MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kunai | 2026-02-23 18:50:09+00:00
I never quite understood why AI and LLMs are marketed the way they are, or why the powers that be behind its massive push seem so keen on selling it as a wholesale replacement for human careers (which given the current curve of improvements despite what the naysayers of human intellect might suggest, is unfeasible).

Accountants didn't die off when calculators came on the scene. In no scenario is an LLM a drop-in replacement for any career field the same way CAD was a drop-in replacement for draftsmen -- and even then, draftsmen are still around today, in slightly smaller numbers, doing CAD drafting and design rather than using raw pen-and-paper skills.

Claude and Codex are exceptionally useful for reducing workload and improving productivity. But that's all they are. They're calculators replacing the slide-rule, drafting-esque drudgery of typing out all your code by hand. So why not market them like that? As helpers, assistants, tools to enable you to do things better and more efficiently? Which, in my usage of them, is what they're really only good at. Instead, there's been a mad rush to shoehorn agents and LLMs and genai into everything, outlandish claims like GPT writing better than Hemingway and Ginsberg, and creating absurd tools like Grok or Sora that are fundamentally broken, don't work well, and have flooded the internet with noise and disgusting slop.

And in all of this, they've created a cancerous gold rush that threatens to wipe out the entire economy when the jig is up and people realize how useless these claims are, and that at the end of the day, it's a fancy search engine, a calculator, that can think a little better and reason more than the ones of old.

It really feels like all of these CEOs are just borderline running a cult at this point.
by cess11 | 2026-02-23 18:50:18+00:00
4000 out of 460000, that's about 0.8% or so? At the face of it, it doesn't seem a lot higher than the 3% lifetime risk of psychosis and whatever it is for bipolar disorder.

To me it doesn't seem like they control much for confounding factors, or the possibility that young people who might develop psychiatric illness could also be more drug seeking or irresponsible in their drug use.
by isx726552 | 2026-02-23 18:50:38+00:00
> But, the pro-legalization folks would argue patently crazy things: it cures cancer, the smoke isn't bad for you at all, there are no downsides! etc.

Who seriously claimed that it “cures cancer”? There have been some claims that it helps alleviate nausea associated with chemotherapy, which is quite reasonable and will likely be proved out by evidence over time.

Really … who genuinely claimed it “cures” cancer?
by masklinn | 2026-02-23 18:50:42+00:00
> Kuda on the UK allowing higher loads, and therefore benefiting from extra wedge devices on the top of the cab.

Cab-top deflectors are extremely common on every truck where the cab is not tall enough to cover a standard trailer (which is common, usually only the highest end sleepers are that tall e.g. Scania's highline cab on the R and S, Volvo's globetrotter xl and xxl, ...)

For instance on this hero image from scania's site every truck but the very shortest and the very tallest have a deflector: https://www.scania.com//group/en/home/products-and-services/...

Obviously if you run higher than standard trailers, you need a custom deflector.
by ebbi | 2026-02-23 18:50:58+00:00
> getting educated on a subject

Hah. "Get educated because I don't like the way you use the word"

From one of the articles you shared:

“acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

Let's see what Israeli leadership have said (a small sample), and then go look at aerial photos of Gaza now, and then tell me who needs to be educated:

Yoev Gallant - Israeli Minister of Defense:

"I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly."

"Gaza won't return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything."

Netanyahu - to members of the Knesset, said that Israel was "destroying more and more houses [in Gaza, and Palestinians accordingly] have nowhere to return", and that "the only obvious result will be Gazans choosing to emigrate outside of the Strip"

In July 2025, Defense Minister Israel Katz instructed the IDF to relocate all Gazans to a "humanitarian zone" in the destroyed city of Rafah, in preparation for an unspecified "emigration plan"

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's repeated invocation of Amalek and the phrase "remember what Amalek did to you".

Finance Minister Smotrich also said, "There are no half measures ... Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat – total annihilation. 'Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.'"

President Isaac Herzog blamed the "entire nation" of Palestine for the 7 October attack. He added: "It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians being not aware, not involved."

Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Nissim Vaturi wrote that the government was allowing too much aid to enter Gaza and that the IDF should "burn Gaza now".[104] He said that Israel's goal was "erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth." When asked to clarify his statements by Kol BaRama, Vaturi reiterated that Gaza and its inhabitants must be destroyed, saying: "I don't think there are any innocent people there now... If there is an innocent person there, we will know about them. Whoever stays there should be eliminated, period."[106] In 2025, Vaturi called Palestinians "scoundrels" and "subhumans" and called for the adult men in Gaza to be killed.
by AuthAuth | 2026-02-23 18:51:13+00:00
I really do agree with the sentiment of this guy. I am this guy mentally but what he is saying is so painfully out of touch and completely ignores how people actually use the web today. My bro the web isnt controlled by corps because its to hard to host a web page. Corps have created these extremely far reaching and complex applications and people prefer to use those than browser through statically generated pages. Average man doesnt want to come home and update his page he just wants to open the app on his phone, scroll for a bit and close it.

The problem is in the environment but also the user behavior. Unless you can provide a convincing argument to change both by presenting an actual improvement then its farting in the wind
by elteto | 2026-02-23 18:51:17+00:00
As unsafe as C or C++. In fact, safer, because only the ABI surface is unsafe, the rust code behind it can be as safe or unsafe as you want it to be.

I was addressing this portion of your comment: "C's ABI and dynamic linking are the thing that enables the software to get huge". If the C ABI is what enables software to get huge then Rust is already there.

There is a second claim in your comment about a "safe ABI", but that is something that neither C or C++ offers right now.
by beernet | 2026-02-23 18:51:19+00:00
> Is there someone you think _could_ interview Putin responsibly?

No, and no one should, see next answer.

> Implicitly being the key word here and is certainly subjective. If the body of evidence you're presenting is "would interview Putin" and "spoke Russian to Zelensky", I don't find that convincing.

"Would interview Putin" implies "is willing to provide a huge international platform for a terrorist and still-active mass murderer who is best known for his effective propaganda of peoples' minds". If you do not find that convincing, you are not alone at all. This has been the objective of Russia all along.
by signal11 | 2026-02-23 18:51:39+00:00
The EU’s tech regulation has always been a bit “off”, like they don’t really understand tech or how to encourage improved behaviour. Eg cookie popups, those are a blight and it’s the EU’s fault — to the point they’re working to roll them back[1] after all these years, because informed consent is impossible at the scale at which cookie popups hit users.

Then there was the whole “pay or okay” controversy around paywalls or tracking ads.

My observation is: saying no to tech rarely works. Building a more compelling alternative does. But the EU would rather regulate than build.

[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-cookie-law-messed-up-...
by com2kid | 2026-02-23 18:51:47+00:00
I love inverter microwaves so much. I got a cheap one at Target for maybe $100 or so. I almost never use full power, typically I go for 50% or 60%. Food heats through evenly, every time.

I try and tell friends about it and they all think I am crazy. I've had more luck with induction cook tops, probably because there is more general buzz around them.

I really with Alex on Technology Connections would do a video on inverter microwaves to get the word out!
Show HN: I rebuilt my hobby mapping platform
by velmu | 2026-02-23 18:52:01+00:00
A couple of weeks back I realize that unemployment was about to hit me for the first time in my 25 year old career.

I had not been really developing for the last 10 years or so, but had my old hobby mapping platform up and running and creating modest revenue to pay for the hosting costs. I

Didn’t ever really try this vibecode thing seriously, but decided to stay relevant I should look into it (whatever it’s called now Agentic Engineering, whatever). I had dabbled with JavaScript/Typescript over the years (mostly just adding small hacks and kludges for marketing at work), but always felt Node had too much baggage.

So to give Deno a go. From the frameworks I chose Fresh because it was first party. And now here we are 14 days later my multi-tenant site is live in 30+ locales fully translated running it’s own routing and geocoder. Additionally I had translations and data from before, but did a ton of data wrangling and exploring of the data structure.

Can’t say how amazed by not only Deno, Claude, but also the state the open mapping ecosystem has reached. It’s amazing to use the combination of OSM, OSMR and MapLibre GL are. Last time I worked on this hobby the commercial APIs were hands down better.

You could call me jaded and tired of all the hype on average. But for me this was an exciting journey of discovery and enjoying building things.

P.S. If anyone’s hiring I’m available remote or in Finland from July - drop me a line at wet.salt5007@fastmail.com
by hathawsh | 2026-02-23 18:52:25+00:00
A lot of code is "useless" only in the sense that no one wants to buy it and it will never find its way into an end user product. On the other hand, that same code might have enormous value for education, research, planning, exploration, simulation, testing, and so on. Being able to generate reams of "useless" code is a highly desirable future.
by MertsA | 2026-02-23 18:52:29+00:00
A bootable container, kernel included, is not a container. Building a whole new OS image for patches isn't a bad idea, but depending on the workload this might be a non-starter. At the very least, make updates to the OS image incremental ala OSTree. kexec can also be a nice speedup on server hardware but that carries its own risks from kexec itself but also from lack of exercising cold boot. It's not nice to find out about a few percent of hosts failing to boot all at once because nothing tested it for months until the power outage.

IMHO, optimizing your update process and treating whole OS environments like we do containers is good, but there are plenty of environments like stateful services where a rolling reboot can still take months to complete if done in a naive way.
by ASalazarMX | 2026-02-23 18:52:37+00:00
I think it's even more pernicious. Religious leaders want to tell you what to think, but since it usually benefits them, it takes constant reinforcement to be effective.

On the contrary, we willingly use (and even pay for) chatbots so they increasingly think for us, and it would take a monumental effort to take them away from us now.

People would even make their own if needed, but at least in that case, it won't be a megacorp telling the chatbot what to think in the first place.
by kunai | 2026-02-23 18:52:58+00:00
I mean that's certainly part of it, but Altman's grotesque comments today about the idea of raising a child being "more inefficient" than training an AI model there's something deeper, darker, psychologically I think; that the VC people are fundamentally misanthropic and antisocial and despite AI not really fulfilling their desire for a world where humans are entirely fungible they want to sell it that way as a sort of bizarre wishcasting. It's just incredibly odd.
by locknitpicker | 2026-02-23 18:53:00+00:00
> Why would Nicki Minaj (someone with more than 300 million followers across all social media platforms, 26 million on Twitter alone) ever need a bot farm to boost her content?

How many of those 300 million followers are actually bots? The report mentions that around a third of the profiles that engaged in the artist's political content were fake profiles.
by Wobbles42 | 2026-02-23 18:53:10+00:00
We have the word slush to mean a mixture of ice and water. A single word for boiling water would occupy a similar conceptual space.

While these are not separate states of matter, they ARE special thermodynamic systems, with the particular property that they tend to remain exactly at the phase transition temperature while heat is added or removed from the system.

This is a somewhere esoteric technical distinction, but it has practical everyday consequences. It's why boiling food works so consistently as a universal cooking option.

You don't need to control the temperature of boiling water, it is an exact temperature that depends only on ambient pressure. As a consequence recipes work by only specifying time, sometimes with a single adjustment for people at higher altitudes.

This is remarkable given the wide variety of containers and heat sources used, and it is used practically by virtually every cooking tradition, even if it's reason for working is not common knowledge.

It shouldn't be surprising it'd acquire a single word as a unified concept.
by PoignardAzur | 2026-02-23 18:53:27+00:00
> Energy density: No weight and volume was mentioned

Note that the report includes some photos of the battery, so we can assume that it's not, like, several orders of magnitude larger than what they advertised.

EDIT: Honestly, I'm pretty excited. Even if their promises on cost and materials don't pan out and the lifetime turns out to be terrible, what they've just demonstrated is already a game-changer.
Show HN: Emotica – AI that analyzes your emotions instead of just tracking them
by tirupati_balan | 2026-02-23 18:54:01+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m Tirupati, co-founder of Emotica.

Most mood apps let users log emotions, but they don’t help interpret them. We built Emotica to analyze emotional patterns from journaling using AI.

What it does:
- AI-powered emotional analysis
- Visual emotion “clouds”
- Conversational reflection
- Pattern recognition over time

We recently launched and crossed 600+ downloads.

We’re offering free lifetime access to early adopters in exchange for honest feedback.

Would really appreciate thoughts on:
- Whether emotional analysis is valuable beyond tracking
- UX clarity
- Long-term retention potential

Happy to answer technical or product questions.

— Tirupati
by Tepix | 2026-02-23 18:54:06+00:00
I've done some experiments with mycelium as a construction material, but I'm hardly an expert.
Mycelium weighs anywhere between 50 and 950kg/m3. Usually you won't have mycelium as thin as cardboard, because you want use mycelium as a 3d buffer, replacing styrofoam. EPS (styrofoam) has densities of 15-30kg/m3. So while it's more sustainable it's also heavier.
by closeparen | 2026-02-23 18:54:30+00:00
Do you believe the research shows that screens in and of themselves are so powerfully damaging that being exposed for, what, a few hours a week at a friend’s house will cause them to require psychiatric medication?

So many questions. Are you campaigning against billboards in your city? Do you avoid taking your kids to any business that has digital signage? I assume you completely abstain from all types of movies and TV? What about radio or books?

What are you, personally, doing on HN?

Fascinating.
by palmotea | 2026-02-23 18:54:37+00:00
>> They're going to send the jobs where the wages are cheaper, and that's exactly what they're doing.

> I read these sentiments, and I honestly don’t understand the tone. This kind of behavior is exactly what you’d expect after taking just a few introductory undergraduate economics courses.

You'll notice I was responding to something I quoted. They claim they're taking action X because of Y, when they're actually taking action X because of Z. Changing Y will do nothing about X. Hence the tone.

Also, the eight most terrifying words in the English language "I just took few introductory undergraduate economics courses..."
by tech_ken | 2026-02-23 18:54:44+00:00
> I never quite understood why AI and LLMs are marketed the way they are, or why the powers that be behind its massive push seem so keen on selling it as a wholesale replacement for human careers

Because labor is the largest line item in almost every software company on Earth. Executives' primary KPI is their market cap, so convincing investors that your profit/expense ratio is going to 2x in 6 months when you finally get full LLM adoption is an excellent way to juice your performance metrics, and thereby your bonus (mutatis mutandis for various finacial setups).
by extr | 2026-02-23 18:54:58+00:00
Part of the issue with legal weed is it's much like if all alcohol was sold as minorly different varieties of Everclear at 150+ ABV, and brands primary boast was just how potent and alcoholic their mix is. It doesn't encourage appropriate usage and IIRC many of these cases of psychosis are from consuming high THC products 24/7 for weeks/months/years on end.

If anyone is curious, check out brands like Rove, Dompen, Care By Design, which offer THC pens at very low dosage. They're frustratingly undermarketed and understocked, but as a CA resident I buy and use pens that are ~4% THC (rather than 90%+). A single puff occasionally after the kids go to sleep - the effect is marginally psychoactive, scratches the itch for "relaxation without impairment", helps me sleep restfully.

Completely different experience to high THC products. If you compare the literal amount of THC consumed, it's an almost 20x reduction. It's literally the equivalent to having a half glass of wine instead of lining up 10 shots.
by quantum_magpie | 2026-02-23 18:55:06+00:00
No, it’s more like you have 10k km to drive in this car.

And then, after you actually drive it for 10k km on “unauthorized” highways, they ban you.

That’s why analogies are for fucking idiots. There is a true example — you bought access to use your account for n tokens, and google got pissy that you didn’t use the tokens in their spyware ecosystem.

For you analogy loving fucks, it’s like the arcades selling their proprietary 50 cent worth token coins, that only works on their machines, when they could just accept 50 cent coins.
by jjmarr | 2026-02-23 18:55:29+00:00
C++ ABI stability is the main reason improvements to the language get rejected.

You cannot change anything that would affect the class layout of something in the STL. For templated functions where the implementation is in the header, ODR means you can't add optimizations later on.

Maybe this was OK in the 90s when companies deleted the source code and laid off the programmers once the software was done, but it's not a feature Rust should ever support or guarantee.

The "stable ABI" is C functions and nothing else for a very good reason.
by unethical_ban | 2026-02-23 18:55:30+00:00
The problem is, doing the analogous action with the entire internet is a privacy nightmare. You didn't have to tell 7-11 every item you bought at every store in the past 2 years and opt-in to telling them what other stores you go to for the next 5.

There is no digital equivalent of "flash an ID card and be done with it" in the surveillance state era of the internet. Using a CC is the closest we have and even then you're giving data away.
by evilantnie | 2026-02-23 18:55:54+00:00
If we want parents to be accountable, then these platforms need to provide better tools to enable parents to do so. It is impossible to monitor the entirety of your child's behavior online through any of these platforms today. They are their own person, they make their own choices, and those choices are heavily influenced by a world the parents have increasingly less influence over, especially as they grow older.

On the flip side, I do think we should also hold companies more accountable for this. We collectively prevented companies from advertising tobacco to minors through regulation with a pretty massive success rate. These companies know how harmful social media can be on youth, and there is little to no effective regulation around how children learn about these platforms and get enticed into them.
by nephihaha | 2026-02-23 18:56:01+00:00
"Capitalist social media is exactly as dangerous as alcohol and tobacco. Somebody should be held responsible for that, and the legal and social framework we already have for dealing with people who want to get kids addicted to shit works fairly well."

They work hand in hand with governments around the world, that's why they get the tax breaks. In return they hand over details about your opinions, social networks and whereabouts, not to mention facial recognition data via Facebook. They aren't remotely capitalist in any real sense since they have a bad business model.
by LeFantome | 2026-02-23 18:56:14+00:00
> The Ladybird devs painted themselves in a corner when choosing C++ for a new web browser

That choice was never made. C++ was selrcted as the language of choice for SerenityOS. Since the goal of the OS was to make its founder happy, and C++ was his faviourite language at the time, that seems like an obvious choice. Later, as part of SerenityOS, there was a need for an HTML parser. It was written in C++ as was the rest of the operating system. Then that HTML parser evolved into a full web browser. As part of the SerenityOS project, that browser was written completely in C++. Then that web browser forked off into an independent project...

Ladybird was already a fully functioning browser (not finished of course but complete enough to surf many web pages) when it was forked from SerenityOS to create a stand-alone web browser. The choice at that point was "keep evolving the current C++ code base" or start-over. I doubt the second option was even considered.

They have been evaluating other languages since before the fork. Rust was evaluated and rejectd early-on. They even created their own language at one point.
https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt
by ozgrakkurt | 2026-02-23 18:56:26+00:00
I found c ABI a bit too difficult in rust compared to c or zig. Mainly because of destructors. I am guessing c++ would be difficult in a similar way.

Also unsafe rust has always on strict-aliasing, which makes writing code difficult unless you do it in certain ways.

Having glue libraries like pyo3 makes it good in rust. But that introduces bloat and other issues. This has been the biggest issue I had with rust, it is too hard to write something so you use a dependency. And before you know it, you are bloating out of control
by mbo | 2026-02-23 18:56:31+00:00
I have a little theory that a thing that makes Japanese website feel Japanese is their choice of typeface, which will almost always be something with robust CJK character support. This typeface is preserved when Chrome auto-translates the site.

But fonts with good CJK support have wider Latin letter-forms, even when not in `font-variant-east-asian: 'full-width'` mode. I write about this here: https://maxbo.me/subordinate-latin.html (and cite "the peculiar case of Japanese web design")