MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lp4v4n | 2026-02-09 23:24:22+00:00
>Because it is not at all obvious that that is, in fact, reality. It doesn't help to complain about easily-disprovable things like the affordability of cars.

Well you can just search "why are cars so expensive" and then you will find dozens of articles like the one below. I'm not American but I have the impression that cars were a kind of milestone in the life of young people in the past and this disappeared due to affordability. How much does it cost to live in a van nowadays? Can a part time fast food worker afford it?

I don't like this hedonistic argument that you used, it sounds like cheating, you risk sounding like the GP saying that houses today that nobody can afford are in fact cheaper because they are less likely to catch fire.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/buying/why-owning-a-car-is-g...
by to11mtm | 2026-02-09 23:24:23+00:00
Ehhh, it could go both ways (as far as over-optimism)

On one hand, historically there's a lot of sparsely populated land; that makes it easier to both do exploration and partition off the land.

Also there is China's more central economy planning; i.e. if it's truly worth it they are more willing to do something about relocating people while 'selling it better' (which is again helped by the sparse populations where they are looking.)

That is, unless you are saying they fudged the sampling....

However, that's still other a weird reversal of the geopolitical playbook; that is, one could argue that the -smartest- thing the US/EU can do, is to import whatever natural materials they can, until the 'clock' runs out, then the native materials can be extracted (even at the 'ecologically correct' cost.)
by jajuuka | 2026-02-09 23:24:43+00:00
It's bad enough that Discord seems to be vulnerable to attack. But now they want to hold on face scans and ID's that directly tie to their accounts? It's already not smart, but especially dangerous for public figures like streamers and vtubers. Not only can it dox their appearance (if they are hiding it) but also give the insane stalkers direct ways to harass them or assault them at home.

However I think Discord is far too embedded for communities. Whether that be social or development. So I don't think we'll see a big exodus. Having teen mode be the default will just mean that NSFW flags on channels or content will be a death sentence for that board or community. Similar to how Reddits big push to shove NSFW into a corner has gone. There are obvious examples like adult content that are NSFW intentionally. But things like art or cosplay can easily be twisted as NSFW and it just shuts down the reach of these kinds of artists.

Unfortunately most people are dug in now and it takes absolute extreme actions to get people to move. The fact that X is still around should be clear evidence of that. It's draining over time but that kind of universal community has not be replicated. Just a couple different echo chambers.
by johnea | 2026-02-09 23:24:44+00:00
More direct link to article:

https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/new-theory-may-explain-myst...

The arXiv link to the HTML version of the paper:
https://arxiv.org/html/2601.14368v1

Please don't link phys.org and other aggregation sites unless they are the original source...
by troad | 2026-02-09 23:24:52+00:00
> Having done this for a dozen of experiments/toys I fully agree with most of the post, would be nice if the the addition of must_tail attribute could be reliable across the big 3 compilers, but it's not something that can be relied on (luckily Clang seems to be fairly reliable on Windows these days).

This may be a stupid question, but if the function must tail, that's just a jump, no? Why not use goto?
by xg15 | 2026-02-09 23:24:57+00:00
> A public CA checks it one-time, when it's being issued.

That's the same problem we have with server certs, and the general solution seems to be "shorter cert lifetimes".

> Worse still, some APIs (mainly for finance companies) require things like OV and EV, but of course they couldn't check the Subject DN if they wanted to.

Not an expert there, but isn't the point of EV that the CA verified the "real life entity" that requested the cert? So then it depends on what kind of access model the finance company was specifying for its API. "I don't care who is using my API as long as they are a company" is indeed a very stupid access model, but then I think the problem is deeper than just cert validation.
by Revolution1120 | 2026-02-09 23:25:02+00:00
I don't know what Palantir can do, whether it's good or bad, but countering China is the top priority. Four British prime ministers have been monitored by China. British politicians visiting China even have to change clothes under a bed sheet. More than six months ago, there were rumors that Palantir was behind all of this, but it was actually China that did it.
by wqaatwt | 2026-02-09 23:25:43+00:00
The Roman state was arguably much more modern than the medieval kingdom. It was highly centralized and funded through taxation (most of the plundering was already done by the early imperial period).

Not sure the Huns were the biggest direct threat either (unless we think that they are directly responsible for the Gothic migrations/invasions who were the ones who took over significant parts of the empire).
by ge0rg | 2026-02-09 23:26:20+00:00
A federated ecosystem of servers that need to verify each other based on their domain name as the identity is the prime use-case for a public CA to issue domain-verified client certificates. XMPP happens to be this ecosystem.

Rolling out a private PKI for XMPP, with a dedicated Root CA, would be a significant effort, essentially redoing all the hard work of LetsEncrypt, but without the major funding, thus ending up with an insecure solution.

We make use of the public CAs, that have been issuing TLS certificates based on domain validation, for quite a few years now, before the public TLS CAs have been subverted to become public HTTPS-only CAs by Google and the CA/Browser Forum.
by Terr_ | 2026-02-09 23:26:41+00:00
> There is not a loophole. When you die your loans get paid off first. The money to pay off these loans would be taxed.

You're missing the loophole, it's the the "step-up basis" rule, which dramatically affects the amount of tax on that liquidate-to-repay event.

1. Repaying 1 day before the owner dies: Liquidate $X, of stock, which 90% of it are capital-gains, heavily taxed.

2. Repaying 1 day after the owner dies: Liquidate $X of stock, which is now considered ZERO gains, almost no tax.

This massive discontinuity also applies when it comes to the transfer of stock to inheritors, and any taxes they might pay for liquidating it. A day before, they get a stock that "has grown X% in Y years." A day later, they get a stock that "has grown 0% in 0 days."

> It could delay paying taxes until you die, but you can't escape it.

But they did escape the taxes, or at least the "gains" portion of them! For decades, the unrealized gains in growing assets were "eventually" going to happen someday... Until, poof, all gains have been forgotten.
by Animats | 2026-02-09 23:26:51+00:00
"Background job"?

The real question is what happens when the background job wants attention. Does that only happen when it's done? Does it send notifications? Does it talk to a supervising LLM. The author is correct that it's the behavior of the invoking task that matters, not the invoked task.

(I still think that guy with "Gas Town" is on to something, trying to figure out connect up LLMs as a sort of society.)
by bmacho | 2026-02-09 23:26:51+00:00
Literally 100% of that heat travels from the 1000000C stuff to the environment throught that vacuum. Vacuum doesn't just remove energy.

If you use a steam engines it doesn't matter if your source of heat is 900C or 1000000C, all heat will be captured, and 40-60% will be turned into electricity.
by rayiner | 2026-02-09 23:27:06+00:00
You can't invoke America's track record of immigration without noting that, the last time the foreign born population hit present levels, the country pumped the brakes on immigration through restrictive immigration policy that dropped the foreign-born population from 15% in 1920 to under 5% by 1970. The country also aggressively pushed immigrants to abandon their cultural identities and assimilate into Anglo culture.

You also can't overlook that prior waves of mass immigration also caused decades of negative consequences in the meantime, from the emergence of nationality-based political machines in major cities to the Italian mafia. And you can't overlook that mass immigration changed the culture of parts of the country permanently, in many cases for the worse. There's no place in the country that experienced mass immigration that's as orderly and functional as New England. Is New Jersey or Queens America as John Adams would have understood it?
by reddozen | 2026-02-09 23:27:22+00:00
I don't know if you read your own source but it's incredibly unconvincing "research" slop. In their "case study" they just point to a particular race and the money the candidates received and infer it's bad.

No analysis if the politician was acting against their constituents interests... Pretty embarrassing paper to put their name on. I can see why there's no coauthors.

Also they conflate political ad spending with issue awareness ad spending, which is a borderline malicious.
by tokioyoyo | 2026-02-09 23:27:48+00:00
I’m giving it exactly 2 weeks after implementation for most people to just suck it up and upload their IDs. I can’t think of a single “this new thing will break the service, people will mass quit!” thing every working out. Sure, some users left. But super majority, who has already built communities and are depended on it just keep churning.

Privacy and all that jazz aren’t that important to an average person. Everyone’s IDs are already circulating in a mix of Tinder, AirBnB, Twitter, <any random other app that just requires it>.
by laughing_man | 2026-02-09 23:27:52+00:00
It doesn't work because other businesses are creaming off the classifieds. Businesses like Tinder, Ebay, and Craigslist.

Newspaper management has been trying to do something about it for decades. I don't know if there's anything to be done. Somehow they have to get people to pay for the high cost items, like newsgathering, that they've never really paid for in the past. As far as I can see only the NYT has had any success in this area, and it always feels like a holding action.
by mncharity | 2026-02-09 23:27:58+00:00
Does anyone have experience of early-childhood "Why?"-phase meets speech-enabled LLMs?

Startup wise, there's old work on conversational agents for toddlers, language acquisition, etc. But pre‑literate developmental pedagogy, patient, adaptive, endlessly repetitive, responsive, fun... seems a potential fit for LLMs, and not much explored? Explain It Like I'm 2-4. Hmm, there's a 3-12 "Curio" Grok plushie.
by IMTDb | 2026-02-09 23:28:02+00:00
I’m not sure destroying other people’s property is the best way to make them sympathetic to your cause.

I don’t own a Ring camera (or any similar device), but the idea that someone could spend time unnoticed on my porch, messing with my stuff, right where my daughter likes to play on weekends, makes my skin crawl.

If that happened to me, I’d probably just double down on security to be honest. Knowing that some people actually feel it's the right thing to do makes me wonder if I shouldn't start today.

To be clear, I have no issue with someone peacefully informing people in their neighborhood about the potential dire consequences of enabling "share images of my doorbell with the government or other private agencies", that's all fine to me. But if you feel the need to impose your views by harassing me about it or by breaking the law to get your point across, you won't get an ally in me.
by jamiemallers | 2026-02-09 23:28:08+00:00
What's interesting about GitHub outages is how they've become a forcing function for teams to re-examine their deployment pipeline resilience.

We've gotten so used to GitHub being "always there" that many teams have zero fallback. CI/CD stops. Deploys halt. Hotfixes can't ship. During an active incident on your own systems, that's brutal.

A few things I've seen teams do after getting burned:

1. Mirror critical repos to a secondary git host (GitLab, self-hosted Gitea)
2. Cache dependencies aggressively so builds don't fail on external fetches
3. Have a manual deploy runbook that doesn't require GitHub Actions

The status page being hours behind reality is a separate frustration. I've started treating official status pages as "eventually consistent" at best — by the time they update, Twitter/X and internal monitoring have usually told me what I need to know.
by a_e_k | 2026-02-09 23:28:42+00:00
Not to mention if that if somebody needs to come over, the proper thing to do is signal first. Then I'm happy to politely ease off a bit and open more space for them to come over safely.

It's the people who aggressively slide right over just a few feet in front of me (cutting off nearly all of my safety buffer) without so much as a signal that really drive me nuts.
by slavavechir | 2026-02-09 23:29:49+00:00
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by assimpleaspossi | 2026-02-09 23:29:59+00:00
>>Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be

I've been putting my pants on every morning for the last several years, had breakfast, gone to work, and come home without worrying about any current events in the USA and my life seems no different than 50 years ago except I have modern gadgets.

Social media is not the world. In fact, it's 10% of what the real world is like and how the real world thinks. It's why I ignore social media except for HN and one other but I only scan the headlines and rarely pop into comments like this.

And I'm happy.

EDIT: And the comments below are proof why you, too, should ignore all social media and why you, too, will be happier.
by Avamander | 2026-02-09 23:30:07+00:00
Not forbidden, just not going to be a part of WebPKI.

It's one of those things that has just piggybacked on top of WebPKI and things just piggybacking is a bad idea. There have been multiple cases in the past where this has caused a lot of pain for making meaningful improvements (some of those have been mentioned elsewhere in this thread).
by jxdxbx | 2026-02-09 23:30:45+00:00
Yes, I came here to say this. The whole topic drives me crazy. Air is just blue. Everything is a color because of some physics reason. Some birds have blue wings due to microscopic structures and how light interacts with them, rather than pigment.

If you took a large column of air into space and shined white light through it, it would be blue.
by Tangokat | 2026-02-09 23:30:52+00:00
"Lower cost to reach customers = lower product and service prices"

This is economically illiterate.
Advertising is not a discount mechanism. It is a tax on the consumer. When I buy a product heavily marketed on Instagram or Google, I'm paying for the product plus the auction bid price required to acquire me plus the margin of the ad-tech middleman (which are trillion dollar companies).

You are conflating "information distribution" with "persuasive surveillance." In a world without behavioral advertising, businesses compete on quality and reputation, not on who can exploit the most psychological vulnerabilities to manufacture demand.

As for innovation: The current ad ecosystem has killed organic discovery. You can't build a "micro-business" based on merit anymore.
The winner SHOULD be the engineer who solved a hard problem efficiently. But instead the winner is the dropshipper who cracked the arbitrage spread between a cheap, garbage product and a highly manipulative Facebook ad campaign.
by erelong | 2026-02-09 23:31:01+00:00
was trying to figure out how I could run this basically on a computer that's offline / local

maybe I could feed the link to an AI that could walk me through an easy way to set up element (to chat?) and ollama (for the LLM?) and then whatever else you need with the various SOUL.md, HEARTBEAT.md, MEMORY.md files...
by davee5 | 2026-02-09 23:31:04+00:00
This is precisely why it's the right design for an Apple car and probably the wrong design for a Ferrari.

I knew someone who allegedly worked on the Special Project after a successful career at more familiar premium automotive brands. He was expressing exasperation with the process and said "I don't get why they're letting people who don't like cars design one. You wouldn't send your kids to a school full of teachers that hate children!"
by troad | 2026-02-09 23:31:07+00:00
> No worries at all if you’re not familiar with that expression.

There are only two possible interpretations of what you're claiming: (a) you don't know how to change a computer setting, or (b) you do know how to change a computer setting, but chose not to do so, so you could complain and moan. Since the latter would be lazy and asinine, I'm sure it's not applicable here, and I'm going to take the more generous assumption of ignorance.
by Marsymars | 2026-02-09 23:31:45+00:00
Disclaimer: See my sibling comments for some my general thoughts on the problems with banning trademark ads.

But for your specific example - I get where you're coming from, but I'm skeptical that the ad market is even that functional.

Firstly, if I google "leatherman", every sponsored result for Leatherman brand multitools anyway. (And no amount of refreshes or re-searches gives me anything other than Leathermans.)

Secondarily, I'm not convinced that the set of advertisers (not counting Leatherman itself) that will advertise for "leatherman" are actually on average a better products for the consumer. (e.g. as opposed to lower-quality, higher-priced knockoffs.)
by danjones-crypto | 2026-02-09 23:32:13+00:00
It may have been easy to miss them! IIRC, we didn't discuss these as explicit "problems", per se, just design trade-offs with particular implications. We even discuss at the end of the second paper whether its worth reconsidering PCS and FS altogether in many circumstances. This is because it is quite common to compose messaging with backup/multi-device setups that undermine (some understandings of) PCS and FS (all over the place, not just in the Matrix ecosystem).

On that note, a quick correction from my side. I suggested that:
"But (!) Matrix could get way better authentication guarantees if they just _disabled accepting messages_ from these old sessions at the same schedule as the sender stops using them."

But I think this is way easier said than done because (with the history sharing architecture that is currently used) it is difficult for a fresh device to meaningfully distinguish historical Megolm sessions and active ones. Other designs get around this by re-encrypting the plaintexts rather than the session keys, but this would be quite a big change.
by alex43578 | 2026-02-09 23:32:20+00:00
Even if that’s a metaphor for hyper-personalized education, my point still stands.

Society and the labor market benefits from everyone meeting a baseline level of education across certain areas.

Ideally, everyone that graduates high school can read and write English at a HS level, perform basic algebra, understand percentages and interest rates, etc. For the purposes of school, there’s no need for “diversity of thought” in the school system - we aren’t even delivering on the basics these days.
by ericmay | 2026-02-09 23:32:21+00:00
Yep and the workers from those countries prefer that arrangement since it pays better. The alternative is they don’t do the work, we just pay higher prices, and then they don’t get paid and stay home.

> I'm sure push comes to shove, US can import a bunch of central Americans to do hard and dirty work in mining.

Yea let’s ban migrant labor and the entrance of migrants now so we don’t have this moral failure. :)

By the way, the east (as opposed to the west) is fine with migrant labor too. That’s why remittances are a thing. Well, when they’re not being xenophobic or whatever.
by shomp | 2026-02-09 23:32:32+00:00
If you follow the American school of economics (Henry C. Carey), tariffs are actually a good thing, mainly because: 1) other nations all have tariffs (against the US and other nations) making free trade a delightful delusional idea 2) tariffs protect lesser industrialized nations from refining/enhancing raw materials into more expensive goods and selling them back to them. The systematic offshoring of industrial potential to cheaper labor places basically un-industrialized the US. I think it's very short-sighted to say tariffs are bad. What was bad was the de-industrialization of the leading superpower. The cure, if we may call it that, might be bitter medicine. Bitter, but necessary.
by codebje | 2026-02-09 23:32:37+00:00
Being angry at them won't change their behaviour, but will make you more stressed. Remember: driving like that is its own punishment, because they'll be extremely angry and frustrated at everything. Between that and the realisation that driving 2% slower adds about 1 minute more per hour of driving you have to do, I find I can avoid stressing at people lane weaving and have a nicer journey myself.
by vidarh | 2026-02-09 23:32:41+00:00
> The blog post used the word autonomous a lot, which I suppose is true if Nicholas Carlini is not a human being but in fact a Claude agent.

Nothing in the article suggests it did not autonomously do the work.

> Why would anyone do that?

Because a lot of naysayers here pretend as if this is somehow trivial.

> My point was that why does the company _not_ make a useful tool?

Useful to whom? This is a researcher testing the limits of the models. Knowing those limits is highly useful to Anthropic. And it's highly useful to lots of others too, like me, as a means of understanding the capabilities of these models.

What, exactly would such a tool that'd somehow make the people dismissing this change their minds look like? Because I don't think anything would. They could produce lots of useful tools, if they aimed lower than testing the limits of the model. But it would not achieve what they set out to do, and it would not tell us anything useful.

I produce "useful tools" with Claude every day. That's not interesting. Anyone who actually uses these tools properly will develop a good understanding of the many things that can be achieved with them.

Most of us can't spend $20k figuring out where the limits are, however.

> I feel like that is a much more interesting topic of discussion than “why aren’t people that aren’t impressed by this spending their time trying to make this company look good?”

This is a ridiculous misrepresentation of the point. The point is that the people who aren't impressed by this very clearly and obviously do not have an understanding of the complexity of what they achieved, and are making ignorant statements about it.

> Aside from the notion that they maybe intentionally set out to create the least useful or valuable output from their tooling (eg ‘the floor’)

Again, you're either entirely failing to understand, or wilfully misrepresenting what I said. No, their goal was not to "set out the create the least useful or valuable output". Their goal was to test the limits of what the model can achieve. They did that.

That has far higher value than not testing the limits. Lots, and lots of people are building tools with Claude without testing the limits. We would not learn anything from that.

> my question was “Why do they not make something genuinely useful?”

Because that wasn't the purpose. The purpose was to test the limits of what the model can achieve. That you struggle to understand why what they achieved was massively impressive, does not change that.