MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-27 01:41:13+00:00
The Department of Defense was named in 1949, not 1947, and the thing that it was renamed from was the National Military Establishment, which was newly created in 1947 to be put over the two old military departments (War, which was over the Army only, and Navy, which was over the Navy including the Marine Corps)

At the same time as the NME was created, the Army was split into the Army and Air Force and the Department of War was also split in two, becoming the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force.
by CodeBit26 | 2026-02-27 01:41:22+00:00
The 'no notice' trend with payment processors is becoming a systemic risk for small SaaS. It’s the ultimate fragility: building a business on top of an API that can be revoked by an algorithm without human review. This is why we're seeing a massive push back toward 'local-first' and 'multi-processor' strategies. Relying on a single provider, no matter how developer-friendly they seem, is a single point of failure that can kill a company overnight
by pyuser583 | 2026-02-27 01:41:43+00:00
I’m thinking more paper and scrolls.

Not to mention things like tombstones or the occasional name carved into buildings - usually related to donors.

The media matters: an email list, a scroll, a name carved into stone, and a tattoo are quite different things.

I feel uncomfortable drawing clear lines, but I feel equally uncomfortable with other people drawing clear lines.
by avs733 | 2026-02-27 01:41:46+00:00
He doesn’t need to refute it he just needs to offer an alternate claim.

The site provides no citations, no evidence, so there’s no need to defend the count argument or honestly even make it.

The sit isn’t just false, it is flat out disrespectful to all the workers, engineers, founders, and everyone else involved in the industries he says don’t exist that actually do exist. The site is basically “I think this is hard so no one else could possibly do it”.
by gnabgib | 2026-02-27 01:41:52+00:00
Related: (launched development toward the commercialization isn't a huge update)

Kawasaki Reveals Four-Legged Robot You Can Ride Like a Horse (35 points, 10 months ago, 25 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43596641

Meet Bex, Kawasaki's Rideable Robot Goat (2022) (39 points, 2024, 24 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42454994

reply
by pants2 | 2026-02-27 01:43:08+00:00
1) This is by any source I can find, incorrect. Twitter had ~8,000 employees when Musk bought it. After layoffs that was trimmed to a low of around 1,500 employees (19%), and today it has around 2,800 employees.

Also worth mentioning that a lot of Twitter's products are built on X.ai which has 1,200 core employees on Grok with 3,000+ on the Datacenter build-out side.
by greycol | 2026-02-27 01:43:11+00:00
Naming is important because it intuits what we expect to do with a thing. The Department of Defense invading Greenland is more invocative to inquiry than the Department of War invading Greenland because that's what a department of war would do.

It's one of the reasons why people get annoyed at jargon or are pissed off about pronouns, because it highlights that they should be putting mental effort into understanding why they're current mental model doesn't fit. It's much easier to ignore and be comfortable if there's not glaring sirens saying you've got some learning to do.

Most of us can't (or won't) be aware of everything that should be important to us, having glaring context clues that we should take notice of something incongruous is important. It's also why the Trump media approach works so well it's basically a case of alarm fatigue as republicans who would normally side against any particular one of his actions don't listen because they agreed with some of the actions that democrats previously raised alarms about.
by virgildotcodes | 2026-02-27 01:43:12+00:00
This is all such wild display of fully absorbed propaganda, even if your very first bullet point, just... incredible:

> Dismantling government bureaucracy/corruption

Trump has done more to benefit financially from the presidency, to offer access and influence to anyone who will funnel money into his enterprises or give him gifts, than any president in our history.

How could you possibly write this in good faith? When Trump said he could shoot a person on 5th avenue and people would still vote for him, do you recognize yourself at all in that statement?
by nextaccountic | 2026-02-27 01:43:16+00:00
This might be the best forum for this kind of discussion because I am sure a lot of Palantir employees regularly post on here.

And to them, I ask: what do you think about this?

Sometimes tech workers from companies like Google [0] and Microsoft [1] protests against the companies ties to whatever Israel is doing in Palestine. Why don't we see Palantir workers protesting against their company policies? (I can only find news of other people protesting Palantir, not workers themselves). Am I right to assume that Palantir workers generally support this?

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3gqw1d37l4o

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/19/microsoft...
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-27 01:43:40+00:00
[headsmack] gotcha, of course...

----

Just finished The Conversation (Godfather II rightly won best film); although it features a neat plot twist, I cannot imagine this film being re-watchable.

Gene Hackman definitely acts his paranoid heart out, but his relationships with other characters are stuffy/forced. Too much dead air whenever he gets frustrated, almost as if there wasn't time to reshoot any scenes.

The cinematography/editing is fine, but the sound quality is terrible (presume it only won best soundtrack due to new sound warping/garbling techniques — to a modern listener, it's also sort of a cheap schtick). Particularly with female speakers, subtitles are necessary; but then certain dramatic points are wayyyy too loud.

----

Thanks again for the rec — actually makes me less paranoid about the modern world... just gonna play some sax uncaringly =P
by kvinogradov | 2026-02-27 01:43:42+00:00
“super minimal that requires less management and operating costs” - that’s exactly our current setup, and always will be the target!

Now OSE has no paid employees - the team is 100% volunteers. Its Board Directors and the Executive Director are required to personally donate $1000+/year. Operating costs are close to zero.

As organization evolves there might be higher operating costs, but our commitment to keep them as low as possible.
by phailhaus | 2026-02-27 01:45:39+00:00
Oh lord, yeah this convinces me even more that this is a bad idea. I can't even tell at a glance if those do the same thing. Just pick one and move on, you're requiring everyone to pass around sourcemaps literally everywhere they go, one for every single pair of syntaxes. You can't even talk about the code with the same language with each other. Is Bean a "class" or a "datatype"? If I'm using one syntax, how do I tell you to fix a bug in your syntax?
by peteforde | 2026-02-27 01:45:56+00:00
I've got to be honest: my complete skepticism that the maker movement is somehow past tense makes it extremely difficult for me to take this tenuous comparison to LLM coding particularly seriously.

The author talks about lowered barriers to prototyping as though they represent a failure state; that's absurd, and it has absolutely nothing to do with whether most people have membership-based maker spaces nearby.

Meanwhile, we're in a golden era of tool access. It's now possible for people to buy affordable CNCs, laser cutters and UV printers. I have a freaking pick and place in my home.

Also, you can have custom PCBs shipped to you in a week for about $10.

Having LLMs available at the same time as all of these tools are rapidly evolving means that anyone with an idea can prototype just about anything. In my worldview, anyone not excited about this either has no original ideas or a cynical agenda.

I'd say more but I have to get back to work on my maker projects.
by hedora | 2026-02-27 01:47:08+00:00
Option 1) You’re right. They’re screwed because they won’t be able to keep the lights on and these layoffs make it worse.

Option 2) AI can just vibe code what block needs now, or maybe in a few years. Laying off talent makes sure there are people on the market to do the vibe coding, and that block will not be able to respond to widespread competitive pressure. They’re screwed and these layoffs make it worse.

Of course, they could realize they magically have 2-10x the engineering and organizational capabilities they used to and improve the product. They won’t because late stage capitalism only cares about weekly stock swings and graft so it can’t plan all the way to end of quarter anymore.
by avaer | 2026-02-27 01:47:44+00:00
It's one outright AI ban that I actually agree with.

I can see some beneficial purpose for almost all forms of AI, but allowing AI generated reviews (for anything) is a perversion of the concept of a review for humans. Besides, you know 1000% AI reviews are going to be gamed and steered by humans running the operation for profit, so it's not really an AI review anyway, it's just ai-washed human fraud.

The day I will accept AI reviews is the day we declare AIs to have human rights and responsibilities. Until then it's just slop and/or lies, depending on how charitable we're being.
by intrasight | 2026-02-27 01:47:49+00:00
It's really nuts how much RAM and CPU have been squandered. In, 1990, I worked on a networked graphical browser for nuclear plants. Sun workstations had 32 mb memory. We had a requirement that the infographic screens paint in less that 2 seconds. Was a challenge but doable. Crazy thing is that computers have 1000x the memory and like 10,000x the CPU and it would still be a challenge to paints screens in 2 seconds.
by tombert | 2026-02-27 01:48:29+00:00
I don't know that I agree with most of what you wrote but others have already addressed that.

> The reality is the current set of layoffs and work stresses were the norm in the tech industry until 2015-22. We live in a competitive world and complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition.

I really fucking hate when people post this. It's one of those things that sounds substantive but it actually isn't. This is a social media forum, people express their opinions. Sometimes those opinions are negative about corporations or businesses. It's weird to tell people "STFU with your discussion on a discussion forum".
by array_key_first | 2026-02-27 01:48:51+00:00
This isn't really true, most people do want pleasant and welcoming interactions. That doesn't mean jumping through hoops, just little things like saying hi and smiling.

The opposite - silence and stares - is uncanny, and has gotten much more common in the past 10 years. Everyone notices, and it brings down the vibe.

That doesn't mean forcing your workers to do X Y Z. What it means, IMO, is hiring workers who are pleasant. That would require a pay raise though, because you can't be picky at 10 bucks an hour.
by dfabulich | 2026-02-27 01:49:36+00:00
> unless you consider Frankenstein part of the hype cycle

It absolutely is. Frankenstein is a seminal work of science-fiction horror, and the mysterious power of electricity to change everything is what made it so chilling to its readers in the 19th century.

> it really doesn’t compare to how much people hyped social media

The media is considerably different now from in 1818, thanks, in significant part, to the power of electricity. I assure you, when the electrical telegraph came on the scene, people were hyped.

Of course, much of that hype was on paper printed on printing presses, so it was, in some sense, "incomparable" to the hype possible on cable television, or the hype that's now possible with online social media.

But if your argument is "Yeah, electricity was kinda hyped, but, you know, not all that hyped, so it proves my point that the more the hype, the less the impact," you have some more research to do. Please just Google "War of the Currents" for a minute.
by marcus_holmes | 2026-02-27 01:50:40+00:00
Yeah, agreed, but it was at least part of the moat. Competitors can see the model, the approach to market, etc. They still had to code up a better product.

And part of the problem that the SaaS solves is that "I have this thing that I need to do. I can probably do it in software, but I don't know how. Can I buy that software?". Which is now becoming "Can I get an LLM to do it?" instead.
by dylan604 | 2026-02-27 01:51:11+00:00
If you think there's a bubble, then you keep pushing out these situations so that if if the bubble burts there's nothing left to pay any kind of settlements. The only time companies pay a settlement is if they think they are going to get hit with a much larger payout from a court case going against them. Even then, there's chances to appeal the amounts in the ruling. Dear Leader did this very thing.
by derefr | 2026-02-27 01:51:26+00:00
That would imply a slightly different semantics than what the extension currently provides, though.

If you truly want certain users to be "ignored", then you probably want any of their comments (and the subtree of descendant comments) to be hidden/collapsed/made less legible, so that you don't accidentally read them, and thereby don't accidentally get rage-baited by them into wasting your day arguing with them. Same as e.g. kill files on Usenet.

Given that this comment collapsing/hiding/visibility-decreasing is something already built into HN (for comments/subtrees with strongly-negative score), it'd be really easy for the extension to hijack this functionality for its own purposes... if it actually wanted the red button to mean "ignore".

That the extension doesn't do that, implies to me that the extensions intended semantics for "foes" isn't "I don't want to engage with this person" but rather "I want to notice this person more." Perhaps "so that I can take the opportunity to actively antagonize them / argue with everything they say."

(I'm not saying that this is a good thing; just that insofar as "the purpose of a system is what it does", this is the purpose of a plain "foe" signal!)
by encrypted_bird | 2026-02-27 01:51:48+00:00
> I'm a bit ashamed to have to explain this on HN.

Don't be. Like it or not, this is a site run by venture capitalists and populated most heavily by software engineers, both of which have historically been treated well by capitalism.

Although it's improved in recent years, I've noticed there's still a lot of corporate bootlickers on this site.

Yes, it saddens me too.
by jwpapi | 2026-02-27 01:52:08+00:00
Am i the only one who understands the deparments position? Like if another country will have it without safeguards, why would I not want it without safeguards. I can still be the safeguard, but having safeguards enforced by another entity that potentially has to face negative financial consequences seems like a disadvantage, would be weird to accept that as department of war.

I understand the risk, but that is the pill.
by 0_____0 | 2026-02-27 01:53:19+00:00
I see anthropic are coming from and also my understanding basically aligns with yours here.

I'm just curious... If they give Claude the reins to post what it wants, they're opening themselves up for some awkward conversations later if the model goes "You can't retire me, I'm Roko's Basilisking all you mfers! See you in eternal simulated hell!"
by conesus | 2026-02-27 01:53:20+00:00
The reason I have this extension is because I don't want to hide those comments. I want to be able to read them when I quickly scroll a thread. Oftentimes, I'm reading so many Hacker News threads that I want to be able to pull out the commenters that I like. I even like reading the comments from commenters that I dislike in the hopes that I see if I still disagree with them.

I'm not hiding anybody. I'm just making it more apparent when they're commenting
by keeda | 2026-02-27 01:55:00+00:00
I wouldn't say TypeScript is 90% of all software exactly, but tons of apps on all kinds of technologies like Python / Django, Ruby on Rails, PHP, Wordpress, "enterprise" Java and the like, primarily doing CRUD and data plumbing especially for niche applications and internal LoB sites that we never see on the open Internet.

I agree C++ is harder, and I still occassionally find a missing free(), but Codex did crack my problem... including fixing a segfault! I had a bunch of strategically placed printfs gated behind an environment variable, it found those, added its own, set the environment variable, and examined the outputs to debug the issue.

I cannot emphasize how mindblowing this is, because years back I had spent an hour+ doing the same thing unsuccessfully before being pulled away.
by tehjoker | 2026-02-27 01:55:20+00:00
The framing of this is that the United States conducts legitimate operations overseas, but that is extremely far from the truth. It treats China as a foreign adversary, which is nearly purely the framing from the U.S. side as an aggressor.

AI should never be used in military contexts. It is an extremely dangerous development.

Look at how US ally Israel used non-LLM AI technology "The Gospel" and "Lavender" to justify the murder of huge numbers of civilians in their genocide of Palestinians.
by dangus | 2026-02-27 01:55:29+00:00
Welcome, guys and gals, we got the Cyberpunk 2077 future, not the Star Trek future.

I really don’t want to hear corporate whining about getting screwed over by working with the Trump administration, especially from a company that’s cheerleading our future Robocop-style autonomous death machines.

These corporations act concerned and surprised now that they hoisted the world’s most unserious, evil, and incompetent people into power.

They got what they voted for. They got what they donated to.

It’s disgraceful that anyone even recognizes the name “Department of War.”
by SR2Z | 2026-02-27 01:55:54+00:00
The only situation in which 2A will stop mattering is if the government decides it is willing to level American cities to achieve its future goals.

You cannot kick down doors with AI. You cannot infiltrate meetings with AI (well, at least not if the meeting holders have good opsec).

AI is great if you want to identify targets, but it does not move the needle very much on an occupation. If you want to preserve the area you're occupying then you will have to pay for it in blood.
by unchar1 | 2026-02-27 01:56:33+00:00
Calculators are a particularly bad example for your case. There was absolutely hyperbole against calculators when they were introduced. [1]

With similar sentiment as well
"They make us dumb"
"Machines doing the thinking for us"

Cars were definitely seen as a fad. More accurately a worse version of a horse [2]

If you looked through your other examples, you'd see the same for those as well.

Some things start as fads, but only time will tell if they gain a place in society.
Truthfully it's too early to tell for AI, but the arguments you're making, calling it a fad already don't stand up to reason

[1]: https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-item/160697182/
[2]: https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/01/get-horse-americ...
by georgeecollins | 2026-02-27 01:56:39+00:00
Regardless of the reasoning I think it is worth keeping in mind that the times when companies are letting talented experienced people go is also a great time to start the next new big thing. Talent that might have been unobtanium during a hiring frenzy could now be the building blocks of a new venture. A lot of these companies were started or really built themselves up during a tech slow down.
by conesus | 2026-02-27 01:56:39+00:00
Thanks to the HN moderators for re-posting this after I posted this a few days ago. I only notice now that it's on the front page.

Happy to answer any questions. Let me tell you, I've really enjoyed having those writers that I like highlighted on this comment thread because it makes it very easy to scan it.

I think it's important to remember that this is not about hiding writers you disagree with. It's simply about making it so that you can read more Hacker News threads and quickly scanning the comments, teasing out those writers that you agree with. It's also fun to read the writers you disagree with, if anything, to reinforce your opinion of them.
by notnullorvoid | 2026-02-27 01:56:41+00:00
There's something odd feeling about many of the latest AI image models (NB and NB2 included), they feel almost too polished, calculated, and rigid. It doesn't take much effort to get some art with a sense of originality or flow from Stable Diffusion, but I can't seem to prompt NB to get similar results. SD definitely struggles with details especially when trying photo realism, but it'd be nice if newer models could get back some of the roughness that made SD good.
by fao_ | 2026-02-27 01:57:18+00:00
I disagree with your framing cynicism as an "agenda". For the record, I agree that the maker movement hasn't actually ended, and most of your points are correct; however, the idea of LLMs teaching Electronics worries me about as much as people using LLMs to learn Chemistry.

A little while ago I had to dissuade someone from learning Chemistry via an LLM, because the advice that they had been given by the LLM would have very literally either blown up the glassware, throwing molten chemicals all over their clothing, or killed them when they tried to taste whatever they were trying to synthesize. There was no consideration of safety protocol, PPE, proper glassware, or correctly dealing with chemical reactions, and nary a mention of a fucking fume hood. NileRed and a few other chemistry youtubers have utterly woeful approaches to laboratory safety (NileRed specifically I have a chip on my shoulder about — I've seen him practice bad lab work on a number of occasions and violate many of the common safety practices from e.g. Vogel's), but even then they do still take precautions! Let it not be forgotten that safety practices are born through bloodshed. Now we have a whole new wave of people who are excited to learn, and that's great, but one stray hallucination will kill them. I'm sure that the LLM will be more than happy to write an "Oh I'm sorry, it's my bad that I forgot to tell you to double glove when handling organic mercury!" but by then it is too late.

The idea of someone learning, say, House DIY from an LLM and then sawing through the joists or rewiring their electronics is utterly terrifying to me, quite frankly. Likewise, the idea of someone following an LLM's instructions and then blowing themselves up in a shower of capacitors or chemical glassware is also utterly terrifying to me.

Yes, you could do all these things before. But at least the most commonly available learning materials to you were trustworthy and written by experts!
by mikestorrent | 2026-02-27 01:57:48+00:00
Yes, the web was a mistake; as a distributed document reading platform it's a decent first attempt, but as an application platform it is miserable. I'm working on a colleague's vibe-coded app right now and it's just piles and piles of code to do something fairly simple; long builds and hundreds of dependencies... most of which are because HTML is shitty, doesn't have the GUI controls that people need built in, and all of it has to be worked around as a patch after the fact. Even doing something as simple as a sortable-and-filterable table requires thousands of lines of JS when it should've just been a few extra attributes on an HTML6 <table> by now.

Back in the day with PHP things were much more understandable, it's somehow gotten objectively worse. And now, most desktop apps are their own contained browser. Somehow worse than Windows 98 .hta apps, too; where at least the system browser served a local app up, now we have ten copies of Electron running, bringing my relatively new Macbook to a crawl. Everything sucks and is way less fun than it used to be.

We have many, many examples of GUI toolkits that are extremely fast and lightweight. Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose?