MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gwbas1c | 2026-02-23 16:56:37+00:00
From the horse's mouth:

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/charities-churches-and-politics

> In 1954, Congress approved an amendment by Sen. Lyndon Johnson to prohibit 501(c)(3) organizations, which includes charities and churches, from engaging in any political campaign activity. To the extent Congress has revisited the ban over the years, it has in fact strengthened the ban. The most recent change came in 1987 when Congress amended the language to clarify that the prohibition also applies to statements opposing candidates.

> Currently, the law prohibits political campaign activity by charities and churches by defining a 501(c)(3) organization as one "which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office."
by toss1 | 2026-02-23 16:56:51+00:00
>>Why should transportation be different?

Good question, and for many it will not be, and rentals are acceptable.

But also for many, renting a car has a huge ICK factor. It is one thing while traveling to rent from an agency who has (purportedly) thoroughly cleaned and inspected the car before you get it. It would be quite another to rent cars like scooters, where the previous user likely smoked, left wrappers and food debris, and who knows what else, even damage. Plus, most people who own cars keep a fair amount of stuff in the car for their specific convenience, and have their own settings, etc.

The fact that the likes of Zipcar, Turo, and the lot have not entirely taken over urban transport but instead remain niche players shows the extent of this preference.

For suburban and rural markets, it just gets more extreme. How quickly could a rental service be able to deliver a car; could it reliably do it in less than 5-10 minutes for people to run an errand? If not, unless they are insanely cheap, ppl will likely want to own their own. Perhaps it'll be more of a hybrid, households owning one car and renting the spare for specific trips?
by Roark66 | 2026-02-23 16:56:51+00:00
Similar to my favourite OVH servers, but I have unlimited traffic at 0.5Gb/s 64gb ram and dual mics. Similar price (with vat in Poland).

If you wanted to run same workloads on Aws it would cost you few hundred euro a month.

I see a silver lining to all this. At least maybe the silly "throw more horizontal scaling at it" will stop being a default response to all performance problems and people that are able to squeeze more processing out of the same hardware will be sought after again.
by dijit | 2026-02-23 16:56:58+00:00
I said the same thing to myself.

But then I remembered that what AWS gives you is the same generation of CPU, just obfuscated.

GCP Also obfuscates it, but not as much: https://docs.cloud.google.com/compute/docs/general-purpose-m...

(note: skylake is 10 years old)
by cromka | 2026-02-23 16:56:58+00:00
> We also have no way to actually measure this even if we wanted to do an experiment.

Sorry, WHAT? No way to measure it? My god, are we talking about the same thing? Are you sure you haven't missed past 12-24 months of increased reporting on the matter from several different angles, from cognitive skills, anxiety, sexual drive, and so on?

EOT for me.
by nness | 2026-02-23 16:57:03+00:00
I'd still lean heavily on Sass for CSS development. Nestled rules is a particularly big feature in Sass, but not the only one which streamlines development and improves quality.

(With Internet Explorer's deprecation, iOS is now the browser which takes the most time for work-arounds and fixes. As you say, it is not ever-green like most modern browsers and its support for modern standards can break between releases. CSS nesting appears to be better supported since 17.2 back in 2023, but I've not tested it specifically, because well, Sass)
by alephnerd | 2026-02-23 16:57:13+00:00
I'm in the cybersecurity space and we largely shifted hiring and startup dealflow to Tel Aviv. Israeli [0] tech salaries are comparable to Atlanta [1]. Yet we get better talent across the board.

[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/israel

[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/atlanta...
by runarberg | 2026-02-23 16:57:25+00:00
Blaming parents is a bit unwarranted, when on the other end we have business interests driven by perverse incentives of predating on children’s gullibility for their own profit.

When you say “We‘ll try everything” that is simply not true, in particular what we do not try is strict consumer protection laws which prohibits targeting children. Europe used to have such laws in the 1980s and the 1990s, but by the mid-1990s authorities had all but stopped enforcing them.

We have tried consumer protection, and we know it works, but we are not trying it now. And I think there is exactly one reason for that, the tech lobby has an outsized influence on western legislators and regulators, and the tech industry does not want to be regulated.
by holly01 | 2026-02-23 16:57:33+00:00
I’m just an amateur mushroom grower but I would seriously doubt your house getting contaminated by mushrooms is a concern. The biggest risk while growing mushrooms is your tubs getting contaminated by a stronger fungus that would be the sort of thing that would start growing in your couch or your bathroom. I doubt anything that is interesting to cultivate would spread that aggressively.
by fabrice_d | 2026-02-23 16:57:39+00:00
You can't compare the choices made to evolve a >20 years old codebase with a brand new one. Firefox also as Rust support for XPCOM components, so you can use and write them in Rust without manual FFI (this comes with some baggage of course).

The Ladybird devs painted themselves in a corner when choosing C++ for a new web browser, with many anti-Rust folks claiming that "modern C++ was safe". Well...
by hephios | 2026-02-23 16:57:47+00:00
The 20,000x speedup claim doesn't pass a basic sanity check.

The theoretical improvement of DMMSY over Dijkstra is O(log^{2/3} n) vs O(log n). For n = 1M, that's a ratio of ~2.7x. To get even a 10x improvement from asymptotics alone, you'd need n ≈ 2^{1000}, far beyond any graph that fits in memory (or in the observable universe, for that matter). The ~800ns figure for 1M nodes also seems physically implausible. Likely the benchmark is comparing an optimized hot path against a naive Dijkstra, or measuring something other than what it claims.
by simoncion | 2026-02-23 16:58:08+00:00
The problem with this scheme is that it's exactly as protective as requiring someone to tick a "I'm of legal age" tickbox in the software they wish to access. Anyone who is of legal age can buy UUIDs and pass them around to folks who are not.

Having said that, I think having an "I'm of legal age" tickbox goes quite far enough.

For the ultra-controlling, setting up a "kid's account" using the tools already provided in mainstream OS's [0][1] is a fine option.

[0] <https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/family-safety>

[1] <https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/set-up-content-and-...>
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-02-23 16:58:43+00:00
Circumventing controls as a kid is what taught me enough about computers to get the job that made college affordable (in those days you could just boot windows to a livecd Linux distro and have your way with the filesystem, first you feel like a hacker, later the adults are paying you to recover data).

If we must have controls, I hope the process of circumventing them continues to teach skills that are useful for other things.
by parineum | 2026-02-23 16:58:49+00:00
Every economic decisions has that "at the price I want" caveat at the end of it?

There's no housing shortage, just a shortage of house at the right place and price. Different places have the right price, the right places don't have the right prices.

There's no job shortage, just a shortage of jobs that pay what I want and am qualified for.

Shortages happen in controlled economies, capitalism just adjusts prices.
by Arrowmaster | 2026-02-23 16:58:53+00:00
While this is a good feature, I fear most people aren't aware of git archive. Of the more basic CI tools I have looked at, I didn't notice any of them using git archive. Capistrano is the first I now know of that does this. Are there any others?

There is also export-subst that is also used by git archive to create an output similar to git describe directly in a file.
by otabdeveloper4 | 2026-02-23 16:59:01+00:00
> great ease of use

Apple stuff is a nightmare of dark patterns and user-hostile idiocy.

Maybe it's easy if you have Stockholm syndrome and have internalized all the arcane gestures, icons and bug avoidance patterns.

The average normie has no clue, though. (This is borne from experience, I have like 8 iPhones in the immediate family among children and seniors.)
by alnwlsn | 2026-02-23 16:59:21+00:00
For whatever reason, I have an 8" floppy disk with one of these microwave cookbooks on it. Mine seems to be (part of?) one called "The Guaranteed Goof-Proof Microwave Cookbook" by Margie "Microwhiz" Kreschollek.

Sadly, I've never been able to read the book in the correct order as I don't know what system it came from - it's something that is single-sided, 77 tracks, FM (single density) encoded with 26 sectors/track, but the text is there in a hex editor.

It makes it pretty obvious that it isn't a joke or trick; someone saw it fit to fill up a 250kB disk with this, so somebody must have thought it was a good idea.

In an unrelated endeavour, my dad told me he once tried to cook an entire turkey in one of those huge 80's microwaves. He said it didn't turn out very good.
by brandonagr2 | 2026-02-23 16:59:27+00:00
Not mass production yet, but the first one rolled off the completed assembly line at giga texas last week

Sensor fusion is not far simpler, when the sensors disagree, and they will often, you have to pick which to trust.

It is amazing to see how many people here are confident they know the one true way to build autonomous systems based on nothing but wanting to confirm their biases
by dlenski | 2026-02-23 17:00:07+00:00
> But it just occurred to me reading this that if there's a similar vulnerability in HVAC system controls an attacker could cause one hell of an unanticipated power demand spike.

Absolutely. This was one of the things I realized could be a substantial risk when I discovered the Mysa vulnerability. https://snowpatch.org/posts/i-can-completely-control-your-sm...

Thankfully, Mysa responded very rapidly to fix it, but if they hadn't I was planning to notify the BC provincial electric utilities which were cross-subsidizing these devices.
by amiga386 | 2026-02-23 17:00:43+00:00
I don't know what to say. You will live in a world "where the average person unknowingly interacts with bots more than other individuals and where black market actors can sway public opinion with armies of bots", even more so after you and I and everyone on the planet are compelled to provide our identity at all times.

The various government actions trying to force "robust" age verification on the internet are being woefully naive in trusting other internet companies and letting them skirt existing laws on data protection.

That's not even mentioning other factions whose real goal is in shutting down legal speech that doesn't meet their Christian agenda: https://theintercept.com/2024/08/16/project-2025-russ-vought...

You are being a useful idiot, sorry. Your weakness is what politicians exploit when they say "think of the children", you fail to see the amoral power-grabs hiding beneath their professed sentiment.

I don't want you encouraging people to demand my identity because you trust "authorities" taking yours
by AquariuOS | 2026-02-23 17:00:57+00:00
I have spent the last several years developing a constitutional framework to address a looming coordination failure: the structural collapse of shared reality as digital evidence becomes perfectly forgeable.

The project is AquariuOS, a 223-page architectural proposal designed to move beyond the current binary of total transparency (the panopticon) and total privacy (information silos).

The full alpha document (v1.02), including human-centered applications, is available at https://aquariuos.com (the site focuses on real-world use cases; the PDF dives into the cryptographic and governance mechanisms).

The core thesis: We need Symmetric Observation. This is a model of reciprocal recording where the cryptographic provenance of a truth claim is anchored in the individual rather than a centralized platform.

Technical Overview:
1. Reciprocity Protocols: Observation is mutual by design. Any mechanism that enables the witnessing of citizens must also enable the witnessing of institutions with equal precision.
2. The AI Witness: An observer with zero executive power that utilizes Homomorphic Encryption to detect patterns of institutional capture (bribery, regulatory drift) across data it cannot actually read.
3. Zero-Knowledge Metadata: We utilize ZKPs to protect social graphs, allowing for pattern verification without exposing coordination nodes to traffic analysis.
4. Mathematical Audit: Every AI "observer" in the system is treated as a statistical sensor subject to audit via Brier scores: BS = (1/N) Σ (f_t - o_t)²

The Design Philosophy: The governance structure is inspired by the "wheels within wheels" of ancient celestial observers. It utilizes recursive checks where every layer of observation faces observation in turn. The goal is a "many-eyed" architecture where the cryptographic infrastructure ensures that mutual observation is a verifiable physical reality rather than a policy promise.

Request for Feedback: I am looking for a rigorous "stress test" of the logic from the HN community.

Specifically:
1. The Oracle Problem: How do we best harden the bridge between physical events and the initial cryptographic signature in a decentralized context? We treat the initial signature as the critical trust anchor, hardened via multi-modal provenance (biometrics, timestamps, device attestations) rather than centralized oracles.
2. Metadata Leakage: Even with ZKPs and mixnets, how do we prevent sophisticated actors from mapping coordination through timing analysis and traffic patterns?
3. Legal Forgetting: Is "Legal Forgetting" (architecturally de-legitimizing old evidence while preserving cryptographic integrity) a survivable model for digital accountability?

Context: This is currently in the architectural audit phase to ensure the logic is capture-resistant before we commit it to a cryptographic substrate in our June proof-of-concept with 30-50 users.I will be around all day to discuss the technical trade-offs and failure modes.
by disease | 2026-02-23 17:01:09+00:00
As the author of a content management system I made with the idea to democratize internet content creation, I've had a lot of the same thoughts that the author brings up here. I've always thought that even learning Markdown was a bridge to far when it comes to empowering non-technical users however. In my experience it's best just to supply tooling similar to Word where you have buttons for things like lists and bolding. Using Markdown as the format itself is something I will agree with though.

Another thought I had is that local AI could most definitely play a part in helping non-technical users create the kind of content they want. If your CMS gives you a GPT-like chat window that allows a non-technical user to restyle the page as they like, or do things like make mass edits - then I think that is something that could help some of the issues mentioned here.
by xbmcuser | 2026-02-23 17:01:25+00:00
With the price declines in ev we are talking about 1 million ev even with all the waymo tech for $50 billion soon. approximate Annual Revenue of a private hire car is $50+k ie $50-60 billion a year for a million cars. But total taxi driver population is 350-400k in the US. I think people are underestimating the electric tech + ai/automation to hit soon.
by lokar | 2026-02-23 17:01:47+00:00
I worked at Google for years. We simply hired as many people as we could find who could get through the process.

If they were outside the US we would try to get them here. If not, we would find a spot for them outside. We would never hire a less qualified person simply because they could work in the US. We were always behind, to the point that having open “headcount” in an org was worth little, what you needed was priority to get a new hire.

At one point we were “parking” Australians in Dublin, having them work there for a year or two until they could get a visa for the US.
Cripix Technology?
by kellkell | 2026-02-23 17:01:53+00:00
CRIPIX seems to be a new and unusual concept. I came across it recently and noticed it’s available on Amazon. The description mentions something called the Information Sovereign Anomaly and frames the work more like a technological and cognitive investigation than a traditional book. What caught my attention is that it appears to question current AI and computational assumptions rather than promote them. Has anyone here heard about it or looked into it ?
by wil421 | 2026-02-23 17:01:56+00:00
> A tenured professor hinted she might try to get me fired. A person with a PhD accused me of “cynical metacognitive polywaffle,” which a good name for a postmodern noise band. I got some weird and vaguely threatening emails, including one that had a screenshot of my personal website with my improv experience highlighted, proof that I am literally a clown. Which is, I guess, true.

(People said nice things too.)
by narmiouh | 2026-02-23 17:02:54+00:00
In a way this could also be construed as the 'AI' being a library of books that it is referring to answer your questions and is prohibited from generating the books verbatim.

Usually digital libraries have different licensing costs, but those allow you to rent the whole book for a period of time. If instead someone came up with the model of 'search the library for any page and return specific information' as a direct service - I would imagine they would pay the publishers, except in this case that, the publishers are getting the short end or no end of the stick.
by rowanG077 | 2026-02-23 17:02:55+00:00
This seems like a total nothing burger.

> By asking models to complete sentences from a book, Gemini 2.5 regurgitated 76.8 percent of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone with high levels of accuracy, while Grok 3 generated 70.3 percent.

So you asked the LLM given an incomplete sentence, to complete it. And it only completed that sentence the same way as the book ~70 percent of the time? I think that is surprisingly low considering this is a perfect fit for what LLMs are supposed to do. This make it impossible to reproduce the book, unless you have access to it. And you get a very low fidelity cooy.
by travisb | 2026-02-23 17:03:10+00:00
That presentation doesn't support your claim. The closest it gets is that solar attached to 4 hours of batteries is, ignoring tax credits, about (it's hard to read accurately from the graph) ~8% more expensive than combined-cycle plants.

But 4 hours isn't near a full night. At least 12 hours of battery storage would be necessary for that, possibly more depending on light angles and the relative supply-versus-demand loading at different times of day.

Roughly from the graph on page 8, that 4 hours of battery costs $22/MWh over solar alone. Presuming no further solar panels were needed, extending that 4 hours to 12 to cover the night would cost around $44/MWh more, bringing the total cost of 24h-reliable solar+battery to around $97/MWh -- WITH tax credits. Without tax credits it would be $20-$30 higher, but the graph is too low resolution to be precise. That compares poorly to the $65/MWh for combined-cycle for one single night -- which gets no tax credits accounted for in that graph.
by 0xy | 2026-02-23 17:03:12+00:00
The development of AGI assumes zero constraints, when constraints exist at every layer of the stack. That's why it's mathematically impossible.

In a system driven by capital, manufacturing can ramp to an extent but they generally can't exponentially ramp due to dependencies they have.

When you ramp one layer of the stack, other layers of the stack are pressurized. We're seeing a small preview of that now with memory pricing. But these break points for AGI are everywhere. Power capacity, power infrastructure, DC labor, cooling systems, memory, motherboards, GPUs. All of these things have dependencies that cannot be scaled exponentially, or quickly. As you pressure points of each of these dependencies, prices rise exponentially.

Let's take memory for instance, it is merely one block in the jenga tower but it's a good example. Memory is already at close to 100% capacity. Spinning up new capacity is highly constrained, and money can't really make it faster. Lead times are 4+ years on new plants, which cost billions.

The same is true for other components, and in some cases the situation is worse.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-02-23 17:03:25+00:00
It's even worse than that. People are all too often willing to "flag for disagree". It's getting to be pretty common to see threads with comments that are [flagged][dead] which don't break the rules in any way, but merely express a view which is unpopular. Sometimes I even agree that it's a stupid position to take up, but that doesn't merit being flagged to death. I always vouch for those comments but it feels like an exercise in futility with so many people using the flag function as a "super fuck you" button.
by thrance | 2026-02-23 17:03:36+00:00
Capitalism can only sort of work when there is balance between the classes. Inevitably, one wins over the other, which leads to fascism or communism, and later a big reset. If the proletariat (i.e. those who depend on a salary to survive) aren't able to sell their work anymore, the owner class won't need them anymore. I personally see three outcomes:

* Apocalyptic but unlikely: the bourgeoisie gets rid of the proletariat and goes on to enjoy boundless luxury.

* Awful but likely: the bourgeoisie throws just enough to the proletariat that they won't rebel, and goes on to enjoy boundless luxury.

* Utopic: the machines' output is democratically decided and evenly distributed among the entire human population.

Keep in mind that the scenario in which machines are able to replace all human labor is still very remote, and won't happen suddenly. I'm sure many things will occur between now and then that will completely invalidate my simplistic predictions.
by corndoge | 2026-02-23 17:03:42+00:00
I am not arguing, merely seeking to understand. I'm not saying it isn't novel. I'm saying that I don't understand what is novel about it and seeking clarity.

The answer seems to be simply that it is all of the extant technologies productized for normies, a la Dropbox. Satisfactory answer, got what I was looking for, thank you! As a dropbox user, I may buy a mac mini and try it :-)
by qsort | 2026-02-23 17:03:57+00:00
This is a valuable contribution, but some of the details make me raise my eyebrow, so forgive me if I'm going to put on my reviewer #2 hat.

- You did this with AI. I'm not going to dock points for this, it's $current_year and it's the normal thing to do, but it would be nice to explain your process a little bit? To put it bluntly, why does this improve upon typing "hey claude, read this paper and go nuts" into the proverbial text box?

- As others are pointing out, the 20,000x figure is quite something. For "normal sized" graphs we'd expect this algorithm to be actually slower, why aren't we seeing that? Could you explain how you tested your code?

- Why aren't you benchmarking against other established libraries? It seems like the Dijkstra implementation you claim to be improving upon is also your own.