MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by martin-t | 2026-02-14 04:43:56+00:00
> The principal danger is the concentration of power.

Absolutely. Good people can cooperate or reach compromises for mutual benefit. Bad people are each in it for himself - while they do form alliances sometimes, ultimately working together is unnatural for them and often temporary.

Requiring any position of power to be always distributed among many people obviously makes it hard for a single person to abuse power but less obviously disadvantages bad people by its very nature on a deeper level.

> local communities and institutions

I have an idea which I for now call consent-based society. I need to think about it a lot more but for now:

People talk about rights and freedoms but can't decide where the rights of one person end and another person's begin. If we focus on consent, it may become simpler. People could then form larger and larger groups based on agreement (consent) to rules - a house, small village, city, state. But only as long as it benefits them - consent can be revoked at any time.

But of course, historically, nation states emerged because large hierarchical power structures are advantageous at war and it'll take a long time to get people away from considering them natural, correct or inevitable.

---

Anyway, I don't think your post really answers my question though. From what I read, liquid democracy seems like a form of bottom up governance.
by BobbyTables2 | 2026-02-14 04:44:21+00:00
I realize people want to tax the rich but seems to me that taxing unrealized gains would seriously penalize investment.

That’s a huge blow to the natural compounding that occurs as stocks appreciate over time.

Wouldn’t that kill their stock market? Who would invest with such taxes?

Seems like people would just pour their investment funds into real estate rentals or such where only “realized” income would exist to be taxed… (ignoring appreciation of the property)
by phoronixrly | 2026-02-14 04:45:30+00:00
Is that the Peter Thiel dinstancing himself from the homophobic student the author calls brave (referring to the newspaper article scan).

Imagine being such an asshole that even Peter Thiel condemns you...

Oh and it also makes it very obvious that the author and I apparently don't share an understanding of what brave and daring is...
Show HN: Why Playwright-CLI Beats MCP for AI‑Driven Browser Automation
by tanmay001 | 2026-02-14 04:45:31+00:00
Most “AI + browser” setups still bolt MCP tools onto Playwright and hope for the best, so every click dumps full DOMs, accessibility trees, and logs into the model.

That burns tokens, collapses context, and makes long sessions unreliable.

Meanwhile, default Playwright reports start to struggle once you have more than a few dozen e2e tests, so teams drown in HTML reports and flaky failures instead of clear patterns.

The insights at https://testdino.com/blog/playwright-cli/ explores how Microsoft’s playwright-cli keeps browser state external, returns only compact element references and YAML flows, and works with normal npx playwright test plus smarter reporting, so both agents and humans stay fast, cost aware, and predictable.
by NateEag | 2026-02-14 04:46:44+00:00
Like everything genAI, it was amazing yet surprisingly crappy.

Yes, the bear is definitely dancing.

But a few feet away there's a world-class step dancer doing intricate rhythms they've perfected over twenty years of hard work.

The bear's kind of shuffling along to the beat like a stoner in a club.

It's amazing it can do it at all... but the resulting compiler is not actually good enough to be worth using.
by Ygg2 | 2026-02-14 04:49:05+00:00
Ok. But they can't access the OSS repo by being insufferable. Writing a blog post as an AI isn't a great way to sneak your changes in. If anything, it makes it extremely harder.

It's a bit like a burglar staging a singing performance at the premises before committing a burglary.

OTOH, staging that AI is more impressive than it seems looks a lot like the Moltbook PR stunt. "Look Ma, they are achieving sentience".
by bruce511 | 2026-02-14 04:50:17+00:00
Define "advertising". I feel this might be hard to do.

For example is my blog talking about Windows considered as Advertising? What about my blog discussing products we make? What about the web site for my local restaurant?

If I add my restaurant location to Google maps, is that advertising? Are review sites?

If I'm an aggregator (like booking.com) and I display the results for a search is that advertising?

I assume though you meant advertising as in 3rd party advertising. So no Google ad words, no YouTube ads etc. Ok, let's explore that...take say YouTube...

Can creators still embed "sponsored by" scenes? Can they do product placement?

Your suggestion is, unfortunately, not implementable. Leaving aside the merit for a moment, there's just no way that any politician can make it happen. Google and Facebook are too big, with too much cash to lobby with. And that's before you tell everyone that the free internet is no more, now you gotta pay subscriptions.

And, here's the kicker, even if you did force users to pay for Facebook and Google, it's still in their interest to maximize engagement...
by toraway | 2026-02-14 04:50:36+00:00
But Anthropic very much is subsidized by VC money, just like OpenAI. They just raised another $30 billion this week. I'm not sure how Anthropic managed to position themselves as the "good guy" in many people's minds, but from my vantage they're much more similar to OpenAI than they are different.

So for the time being I'll stick with the option that isn't trying to profit from lock-in in the long term vs. competing on technical merits of their product. The great thing about basing a workflow on a tool like OpenCode is that if OpenAI enshittifies Codex, I don't have to worry about being trapped and can easily pivot to an open source model, or Anthropic via the API, etc depending on how the future turns out.

I've been paying for the ultra cheap Z.ai plan as my fallback for a while now anyway, or I can use my Github Copilot or or Gemini AI Pro plan via the OpenCode integration, so I certainly won't hesitate to drop OpenAI too if they give me sufficient cause.
by anonzzzies | 2026-02-14 04:50:53+00:00
I had an MSX machine at home and a casio (not sure anymore which one although I still have it, somewhere, and last time I tried, it still worked but that's > 10 years ago); so in class I could write on the casio then, then copy to paper, delete, write more, copy to paper etc. And when boring af school was over, I would type into my MSX with the necessary changes to the BASIC code. Good times.
by jmyeet | 2026-02-14 04:53:25+00:00
The author is wrong. IMHO he's operating under a false premise that the labor market just kind of "happens" or even that the labor market itself is "efficient".

At no point have worker rights and conditions advanced without being demanded, sometimes violently. The history of maritime safety is written in blood. The robber baron era was peppered with deadly clashes such as the Homestead Strike. As a reminder, we had a private paramilitary force for the wealthy called the Pinkerton Detective Agency (despite the name, they were hired thugs) that at it's peak outnumbered the US Army.

Heck, you can go back to the Black Death when there was a labor shortage to work farms and the English Crown tried to pass laws to cap wages to avoid "gouging" by peasants for their labor.

Automation could be very good for society. It could take away menial jobs so we all benefit. But this won't happen naturally because that's essentially a wealth transfer to the poor and the wealthy just won't stand for that.

No, what's going to happen is that AI specifically and automation in general will be used to suppress labor wages and furhter transfer wealth to the already wealthy. We don't need to replace everyone for this to happen. Displacing just 5% of the workforce has a massive effect on wages. The remaining 95% aren't asking for raises and they're doing more work for the same wages as they pick up whatever the 5% was doing.

We see this exact pattern in the permanent layoff culture in tech right now. At the top you have a handful of AI researchers who command $100M+ pay packages. The vast majority are either happy to still have a job or have been laid off, possibly multiple times, and spend a ton of time going through endless interview rounds for jobs that may not even exist.

This two-tiered society is very much in our near future (IMHO).

In the Depression you had wandering hoboes who were constantly moving, seeking temporary low-paid work and a meal. This situation was so bad we got real socialist change with the New Deal.

2008 killed the entry-level job market and it has yet to recover. That's why you see so many millenails with Masters degrees and a ton of student debt working as baristas. Covid popped the tech labor bubble, something tech companies had been wanting for a long time. Did you not notice that they all started doing layoffs at about the exact same time? Even when they're massively profitable?

So the author isn't worried about job loss? Delusional. We're teetering on the edge of complete societal collapse.
by disqard | 2026-02-14 04:54:59+00:00
Maybe I failed to articulate that well.

My point was more along the lines of "we're about to ruin a high-quality resource (the Internet) that we carefully built over decades".

I think your response is valid -- we'll do what we've always done: adapt and move on.

However, that doesn't change the fact that, just like TV, the Internet will be even more chock-full of garbage, with an abysmal SNR.
Show HN: Lucid – Catch hallucinations in AI-generated code before they ship
by jordanappsite | 2026-02-14 04:55:10+00:00
Hi HN, I'm Ty. I built LUCID because I kept shipping bugs that my AI coding assistant hallucinated into existence.

Three independent papers have proven that LLM hallucination is mathematically inevitable (Xu et al. 2024, Banerjee et al. 2024, Karpowicz 2025). You can't train it away. You can't prompt it away. So I built a verification layer instead.

How it works: LUCID extracts implicit claims from AI-generated code (e.g., "this function handles null input," "this query is injection-safe," "this handles concurrent access"), then uses a second, adversarial AI pass to verify each claim against the actual implementation. You get a report showing exactly what would have shipped to production without verification.

"But can't the verifier hallucinate too?" Yes -- and that's the right question. The benchmarks below were validated by running real test suites, not by trusting LUCID's judgment. The value is that structured claim extraction + adversarial verification catches bugs that a single generation pass misses. The architecture also supports swapping LLM verification for formal methods (SMT solvers, property-based testing) per claim type as those integrations mature.

Benchmarks:

- HumanEval: 86.6% baseline -> 100% pass@5 with LUCID (164/164 problems)
- SWE-bench: 18.3% baseline -> 30.3% with LUCID (+65.5%)
- Both benchmarks were validated by running actual test suites, not by LLM judgment
- LLM-as-judge actually performs worse at higher k values -- it hallucinates false positives

Three ways to use it:

1. MCP Server (Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf) -- one config line, verification as a native tool
2. GitHub Action -- automated verification on every PR with inline comments
3. CLI -- npx lucid verify --repo /path/to/code

Free tier: 100 verifications/month. Get a key at https://trylucid.dev

Code: https://github.com/gtsbahamas/hallucination-reversing-system
Paper: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18522644
Dashboard: https://trylucid.dev
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-14 04:56:51+00:00
I believe I've addressed those licenses multiple times in my comment. you're not responsible for the support of the software, at the same time, you're not free of all responsibility for it either (regardless of what you say in your license). A license is not a contract either. there is a reason even eula's sometimes require you to actually scroll through them before you can hit accept. and even then, eula's have been thrown out of court plenty. "I'm not responsible" does not absolve of you of responsibility, you don't get to decide that, laws decide in court. but in terms of ethics, it's even more dire, if you know what impact your action or inaction will have, legalese can hardly excuse ethical obligations.
by nikkwong | 2026-02-14 04:57:11+00:00
That’s the cataclysmic outcome, though. Although I deemed that that’s certainly possible and I would put a double digit percentage probability on it, another very likely outcome is a very severe recession, or a recession, wear a lot of, but not all, white collar work is wiped out. Maybe there’s a significant restructuring in the economy I think in a scenario like that, which also seems to be in the realm of possibility, I think having resources still matters. Speech to text, sorry for the poor grammar.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-14 04:59:23+00:00
This assumes that dating sites are able to give everyone great matches, but are somehow holding them back.

That's not the case. They don't have much idea at all who you're going to hit it off with. And most in person first dates don't lead to second dates, much less leaving the site.

So no. The reality is that dating sites really are trying to give you the best matches, but it's just a numbers game. So they make money on the numbers -- to see more profiles or send more messages you need to pay more.

That's all it is.

Because if they really could reliably make high-quality matches all the time, they could charge $$$$$ for that and make much more money in the end. But they don't, because the algorithm doesn't exist.
by akersten | 2026-02-14 05:00:33+00:00
I'm also trying to think of what use I'd make of sugar that would specifically not be for addictive purposes. Maybe keeping down medicine?

Point being, the internet is the clutchable pearl de jour for easy political points. There's far more proven addictions and harm elsewhere, but those problems are boring and trodden and don't give a dopamine hit to regulate quite like the rancor that proposals like this drum up. Hey, aren't dopamine hits what they're trying to mediate in the first place?
by NeutralCrane | 2026-02-14 05:01:17+00:00
Paying someone for promoting your product or message. I don’t think it’s all that complicated. Talking about your own product on the internet is fine. Paying to promote your message wouldn’t be. TikTok and Reddit and Instagram aren’t trying to keep people endlessly scrolling because they are free-speech fanatics. It entirely comes down to “more time in app = more revenue”. Take away that monetization method and you take away the single incentive that has driven virtually every dark pattern that has developed in social media in the last two decades.
by hn_acker | 2026-02-14 05:02:49+00:00
> So you're saying the internet, which is a machine designed to disseminate information, has no effect on libel compared to before-the-internet?

It sounds to me like you're saying that if libel law has become less effective because of the internet, people should make laws to restrict the internet, or perhaps restrict the ability of people to use the internet to spread information as widely as they can today. In general, I would much rather have laws that punish specific human behavior rather than laws that restrict a medium of human interaction. The same way I don't think a bar notorious for being a hub of defaming gossipers should be liable for hosting defaming gossipers, I don't think social media companies should be liable for hosting defaming gossipers, not least because just about every social media company and bar by practical necessity and by owners' preferences hosts people other than just defaming gossipers. I don't think Section 230 should be repealed or lessened, because Section 230 makes up for the ways in which First Amendment alone fails to protect speech. As a practical matter, I think that the monetary costs that Section 230 saves for people who would otherwise be "protected" by the First Amendment (because the First Amendment provides legal defenses without shaving off court costs) outweigh the monetary costs of being defamed/libeled in today's information age.

> And that anyone should be able to publish libel as long as it costs someone else to sue them?

Is this a good description of the problem?: that in the internet age people can more easily get away with publishing libel even though libel remains as illegal as it was before the internet age, and that in the internet age libel spreads far more easily than it used to even though libel remains as illegal as it was before the internet age. I don't have an answer as to how to reverse the greater effectiveness/spread of libel, but if the solution involves significantly restricting generally legal internet behavior (whether indirectly or directly), I probably don't want the solution.

Should you be able to sue a social media company for providing a medium for a person's libel just because suing the libeler directly would cost you more money? In a country with a First Amendment which bars government restrictions on "freedom of speech", should you be able to pass a law restricting a social media company's ability to unilaterally ban/allow/moderate user-generated posts just because suing the libeler would cost you more money?
by refurb | 2026-02-14 05:02:49+00:00
I don't really see the distinction?

There are many countries now that don't require a passport to enter - you can simply get a facial scan.

And even beyond that, the countries that do take a photo and compare with your passport and absolutely storing that photo and using it for whatever purpose they might have laid out.

So if the issue is that your privacy is being threatened due to a stored photo of you - that happens whether it's facial recognition or facial verification.
by quantified | 2026-02-14 05:03:50+00:00
He spouts serious nonsense sometimes. This sort of seems attainable in the time he has left.

Mars has too many unknowns. Musk is good at taking something with a lot of prior art and medium-high fruit and really making good booze out of the fruit. The moon is a lot closer/cheaper, and there's a lot of info available on it already. The fruit is a little higher.
by evanelias | 2026-02-14 05:03:56+00:00
They should have addressed it much earlier, but it makes way more sense in historical context: when MySQL added utf8 support in early 2003, the utf8 standard originally permitted up to 6 bytes per char at that time. This had excessive storage implications, and emoji weren't in widespread use at all at the time. 3 bytes were sufficient to store the majority of chars in use at that time, so that's what they went with.

And once they made that choice, there was no easy fix that was also backwards-compatible. MySQL avoids breaking binary data compatibility across upgrades: aside from a few special cases like fractional time support, an upgrade doesn't require rebuilding any of your tables.
by Bjorkbat | 2026-02-14 05:05:28+00:00
To me demoscene is kind of synonymous with the Amiga, so I would argue that peak demoscene lines up with the rise and fall of the Amiga brand.

So I think that's maybe the other differentiator between web experiment and art, because demoscene has a very distinct but difficult to describe cultural element that makes me identify it as art.
by catdog | 2026-02-14 05:05:30+00:00
> But the job had better take fewer people, or the automation is not justified.

Not necessarily. Automation may also just result in higher quality output because it eliminates mistakes (less the case with "AI" automation though) and frees up time for the humans to actually quality control. This might require the people on average to be more skilled though.

Even if it only results in higher output volume you often have the effect that demand grows also because the price goes down.
by refurb | 2026-02-14 05:05:44+00:00
I care about the absolute level of development, not the change.

The fact that China wasted decades on a failed economic ideology explains why they were so undeveloped up until the 1980's.

If anything, China is simply catching up (in some ways) to developed countries. While certainly admirable, achieving what has already been done in other places isn't that impressive.
by ragall | 2026-02-14 05:06:07+00:00
Have you ever done a mold spore count in your house ? There's a hypothesis that, due to living in stick frame houses, a large part of the American population might be suffering from a low dose chronic mold intoxication which shows up as a heightened state of inflammation.

> I may be biased, because I live in a city filled with houses over 100 years old, and we get incessant rain. They seem to hold up fine

I wouldn't be so sure.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-02-14 05:07:20+00:00
Concrete or brick buildings are effectively illegal in much of the US because they aren’t safe. Large parts of the US are prone to earthquakes far more severe than any in Europe, a fact learned the hard way. It destroyed all of the prior masonry and brick buildings in the US so that type of construction is no longer allowed. Your choices are pretty much wood-frame or steel-frame construction.

That said, plenty of steel-framed apartments are effectively sound-proof. I’ve lived in them. You don’t need masonry, just wall mass.

Masonry can be engineered to US seismic standards but it is extremely uneconomical to do so. In my city, my house must be engineered to survive without structural damage an earthquake stronger than any in European recorded history. That’s not over-engineering, large parts of the US just have earthquakes that strong. It limits your material choices.

Similarly, US construction must also be engineered for extreme wind loading. Some of the buildings in my area are designed to withstand 300+ km/hr winds. Because that is a thing that can happen here.

Just about everything about US construction style can be explained by the necessity of engineering to survive extreme seismic and/or wind loading. Which it demonstrably does for the most part.
by hinkley | 2026-02-14 05:07:51+00:00
I haven’t done much with Claude code yet but I’ve watched some rather recent videos of other people leverage it to get work done and I couldn’t help thinking, are we going to end up with a similar UI but with fully deterministic “agents” at the end of this hype cycle.

All of the skills I saw demonstrated were deterministic. So does this end in a Functional Core, Imperative Shell scenario that looks like a Terraform Plan and a search engine-style natural language processor out front?
by snozolli | 2026-02-14 05:08:45+00:00
I found the old OKCupid blog posts via Gwern.net:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140910162626/http://blog.okcup...

These should be read by anyone interested in online dating, even if they are wildly out of date.

FWIW, my suggestion for young men (because I was one, and have no advice for women) is to find a third place that you like and meet people there. Church (if that's your bag, it's not mine), climbing gyms, dinner clubs, dog parks, adult education classes, martial arts, etc. My best relationships have come from the climbing gym and the dog park. I would also choose speed dating over online dating. Better to find that immediate spark rather than screw around with messages only to meet and find no chemistry.
by strawhatguy | 2026-02-14 05:09:10+00:00
All I know is that claude code is pretty dang good, grok's nice for searching info, and Google's Gemini hasn't really been in my workflow at all. Neither chatgpt, beyond when it first came out.

Maybe I'm odd, but a Google search is even rare (usually use duck duck go) so I don't know, Google may have problems on it's hands. Possible anyway.