MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alphazard | 2026-02-20 01:19:03+00:00
People already pay for journalism through substack. It's not micropayments, it's a commitment to the ongoing consumption of a high quality creator's work.

I can't think of a single news outlet that isn't obviously propaganda or virtue porn. People who want that can have it, but the internet has has made the business models common knowledge, and now most people would be embarrassed to consume these outlets.

All of that was true before prediction markets, now if a fact is important enough, it has a market, and if I need to know the best take on that fact, I will look at the market.
by SauntSolaire | 2026-02-20 01:19:26+00:00
Yes! You can partially decouple it through recurring subscriptions, or possibly bundling, such as cable TV. But I can't think of a viable micro-payment method that wouldn't have the same problem.

Planned obsolescence is a failure mode because unit consumption (vs metered consumption) is the monetization scheme. Hypothetically this could be decoupled through something like lifetime warranties, but that has too many failure modes to be broadly viable.

The point is, despite other perverse incentives, with lightbulbs you have a situation in which unit consumption and metered consumption are at odds, so one company can make more money by enabling the customer to spend less elsewhere. Of course, if you ever tie the two together, such that one company profits from metered consumption and controls/profits from the unit -- Inkjet printers with proprietary cartridges come to mind -- then you're in for a bad time.

It's nice when the incentives line up on opposite sides of the ledger, but you'll be hard pressed to find that through micro-payments.
by RulerOf | 2026-02-20 01:19:43+00:00
I recently tried whitelisting IPv6 prefixes at the network border and running straight IPv6 traffic from end to end.

It works really well so long as there's an encrypted transport, although I'm a little annoyed that the routes are very different and the ping times are different too. Although at the moment I can't remember if they're worse ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by linkregister | 2026-02-20 01:20:12+00:00
Evidence to the contrary abounds regarding Egypt. Secretary of State Clinton famously rejected the popularly-elected Muslim Brotherhood government and pledged support to Mubarak. This tacit approval led him to have a successful coup against the popularly elected government.

If by "western" you meant some other power then you should be specific. Western as a term is imprecise and can be interpreted differently depending on the audience.
by dwohnitmok | 2026-02-20 01:20:48+00:00
1800 FIDE players do make illegal moves. I believe they make about one to two orders of magnitude less illegal moves than Gemini 3 does here. IIRC the usual statistic for expert chess play is about 0.02% of expert chess games have an illegal move (I can look that up later if there's interest to be sure), but that is only the ones that made it into the final game notation (and weren't e.g. corrected at the board by an opponent or arbiter). So that should be a lower bound (hence why it could be up to one order lower, although I suspect two orders is still probably closer to the truth).

Whether or not we'll see LLMs continue to get a lower error rate to make up for those orders of magnitude remains to be seen (I could see it go either way in the next two years based on the current rate of progress).
by stouset | 2026-02-20 01:21:06+00:00
I found it funny because the opposite direction, people accused Tesla of naming “autopilot” misleadingly, because it gave them the impression of fully unattended self-driving.

In aviation, autopilot features were until recently (and still for GA pilots) essentially just cruise control: maintain this speed and heading, maintain this climb rate and heading, maintain this bank angle, etc.
by salawat | 2026-02-20 01:21:36+00:00
Well, there's OFAC, for one. In the U.S. alphabet soup, that's the Office of Foreign Asset Control, and they maintain the master sanctions list operated by the Federal government. This is a list, that as a matter of law, must be checked against every transaction. If there is a match on the receiving end of funds to a sanctioned individual, the transaction is immediately halted. If a sanctioned party is the originator, a flag may be raised for the institution to deal with otherwise. You do not want to end up on that list, because if you do, the U.S. financial system turns into a roach motel. Assets flow into the custodianship of the service provider, but are unable to move out. A very highly controversial feature to have implemented if I dare say so myself. Then there are the SAR's and CTR's, which are reports that must be filed by banks in the event of "suspicious activity". I.e. structuring, withdrawal of large amounts of cash, etc. They are specifically prohibited from informing you as a customer about these processes.

Then there's the risk department integration. It is mandatory to hand over transaction information on request by law enforcement. The process is mandatory, and continued licensure is conditional on maintaining a program through which financial surveillance can be conducted by the State.

Now, are these features inherently bad? No. Not at first blush. Do they have the potential to become horrifying? Well... Look at what happened to the ICC judge who got added to the sanctioned entities list. It doesn't just effect bank accounts. It involves anything that you engage in a digital transaction to maintain access to. That means entire sectors suddenly go from situation normal, to persona non grata, your business is not welcome here, at threat of massive fines for doing business with a sanctioned entity.

I went into finance looking for a boring, uncontroversial line of work, and came out after a few years realizing the entire sector is so damn wired for power projection it's not even funny. Once you see it and understand how the bounds of what you can do are constrained by these people who are authorized to digitally transact on your behalf... Well... It can't really be unseen.
by anon-3988 | 2026-02-20 01:21:55+00:00
> But yeah, for web stuff? Just use TypeScript. Life's too short to fight the borrow checker over a blog.4

I am not sure about TypeScript. I think having static typing is just too good of an insurance against stupid bug and for your own sanity. I think for web purposes, especially with LLM around, you probably should just use Go. You don't have to like it, but there's enough training dataset for your CRUD application. So all you really need to do is to be able to read it.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-20 01:22:16+00:00
Perhaps you're missing the context? In the incidents which led to this proposal, no judgment of similarity was necessary, the sexualized images were posted in the replies to non-sexualized images of the same person.

This isn't really a novel dimension in the first place, I don't think. It's just rarely an issue in practice, because most people who post these images do so to shame and embarrass the depicted person. No doubt there will be edge cases where a sexualized image of consenting person A gets taken down because they look similar to non-consenting person B - but is that really a big problem?
by kouru225 | 2026-02-20 01:22:36+00:00
We can retroactively value art of the past using an individualistic philosophy, but that doesn’t change how it was valued in past. Artists of the past were considered good artists when they were capable of putting their own selves aside and allow God to flow through them. We now value their individuality, but they probably would’ve seen their individuality as their failures. It was a virtue to be objective rather than subjective. In literature especially we have are tons of letters between writers where they insult each other for writing in styles that are unintelligible to other people

I don’t necessarily ascribe to their views, but I bring it up because you said art has always been this way and it hasn’t always been this way
by andreybaskov | 2026-02-20 01:22:57+00:00
Great summary of the current state of AI coding, without all the hype.

I wonder though if we are fundamentally limited by LLMs architecture to come up with some novel architecture. Or is it just a limitation of current prompting and tools?

E.g. could your brute force the problem by asking "come up with 100 innovative, not yet tried ideas in compiler architecture" and run 100s of this experiments.

I feel like the answer to that is basically that "spark" that we have as human intelligence, but also... sometimes you get it by trying and failing many many times.
by juleiie | 2026-02-20 01:23:08+00:00
I don’t think Gemini writes better code, not 3.0 at least.

Maybe with good prompt engineering it does? admittedly I never tried to tell it to not hard code stuff and it just was really messy generally. Whereas Claude somehow can maintain perfect clarity to its code and neatness and readability out of the box.

Claude’s code really is much easier to understand and immediately orient around. It’s great. It’s how I would write it for myself. Gemini while it may work is just a total mess I don’t want to have in my codebase at all and hate to let it generate my files even if it sometimes finds solutions to problems Claude doesn’t, what’s the use of it if it is unreadable and hard to maintain.
Show HN: 6cy v0.3.0 – A streaming-first binary archive format
by yihac1 | 2026-02-20 01:24:28+00:00
Hi HN — I made this.

Been messing around with a small archive format called 6cy. Not trying to replace zip or anything, mostly just exploring what happens if you make the format a lot stricter.

Every block describes itself. Checksums are always there. Codecs are UUIDs. If decoding can’t proceed cleanly, it just errors out. No fallback tricks.

The whole point was to avoid ambiguity and make corruption obvious instead of silent.

It’s still rough and evolving. Happy to hear thoughts.
by madars | 2026-02-20 01:25:22+00:00
Indeed, for any particular outcome you could design a custom protocol. In contrast, Radius gives you a generic execution environment. Going custom you lose EVM tooling, audited standard contracts, and every bespoke protocol needs its own security analysis, its own edge case handling, and its own integration work.

That said, the most important loss is composability: an agent can't take your Chaumian coupon escrow and snap it together with someone else's DvP protocol and a third party's rate-limiting wallet in a single atomic transaction. The power of a shared execution environment is that these interaction patterns don't need to be anticipated and designed around in advance. Agents aren't going to negotiate which custom protocol to use for every interaction (the necessary protocol might not even exist!), they will use shared infrastructure where composability of various primitives is the effortless default.
by materielle | 2026-02-20 01:25:31+00:00
That’s just not true though. Sure English doesn’t have tones, but there are other tricky parts of the language. Additionally, Russian is another “difficult” language, but all the satellite nations had no problem picking it up.

The real reason people learn English isn’t because it’s easy. It’s because they need to. As someone who is married to an immigrant, it’s not easy for them. They’ve just worked really hard over decades.

Americans will do fine learning Chinese if it ever becomes an economic necessity.
by caspar | 2026-02-20 01:25:50+00:00
I haven't used opencode but pi agent runs rings around claude code. Never eats tons of CPU on big outputs, no flickering, open source, tree-based context instead of claude's linear context, easy to toggle collapsing/expanding tool outputs, built for extension with runtime reloading of extensions and skills, etc. You can easily build your own amp-code like handoff mechanism, customize the UI (i see models' edit diffs syntax-highlighted with delta, and just added a keybind to list session-edited files + files from git status in fzf), etc.

Meanwhile with Claude Code I've had to get claude to decompile the editor (extract JS from the bun executable) _twice_ to diagnose weird things like why some documented config flags were not taking effect.

Opus is great - but I'd rather use a different model than be forced back into Claude Code.
by beeflet | 2026-02-20 01:26:26+00:00
I imagine that the micropayments system would be facilitated transparently through some popup in the browser, similar to how the browser asks for use of your webcam. I also imagine that some basic, configurable limits would be involved. It would look like "Give news.com ability to request up to 0.10 cents (0.01cents per page load)? Y/N". The first time you load the page.

This is an aside, but in an ideal world, such a mechanism would also be used to reduce fingerprinting! You would have to accept a popup for a page to use features like WebGL, for example.

>Any legitimate financial tool needs a way to roll back fraudulent transactions.

I strongly disagree. I would even say the opposite: the ability to bureaucratically roll-back transactions threatens the legitimacy of money. Specifically, it makes the money non-fungible.

In cryptocurrency, there are transparent multisignature-based escrow systems that allow you to have a defined window of time where the money is co-managed according to certain rules. But transactions need to be able reach a "finalized" state where they are irreversible. Otherwise you just can't ever have a truly secure method of payment between untrustworthy parties and micropayments become useless.

Also, it does not need to be cryptocurrency. Micropayments just need to be efficient, secure, and irreversible. There are other payment systems based on Chaumian cash, (GNU taler being one example) that this could be built on.
by mathgladiator | 2026-02-20 01:27:46+00:00
People play dumb status games.

Here is the crazy thing, I went carnivore after I retired because one thread that worried me about shitty insurance is the risk. Now, I'm pretty sure if I only eat meat and work-out, then I might not even need insurance. Like, my labs are phenomenal.

By taking away the fear and the addiction, I've got a level of calm and control of my life that makes me realize the "modern world" is deeply sick.
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2026-02-20 01:28:43+00:00
What you're looking for is the phylogenetic tree. Here's an explorable one: https://www.onezoom.org/

Keep in mind that the further you go back the bigger the error bars on these date estimates, and that a tidy split is an abstraction over a more messy reality (example: we know the hominid groups interbred, giving people with european ancestry some fraction of neanderthal dna).
by dekhn | 2026-02-20 01:28:52+00:00
I disagree- this subthread was not about assault weapons, it was about gun-control laws. But yes, if you limit yourself to assault weapons (itself a somewhat nebulous term that just muddies the discussion IMHO), then yes, you're not going to have a huge impact.

No argument that the media produces inaccurate representations about guns. I spend a fair amount of time reading articles and also spend a lot of time reading into the facts that they report.
by AceJohnny2 | 2026-02-20 01:28:56+00:00
FWIW, LWN.net has a form of this, where a subscriber can share a "guest" link for a subscriber-only article (All such articles become open a week later anyhow).

It's bad form to share guest links on aggregators like HN, I don't think LWN has a quota on the number of accesses on Guest links. On the other hand, the occasional widely-shared guest link may bring a few more subscribers, but I doubt this scales.
by beloch | 2026-02-20 01:29:10+00:00
There's some debate over the type of elephant Hannibal's forces used. They were likely not the African elephants we know today, but North African elephants[1]. This was a physically smaller subspecies that was later extirpated by the Romans. Perhaps analysis of the bone in this story will help settle the debate.

It's also worth noting that, despite the insane effort it must have taken to get elephants over the alps, all but one of Hannibal's elephants died during the first winter in Italy. They made for a great story and were a propaganda coup for the Carthaginians, but didn't wind up making much of a military impact. They were only present for the first couple of battles Hannibal fought.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_elephant
by api | 2026-02-20 01:29:12+00:00
Ten seconds of searching:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1qv0vpi/...

The propaganda take I keep seeing is that you can get arrested for misgendering people or something, but these are at least close to incitement to violence. Some clearly cross that line.

To be clear I’m closer to the American view. I think the bar should be very, very high for speech to be criminally actionable. Just pointing out that it doesn’t seem as nuts as some make it sound.
by reactordev | 2026-02-20 01:29:13+00:00
https://amp.dw.com/en/german-police-expands-use-of-palantir-...

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/12/15/us-tech-...

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/05/calls-to-ha...

https://theweek.com/tech/palantir-influence-in-the-british-s...

https://digitalrightswatch.org.au/2026/02/01/palantir-in-aus...

Mmmmkay…
by goodmythical | 2026-02-20 01:29:27+00:00
Where do you live where you're allowed to express yourself without any form of approval?

For instance, in the US, I cannot hysterically scream FIRE while running toward the exit of a theater, nor could I express a desire to cause bodily harm to an individual.

Not that I would, per se, but if I did I'd be liable to prosecution for the damages caused in either instance.

I'd have to get the approval of those involved (by their not seeking legal recourse), in order to do either without consequence.
by tialaramex | 2026-02-20 01:29:37+00:00
> Throughout the article, OP seems baffled that people have aesthetic preferences. Well, yes, of course we do

I think Bill is astonished not really that people have aesthetic preference but that anybody's real preferences could be different from his. He supposes that, at most, these are false beliefs they should reject to reveal that their sincere preference is identical to his, the only correct preference.
Show HN: I maintain Valkey GLIDE – built a Node queue doing 48k jobs/s
by anotherCodder | 2026-02-20 01:29:49+00:00
Hey HN,

I'm a maintainer of Valkey GLIDE (the official Valkey client) and work on the AWS ElastiCache team. Day job is deep in database client internals — which gives me a clear view of where Node.js job queues hit a ceiling at scale.

The problems with queues like BullMQ aren't subtle: 3+ round-trips per operation, Lua EVAL scripts that NOSCRIPT-error on restart, Lists/BRPOPLPUSH primitives that predate Streams, and complete blindness to cloud topology (cross-AZ bills sneak up on you).

So I built Glide-MQ. High-performance job queue for Node.js built on Valkey/Redis OSS Streams, powered by Valkey GLIDE — a Rust core exposed via native NAPI bindings.

Because I maintain the underlying client, I could go further than an external library ever could:

1-RTT per job — completeAndFetchNext folds completion + next fetch + activation into a single FCALL. No more chatty round-trips.

Server Functions over EVAL — one FUNCTION LOAD, persistent across restarts. NOSCRIPT errors gone entirely.

Streams + Consumer Groups from day one — replaced Lists/BRPOPLPUSH. The PEL gives at-least-once delivery with fewer moving parts.

Cluster-native, not cluster-bolted — hash-tagged keys from day one. No {braces} surprise when you scale out.

AZ-Affinity routing — reads go to same-AZ replicas. Up to 75% reduction in cross-AZ costs on ElastiCache.

Batch API pipelining — addBulk for 1,000 jobs: 228ms to 18ms (12.7x) via GLIDE's non-atomic pipeline.

IAM auth — native ElastiCache/MemoryDB auth with auto token refresh. No secrets in env vars.

Numbers (no-op processor, Valkey 8.0, single node):
- c=1: 4,376 jobs/s | c=10: 15,504 jobs/s | c=50: 48,077 jobs/s
- 15KB payload compressed to 331 bytes (98% savings)

Also included: transparent gzip (zero config), OpenTelemetry tracing, TestQueue/TestWorker in-memory backend for unit tests without running Valkey, and chain()/group()/chord() for job pipeline workflows.

Companion package: @glidemq/dashboard — drop createDashboard([q1, q2]) into any Express (or any other framework) app and get a live REST + SSE UI across all your queues (avifenesh/glidemq-dashboard on GitHub).

Would love brutal testing on it abilities — especially from anyone burned by queue scaling in production.
by LarsAlereon | 2026-02-20 01:30:27+00:00
The YouTube Premium model seems to be the way forward here. In short, pay $5 per month and every video you watch gets paid slightly more per view than they would if you watched ads. Expanding this to a larger ecosystem may require a larger fee, but avoiding the friction of people deciding whether the marginal cost to read an article is worth it is an obvious win.
by 0xy | 2026-02-20 01:30:50+00:00
You didn't search very hard.

https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-net/...

"Internet freedom declined in the United Kingdom during the coverage period due to a reported increase in criminal charges for online speech"

"A separate report from The Telegraph found that 292 people had been charged for spreading false information and “threatening communications” under the Online Safety Act between when it came into effect in 2023 and February 2025. Some civil liberties groups expressed concern that the laws were being applied broadly and in some cases punished speech protected by international human rights standards (C3)."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/15/hundreds-charged...

"Legal experts have also questioned the new rules. David Hardstaff, a serious crime expert at the law firm BCL Solicitors, said the fake news offence was “problematic both for its potential to stifle free speech if misused, but equally for its lack of clarity and consistency”."
by virgil_disgr4ce | 2026-02-20 01:32:02+00:00
> Full Web UI: Good: accessible for all. Great for high-level domain-specific workflows. Bad: looks and works different every time. Raw CRUD possible, but always a compromise with editable data grid libraries.

I'm not a Notion booster, and I know there are many other solutions with similar tools/features.

But I'd argue that Notion databases are a very good balance of all of these things. It can be raw CRUD if you want it to be, but it's easy to create custom views that accomplish often exactly what you need.

Not exactly sure what you mean by "looks and works different every time" w.r.t. web apps.

In my experience this is a good example of where the UX details matter significantly. Yes, Airtable exists. But a Notion database row being its own first-class "Page" is a *massive* deal for me. (Again: I'm aware Notion is not the only thing)