MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by papa0101 | 2026-02-19 21:21:46+00:00
React and its ecosystem is a pile of garbage perpetuated by industry inertia. UseState, useMemo, useThisAndThat where you have to guess whether that dependency will cause a re-render? Or 20 different routers, state managers, query builders? I'm not even talking about html-in-ts with `!!a && (<div>...</div>)` A stodgy, bloated, overhyped and misused monstrosity, that's what React is.
by sjducb | 2026-02-19 21:21:47+00:00
Agreed that sounds like wasteful spending. When that SWAT team finally gets a callout they’re going to go hard and use excessive force.

The US spends 135 billion on its police force so some wasteful spending is going to happen.

Defund the police people would spend that money on something unrelated to law enforcement.

I would spend it on something useful and law enforcement related like more training for officers.
by tim-tday | 2026-02-19 21:22:34+00:00
“Errors” that make it harder to access care are deliberate because they save tons of money.

If not an error if you did it on purpose.

Healthcare insurers deliberately keep ghost providers on the list because it looks good to have a large list. Go through the insurer’s list of providers in any category. call the first 25. If even ONE of them is still in business, not dead, taking new patients, I’ll eat my hat.
by greedo | 2026-02-19 21:22:42+00:00
I stopped cataloging the invoices after it hit $1.6M. Granted that's what the providers would bill my insurance, and we all know those are funny numbers, and while I'm sure that a concentrated effort to negotiate cheaper cash prices might have been productive, there's still the fact that I would have had to have $600k or so readily available. HYSA yields were pretty low for most of this time period, and if I had kept that kind of money in a stock portfolio, taxes would have killed me.

And it's beside the point. 99% of Americans can't afford to build a $600k nest egg just to cover medical expenses. THAT'S WHAT INSURANCE IS FOR!
by kube-system | 2026-02-19 21:23:07+00:00
Well, the NRA has come out against all of these proposed bills and has mentioned concerns about requirements that they may place on manufacturers.

https://www.nraila.org/articles/20260218/washington-action-a...

https://www.nraila.org/articles/20260112/bans-for-3d-bluepri...
by solomonb | 2026-02-19 21:23:08+00:00
Thank you for the `nix app`!

Being able to launch it with:

nix run github:cpcloud/micasa

Is super convenient.

Actually we could go further and serve `micasa` via ssh:

users.users.micasa = {
isNormalUser = true;
shell = pkgs.bashInteractive;
openssh.authorizedKeys.keys = ...
};

services.openssh.extraConfig = ''
Match User micasa
ForceCommand ${micasaPkg}/bin/micasa
AllowTcpForwarding no
X11Forwarding no
'';

Then we could put this in a nixosModule in your flake.nix. Would you be interested in a PR which does this?

services.micasa-ssh = {
enable = true;
authorizedKeys = [ "ssh-ed25519 AAAA..." ];
port = 2222;
};
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-02-19 21:23:08+00:00
> We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing.

Paying $1.00 for an in app purchase that you thought about and decided on is not a micropayment, that's just a small payment.

What makes micropayments interesting is that they can be small enough to escape notice, except in aggregate. They happen in the background, tightly coupled to the thing they're for, and not as part of an explicit purchase that added friction to the consumer's day.

I think there's probably a lot of potential to simplify things with micropayments. Like perhaps rather than paying my mobile provider to maintain a web of relationships with regional network operators and distribute money to them on cadence which has nothing to do with my usage of their network, I could instead just attach some money to each packet and transmit it to the lowest bidder in range (payment stays in escrow until packet delivered, then pays all operators involved). It could be that by cutting out the middleman I pay less and the network operators get more.

That's not what this is about though.
by beeflet | 2026-02-19 21:23:38+00:00
The problems you describe are technical problems. How do you increase efficiency and avoid charge-backs due to fraud? Perhaps it is enabled by cryptocurrency (some systems like payment channels, RaiBlocks already exist for this). I would go into more detail about this but I think i've already debated you about this already.

The entire field of cryptography is about developing technical solutions to previously intractable social problems.

As I have described earlier, the race to the bottom is a feature, not a bug. It encourages other sites to mirror your content.

I would pay you 0.002 cents before clicking on that link. I already have to expend time and energy reading it, and I already pay for an internet connection to read it. If you put some sort of PoW firewall to deter AI scraping like many sites have been doing, I already have to expend money in the form of electricity to access the site.
by dynm | 2026-02-19 21:24:19+00:00
There is a lot of hate for the idea of micropayments here, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I use a service that provides access to a bunch of different LLMs. Each time I call an LLM I, in effect, pay a $0.001 - $0.05 for the response. (Technically, this is implemented as me having to renew earlier.) Each time I make a call, I don't know if the answer will be useful. I don't even know how much it will cost! And in practice, the answers are often garbage, and I have to pay anyway. I find this annoying, but--to my surprise--only very mildly annoying. This has made me much more open-minded about micropayments for news / articles.
by wrs | 2026-02-19 21:24:21+00:00
I started a new LLC in December and applied for an EIN (company taxpayer ID, required for doing essentially anything else, like opening a bank account). Normally this is done online and takes two minutes. This time the online process failed and I had to fax the form in. Six weeks later, they faxed back the number.

To be clear: when it failed, I just got an error code and was told to fax in the paper form. Which contains exactly the same information I had just typed into the website.

I don’t think the IRS needs fewer tech people.
by zerotolerance | 2026-02-19 21:24:25+00:00
"Community" might be the hook, not the content itself. That's the way it works right now even in the pure editorial garbage piles. They might not always pay for the content directly, but they get revenue through high-margin merchandise, advertising, and scams. But you might imagine positioning as "I'm a XYZ reader." Still feels weak, but that's all we've got. The internet killed content scarcity. The product is not the content. The product is the way reading / watching / paying for it makes you feel. It is church. It is a tithing. A community subscription service.
by throwway120385 | 2026-02-19 21:24:43+00:00
No, what the judge is saying is that just arguing that you're allowed to do whatever "gun things" you want because of the 2nd amendment in a state district court is specious. You can argue the merits of the specific case based on the precedent in that and other courts that have jurisdiction but simply standing up and arguing baldly that the 2nd amendment lets you make guns and sell them without a serial number doesn't carry water. To make that argument you'd first have to take the F out of ATF and roll back a lot of case law that exists at the federal level that does give states the right to enact some controls.

It's a gross oversimplification of what the judge was trying to say to imply that they don't care about the 2nd amendment or the constitution.
by zem | 2026-02-19 21:25:03+00:00
one of the very first text adventures I played as a kid [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Kingdom_Valley] had static illustrations; I've always thought of it as a nice touch to add to a text adventure. they key difference between that and more modern graphic (or hybrid text/graphic) adventures was that the illustrations were not meant to be informative; you couldn't look at them and find objects to interact with, e.g., they were just there to add to the mood.
by TheDong | 2026-02-19 21:25:15+00:00
> I don't think I've ever passed a logger into the standard library.

`net/http.Server.ErrorLog` is the main (only?) one, though there's a lot of third-party libraries that take one.

> I've only seen slog since slog was added to the standard library

Most go libraries aren't updated yet, in fact I can't say I've seen any library using slog yet. We're clearly interfacing with different slices of the go ecosystem.

> in Rust everyone has different advice on which crates to use for error handling and when to use each of them. You definitely don't have _more standards_ in the Rust ecosystem.

They all are still using the same error type, so it interoperates fine. That's like saying "In go, every library has its own 'type MyError struct { .. }' that implements error, so go has more standards because each package has its own concrete error types", which yeah, that's common... The rust libraries like 'thiserror' and such are just tooling to do that more ergonomically than typing out a bunch of structs by hand.

Even if one dependency in rust uses hand-typed error enums and another uses thiserror, you still can just 'match' on the error in your code or such.

On the other hand, in Go you end up having to carefully read through each dependency's code to figure out if you need to be using 'errors.Is' or 'errors.As', and with what types, but with no help from the type-system since all errors are idiomatically type-erased.
by amoorthy | 2026-02-19 21:25:24+00:00
We built an editor for creating posts on LinkedIn where - to avoid the "all AI output is similar/boring" issue - it operates more like a muse than a writer. i.e. it asks questions, pushes you to have deeper insights, connects the dots with what others are writing about etc.

Users appear to be happy but it's early. And while we do scrub the writing of typical AI writing patterns there's no denying that it all probably sounds somewhat similar, even as we apply a unique style guide for each user.

I think this may be ok if the piece is actually insightful. Fingers crossed.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-02-19 21:25:25+00:00
I'm not a lawyer and I don't follow this area super closely, but it sure sounds like they did?

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

> Facebook parent-company Meta is currently fighting a class action lawsuit alleging copyright infringement and unfair competition, among others, with regards to how it trained LLaMA. According to an X (formerly Twitter) post by vx-underground, court records reveal that the social media company used pirated torrents to download 81.7TB of data from shadow libraries including Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, and LibGen. It then used this information to train its AI models.

> Aside from those messages, documents also revealed that the company took steps so that its infrastructure wasn’t used in these downloading and seeding operations so that the activity wouldn’t be traced back to Meta. The court documents say that this constitutes evidence of Meta’s unlawful activity, which seems like it’s taking deliberate steps to circumvent copyright laws.
by ex-aws-dude | 2026-02-19 21:25:28+00:00
No because I used to work at McDonald's and loading trailers from warehouses before working in tech.

That gave me perspective that lasts even to this day.

I'm not saying this is true of OP but I've met a few people who constantly complained about working in tech and one thing I noticed is a lot of them never worked a really shitty/physical job.

It blew my mind in university meeting people who's first ever job was a software internship. I remember thinking wow they must have a totally different idea of what a good/bad job is.

I can't think of a better value job that working in tech in terms of amount of effort and schooling required.
by giraffe_lady | 2026-02-19 21:25:51+00:00
I'm sorry but if you honestly thought I was claiming to have privileged insight into the inner workings of the nous of others I'm not sure how to approach this.

What I assert is that working as a police officer in the US is incompatible with a sincere and complete passage through several of the 12 steps, beginning with that one. I've known some retired cops who I believe to have done it though.
by autoexec | 2026-02-19 21:26:01+00:00
I care a lot more about the environmental harm, the impact on computer hardware prices, and what AI is doing to the energy prices which somehow become everyone else's burden to pay than I am about the rampant copyright infringement.

The hypocrisy in how copyright is enforced for AI companies vs everybody else is pretty infuriating though. We have courts ruling against people for downloading youtube videos to enable them to use clips for fair use purposes (https://torrentfreak.com/ripping-clips-for-youtube-reaction-...) while Nvidia is free to violate the DMCA in the exact same way to take youtuber's content in full (https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/nvidia-accused-of-scraping-80-y...).
by mrguyorama | 2026-02-19 21:26:04+00:00
I make above median wage in the US and pay like 13% income tax on average.

Poor people pay very little income tax, as is the entire point of a progressive set of tax brackets and a large standard deduction.

It is trivial to not do your taxes wrong if you have legal employment. If you for some reason doubt your ability to do a couple calculations and copy over 6 numbers to a simple form, Turbotax will do that "hard work" for you for $30.

Even using Turbotax, I once failed to report a W2 (because I technically had more than one job) and the "penalty" was a letter that said "Hi, you missed this, we fixed it, give us $270 + $1 interest", which I never responded to because I am disordered, so they took my state income tax return.

No court. No threat. No serious penalty. I didn't even have to talk to anyone.

If we are talking about poor people, who by definition have minimal income, how do you think they supposedly would get hit by some giant IRS penalty? What is the magical pathway?
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-02-19 21:26:11+00:00
The title resonates a lot with me as well.

I think this hazard extends up and down too; a balance we each have of how we regard possibility & value vs whether we default to looking for problems or denial. This becomes a pattern of perspective people adopt. And I worry so much at how doubt & denial pervade. In our hearts and… well… in the comments, everywhere.

I get it and I respect it; it's true: we need to be aware, alert, and on guard. Everything is very complicated. Hazards and bad patterns abound. But especially as techies, finding possibility is enormously valuable to me. Being willing to believe and amplify the maybe, even when it's a challenging situation. I cherish that so much.

Thank you very much Steve Yegge for the life-changing experience of Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus. I did not realize, did not have framing to understand the base human motivations of tech & building & the comments. I see the world so much differently for grokking the thesis here, see much more the outlooks people come from than I did. It has pushed me in life to look for higher possibility & reach, & to avoid closings of the mind, to avoid rejecting, to avoid fear uncertainty and doubt.
https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150

It's one of the most Light Side vs Dark Side noospherically illuminating pieces I've ever read. The article here touches upon those who care, and what they see: it frames the world. Yegge's post I think reflects further, back at the techie, on what happens to caring thoughtful people, Carlin's arc if idealist -> disappointed -> cynic. And to me Notes was a rallying cry to have fortitude, & to keep a certain purity of hope close, and to work against thought terminating fear uncertainty and doubt.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-19 21:26:21+00:00
There was

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/19/24135011/twitter-alternat...

which had startup royalty behind it and a very slick web site that they didn't promote very well. (A friend of mine who is interested in this space didn't find out about it until it was announced it was shutting down.)

I can only guess that the New York Times, WaPo and such were too good to talk to these people because they only managed to sign up third-tier news sources.
by bscphil | 2026-02-19 21:26:26+00:00
This is totally hypothetical, but I wonder if a system whereby your dollars went to the publications you actually read, but you could immediately, at any time read anything else you wanted for free would work. There would be an obvious reason to subscribe (you get past the paywall for any publication that is part of the bundle) but you would have the feeling that you're not "wasting" money because your money only goes to the publications you actually support.

(In reality, of course, cable providers were mostly doing this under the hood along with pocketing a big cut for themselves; television is just expensive to produce. But it didn't help the feeling of unfairness when you didn't watch any sports but ESPN was probably the most expensive channel in your "package".)
by greedo | 2026-02-19 21:26:27+00:00
Also, I wonder if this is skewed by more affordable treatments for things like basal cell carcinoma or prostate cancer that doesn't require surgical intervention. In my case, I had full on chemo, rad treatment, surgery, and more chemo. Wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, but I'm sure as hell glad I had good insurance. Dealing with the medical side was traumatic enough, I don't think I or anyone in my family had the bandwidth to deal with negotiating cash deals with multiple providers.
Show HN: Skicamslive.com
by mcoliver | 2026-02-19 21:26:52+00:00
I built https://skicamslive.com because I was tired of clicking through youtube playlists to scope out my favorite mountain and wanted something I could put up on my big TV. I wanted something that felt like a "command center" for skiers.

Key Features:
Zero Bloat: just the streams
High-Res Grids: Every mountain page features a 16:9 grid of all available live cams.

Power User Workflow: You can "favorite" the resorts you care about and open all of them in new tabs with a single click (great for multi-monitor setups while you're getting ready to head out).

Fast Search: Filter by mountain name or state instantly.

Mobile Optimized: Works great on the chairlift or at your desk.

The Tech:
Built as a static site using Jekyll, hosted on GitHub Pages. I focused heavily on a "premium" feel using vanilla CSS and minimal JS for the favorites system (stored in localStorage).

I’d love to get your feedback on the UI/UX, and if there are any specific mountains you think are missing, let me know and I'll add them!

Check it out here: https://skicamslive.com
by techblueberry | 2026-02-19 21:26:58+00:00
So I think two things:

1. It's ok to want certain outcomes as a society. Like maybe this is a little conservative or whatever, but we can't just like stand by and be like, well everyone's dumb, no one's having sex, people are dying, healthcare costs are spiking, there goes our economy. Like I wish we would legalize smoking again, but I understand why we don't.

2. I think one could make an argument that over-optimization is immoral. This Paula Deen video really made me sort of understand the excess that leads to the obesity epidemic. She takes what used to be a desert, wraps it in like three other deserts, fries it and then that's now one desert with twice the calories:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYbpWcw6MfA

But like, companies are trying to architect food to fit more fat and sugar in. Instagram doesn't go to people and ask them what they want, they study behavioral psychology to get people to use their products more. At some point, letting giant multinational corporations do whatever they want to hack people's brains is a kind of nihilism and absence of free choice that you're trying to avoid.

Monopolies are bad. Overoptimization is bad. It should be ok for us as a culture to reject micro-transactions. It's ok for us to have a shared morality. even if that means Epic games makes a little less money on Fortnight.

I think one measure should be. How much do people wish they did a thing less.

https://fortune.com/well/article/nearly-half-of-gen-zers-wis...

I used to watch like 6 hours of TV a day. Loved every minute of it. Same thing with video games. Same thing with my favorite restaurant, don't feel the same way about smoking or like the M&Ms I buy in the checkout aisle of the grocery store.
by helterskelter | 2026-02-19 21:27:07+00:00
Lie about family history, but even colonoscopies are not perfect; I just had somebody in my family die of CRC because...

- They had symptoms and wanted a screening, but their PCP repeatedly denied them a referral for like a year because they were "too young".

- They lied about family history after symptoms got worse and got their referral.

- They got the colonoscopy which came back clean, and then symptoms continued to get worse.

- Finally their doctor gave them a referral for an MRI.

Results were stage 4 CRC. The doctor performing the colonoscopy missed the tumor, which was tucked into the sigmoid (the bend in your colon), where he didn't properly inflate because he wasn't taking it very seriously. It had a thumb-tip sized protrusion inside the colon but had gotten huge on the opposite side of the colon wall. They fought it for 8 years after the diagnosis and over 100 rounds of chemo (!!!), were about to get a new procedure at Yale, in which the doctor told them to think of it in terms of "this really may be a complete cure", but it was canceled because of the Big Beautiful Bill.

If you have symptoms (even if you don't), don't let some fuckass Nurse Practitioner tell you no. They don't know shit and they let their egos get in the way when they have to deal with moderately informed patients advocating for themselves. This was preventable and tge medicap system failed them because both the PCP and the doctor performing the colonoscopy were not paying attention to what they were being presented with and saw only their own expectations.

Also...apparently doctors wanted to lower the screening age to like 35, but insurance companies fought it, so it's at 45.
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-02-19 21:27:40+00:00
<< 90% of software out there doesn’t kill people.

As we give more and more autonomy to agents, that % may change. Just yesterday I was looking at hexapods and the first thing it tells you ( with a disclaimer its for competitions only ) that it has a lot of space for weapon install. I had to briefly look at the website to make sure I did not accidentally click on some satirical link.
by inglor_cz | 2026-02-19 21:27:42+00:00
Which is way more than what original hunters and gatherers ever clock. They do move a lot, but not so much, and they alternate their activities a lot too (running, walking, resting, taking entire days off and just guarding their village).

We're not really optimized for this sort of extreme endurance and long-term development of serious pathologies is unsuprising.
by cadamsdotcom | 2026-02-19 21:28:19+00:00
> write the first test so the AI knows how they should be written, and which cases should be tested. Then I tell the AI each test case and it writes them for me.

This is too low level. You’d be better off describing the things that need testing and asking for it to do red/green test-driven development (TDD). Then you’ll know all the tests are needed, and it’ll decide what tests to write without your intervention, and make them pass while you sip coffee :)

> I don’t trust it yet is when code must be copy pasted.

Ask it to perform the copy-paste using code - have it write and execute a quick script. You can review the script before it runs and that will make sure it can’t alter details on the way through.