MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fsckboy | 2026-02-26 23:21:52+00:00
a plating company in San Jose dumped a plating bath into the sewer system. This was so toxic that it killed the bacteria that reduce organic sludge at the sewerage plant. This knocked the whole plant offline, releasing untreated sewerage into the bay. The lower bay was toxic for a week

toxic because of chemicals and toxic because of the release of untreated sewage (bacteria) are sufficiently different that I thought I'd point out that you kind of mix them here. Also, toxic because of high concentrations (e.g. pH) that will dilute vs toxic cumulative forever chemicals are different orders of magnitude altogether.

This incident you describe seems like a one-off and fairly benign compared to long term patterns that lead to superfund sites. Till this company dumped that batch, they weren't dumping batches, i.e. the system was working.

I'm not up on the latest, not a civil engineer or public health authority, but it is generally recommended in many seaside places not to swim at the beach after rainstorms. the influx of large volumes of water into the sewage treatment systems means that they overflow and raw sewage is released. These systems are being improved all the time, but it's a known problem and civilization hasn't collapsed. Some natural creatures like sewage outflow. When Boston moved their outflow pipe from the inner harbor to deeper water in Cape Cod bay, the lobster population collapsed. Maybe we should have called it the lobster poopulation.
by m4rtink | 2026-02-26 23:22:59+00:00
There far too many railways, amusement parks, housing developments and other bubble ventures that were either never even completed after wasting a lot of money or went bust soon after opening.

No reason the same can't happen now - especially for something as expensive and faily easily re-sellable as a datacenter & the hardware insite. Just rip it all out and sell it for parts where they are actually needed.
by jscheel | 2026-02-26 23:23:01+00:00
Jack Dorsey has a habit of explosively increasing headcount. Twitter was so overweight that 80% were eliminated when Musk took over. Block's headcount grew from 3,900 to 12,500 in three years during Covid. Block's stock price has also tumbled from ~$275 to ~$54 since 2022. I think that the severance package is incredibly generous, and the willingness to communicate with those affected is admirable. But I also think that Dorsey is spinning a story to cover up for ZIRP-era mismanagement. AI provides the justification, with the hope that dumping 2x the work on the survivors won't crush them because AI tools will help. The bet may pay off, I'm just skeptical of the justification.
by some_random | 2026-02-26 23:23:21+00:00
Serious question, do you think that the government shouldn't have authority over corporations in its jurisdiction? Not that this is necessarily the right way to do it, but this is rhetoric that would make a devout libertarian blush. Ultimately the government is threatening to nationalize what is new a key wartime industry in preparation for war, that does not seem to me like an abuse of power.
by hellojesus | 2026-02-26 23:23:28+00:00
I first entered the workforce at IBM and several months later they did layoffs (resource action). Every six months after that for my 6ish year tenure there were more resource actions.

To this day I walk into the office each morning thinking today may be the day I get laid off. My wife doesn't think it's a healthy mentality, but I'm not sure I know another path of life.

This is to say at least it's done in one fell swoop. Repeated layoffs are certainly demoralizing.
by ACCount37 | 2026-02-26 23:23:34+00:00
You try to go and unplug it, and other humans shoot you full of holes for it.

LLMs of today are already economically important enough to warrant serious security.

Those aren't even AGI yet, let alone ASI. They aren't actively trying to make humans support their existence. They still get that by the virtue of being what they are.
by GolfPopper | 2026-02-26 23:23:35+00:00
If the American military was focused on defending the United States, it would be a very different beast. The 21st Century American military is a tool for transferring wealth from the public to influential parties, and for inflicting destruction on non-peer nations who pose obstacles to influential parties interests. Defending the United States against various often-invoked hobgoblins is at best a very distant concern, closer to pure lip service than reality.
by numbers | 2026-02-26 23:24:04+00:00
A few thoughts about Block as I've worked there before:

- the company thrives on long term projects that seem to fizzle out as engineers get frustrated and leave

- there are way too many MBAs and finance people now compared to the early years where building was prioritized.

- jack is only doing part time at Block, early days he was around to chat and work with varying levels of hands on

- they've overhired and over-committed to losing projects, worst of all they've de-prioritized projects that were pretty innovative because traction wasn't there quick enough for them to justify them, e.g. terminal, POS specifically for restaurants, localization for EU

- they operate on docs and in the time of AI, the workforce is inundated with slop

- also, I hate that jack can't be bothered to capitalize anything like it's cool. come on man, you're firing 4000 people, not tweeting memes
by beloch | 2026-02-26 23:25:03+00:00
We don't need to look to science fiction for lessons about where this will lead. Fact has already caught up.

The IDF used tools like Lavender and "Is Daddy Home" to analyze communications, identify members of Hamas, and learn when they were home so they could be killed with bomb strikes.

This has long been possible for humans to do, but it's a laborious process. In the past, only people high up in chains of command received such bespoke treatment. AI tools permitted the IDF to grant the same treatment to raw recruits who had been given the sum total of a pep-talk and a pistol.

The result was widespread destruction and indiscriminate killing of civilians. The IDF didn't spend much time scrutinizing AI recommendations and were willing to act on false positives. Every bomb strike, by design (i.e. "Is Daddy home"'s purpose was to determine when targets were in their family homes), took out civilians. Just taking a pizza order from a Hamas member years before the war might have been enough to get entire families and their neighbours killed.

If humans hate another group of humans enough and an AI says "Kill", they'll kill. Without thought or remorse. We don't merely need to be worried about murderous robots on battlefields, we also need to worry about humans implementing the recommendations of AI without thinking for themselves.
by ishandeveloper | 2026-02-26 23:25:05+00:00
Totally fair reaction! Here's our honest thinking behind it.

We deliberately avoided credits/usage-based pricing because as founders using this in our own creative workflow, we hate the cognitive load that comes with it.

If I don't like a voiceover/variation, I should have the freedom to regenerate it until I'm happy without thinking about whether it's "worth" a credit.

That said, we could be wrong! Genuinely curious what you think would feel fair?
by zadikian | 2026-02-26 23:25:31+00:00
TextEdit prefs (not systemwide prefs) have easy checkboxes to disable all that, also the smart quotes. Also gotta make it default to plain text.

The reason I dropped it was cause of a bug where I'd highlight text, copy, and it's actually copy the wrong block. Off by a few chars. Idk the trigger but seems related to larger files.
by digitalPhonix | 2026-02-26 23:25:37+00:00
You open with

> Every driver in the UK has experienced this. Most assume the truck driver is being inconsiderate.

But then go on to explain how that is exactly true. The truck driver is taking time from *all* drivers on "roughly 4.5 miles of dual carriageway", just so that they can end the day 5 miles ahead.

> The five minutes of inconvenience to you saves them meaningful time and money over the course of a day.

It's five minutes of inconvenience to *everyone* on that 4.5 mile stretch of highway that nets the truck 5 minutes (5 miles ahead at ~60 mph). That's a very selfish and inconsiderate outcome.
by Fischgericht | 2026-02-26 23:26:00+00:00
Of course it would be great if a level field would be created by making sure other competing regions follow the same environmental standards.

But what will be the result? The product now has equal cost to be produced, but the market is gone.

People consume cheap stuff because it is cheap. If it is no longer cheap, they will not consume.

US americans just need to make up their minds. Do they want keep getting more and more and more cheap stuff? Fine. Then go on exploiting other regions of the planet. Or do you have enough cheap stuff now? Ok, then nobody needs another factory.

Many on HN are living in a society where it is normal to use a TELEPHONE for only two years before throwing it away.

What would happen if you instead used it for 5 years? No more factories needed. Problem solved. You don't have to compete, as there is no competition.

The result of charging the true cost of T-Shirt to the consumer is not that everybody now has 100 Fair-Traded-Ecofriendly T-Shirts at home that they don't wear. They will notice that 10 T-Shirts are more than enough if you wash your clothes once per week.

What I am trying to say is: The demand is only there due to the option of exploitation. Take away the part of ruining other peoples lives to get cheap stuff, then it's no longer interesting and will just stop.

So of course you can take the detour, try to re-industrialize, and then find out that your people do not actually like this kind of work, and that they for sure also aren't willing to buy your stuff at the price you are asking.

There is a reason nobody would be so stupid to produce "Make America Great Again" merch in America. Your target audience would not buy it if it was made in America.

It is pragmatic to simply skip this step and end up with the same result: You'll just consume less.
by mort96 | 2026-02-26 23:26:05+00:00
YouTube will literally resume back to exactly where I was, then seemingly noticing that I switched back to it, go ahead and close the video I was watching. With all sorts of animations too, it's not just a case of having showed a cached screenshot. YouTube seems to intentionally forget where in a video I was, often after having been paused in the background for only a minute or two.

Why??
by shirro | 2026-02-26 23:26:30+00:00
Over investment in AI data centers is having a huge negative impact all over the economy. Other sectors are missing out on investment limiting their growth and stalling the economy.

Companies have reduced staff prematurely on the promise of productivity improvements that have not occurred and lost customers to terrible customer service and declining product quality.

Many hardware launches are going to be delayed or not meet expectations which really is the tip of the iceberg.

The US/SK memory cartel understandably sold out for a massive short term windfall but they their long term decisions to limit supply have created a huge opportunity for China. I wouldn't be surprised if this will go down in the history books as the start of the exit for US/SK from the industry and the start of Chinese dominance.

The smart phone industry is likely to respond with an increasingly hostile anti-consumer approach as they try and lock customers into the cabins of the sinking ship. I expect cheap and cheerful Chinese budget phones aren't going anywhere.

I am happy for ram, cpu and storage to stall. I want a more robust and open phone which can take a fall and be updated long after the vendor loses interest. I expect to uninstall most of my apps rather than install new ones as I increasingly disconnect from an ever more distracting and worthless medium. I have cancelled nearly every subscription service in the last 12 months. And I have been deleting a lot of free accounts and apps. Its like doing a big cleanup. Surprisingly rewarding.

HN has felt like more than 50% AI industry promoting blog spam of little interest to me as a reader for some time. I am setting a budget of ten, no make it five, more posts here. Then I am out for good. Account deletion and no looking back.
by Animats | 2026-02-26 23:26:34+00:00
> There was certainly a contingent who believed that 3d printing was going to replace all other forms of manufacturing. It was even going to make custom food for us on order.

Yes. Met those guys in my TechShop days. They also insisted that 3D printers should be made with 3D printers, which resulted in a generation of flimsy, inaccurate machines.

The current generation of serious 3D printers is very impressive. Take a look at Space-X's Raptor engine. A rocket engine is mostly one piece of complicated metal with a lot of internal voids. That's something 3D printers are good at. Once 3D printing was able to print stainless steel and titanium, it could be used for hard jobs like that. PLA just isn't much of a structural material, even with 100% fill.

Serious 3D printers are found in machine shops, not homes and libraries.
by bikenaga | 2026-02-26 23:26:42+00:00
"I’m probably the only philosopher in the world who holds that (i) there is tremendous agreement amongst philosophers on the truth-values of many substantive philosophical claims, (ii) there is enormous fact-based progress in philosophy, (iii) philosophers frequently succeed in the aim to acquire communal knowledge of substantive philosophical truths, and (iv) there is plenty of genuine philosophical expertise regarding the truth-values of substantive philosophical claims (setting aside expertise regarding the discussions of those topics). Thesis (i) is the pivotal one. What makes philosophy bizarre compared to other fields is that we are unaware of all of that. And all this time we thought philosophy had something to do with acquiring self-knowledge.

In the appendix I list 200 straightforward facts directly about philosophical matters that virtually all philosophers know and non-philosophers don’t know. Our strong preference for discussing controversial matters has caused us to seriously underestimate the straightforward epistemic accomplishments of philosophy. This leads to a new conception of philosophical achievement and what the discipline of philosophy is."
by joeljoseph_ | 2026-02-26 23:26:42+00:00
[Experimental Project]

I use both OpenAI Codex and Claude Code daily on the same codebase. The biggest pain — they don't share memory. Claude fixes a bug, Codex repeats it next session. Every session starts from zero.

So I built Open Timeline Engine — a local-first engine that captures your decisions, mines patterns, and gives any MCP agent shared memory.

It also support gated autonomy
by sealeck | 2026-02-26 23:27:25+00:00
> Musk has shown that Twitter can operate with 5% (approximately?) of the workforce he inherited

Is X profitable? I don't think the argument was that Twitter couldn't _operate_ with 5% of the workforce (i.e. skeleton sysadmin crew), the issue was whether Twitter could make money and remain a viable business.

It seems that Twitter is no longer a viable business (i.e. less advertising spend, decline in users - especially high-value advertiser targets who now spend more time on LinkedIn, etc).

> laying off a lot of people was seen as a sign that the company was in trouble, but not now

I agree that saying you are laying people off because of AI is a lovely narrative for failing companies!
by toast0 | 2026-02-26 23:27:46+00:00
> iOS I think has really aggressive background task killing, and it also drives me insane. I know they do it for battery life but I'm about ready to switch to Android, and would have a long time ago if I that didn't also mean replacing my watch, headphones, etc.

Android does all sorts of wacky stuff with background tasks too... Although I don't feel like my 6 GB Android is low memory, so maybe there's something there, but I also don't run a lot of apps, and I regularly close Firefox tabs. Android apps do mostly seem well prepared for background shenanigans, cause they happen all the time. There's the AOSP/Google Play background app controls, but also most of the OEMs do some stuff, and sometimes it's very hard to get stuff you want to run in the background to stay running.

I dunno about watches, but Airpods work fine with Android, as long as you disconnect them from FindMy cause there's no way to make them not think they're lost (he says authoritatively, hoping to be corrected).
by easton | 2026-02-26 23:27:55+00:00
It’s not unusual for legal departments to take offense to these sorts of things, because now everyone using Claude within the DoD has to do some kind of audit to figure out if they’re building something that could be construed as surveillance or autonomous weapons (or, what controls are in place to prevent your gun from firing when Claude says, etc). A lot of paperwork.

My guess is they just don’t want to bother. I wonder why they specifically need Claude when their other vendors are willing to sign their terms, unless it specifically needs to run in AWS or something for their “classified networks” requirement.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-02-26 23:28:21+00:00
> The truck cannot go faster. Floor the throttle at 56mph and nothing happens. The fuel injection is electronically capped.

Man, that's kindof scary -- if for some reason the truck legitimately needs to go faster (eg, escape a warzone, a flood, a wildfire), it cannot do so. I'm sure this was a calculated design decision, but on the surface I'd prefer if the speed was logged and then checked at regular intervals (perhaps with automated reader). That would also allow for easy updates to the limit, tighter restrictions in specific areas, etc. I wonder what all the factors going into this design decision were.
by burntcaramel | 2026-02-26 23:28:24+00:00
> We said the runtime asks the OS for large chunks of memory. Those chunks are called arenas, and on most 64-bit systems each one is 64MB (4MB on Windows and 32-bit systems, 512KB on WebAssembly).

Incorrect. You ask the OS for pages. (Golang does internally appear to manage its heap into “arenas”.) On WebAssembly the page size is 64KiB. Window 64-bit it’s 4KiB, Apple Silicon 16KiB, Linux x86_64 4KiB.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-26 23:28:27+00:00
In a nutshell, this is the problem with mainstream dems (and I include Newsom in this) looks an appearance matters a lot more than actual policy leadership.

The policies that actually affect people's lives, there's a lot of overlap for both mainstream dems and republicans.

I live in Idaho, and school teacher here are also extremely underpaid (My kid's teachers all have second jobs). Yet our state has magically found $40M to give away to private school while it's also asking the public schools to find 2% of their budgets to cut.

In I think both cases, the solution is simple, give the teachers a raise and probably raise taxes to pay for it. However, both parties are fairly anemic to the "raise taxes" portion of the message and so they instead look for other dumb flashy one time things they can do instead.

Federal democrats have relied way too heavily on Republicans being a villain and vague "hope and change" promises to carry them through an election cycle. They need to actually "change" things and not just maintain the status quo when they get power.
by gambiting | 2026-02-26 23:28:43+00:00
>> I don't think an AI agent has left a hallucination in my code

I literally just went on Gemini, latest and best model and asked it "hey can you give me the best prices for 12TB hard drives available with the British retailer CeX?" and it went "sure, I just checked their live stock and here they are:". Every single one was made up. I pointed it out, it said sorry, I just checked again, here they are, definitely 100% correct now. Again, all of them were made up. This repeated a few times, I accused it of lying, then it went "you're right, I don't actually have the ability to check, so I just used products and values closest to what they should have in stock".

So yeah, hallucinations are still very much there and still very much feeding people garbage.

Not to mention I'm a part of multiple FB groups for car enthusiasts and the amount of AI misinformation that we have to correct daily is just staggering. I'm not talking political stuff - just people copy pasting responses from AI which confidently state that feature X exists or works in a certain way, where in reality it has never existed at all.
by caaqil | 2026-02-26 23:28:53+00:00
An unwritten rule on the internet (and especially on HN/Reddit) has always been to take the educated and intellectual perspective that the Earth’s borders conveniently end where the USPS stops delivering. Considering life outside the U.S. is an archaic (and slightly exhausting) hobby for people with too much time on their hands from the so-called rest of the world.
Ask HN: My competitor wants to buy us out, recommend a lawyer?
by VladVladikoff | 2026-02-26 23:29:24+00:00
My tech company has grown to the point where has become a significant threat to the industry leader. They have reacted by asking if we are open to acquisition. I’m looking for suggestions of lawyers who are experienced with this type of transaction, as this is significantly outside of my wheelhouse.
by KittenInABox | 2026-02-26 23:29:25+00:00
I do mean homo sapiens. Humans are a cooperative species. They will hunt and gather together in loose communities naturally, sharing excess resources even if individuals are not directly contributing to the resource creation due to being too young, too old, sick or injured. Having inter-societal competition doesn't mean we don't still have cooperative society. Just because ants will fight other ants in different colonies doesn't mean ants are not a social species.
by ternwer | 2026-02-26 23:29:33+00:00
His actions seem pretty consistent with a belief that AI will be significant and societally-changing in the future. You can disagree with that belief but it's different to him being a liar.

The $200m is not the risk here. They threatened labelling Anthropic as a supply chain risk, which would be genuinely damaging.

> The DoW is the largest employer in America, and a staggering number of companies have random subsidiaries that do work for it.

> All of those companies would now have faced this compliance nightmare. [to not use Anthropic in any of their business or suppliers]

... which would impact Anthropic's primary customer base (businesses). Even for those not directly affected, it adds uncertainty in the brand.
by esperent | 2026-02-26 23:29:41+00:00
You can remove 3rd party spyware/bloat in 15 minutes with Shizuka/canto and a usb cable and you won't notice anything changed in the phone. Unfortunately the Google spyware is so deeply integrated that you can't really do that unless you accept a ton of things not working - not just Google apps but also lots of third party apps that require Play services.
by verdverm | 2026-02-26 23:29:51+00:00
It's not so clear the company is actually on the line. They can compel Anthropic to do what they are not willing to do, maybe, this is not the final act. The government needs to respond, to which Anthropic will need to respond, courts may become involved at that point, depending on if Anthropic acquiesces at that point or not. Make a prominent statement against while in the news cycle, let the rest unfold under less media attention.
by a1o | 2026-02-26 23:29:54+00:00
If you want some cool unusual UI, check out the HP Logic Analyzers (like the 16500A but there were others). It had a touch interface even though it had a CRT, and it had a knob for scrolling and for some alternative uses too - I think it used an encoder instead of a potentiometer but I may be misremembering. It was a really cool interface, I used it in early 2000s but it was old already by then, but it was really cool. There is a small website that documents its UI but I forgot the url.