MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Rapzid | 2026-02-20 21:50:38+00:00
Then why accept them and face the embarrassment of being found out not reporting them properly?

You are correct compared to the $320k/year salary these empty nesters pull these things seem not that expensive. So why not just save up and buy them himself?

Yes, RED FLAG. Because apparently he likes nice things and spending money so much he can't seem to afford them himself or forgo the gifts and spare himself the scandal.
by Zak | 2026-02-20 21:50:45+00:00
It's not about what users want. It's about what's profitable for the company.

What I want from Facebook is to see what original words, images, or videos my friends and family thought was worth sharing with the world today, and I want to see clearly when I've reached the end of that. I probably don't need to spend more than ten minutes once a day on that.

It's profitable for Facebook to show me as many ads as possible. If I wasn't an aggressive adblock user, the thing I want would have much less potential profit than all the third-party content they want to show me.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-20 21:51:02+00:00
I think you have not actually understood what I wrote, because of this part:

>> My point is, nothing in this article does establish that it is "actually bullshit".

> Why not?

I've already said it multiple times. Allow me to repeat myself:

> make the elemental mistake that showing one biological mechanism doesn't have an effect, means no other mechanisms can either.

You've written a lot, but you haven't understood that this is the core mistake of the article, and the core mistake of what you're trying to argue.

You reply with a reference to Russell's teapot, and that would be fine if you were merely trying to make the point that the effect of amber light on sleep has not been sufficiently proven. But you're the one literally calling it "bullshit", i.e. disproven. That's wrong. There's no high-quality study conclusively demonstrating it doesn't have an effect.
by kb9alpp | 2026-02-20 21:51:16+00:00
Nice. The article also mentions BluTech lenses (BluTech LLC, Alpharetta, GA). I've found the marginal utility of bluelight blocking solutions are very context specific, indeed.
And mostly-completely bahokie garbage, sadly, but not when it's BluTech and BluBlocker. BluTech/BluBlocker for the screen-induced fatigue is the correct solution. I always get BluTech HI Indoor AR pucks for my prescription lenses. And just switch to prescription sunglasses when I go outside.
by jjmarr | 2026-02-20 21:51:25+00:00
I've never used PayPal because someone signed up with my email to buy internet pornography before I could legally create an account at 18 years old. PayPal allows people to buy things without verifying the email, so now I'm stuck with it.

I could create a separate email, but I don't want to. I could take over the account, but I'm also unwilling to commit financial fraud. I called PayPal, and they said they couldn't do anything.

I've just used Stripe, Link, or directly used my credit card. Nothing bad has ever happened as a result. Any time I've had a dispute, I've been able to get a refund from my credit card company.

I also live in Canada. We have had "e-Transfer" since 2003, meaning I can securely email or text money to friends and family with no fees. So I don't need PayPal for that, either.
by dudewhocodes | 2026-02-20 21:51:46+00:00
There's a lot of tech banter on Twitter and LinkedIn, much of which is noise you can filter out.

SaaS is not dead. People and businesses benefit from having relatively cheap access to maintained standardized software.

The "SaaS is dead" idea comes from some people using coding agents and thinking that companies will now produce their own internal software packages (CRM etc.) instead of buying in. Why would they bother?

However, highly-specific internal software might see interesting developments.
by jmward01 | 2026-02-20 21:51:53+00:00
I think the key here is engagement is based a lot on content quantity, not quality. If your feed doesn't have a lot of natural quantity associated with it then FB will find something to stuff in there. The reality is that most people don't have a lot of quantity on their feeds from their friends so that means they get the AI slop to fill the void. At least that is my complete guess on a root cause of (some) of the FB slop. I haven't logged in for 6 months and I am now checking it 1-2 times a year because the last few times I logged on it was pushing hate content at me.
by drcongo | 2026-02-20 21:52:16+00:00
My support experience with Hetzner has been first class, every single time. They're honest, responsive, proactive and helpful.
My support experience with Digital Ocean has been abysmal, every single time. Our latest experience was a misconfigured or malfunctioning Valkey cluster, we provided a ton of supporting information, their tech team magically fixed it and closed the ticket, and their support people tried to blame us for it breaking. This is so standard with them that I posted in our Slack "emailed DO support asking for a technical breakdown of what happened, they'll reply in a week blaming us". It only took them a couple of days though.
by emsign | 2026-02-20 21:53:06+00:00
Since smartphone apps are often times required to do banking or identifying yourself now and there's tons of special apps in order to use appliances, and by that I mean really the only way to use modern appliances is by a smartphone app, emulating an Android environment on a laptop or PC with a bluetooth dongle is essential if you want to leave that smartphone era behind you for good, but still be able to function in this society.
by llbbdd | 2026-02-20 21:53:13+00:00
It's not the screen size, it's the demographic shift. By 2000, only half of U.S. households had a shared living room PC, mostly for work and/or games. Everybody having a phone in their pocket later was a change that we did very much have to account for. Non-technical people can be scammed very easily into life-ruining mistakes with a little social engineering and a little bit of access to powerful tools already on their devices.

I remember when big sites started having to put big banners in your browser console warning you that if you weren't a dev and someone told you to paste something there, you had been scammed, and not to do it. They had to do that because the average Facebook user could be tricked very easily by promises of free FarmVille items or the opportunity to hack someone else's account, and those are fairly low stakes bait. Now people bank with real money on their phones.
by samhclark | 2026-02-20 21:53:14+00:00
This makes sense to me. I guess I'll start hunting for the equivalent of `govulncheck` for Rust/Cargo.

Separately, I love the idea of the `geomys/sandboxed-step` action, but I've got such an aversion to use anyone else's actions, besides the first-party `actions/*` ones. I'll give sandboxed-step a look, sounds like it would be a nice thing to keep in my toolbox.
by elAhmo | 2026-02-20 21:53:19+00:00
I get similar ads in Youtube Shorts. It was appearing only when I was abroad, and I was curious to see what is triggering it, it was mostly: male, 18+, location in country X. Same happens now in a country where I live.

Most of the reported ads don't get taken down by Google, although they are very obviously AI porn ads.
My first experience with an "AI"-ed call centre?
by chrisjj | 2026-02-20 21:53:32+00:00
I think I've just had my first experience with an "AI"-driven call centre.

I phoned up with a simple question about a UK Govt. service I use, and got a human being who repeatedly gave me wrong or non-answers in a wierd way I've never heard before. I reckon my voice was being put through voice-to-text feeding a chatbot which was replying in text on her screen and she was reading that text to me.

After a few "sorry, that doesn't answer my question at all" from me, she seemed to put her hands on the wheel to reply "You're not listening to me. I can't help you if you won't listen to me". I said "I'm listening but not hearing an answer." This must have been outside the chatbot's comprehension, because she then hung up the call.

I phoned back, got a different girl... who gave the same non-answers but with immaterial variations - ending with the same result. Total clincher.

This is the future, I guess. "AI"s operating human puppets.
by IAmBroom | 2026-02-20 21:53:33+00:00
Some research indicates people over 50 (includes me) achieve best results at 0.3 microgram dosage, which is 1,000 lower(!). Higher dosages reduce the effect.

You might take a quick sec to look into the data. You can buy 5mcg on Amazon, although 5 mg is more common (and 10mg, and ...).
by jsheard | 2026-02-20 21:53:47+00:00
> I figured that they have found an (automated) way to imitate Googlebot really well.

It's not possible to imitate Googlebot well enough to fool a site (or WAF) which knows what it's doing, because the canonical way to verify Googlebot is a DNS lookup dance which will only ever succeed if the request comes from one of Googlebots dedicated IP addresses. Same with Bingbot and all the others.
by progforlyfe | 2026-02-20 21:54:19+00:00
I'm definitely not a "fan" of Facebook or anything, though I do use it and make a few interactions per day -- based on this blog post I think the reason why his dashboard was full of trash & slop was simply because he hasn't logged in for 8 years. If you have no interactions in 8 years (and people you friend/follow are also gone from the platform) they will resort to showing you this crap.

I honestly do not care if Facebook is cooked or goes away -- but I doubt the situation is that bad.
by al_borland | 2026-02-20 21:54:51+00:00
I made a Facebook account a few years ago for a private group related to a class I was taking. I didn't want to do this, but it is what it is.

Being paranoid, I ran a VM just for Facebook. The browser never went to any other sites, so as far as I know there is no way it could track me or get any actual information about me, other than maybe a very rough location based on my IP. I also setup a burner email just for this and used a fake name/picture.

On a fresh account with no info, my feed was much like that of the linked article. A bunch of thirst traps and various "news" and memes. Occasionally it would tell me to follow stuff so it could actually populate the feed, but when it wasn't doing that, it was giving me this kind of garbage. This was before the advent of generative AI, so I assume these were mostly real photos, but who knows who was actually behind those accounts.

Twitter was fairly similar, but would show a lot of high school kids fighting or general street fights... along side the thirst traps.
by rkeene2 | 2026-02-20 21:54:54+00:00
Well, not really because that part doesn't grant the US President arbitrary powers to perform any action that would result in regulation (for example, he is not given the power to go around killing random people even if doing so would effectively regulate international trade; he can't declare war on another country even if doing so would be the best way to effectuate regulation of trade with another country) it gives him the OBLIGATION to perform regulation, using the powers delegated to him.

If giving the US President unlimited and arbitrary authority as long as they can claim it was useful for meeting a legal obligation created by Congress were the correct interpretation then we need look no further than the "Take Care" clause of the US Constitution, where the US President is given the obligation to take care that all laws are faithfully executed -- which, with this interpretation, would mean that any action would be under the purview of the US President as long as they could claim at doing that action resulted in the laws being faithfully executed.
by taeric | 2026-02-20 21:55:03+00:00
I find it somewhat pleasant, but by far the best thing I did to help my eye strain was greatly lower the brightness. Basically, I was told to make it so that my phone's camera could see something on the screen and my desk at the same time without washing out.

After doing that, I have found that the "temperature" of the screen doesn't really matter to me that heavily.
by _wire_ | 2026-02-20 21:55:18+00:00
The confusion arises from the question begging an arbitrary distinction of a token in isolation from all the state in the model and its progression in response to a prompt.

They work because while the process is generating a token at a time, each token has a location in an N-dimensional matrix of overlayed state networks for all the tokens in the training data, the tokens in the given prompt, and the sequence of tokens emitted so far for this prompt.

As an analogy, an image on the screen is emitted a pixel at a time, but each pixel's state is coded as part of a network in a matrix that includes all the residual state from the point of image capture.

And just like an image on your screen the computer has no "ideas" about the contents of the presentation, but other subsystems may use mathematical approaches to selecting and categorizing images, filtering, etc.

The common regard that AI is thinking is purely a matter of appearances, and idiomatic terminology.

As to why we tend to become troubled by the resemblance of AI behavior to thought or creativity, but we are not at all troubled by how entire worlds exist within our TV sets is a matter of surprise and conditioning to the medium.
by stego-tech | 2026-02-20 21:55:45+00:00
Yep, that played a significant role in shaping how things turned out. We want a single source to blame, but rarely does history present us with such a neat villain (though god, Reagan comes so close to being one, at least for the specific issues important to me).

Understanding the interconnectedness of systems beyond your own realm of expertise is how you learn what needs to be done to fix issues - and avoid falling for snake oil “silver bullets”/“one weird trick” populist positions.
by martin-t | 2026-02-20 21:56:33+00:00
Crazy idea: when companies change their product, they have to change the name.

Do you ever feel like the same food item doesn't taste the same it did 10 years ago? Maybe it's your memory being faulty or maybe the company got new management which decided to cut costs while keeping prices, extract the differential value from customer inertia and move on when the product stops being profitable.

Android is the same. Certain freedoms were a part of the offering - a part of the brand name. They no longer are. Not only should lose their trademark[0], they should be legally forced to change the name.

[0]: The purpose of which is to identify genuine product from counterfeits - in this case, the counterfeit just happens to be by the same company which released the original product.
by user1138 | 2026-02-20 21:56:39+00:00
The formal verification and AI safety literature frequently cite total languages as a solution to the halting problem. This paper argues that this claim relies on a binary reduction of a trinary problem. While total languages provide an exit proof (halting), they cannot provide a correct-exit proof without step-by-step verification, which is itself the halting problem.

Using Rice’s Theorem (1953) and Turing’s second proof (1936), I demonstrate that "early termination"—halting at an unintended point with incorrect output—is a non-trivial semantic property and therefore undecidable. The safety guarantees currently being marketed are often just tautologies where "termination" has been swapped for "safety".

No novel math here—just a careful reading of the foundational proofs we’ve had for decades.
by Sparyjerry | 2026-02-20 21:56:50+00:00
DOGE already address all of those political hit piece articles. The claims made in them were spurious such as that they could not use the full amount of the contract. DOGE addressed this criticism by saying over 99% of contracts end up fulfilling their full amount. I'd be wary of what you read in the news especially when it relates to politics. Those news sites even thought Elon Musk was saluting a long dead genocidal maniac when he waved to the crowd - but specifically only Elon Musk and not any other person who made similar waves - why would that be?
by brational | 2026-02-20 21:57:55+00:00
ha.. I was about to type this exact paragraph. my instagram has no human connections, I only follow local business (food, bars, museums/gardens, non profits, etc) so I can be aware of specials & things. I have no followers. I don't really like anything but clearly engage with cooking stuff, funny animal videos, comedy in general. Multiple languages. lots of crossover.

Honestly it's a pretty great instagram experience.

And yes I'm a middle aged male so no matter what the smut comes back (at least I get it in multiple languages too?)
by AshamedCaptain | 2026-02-20 21:58:11+00:00
Certainly you can claim that because not all mechanisms have been disproven yet, then there could still be an effect. That is why I quote Russell's teapot. Your claims are technically not disproven, and may not even be possible to disprove, but that doesn't mean that the existence of the teapot is most definitely bullshit. This is what the example of Russell's teapot is trying to show.

I also keep continuously putting the example of homeopathy because it is exactly the same. Homeopathy has plenty of evidence, but no known mechanism of action. All the proposed religious, memory of water, etc. have been disproved.
Certainly you can argue that homeopathy could still be a thing because there could be some physical/biological mechanism that has not yet been disproved! But this is just nitpicking: homeopathy is still bullshit. In the same way that the teapot in space is bullshit.

Anything else is a (useless) nitpick.

In any case, even from day #1 it's been known that blue light could possibly have a mechanism, but there's always been a big stretch from there to claiming that blue light filters/night shift have an effect, and the evidence for the latter is substantially lacking. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/blue-light/
by ChocMontePy | 2026-02-20 21:58:38+00:00
I noticed last year that some archived pages are getting altered.

Every Reddit archived page used to have a Reddit username in the top right, but then it disappeared. "Fair enough," I thought. "They want to hide their Reddit username now."

The problem is, they did it retroactively too, removing the username from past captures.

You can see on old Reddit captures where the normal archived page has no username, but when you switch the tab to the Screenshot of the archive it is still there. The screenshot is the original capture and the username has now been removed for the normal webpage version.

When I noticed it, it seemed like such a minor change, but with these latest revelations, it doesn't seem so minor anymore.
by richardboegli | 2026-02-20 21:58:42+00:00
Have a look at this post

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46723594 from Emre @emrekosmaz

It is a smartphone that runs Android, launches Debian, and dual-boots Windows 11

Actual link
https://nexphone.com/blog/the-tale-of-nexphone-one-phone-eve...
by grayhatter | 2026-02-20 21:58:45+00:00
> You are saying that basically we do not have to hold anyone to any standard

No, you have completely misunderstood.

> it’s enough to use prior behavior and common sense to deduce the conclusion.

Yes? It's not a difficult concept that you can use pattern recognition to predict how someone, or something will behave. It works especially well the more moving parts there are. The more moving parts, the more likely you are to find conflicting bits. So in that case, if you want to predict or explain the root cause of the behavior, you're going to need to use heuristics.

Technically, I guess you don't need to, you're arguments are a perfect counter example, about how you can just ignore the parts that make you feel icky, or conflict with what you assume you understand. Most people you talk to will not be able to perfectly explain the ideas they hold so if you want to learn what they might have to teach, you need to make some kind of attempt to engage with them, even if in the end you find you still disagree, you're very likely to learn something. But given how transparently you don't want to, I thought it might be nice to point out how obvious it is to anyone who might have something useful to explain, that you're just looking to get off on the one sided argument.

> and you want me to accept it? I’m sorry, but it sounds like BS.

I personally don't care what you accept. My reply wasn't attempting to convince you of anything. Just wanted to point out how obvious it is you're not even trying, just for the slim chance that you actually might want to.
by tzs | 2026-02-20 21:59:08+00:00
If you aren't trying to completely get rid of ultraprocessed foods, high fiber breakfast cereals can help with fiber. General Mills Fiber One Original or Kellog's All Bran Buds for example. The former has less sugar and slightly more fiber, but the latter has a better mix of soluble and insoluble fiber. Fiber One is 17 g insoluble/1 g soluble, and All Bran Buds is 12 g insoluble/5 g soluble.
by techblueberry | 2026-02-20 21:59:26+00:00
Most of these seem at least plausible to me given they almost all have to do with foreign conflicts, and given that they have to be renewed every year, they can't be too excessive since Trump has kept in place 8/9 of Biden's emergency declarations? and your description of the most comedic one was actually maybe the most important one?

It was to stave off a bank run at the beginning of the great depression, and it was only done as a temporary measure so that Congress had time to write the long term legislation which they did 4 days later on March 9th.
by horsawlarway | 2026-02-20 21:59:31+00:00
Security is a tradeoff (fucking always...)

It's the same reason I choose to keep my front door unlocked basically all the time - I know my neighborhood, the risk is really low and the convenience is high.

Further... practically everyone agrees that they don't need bank vaults as front doors. It makes zero practical sense: The cost is incredibly high, and the convenience is very low.

There are ALL sorts of wonderfully cool things you can do on a system where applications are allowed to trust each other, and the system is permissive by default.

You can customize behavior more easily, you can extend software more easily, you can add incredibly detailed & functional accessibility support, you can create incredibly powerful macros and commands.

This is so important that fundamental OS design from the early 90s actually prioritized and catered to exactly this style of open, trusted, platform (ex - all of COM in windows...). This is what made personal computing a reality...

All of those fall flat when you try to impose "well funded" security efforts.

Those efforts have a place, in the same way that bank vaults have a place. Whether that place is a personal computer is a different question.

Implying those folks are hostile for no reason is... at best a woeful misunderstanding of the situation, and at worst a malicious mischaracterization.
by agentifysh | 2026-02-20 21:59:39+00:00
One theory I have for the degradation of facebook and just internet content/discussion/comments in general in the past 25 years have been the rapid change in the cultural demographic of global internet users.

late 90s to early 2000s, only highly developed economies made up most of the internet but as more emerging markets joined the ranks, they ultimately surpassed those that reached peak internet penetration of the incumbents.

A lot of these new dominant markets also happen to speak English well enough and in far greater numbers and with it the cultural baseline shifted as well.

Without naming specific countries, some social networks are dominated by the userbase there which far exceed the countries that were online first and the degradation in both discourse and content is not coincidental.