve got a validation routine that reliably prevents self-delusion, I’d love to hear it—especially what signals you treat as a hard “no.”
by js8 | 2026-02-27 14:53:47+00:00
But isn't it just a failure to communicate it? What if almost all other people are similarly disillusioned?

Also, according to psychologists, one negative experience outweighs roughly five positive experiences of the same magnitude. So, as we get older, we might have tendency to accumulate negative experiences, and as a result become more cynical and less idealistic. And so it kind of perpetuates.
by skeeter2020 | 2026-02-27 14:53:56+00:00
for once the CNBC sound-bite does a great job of telling you all you need to know - and without reading past the top 2 bullet points:

* Block said Thursday it’s laying off more than 4,000 employees, or about half of its head count.

* Shares of the payment company skyrocketed as much as 24% in extended trading. It was last seen up nearly 18% in Friday’s premarket.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2026-02-27 14:53:57+00:00
> these decisions are functionally equivalent

> I know your point is that "people will die" when you blow up a building, but the parameters are really quite similar

The parameters are similar, but the effects are different. That's what makes the decision not functionally equivalent. A functionally equivalent decision would have the same functional result.

To put a point on it: we are allowed to, and indeed should, consider the effects of a decision when making it.
by rayiner | 2026-02-27 14:53:58+00:00
I’m from the subcontinent, so I’d love to live in a place where families stay together like India but has public order and good governance like Massachusetts. Where is that place? Good governance (stable, efficient, low corruption, free—not just in the formal government but across society’s institutions) and public order is a luxury reserved for a handful of the world’s population. Basically Scandinavia, a few states in the U.S., and the Anglo countries (UK, AUS, CAD, NZ). Where else? Japan and Singapore come close, at the cost of pretty top-down management of the population.

And for places that don’t have order and good government, progress towards those things is non-existent. People in my home country of Bangladesh have spent their 55 years of independence doing everything they can to remain poor and dysfunctional. They just held sham elections (again) after overthrowing the government (again). And the guy in charge of the sham elections was a Nobel Laureate lauded by the international community.

So I’m much more afraid of the few islands of prosperity regressing to the global mean than I am aspirational about trying to have it all. I’ll endure donuts cut in half and running out of food at potlucks in return for order.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-27 14:54:08+00:00
> leaders at Anthropic are willing to risk losing their seat at the table

Hot take: Dario isn’t risking that much. Hegseth being Hegseth, he overplayed his hand. Dario is calling his bluff.

Contract terminations are temporary. Possibly only until November. Probably only until 2028 unless the political tide shifts.

Meanwhile, invoking the Defense Production Act to seize Anthropic’s IP basically triggers MAD across American AI companies—and by extension, the American capital markets and economy—which is why Altman is trying to defuse this clusterfuck. If it happens it will be undone quickly, and given this dispute is public it’s unlikely to happen at all.
by fartfeatures | 2026-02-27 14:54:13+00:00
There are ways to achieve that without a blanket ban, if you read their AI policy it seems more "ethically" motivated. They certainly address this first, with many more words and 7 references.

They do go on to address code quality but it is more of an after thought with 0 references, less words and appears lower down the page.

The timing is also suspicious, shortly after publication of this report: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/smartphone-ma... which forecasts declining smartphone sales meaning less devices for this OS to run on.
by staticman2 | 2026-02-27 14:54:37+00:00
> If I recall correctly, the OAI-Microsoft deal just defined it as “AI-shaped tech that can generate $100 billion in annual profits”, which I think is actually close to the correct answer

So if they hit 100 billion annual then it's AGI but if Kellogg's launches “FrostedFlakes-GPT" and steals 30% of the market it's no longer AGI at 70 billion?
by kruffalon | 2026-02-27 14:54:44+00:00
It is so nice to see that in reality there already are useful laws to combat enshittification, we just need to use them.

It is also hopeful that publicly funded organisation asks for better governance rather than just bowing down.

Obviously it is in the Zeitgeist to do this now, could (should) have been written 20years ago, but who would have listened?
by dogleash | 2026-02-27 14:54:45+00:00
> Premium to be able to "Jump Ahead to parts other users think are valuable".

This is Google's euphemism for building a SponsorBlock equivlient into youtube. It just sounds terrible if they come out and tell you that in addition to removing their ads, they're selling an adblocker. They don't want you adblocking their ads, but they'll gladly charge you to do it to someone else.
by poszlem | 2026-02-27 14:54:51+00:00
You can believe that only if you don't care about getting a revolution in your country or extreme populist movements gaining traction. When large numbers of people feel economically disposable, the issue stops being about an individual firm’s right to hire and fire and starts becoming a systemic stability problem.

But if you are okay with getting some heads chopped off with a guillotine from time to time, feel free to believe that.
by SkyBelow | 2026-02-27 14:54:52+00:00
>not status orientated

Should we view those who chase status as a bad thing, or look to those who assign status that is then chased? If the average person cares more about who won last night's big game than some work done to improve medication, should we really have anything to say about those who decide to optimize their lives by what society actually rewards?

I noticed this way back in grade school. Good grades were, if anything, a net negative prestige, while sports were a positive prestige. It made me wonder what the school was actually optimizing for, because the day to day rewards weren't being given to the studious. (The actual reward function was more complicated, such as good grades being a boost if one was already a sports star, but these were exceptions to the norm.)
by UqWBcuFx6NV4r | 2026-02-27 14:54:53+00:00
Please tell me more about how you used GPT-3 a few years ago and haven’t stopped blabbing about how bad it is ever since.

If you’re unable to look at a PR for a few minutes and glean that it’s not worth looking at, then that’s entirely a skill issue on your part. Don’t blame everyone else for what’s very clearly your own shortcoming.

If you’re finding a PR to be unreviewable, then reject it because it’s unreviewable, not by backwards-engineering some BS rule which results in you trying to control how people write their code.

I am completely confident that I could put together some LLM-assisted code that you could t distinguish from something else hand-written, with still enough LLM assistance to have been meaningfully beneficial.

There are many valid critiques of LLMs, but the whole “it’s banned because of code quality” approach is BS. This decision was clearly one rooted in the silly AI culture war.

This is all completely ignoring that the rule is completely unenforceable to begin with. It’s like the chuds on twitter talking about how they can “always tell” that someone is trans. It’s logically flawed.
by kjs3 | 2026-02-27 14:56:06+00:00
Ha! We (gatech) were a CDC shop as well, with PLATO. We'd moved up to the Cyber 180s (I think we had a 810, 2 x 855 and a 990 vector machine). FORTRAN on the 990 was pretty fun, and I might be the last person to ever run the ALGOL-60 compiler.