MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-25 18:28:50+00:00
The US technically even has laws that that were supposed to do that still on the books. A particular problem was a very broken decision by the US Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission [1] that opened too large of a barn door that the US has been reeling from ever since. That trial argued that companies were individuals/people and that money was the "free speech" of companies and shouldn't ever be curtailed. So there are so many things wrong with that court case on so many levels. It led to the rise of Super PACs (Political Action Committees), companies designed to launder money for political gain where the donors are allowed to remain anonymous and the Super PAC "speak" for them, because now it was "free speech" and not bribes and regulatory capture.

I know pessimists that believe the only way the US succeeds in the Campaign Finance Reform it needs now is through a Constitutional Amendment and if we can't count on Congress to be interested in it (due to bribery), and not enough individual States seem to care (some because they want a chunk of that pie), it's going to take a full Constitutional Convention to pass that amendment, something that hasn't successfully been done in the US since 1787 (also, the first attempt).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
by recursivecaveat | 2026-02-25 18:28:53+00:00
They're no dirtier than subways, which people don't mind. People have a very negative association with buses though. The streetcar experience for example is pretty much identical minus the bumps, but they're perceived much more positively. The timing and routes are indeed brutal though. If I wanted to ride the bus to my work the best route is 20 minutes of walking, 10 minutes of riding on a bus that runs every half hour, then another 20 minutes of walking. This is definitely not a rural area or anything either.
by dlenski | 2026-02-25 18:29:00+00:00
Huh …?

IMSI tracking is a consequence of how baseband devices communicate over-the-air, just as WiFi MAC address tracking is a consequence of how 802.11 devices communicate over-the-air.

And it's definitely a vulnerability, because it's used to track end users and reduce their privacy.

So it IS a baseband vulnerability. And IMSI randomization mitigates it to some degree, just as WiFi and Bluetooth MAC randomization mitigate tracking via those identifiers.
by spenczar5 | 2026-02-25 18:29:03+00:00
"Cheap" how? I have a friend who works on Seattle's bus planning. Removing a stop is a _lot_ of political work. When an elderly person depends on that bus stop being within a block so they can get to their doctor, and you're proposing to move it six blocks further away, that's essentially a _political_ cost.

It's might better in the system throughput, and those benefits may even outweigh the misery put on that one person. But in the US, we largely sort that out by using cool-down times, hearings, and "community input."

Net result, according to my friend at least, is that bus stops feel _very_ sticky and hard to change.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-02-25 18:29:22+00:00
I think you missed the core arguments of the article. Fewer stops mean faster bus and faster bus helps with regularity and wait time. It also means you can do more loops with the same number of buses and drivers so it reduces cost per trip.

It's not marginal at all. Stops rebalancing actually address your core issues. Less stops also mean more money per stop to provide nice shelters which solves your second issue.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-02-25 18:29:48+00:00
> anthropic dropped this and it's also exactly how the system is supposed to work. Companies don't regulate themselves, the government regulates the companies.

In this case, it's exactly how it's NOT supposed to work because there's no government regulation concerning the issue. It would be bad looks to have regulation that mandates LESS safety thus the issue was forced on commercial grounds.

I called it yesterday, there was never any doubt in my mind how this would end, and it did in less than 24 hours:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47144609
by jama211 | 2026-02-25 18:29:59+00:00
I really recommend you try LLMs again if you haven’t, the last part is really becoming less and less true every day. But I 100% agree that this does not pose a risk to the software developer for all the other points you mentioned. It will just make that trench digger more useful to the developer that needs it. And they’ll still need someone to drive the digger.
by ramoz | 2026-02-25 18:30:27+00:00
I’ve said similar in another thread[1]:

Sandboxes will be left in 2026. We don't need to reinvent isolated environments; not even the main issue with OpenClaw - literally go deploy it in a VM on any cloud and you've achieved all same benefits.
We need to know if the email being sent by an agent is supposed to be sent and if an agent is actually supposed to be making that transaction on my behalf. etc

——-

Unfortuently it’s been a pretty bad week for alignment optimists (meta lead fail, Google award show fail, anthropic safety pledge). Otherwise… Cybersecurity LinkedIn is all shuffling the same “prevent rm -rf” narrative, researchers are doing the LLM as a guard focus but this is operationally not great & theoretically redundant+susceptible to same issues.

The strongest solution right now is human in the loop - and we should be enhancing the UX and capabilities here. This can extend to eventual intelligent delegation and authorization.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ramoz&next=47006445
by matthewdgreen | 2026-02-25 18:30:44+00:00
Solar is just one technology. Decarbonizing successfully requires still further huge investments in batteries, modular nuclear reactors, CO2 removal, zero-carbon steel production, aviation e-fuels, non-fossil plastics, etc. But yes, hopefully we've unlocked enough economic advantage with just that one technology to get us 90% of the way there just on the basis of economics. (If the current administration doesn't find some way to sabotage it.)
by jph | 2026-02-25 18:30:45+00:00
If you're open to questions, I'm switching my teams from Docker to Podman on macOS. I'm hitting blockers for multi-user setups i.e. each developer has a non-admin account on the machine, whereas brew runs in its own account with admin permissions.

I would love a way to have Podman installable in userspace meaning in a non-admin account, or installable without brew, or with a dependency list such as QEMU or whatever else needs to be installed by an admin ahead of time, or with a sudousers config list, etc.

I know this is an atypical setup. Any advice from anyone here is much appreciated about multi-user non-admin macOS container setup for Podman or Docker or equivalent.
by k310 | 2026-02-25 18:31:00+00:00
Save yourself $40. It's free at arxiv.

Damn highwaymen, MITM's.

The dramatic transition of the extreme Red Supergiant WOH G64 to a Yellow Hypergiant

G. Munoz-Sanchez, M. Kalitsounaki, S. de Wit, K. Antoniadis, A.Z. Bonanos, E. Zapartas, K. Boutsia, E. Christodoulou, G. Maravelias, I. Soszynski, A. Udalski

Red Supergiants (RSGs) are cool, evolved massive stars in their final evolutionary stage before exploding as a supernova. ...

https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.19329
by nostrademons | 2026-02-25 18:31:01+00:00
FWIW most experts now favor approval voting [1] over ranked choice. Approval voting has similar advantages as ranked choice in allowing 3rd-party candidates and favoring moderate candidates. It avoids the chaotic behavior that RCV can exhibit [2] where shifts in the order of voters' down-ballot preferences can very significantly alter the outcome of the election [3]. And it's also much easier to explain to voters ("It's like voting today, except you vote for everybody you'd find acceptable and the best candidate wins. Sorta like when you're picking a restaurant to go out to with friends - you go to the place that is acceptable to the greatest number of people, not the one that a minority really want to go to"), doesn't require that you reprint ballots (you can re-use normal FPTP ballots, but you just count all votes instead of disqualifying ballots with multiple candidates marked), and is easily adapted to proportional representation and multi-member elections (you just take the top-N best candidates instead of the top-1).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting

[2] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1o1byqi/...
by JohnMakin | 2026-02-25 18:31:10+00:00
This already is a thing people did at least as far back as I started getting into web privacy, which was ~10 years ago. I have been the target of it before.

LLM's are probably better at it, but I don't know if this is as destructive as people may guess it would be. Probably highly person dependent.

The micro-signals this paper discusses are more difficult to fake.
by bogedy | 2026-02-25 18:31:23+00:00
always seemed obvious to me that the reason for the disparity is that european buses are a way to get around dense cities and US buses are a welfare program for residents of sparser cities who can't afford cars. the bus lines don't actually go anywhere people care about, they're their just to provide the bare minimum ability to go somewhere.

the top comment is right and this article is a good exmaple of what transit people do. they get so excited about transit and how awesome it is that they forget about some of the more fundamental issues.
by skrebbel | 2026-02-25 18:31:34+00:00
When people write a statement and then tack on a question mark they force people to guess what they mean. Is it a typo? Is it an observation and the question mark is supposed to somehow signal disapproval? Or is it an actual question, with a little grammar error that's not uncommon for non-native English speakers?

Maybe this is just me being weird but I simply don't understand why people think a question mark means ", and that's stupid for obvious reasons that I can't be bothered to spell out and therefore I disapprove".

Admittedly my reply was even worse so yeah, pot, kettle.
by aplomb1026 | 2026-02-25 18:31:36+00:00
The practical implications here are sobering. We've long known stylometric analysis could fingerprint authors, but the combination of LLM reasoning + web search makes this orders of magnitude more accessible. No specialized tooling needed anymore.

What concerns me most is the asymmetry: defenders need to sanitize every post across every platform, while attackers only need a few correlated data points. And the countermeasures suggested (paraphrasing, persona separation) are exactly the kind of operational security that breaks down under sustained use.
by aplomb1026 | 2026-02-25 18:31:59+00:00
The real question is whether remote control becomes the default interface for AI coding tools. Right now we have this awkward split between chat-based coding (Cursor, Copilot) and terminal-based agents (Claude Code, Aider). Remote control bridges that gap but introduces a new failure mode: you're now debugging the agent's environment management on top of the actual code problems.

I've found the terminal-based approach more reliable precisely because it's simpler - fewer layers of abstraction between the model and the filesystem. Adding a web UI on top reintroduces all the state synchronization issues we thought we'd left behind.
by throw310822 | 2026-02-25 18:32:22+00:00
Or simply be constantly hibernated and de-hibernated. Or, if your brain is simulated, the time between the ticks.

My mental image, though, is that LLMs do have an internal state that is longer lived than token prediction. The prompt determines it entirely, but adding tokens to the prompt only modifies it slightly- so in fact it's a continuously evolving "mental state" influenced by a feedback loop that (unfortunately) has to pass through language.
by GorbachevyChase | 2026-02-25 18:32:30+00:00
I actually think those most at risk are normal people the activists will harass. Soon it will be possible for anybody who works at the “wrong” business or expresses any opinion on any subject to be casus belli for unhinged, terminally online, mentally ill people who are mad about the thing of the day to start making threatening calls to your employer or making false reports to police or sending deep fake porn to your mom.

I think that we are close to a time where the Internet is so toxic and so policed that the only reasonable response is to unplug.
by collabs | 2026-02-25 18:32:40+00:00
One big dream I have is to have some kind of free of cost at the point of service micro transit -- my dream is basically uber pool without the uber. Vans about the size of a Ford Transit or even a fuller size bus up to 40 passengers that picks up and drops passengers where they are or where they want to go to all with the push of a button on their smart phone and lots of patience. The idea is to have a huge number of government owned public transit vehicles that don't follow any published route but dynamically change their routes almost like some kind of Google Maps or Uber Pool but all the data about where people take rides at what time of the day and where they go and where the hot spots we have are now fully available to the government to improve the fixed route scheduled public transit.
by paxys | 2026-02-25 18:32:41+00:00
Not 100 sq miles but 100 mile x 100 mile, which is 10,000 sq miles. And that assumes peak efficiency. Factoring in degredation you'd have to multiply this by 2.

Not "just" by any stretch of the imagination. This is larger than Rhode Island and Lake Erie combined. Aka a pipe dream. Might as well "just" build a dyson sphere while we are at it.
by conesus | 2026-02-25 18:33:08+00:00
This new remote control handoff is neat but still requires you to remember to do the handoff. Oftentimes I’m waiting on an agent and then walk away.

I built Crabigator[1] and it's a wrapper around `claude` and `codex`, so its ready for coding on the go on start and already streaming. Plus, crabigator shows many parallel windows, separated by repo/project/machine, so you can manage multiple agents seamlessly.

[1]: https://drinkcrabigator.com
by burnt-resistor | 2026-02-25 18:33:08+00:00
Something about correlation and causation of magic gotcha signals. Text may appear generated to a reader but there's no smoking gun evidence that can disambiguate fact from hypothesis. Even intuition isn't evidence.

Perhaps there needs to be some sort of voluntary ethical disclosure practice to disclaim text as AI-generated with some sort of unusual signifiers. „Lower double quotes perhaps?„
by brdd | 2026-02-25 18:33:20+00:00
Hosted models only. (my philosophy is that I need these things to be fast if I'm talking to them, and they also need to be maximally not wrong, which means cloud hosted big models even if they're expensive. To me, if it's wrong even once or if I'm sitting there waiting for it to reply, that's already making the value prop not worth it)

I think per token costs I calculated on Opus 4.5/4.6 were like $0.30/day for my text automations; $0.60/day for a few things I do that load up the browser. In general, anything browser-based munches up a lot more token (expected). What can be a bit of sticker shock is if you're having it load a lot of large web pages in a long conversation-- that can be several dollars. In the grand scheme of things, several dollars is not a lot but certainly from a "should I just go to the website myself" it tips the scale. I'm usually more interested in doing things once to "teach" it what to do (e.g. how to check a price) and then having it run that as a dialed-in cron job

Hope this helps
by neilv | 2026-02-25 18:33:21+00:00
I liked MIT's "building 20" cluster of wooden shacks, which were featured prominently in the east side of campus. It was said that, when an experiment needed more space, people would casually punch a hole in a wall.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20

Building 20 was razed to build the Gehry-designed, donor-named Stata Center (incorporating a donor-named Gates "tower"). Breaking with MIT tradition of calling buildings by number, IME most people call it by donor name. (Gehry's reflective surfaces could blind biologists in building 68 across the courtyard, at least before the donor-named Koch building was installed nearby.) Stata has its merits, but I think grad students who punched a hole in the wall would be in trouble.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stata_Center
by thinkingtoilet | 2026-02-25 18:33:23+00:00
What makes you think the newspapers of the day are all telling the truth? Does the media today tell the truth? Did newspapers disclose when the equivalent of a billionaire bought them out and drastically changed the editorial bias?

I'm not saying we shouldn't read historical documents. I'm saying to not apply the same skepticism you would apply to modern media to old media is a mistake.
by palmotea | 2026-02-25 18:33:37+00:00
> Is this any different from people today calling their dogs and cats “my baby”? Transporting four legged animals in baby carriages, is that psychosis?

It's not psychosis, but it's also not healthy to blur the line between a pet and a child, but at least a pet is a living thing that can know you and have a relationship with you.

But if someone's calling their laptop their baby and carrying it around in a baby carriage, I'd be comfortable calling that psychosis.
by DalasNoin | 2026-02-25 18:33:56+00:00
We use semantic information inferred from comments and submissions. I think using stylometry would be a great addition, but it would be hard to google for "guy who writes fanciful using many puns" rather then "indie developer in Switzerland". I think stylometry could be better used for verification, once you have a small set of candidates stylometry could further narrow down the candidates and be used to make a decision.
by SlinkyOnStairs | 2026-02-25 18:33:59+00:00
> not sure of the point is tho ? Mine is that gemini was biaised so hard that it was generating diverse founding fathers which is factually untrue.

While your first post's criticism of Gemini's nonsense is true, that is a critique often framed as "Everything was neutral until the wokerati put all this woke into our world". Hence the big response.

Taking away the hamfisted diversity doesn't fix the underlaying problems Google tried to cover by adding it.

> The fact that history has a pro-american values when written by americans is also true but it has nothing to do really with the argument: if an AI is able to see through such propaganda and provide a balanced view on it as a human would this is enough

The problem is that it doesn't "see through" anything. LLMs don't "think".

In your example, it's not reviewing historical documents about the US constitution, it's statistically approximating all the historical & political writing about the US constitution. (Of which there is a lot)

Now, the training and prompt will influence which way the LLM will lean, but without explicit instruction or steered training, it'll "average out" all the prior written evaluations of the US constitution and absorb the biases therein.

> So it's definetely seeing through any form of propaganda you desribe

I would argue the opposite (though I can only go off your snippets), it's mirroring the broad US consensus it's constitution pretty well. And this kind of "Well who's to say whether X is good or bad" response is something that LLMs have been heavily trained and system-prompted to do, many people have noted how hard it is to get a straight answer out of LLMs.

To pick out one detail: The undercurrent of 'American Exceptionalism' shows in how the Constitutional Amendments are seen as "self-correction" and the US consitution being "improvable". By European standards, the US constitution is hard to change. In many countries, a simple 2/3rds supermajority in both houses is sufficient. This also shows in the amount of changes; The Constitution of Norway is but 26 years younger than the US', yet has racked up hundreds of changes notably including a full rewrite in 2014. (Such rewrites are fairly common in the past century) By European standards, the US constitution is a calcified mess.

Now, this doesn't mean Grok is "evil" about this particular detail, it's just a small detail. It's a fine enough summary, would certainly get whatever kid uses it for homework a passing grade. But it's illustrative of how the LLM output is influenced by the prior writing and cultural views on the subject. If you're bilingual, try asking the same thing in two languages. (Or if you're not, try it anyway and stick the output into google translate to get an idea)

It's the things people generally don't think about when writing that are most likely to fly under the radar.
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-02-25 18:35:02+00:00
I try to curb my usage of 'actually' too. Like you I came to think of it as an indirect, fluffy discourse marker that should be replaced with more direct language.

I'm totally fine with the word itself, but not with overuse of it or placing it where it clearly doesn't belong. And I did that a lot, I think. I suspect if you reviewed my HN comments, it's littered with 'actually' a ton. Also "I think...", "I feel like..." and other kind of... Passive, redundant, unnecessary noise.

Like, no kidding I think the thing I'm expressing. Why state that?

Another problem with "actually" is that it can seem condescending or unnecessarily contradictory. While I'm often trying to fluff up prose to soften disagreement (not a great habit), I'm inadvertently making it seem more off-putting than direct yet kind statements would. It can seem to attempt to shift authority to the speaker, if somewhat implicitly. Rather than stating that you disagree along with what you believe or adding information to discourse, you're suggesting that what you're saying somehow deviates from what the person you're speaking to would otherwise believe or expect. That's kind of weird to do, in my opinion. I'm very guilty of it, though I never had the intent of coming across this way.

It can also seem kind of re-directive or evasive at times, like you don't want to get to the point, or you want to avoid the cost of disagreement. It's often used to hedge statements that shouldn't be hedged. This is mainly what led me to realize I should use it less. I hedge just about everything I say rather than simply state it and own it. When you're a hedger and you embed the odd 'actually' in there, you get a weird mix of evasive or contradictory hedging going on. That's poor and indirect communication.
by bubblewand | 2026-02-25 18:35:25+00:00
I picked it up from Salinger. I find that if I can't eradicate parenthesis by some other means, or if it's more effort to do so than I want to spend, em-dashes usually replace them without doing any harm and aren't quite so ugly, aside from being useful in other cases. In particular, parenthesis at the end of a sentence are awful, while a single em-dash does a similar job much more neatly and looks totally natural.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-25 18:36:05+00:00
To note, India also has three times domestic PV demand (~50GW/year) manufacturing capacity (~150GW/year) live.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/indias-electrotech-...

India's Solar Manufacturing Excesses Turn a Boom into a Glut - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47050286 - February 2025
by jama211 | 2026-02-25 18:36:23+00:00
You could but it would be a hugely inefficient system. Like, just address an actual need dude.

Most saas isn’t limited by the code behind it anyway. That almost doesn’t matter, even before LLMs. It mattered that there’s support, customer onboarding, solving a businesses issues, customer story, adapting to the needs of their business partners, etc. All of which require large amounts of real human work.