MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by peteforde | 2026-02-27 22:00:49+00:00
If this is how an us vs them scenario is being framed, you're making a very strong case for the team I've chosen.

It sounds like you're describing winners and losers, but it's shaky ground when you realize many people simply aren't motivated to think like an economist.

Given the choice between spending my life doing interesting things and accumulating wealth, I'm quite comfortable knowing how I'll look back on things from the end.

BTW: you say "of course you're not going to be setting up a mini factory" to someone who quite literally has a mini factory in their house. I'm on Hacker News to hang out with other people who think that's awesome, not some misaligned economic philosophy.
by duped | 2026-02-27 22:00:51+00:00
> But they also don't want to pay any money, because the internet, as we all know, "is free".

I pay ~$150/month for internet itself. I pay close to $90/month in internet services and media. I have coworkers spending hundreds each month on multiple AI subscriptions just because they have a better product for their work than Google. If tiktok and reels cost money then people would be ripping copper wire out of street lights to pay for it.
by rurp | 2026-02-27 22:01:33+00:00
Despite being a huge fan of Simmons I had originally passed on this one because I didn't care for the Dickens novels I had read in school. At a family gathering I was surprised to learn that my Grandma was a big Simmons fan. She convinced me to give Drood a shot and sure enough I really enjoyed it! So I'd say it's worth checking out even if you're not a big Dickens reader.
by xpe | 2026-02-27 22:02:01+00:00
When someone says something that I think is poorly framed, I often reframe it and speak to that instead. (Lots of people do this, even if they don’t realize it. I’m aware that I do, for better and worse, and I still prefer it; I think it is more authentic. I think some of the best ways we can enrich other people’s lives is by sharing different ways of processing the world. Lots of people get locked into pretty uninteresting narratives.)

So reframe I did. (I don’t think those articles you cited are worth any more attention than I’ve already given them.)

My most blunt editorializing would be this: most people would be better grounded if they read AI alignment and safety books by Stuart Russell, Nick Bostrom, Brian Christian, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Nate Soares. If you’ve read others that you recommend, please let me know. I’ve read many that I don’t usually recommend.

As far as long form articles, I recommend Paul Christiano, Zvi Moshowitz, as well as anyone with the fortitude to make predictions while sharing their models (like the AI 2027 crew).

I recommend browsing “Best of Year Y” (or whatever they are called) articles on the AI Alignment Forum and LessWrong.
They are my go-tos for smart & informed writing on AI. For posts that have more than say 100 votes, the quality bar is tremendously higher than almost anywhere else I’ve seen, including mainstream sources with great reputations.

In conclusion, I would rather point to interesting people to read and places to engage.
by highwaylights | 2026-02-27 22:02:03+00:00
You had me until Proton. I bang this drum every so often when it comes up but I’ve had terrible experiences with Proton locking me out of email permanently without warning or explanation in a way that made not just the email address but the accounts linked to it completely unrecoverable.

Don’t play around with email. It’s not communication, it’s critical digital infrastructure - quite possibly your primary key on the internet. The consequences of getting locked out by a faceless provider for reasons you’ll never hear about are probably a lot bigger than you think.
by hedora | 2026-02-27 22:02:26+00:00
Borrowing from libraries sort of gives money to the creators, since the libraries seem to buy + dump lots of copies. Buying used gives the libraries money, since they dump the copies at the used store.

Alternatively, be like me, and have a $100 budget for N ~= 20 BluRays/40 DVDs. 2-3 can be new purchases if used isn't in stock.
by mitchell209 | 2026-02-27 22:02:54+00:00
Lol this is the same thing that's been repeated about DDG for over a decade. I had the same exact complaints and eventually switched back to Google since I was using !g bangs so often, and that was when I was in high school. Which is why, when I learned about Kagi I switched and never looked back. Even as a "casual" user I still find value because of the lack of obnoxious ads and control I have over boosting or blocking sites from my results completely.
by roenxi | 2026-02-27 22:03:16+00:00
The old people's tolerance for general problems is why the general problems persist.

A realistic dynamic is the old people are comfortable with the general problems and have positioned themselves to benefit from them. Indeed, they solved the general problems that troubled them in their youth with political activism in their middle age. The young people have different political needs that require general problems to be solved.

Also young people have a terrible track record of actually identifying problems, they are pretty clueless in the main.
by Gazoche | 2026-02-27 22:03:17+00:00
I have never read an ending that was as sad, happy, clever and beautiful as the ending to Rise of Endymion. To this day it's one of the very few books that made me shed a tear.

Now, over decade later, I am in the middle of re-reading every book in the Cantos series back to back (this time in their original language), and still loving them.

Rest in peace Mr Simmons. You had the words of a poet and the mind of a dreamer.
by epolanski | 2026-02-27 22:03:43+00:00
> "Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow," Trump added.

The Al Capone executive.

No surprise most CEOs are either licking his butt or staying silent, there's clearly a climate of fear.
by mlinsey | 2026-02-27 22:03:47+00:00
Adoption of web browsers was also much lower when Netscape was dominant. 90% marketshare is less meaningful if you're only 1% of the way to the potential market size. Peeling away users who talk to ChatGPT every day is very possible, but harder than getting someone whose never used an LLM before (but does use your OS, browser, phone...) to try yours first.

I think the even better analogy than browsers is search engines. There aren't any network effects or platform lock-in, but there is potential for a data flywheel, building a brand, and just getting users in the habit of using you. The results won't necessarily turn out the same - I think OpenAI's edge on results quality is a lot less than early Google over its competitors - but the shape of the competition is similar.
by carabiner | 2026-02-27 22:03:49+00:00
It's everything. NASA doesn't have the money, brainpower, efficiency etc. to implement SpaceX development method. They can't fab it fast enough, nor can they iterate on the engineering fast enough, nor are they will to sustain the optics of a "government rocket blowing up" like Musk is. They don't have the caliber of engineering talent available or a workflow setup (high autonomy, long hours, better pay).
by caidan | 2026-02-27 22:03:55+00:00
The conclusion that we will abandon Spotify for individual artist discords is nonsense. Clearly Spotify should be enabling all of the community building and merchandising that artists want to do because that would help their margins and moat. But regardless of whether they do or do not, the vast bulk of the demand side, the listeners, are going to want à la cart unrestricted music. It’s the same thing we want for video, we are just not given it. Perhaps they should balkanize into fifteen different streaming services each with its own catalog and exclusives but that way lies the return of piracy.
by peteforde | 2026-02-27 22:04:18+00:00
You misunderstand what I said. I know why it bugs me - it's because your perspective is demonstrably wrong - and I'm sad that I still feel compelled to refute your lazy, cynical perspective.

I don't know why someone who thinks like you hangs out on Hacker News. Wouldn't you be more at home on Passive Consumer News? I'd suggest you go make that real, except... never mind.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-27 22:06:53+00:00
I think the pay solution could potentially work. The biggest issue is the decentralized nature of the internet. If I could setup an account which gives me access to everything ad free, but deducts what the page would earn in advertisement (say something like $0.001 for a visit) and most of the internet which does a pay wall participated in this scheme, then I'd do it. I'd happily put in $10 to such an account and recharge it when I start finding the internet being locked away.

You'd want such a platform to be relatively open to allow anyone to participate, but you'd also have to be pretty aggressive at policing as bad actors would be all over the place trying to artificially drain an account. Maybe it's something that could be built into the browser? You could get a "X would like to charge you for a visit" which you could approve or deny and you could configure to always approve.

Transaction fees would be a beast.
by tinzulic | 2026-02-27 22:07:07+00:00
Congrats on the launch. The client-side rendering on WebCodecs/WebGL2 is impressive — that alone is a hard technical problem most teams avoid.

One thing I've been thinking about building in this space: there's a fundamental split between understanding what to edit (where VLMs/agents shine) and executing the edit precisely (where you need deterministic operations, not model inference).

Most "AI video editors" blur these two together — they use the same probabilistic approach for both understanding and execution. But when a user says "cut the first 3 seconds and add a 0.5s crossfade," that shouldn't go through a model. That should be a precise, repeatable operation.

The Cursor analogy in your roadmap is apt — Cursor works because it predicts intent but executes through deterministic code transforms, not by asking an LLM to write the whole file. Same principle applies to video.

Curious how you handle the boundary between agent-proposed edits and deterministic timeline operations under the hood?
by arthurjj | 2026-02-27 22:07:15+00:00
I was thrown by

> I do my best to boycott bad things. And I fail pretty often. I still use Amazon on occasion and I can’t get off Spotify. I use Uber and DoorDash a lot more than I’d like. And I have too many Apple products/services.

> Individual actions probably will not save the world, but big tech is bad

It's weird to see this without any context or justification or comparison to other industries. As if it's so self evidently true that the author never considered the reader might dismiss his wider point when coming across it with no explanation
by senko | 2026-02-27 22:07:24+00:00
Possibly, but curiously Dario's statement, and other (unrelated) political stories like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47181391 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47181944 didn't trip it.

Yet at least 6 of these (counting only those with at least 15 votes) did.

The algorithm works in mysterious ways!

(edit: one did manage, at 55 upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47186127 )
by Ganeshan007 | 2026-02-27 22:07:33+00:00
I built a personal Claude assistant that runs on WhatsApp. It's a single Python process (asyncio) that routes
messages to Claude agents running in isolated Docker containers. Each group gets its own filesystem and
memory.

Inspired by NanoClaw (TypeScript, container isolation) and nanobot (Python, simple setup). I wanted both — so
SlimClaw has per-group isolation like NanoClaw but sets up with pip install slimclaw && slimclaw-setup. No AI
IDE required.

Some things it does differently: when someone @mentions the bot in an unregistered group, it notifies your
admin channel instead of silently ignoring it. You reply "join Family Chat" and the group is live. Skills
(markdown files) let you add capabilities without touching the core. Model selection (Haiku/Sonnet/Opus) is
part of onboarding.
by roblabla | 2026-02-27 22:07:46+00:00
> NSA most certainly has a backdoor there and such complete access to any Android phone.

Citation needed?

> This was common knowledge after the Snowden stuff.

Not to me, it isn't? As far as I'm aware, most of the Snowden stuff were centered around PRISM, which allowed widescale wiretapping of internet backbone, as well as agreements with big cloud providers to allow tapping into their data.

I haven't seen anything indicating that there was widespread compromise of personal computing devices at such a deep level of the root of trust. I haven't seen any indication that the NSA has a backdoor in the earlyboot CPU of any device, whether that is the Qualcomm boot processor, the Intel Management Engine or the AMD Platform Security Processor (which all have similar capabilities and hidden firmware).

If I missed anything/have links to research into these backdoors, I'd like to see them!
by peteforde | 2026-02-27 22:07:58+00:00
Again: not doing anything at all with health or chemistry. They aren't what I am interested in, even peripherally.

What you seem to be missing is that LLMs are better at/for some things than others. Legal review, 3D geometry, therapy and apparently chemistry are off the list.

It doesn't make sense to project that onto domains where it excels.
by al_borland | 2026-02-27 22:08:27+00:00
I had a similar experience with DDG. I felt like I had to add “!g” to everything, which doesn’t actually move one away from Google, it just creates friction.

Kagi, however, has been a different experience for me. I haven’t felt the need to go to Google at all. If I can’t find it with Kagi, I’m confident I won’t find it with Google either. There have also been several times where I was on an outage call with a double dozen people all looking for answers to some issue. Everyone was coming up empty with Google, and I was able to find something that solved the issue pretty quickly with Kagi.
by pdonis | 2026-02-27 22:08:30+00:00
> Unmanned testing in similar conditions before putting humans on it might've resulted in a nice explosion without loss of life that would've been much harder to ignore

The loss of the Challenger was the 25th manned orbital mission. So we can expect that it might have taken 25 unmanned missions to cause a similar loss of vehicle. But what would those 25 unmanned missions have been doing? There just wasn't 25 unmanned missions' worth of things to find out. That's also far more unmanned missions than were flown on any previous NASA space program before manned flights began.

Even leaving the above aside, if it would have been politically possible to even fly that many unmanned missions, it would have been politically possible to ground the Shuttle even after manned missions started based on the obvious signs of problems with the SRB joint O-rings. There were, IIRC, at least a dozen previous manned flights which showed issues. There were also good critiques of the design available at the time--which, in the kind of political environment you're imagining, would have been listened to. That design might not even have made it into the final Shuttle when it was flown.

In short, I don't see your alternative scenario as plausible, because the very things that would have been required to make it possible would also have made it unnecessary.
by ufmace | 2026-02-27 22:08:35+00:00
I don't think it's a money thing really. IIRC the regular XZ creator/maintainer had a regular job and enough money already, and it was more of a burnout thing from dealing with the usual hassles of OSS. Which means what it really needs is to be taken over by an actual business organization, with a team of developers and professional project managers and customer support people etc so no one person gets too burnt out and if anyone does, they have plenty of backup.
by leptons | 2026-02-27 22:08:38+00:00
Where the hell did I ever say I backed any of it? You are making up shit in your head that simply is not there. Maybe you need a reality check, or go back to reddit.

What I did say was:

>if there has to be age verification

That is far, far different than saying I want that shit. I do not make the laws, and I wouldn't vote for it either, so please, get your head out of your ass.
by hedora | 2026-02-27 22:08:52+00:00
Yep: JSON schema Alternatively, with typescript you can write:

export type FooRpcV1 : { version: 1, ... }
export type FooRpcV2 : { version: 2, ... }

in zod syntax, and it'll do the right thing statically and at runtime (ask an LLM for help with the syntax).

With protobufs (specifically protoc), you get some type like:

export type FooRpc : { version : 1 | 2, v1fieldA? : string, v1fieldB? : int, v2fieldB? : string, v2fieldB? string };

which is 2^5 message types, even if all fields of both versions were mandatory. Then application logic needs to validate it.
by TheosResearch | 2026-02-27 22:09:04+00:00
I built THEOS — two reasoning engines running simultaneously in
opposite directions. The left engine is constructive, the right
adversarial. A governor measures contradiction between them and
sustains reasoning until the best available answer emerges — or
reports irreducible disagreement honestly.

The result that started this: ask any AI what the difference is
between being alone and being lonely.

Standard AI: "Being alone is physical isolation. Loneliness is
emotional disconnection."

THEOS: "They are independent of each other — one does not cause
the other. You can be in a crowded room and feel completely unseen.
Loneliness is not the absence of people. It is the absence of
being understood."

Zero external dependencies for core. 71 passing tests. Pure Python
3.10+. pip install theos-reasoning

3-minute video intro: https://youtu.be/i5Mmq305ryg
Docs: https://frederick-stalnecker.github.io/THEOS/

Happy to answer technical questions about the architecture.
by pwthornton | 2026-02-27 22:09:23+00:00
Term limits are anti-democratic, and it's just a way for voters to not take responsibility for their voting.

A much more real issue is actually age limits. If someone starts in the Senate at 40 and serves for 24 years, term limits hardly seem to be the big issue. They are retiring at a normal time, and they should still be functioning at a high level.

Conversely, someone who gets elected at 70 and then gets term-limited at 82 is still over a normal, reasonable retirement age. The typical 82 is not in the physical or mental condition to be taking on such an important, high-stakes role.

Both of my parents are in their mid-70s and are in very good mental health for their age. They are very lucid, and my Dad still works part-time as a lawyer. They are also clearly not at the same intellectual powers they were a decade or two ago. Some of it can even just come down to energy levels. I have to imagine being a good legislator requires high energy levels.

Many public companies have age limits for board members, and they even have traditional retirement ages for CEOs. In the corporate world where results matter, there is a recognition that a high-stress, high-workload, high-cognitiative ability job is not something that someone should be doing well past their prime.

Al Gore had to leave the Apple board because he turned 75. In the U.S. Senate, there are 16 people 75 and older.
by nashashmi | 2026-02-27 22:09:41+00:00
He lost me at paying for services. Sure, me in my 40s can afford to pay for a good 200$ worth of services, but when I was starting out in high school and college, I could not even fathom paying for anything. And that was the time I was doing real work in my life, not like now.

I don't know what this allergy to features are. You can disable the features. It is not hard. I remember when they used to force conversation feature down everyone's throats. Some oldies hated it, but when they got used to it they appreciated it. Now they have an off feature.
by Palmik | 2026-02-27 22:09:52+00:00
From Anthropics recent blog post: https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

> By examining request metadata, we were able to trace these accounts to specific researchers at the lab.

> The volume, structure, and focus of the prompts were distinct from normal usage patterns

Clearly some employees of Anthropic personally looked at individual inputs and outputs of their API
by Brian_K_White | 2026-02-27 22:10:09+00:00
That is already way too much as far as I'm concerned. It's not that it's difficult, it's that it's arbitrary and a form of commanded speech or action. Smallness and easiness isn't an excuse.

If you write a story, there must be a character in it somewhere that reminds kids not to smoke. That's all. It's very easy.
by nderjung | 2026-02-27 22:10:16+00:00
Howdy! We are hard at work at improving the DX, and as a result we've been working on a brand new CLI. We haven't made any announcements yet, but it's already open-source for early adopts if you'd like to give it a try!

https://github.com/unikraft/cli

Feedback is very much appreciated, we're listening! :)
by aaronharnly | 2026-02-27 22:10:17+00:00
This is the Truth Social post, which the article quotes but doesn't quite convey the flavor of:

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1161445529692...

> THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS! That decision belongs to YOUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, and the tremendous leaders I appoint to run our Military.

> The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY.

> Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again! There will be a Six Month phase out period for Agencies like the Department of War who are using Anthropic’s products, at various levels. Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow.

> WE will decide the fate of our Country — NOT some out-of-control, Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP
by mapontosevenths | 2026-02-27 22:10:23+00:00
I'm not sure a lack of intuition implies a lack of reasoning. They clearly didn't make that jump until they were told to look for something, but did pretty handily once asked. Clearly they used some version of reasoning to do that, but just as clearly had no interest in it at all until directed to look for it.

I wonder if we phrased it differently we could get them to make the leap without so much hinting? I'll tinker with it a bit later.

Either way, very cool experiment! Thanks for posting it. I'd upvote you again if I could.
by zippothrowaway | 2026-02-27 22:10:23+00:00
[citation needed]

OpenAI have made this claim and maybe it is with API pay-per-use (there's also good evidence eveb that is not if you dive into how much a rack of B200s cost to operate), but I'd be very sceptical that the free, $20 or $200 a month plans are profitable.

Then the questions are if the market will bear the real cost and if so how competitive OpenAI are with Google when Google can do what Microsoft did to Netscape and subsidize inference for far longer than OpenAI can.