MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Ethee | 2026-02-23 21:03:11+00:00
I tested this with Opus the day 4.6 came out and it failed then, still fails now. There were a lot of jokes I've seen related to some people getting a 'dumber' model, and while there's probably some grain of truth to that I pay for their highest subscription tier so at the very least I can tell you it's not a pay gate issue.
by jajuuka | 2026-02-23 21:03:40+00:00
Extra hassle is manageable. Sites or programs that want you to put in a birthday are extra hassle but objectively better than something like submitting an ID. Privacy degradation is also manageable as well. It just depends on the solution.

We've had decades of age gating being "are you 18+ or not" yet it is only now that talks of something more enforceable are coming up. This discussion is largely about how one can create a sense of safety and protection. For the more extreme end it's face scans and submitting ID. Even though these are bypassed by any teenager who cares they are still being pushed seriously because it instills that sense of safety and protection for children. Security theater is just a part of managing the internet and not going away unfortunately.
by ashertrockman | 2026-02-23 21:03:45+00:00
Yeah of course, I've been thinking about this a lot and I'm updating my beliefs all the time, so it's good to hear some more perspectives

A) I see what you mean. But I'm more so thinking: companies consider their models an asset because they took so much compute and internal R&D effort to train. Consequently, they'll take measures to protect that investment -- and then what do the downstream consequences look like for users and the AI ecosystem more broadly? That is, it's less about what's right and wrong by conventional wisdom, and more about what consequences are downstream of various incentives.

B) I don't really care about AI safety in the traditional sense either, i.e., can you get an LLM to tell you to do some thing that has been ordained to be dangerous. There's lots of attacks and it's basically an insoluble problem until you veer into outright censorship. But now that people are actually using LLMs as agents to _do things_, and interact with the open web, and interact with their personal data and sensitive information, the safety and security concerns make a lot more sense to me. I don't want my agent to read an HN post with a social-engineering-themed prompt injection attack and mail my passwords to someone. (If this sounds absurd, my Clawbot defaulted to storing passwords in a markdown file... which could possibly be on me, but was also the default behavior.)

C) This is a completely fair point, there's amazing work coming out of these smaller labs, and the incentives definitely work out for them to do a distillation step to ship faster and more cheaply. I think the small labs can iterate fast and make big changes in a way that the monolithic companies cannot, and it'd be nice to see that effort routed into creating new data-efficient RL algorithms or something that pick up all the slack that distillation is currently carrying. Which is not to say they're doing none of that, GRPO for example is a fantastic idea.

One way you could have a change in perspective is not just in the architecture/data mix, but in the way you spend test-time compute. The current paradigm is chain-of-thought, and to my knowledge, this is what distillation attacks typically target. So at least, all models end up "reasoning" with the same sort of template, possibly just to interlock with the idea of distilling a frontier API.

D) Interesting to hear. In my research, I find these models to be quite a bit harder to work with, with significantly higher failure rates on simple instruction following. But my work also tends to be on the R&D side, so my usage patterns are likely in the long-tail of queries.
by mindslight | 2026-02-23 21:03:49+00:00
Yes, this is exactly the question I always have with the PE narratives - what do the supply-side incentives of PE look like? Is this an overall profitable activity where the vultures and their debt-backers win out? Is it merely profitable for the PE firm but a whole bunch of debt-bagholders lose out? Are those losers corporate junk bond stuffed into retirements funds and whatnot, but the funds' managers are happy with their own fees, and customers don't really notice the slightly lower returns from a few "bad investments" (but are still ultimately being swindled) ?

The article touches on this a little in vague terms, citing some studies, which is more than I can say for most. If this is an economically destructive dynamic, and it most certainly feels like it is, then some type of investor must be losing out, right?? It seems worth it to focus on who those parties are to see if that source of energy can be cut off.
by rdtsc | 2026-02-23 21:04:05+00:00
> Realistically soldiers should head in the right compass direction and hope for the best. But then you (the player) shouldn't have a proper map of your own, either.

It would depend where and when. An army on their own territory might know the terrain. An army on enemy's territory would try to send scouts ahead as opposed to wondering randomly, too.

So at the army level it would almost work out like the they have "psychic" powers because they have scouts. At the individual units it would depend. But it would also be kind of annoying to play if the realism is increased too much. Like they wander into the woods and get stuck in a bog and die of hypothermia.
by taurath | 2026-02-23 21:04:19+00:00
Let’s be clear though - it’s not that Americans are clinging to some deep stability that brings them comfort or relaxation, it’s that they’re on the edge already. The vast vast majority of people are barely able to afford the basics of life, while we’re bombarded with an ever more shameless wealthy elite’s privileges.

Politics is like water boiling - it’s just going to be little bubbles at first but all of a sudden it will start to really rumble.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-23 21:04:56+00:00
Speaking of Windows alone, there are the various calling conventions (pascal, stdcall, cdecl), 16, 32, 64 bits, x86, ARM, ARM64EC, DLLs, COM in-proc and ext-proc, WinRT within Win32 and UWP.

Leaving aside the platforms it no longer supports.

So there are some changes to account for depending on the deployment scenario.
by einpoklum | 2026-02-23 21:05:21+00:00
> Coding assistants are also really great at porting from one language to the other

No, they are quite terrible at doing that.

They may (I guess?) produce code that compiles, but they will, almost certainly not produce the appropriate combination of idioms and custom abstractions that may the code "at home" in the target language.

PS - Please fix your blockquote... HN ignores single linebreaks, so you have to either using pairs of them, or possibly go with italicization of the quoted text.
by gtech1 | 2026-02-23 21:05:53+00:00
Weird, I feel I'm talking to an LLM with a limited context window.

>>Centos didn’t go away. It changed. Rocky (et. al.) took the old centos role, and >>I see this as a win/win for everybody.
>>Ubuntu is the disaster Linux distro, I won’t touch Ubuntu if I have any other >>option.

>> All I said was I hated ubuntu

(???)

take care now
by swed420 | 2026-02-23 21:06:52+00:00
But imagine the kind of self-selection you'd find on such a forum. Furthermore, it's been long known that cannabis use can trigger schizophrenia in those who were already genetically predisposed to such. Your observation and the OP are not news worthy, imo. Bad outcomes have also been observed when combined with immature brains.

But for healthy adults, countless have used cannabis for generations without experiencing harmful reactions.

This one's my favorite: https://thereitis.org/mr-x-by-carl-sagan/
by saberience | 2026-02-23 21:06:53+00:00
Pot, meet kettle!

I don’t think I’m the only one feeling some schadenfreude at this news. I suppose it’s ok when you’re a hot Silicon Valley scale-up to slurp up the rest of the worlds data for free and then hire hot shot lawyers to defend you against all the creatives you ripped off, but when it’s the “evil” Chinese doing the same to you it’s a dastardly “attack”?
by txrx0000 | 2026-02-23 21:07:06+00:00
> I just like, can't help but start with fuck these companies. All other arguments are downstream of that. Better the nanny state than Nanny Zuck.

How about we reject all institutional nannies?

It is much easier to implement user-controlled on-device settings than any sort of over-the-Internet verification scheme. Parents purchase their children's devices and can adjust those settings before giving it to their kids. This is the crux of the problem, and all other arguments are downstream of this.
by stbede | 2026-02-23 21:07:11+00:00
American religions are more like American Indian tribal nations. They have independent jurisdiction and their income is not subject to taxation. Whether or not they engage in politics is completely their prerogative and has no bearing on their tax exempt status. It’s like saying the Navajo nation can’t engage in politics or else they would lose their tax exemption.

Further, the core reason for freedom of speech in a democracy is to have freedom for political speech. The need is to have different factions discuss ideas related to the governing of society. Any legal regime that restricts the rights of religion to engage in political speech is one that rejects the separation of church and state. The purpose of the separation is to prevent the government from interfering with the rights of disfavored religious groups or granting special privileges to favored religions. If an individual has a right to political speech, then an association of individuals also has that right whether or not it is religious in nature.
by ZeroGravitas | 2026-02-23 21:07:57+00:00
> Part of Bukele’s truce is to allow gangs to run their networks within the prisons, while their wealth and power remain untouched. In exchange, they have to keep homicides and violent crimes down. The leader of Barrio 18, one of the country’s two most powerful gangs, also alleges that they helped Bukele rise to power directly.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/bukele-trump-gangs/
by snowhale | 2026-02-23 21:08:12+00:00
the 16M session number is the real data point here. that's not a huge moat by any standard -- it just means detecting distillation is structurally hard, not that it isn't happening. you'd need to either detect statistical similarity in outputs (feasible but expensive) or rely on behavior probes, which get gamed fast. this announcement reads more like a legal paper trail than a technical deterrent.
by cpgxiii | 2026-02-23 21:08:38+00:00
There are a variety of x86 products with Coreboot support, if what you are looking for is firmware openness. If what you are looking for is PCB design openness, the options are much fewer, but at that point you are probably optimizing for an overly niche objective.

> Part of the point of this for me is to see what's possible with open hardware (down to chip level at least)

I appreciate the idea, but this is essentially saying "this project will prioritize a specific choice of one (core) piece of hardware to the detriment of everything else, users included". Approximately none of your potential users are going to benefit from the "openness" of the SBC versus that of a more broadly-supported platform (I say "openness" because the reality of SBCs is that actually finding a usefully performant one that is completely blob-free is almost impossible). Open hardware means very little if it isn't running an upstream kernel and userland.
by staticassertion | 2026-02-23 21:08:43+00:00
I feel like maybe we're drifting here. You said this:

> Well, I am on the provocative side that as AI tooling matures current programming languages will slowly become irrelevant.

And I said I disagree because language directly impacts things like performance. And it does, massively. Like, order of magnitude differences are not hard to achieve simply by changing language.

You are now saying that things just need to be "fast enough", but I don't get how that's relevant. The point is that a different language will have different tradeoffs, and AI changes some of the calculus there, but language is still a major component of the produced artifact. If you agree that language has major implications on the produced artifact, then we agree. If you don't, then I'll just once again appeal to the massive performance gaps between different languages.

I still am not understanding the offshoaring conversation.
by cjbenedikt | 2026-02-23 21:08:48+00:00
Very odd. When i use the link it comes up with this: "We assemble the first comprehensive sample of venture fraud cases involving 614 U.S. venture capital (VC)-backed startups founded since 2000. We find that VC-backed firms are 54% more likely to face fraud charges than comparable non-VC-backed firms within a subsample of newly public firms where detection likelihood is high and homogeneous. We then examine the role of governance in explaining venture fraud, focusing on two features that have risen in recent years—founder-friendly structures and cap table complexity."
Not even remotely what you're commenting on. Just wondering.
by rimunroe | 2026-02-23 21:09:04+00:00
I do this simply to keep on top of dishes. I always run the dishwasher at night regardless of how full it is. If it's significantly full after lunch I run it then too, even if it's not all the way full. Otherwise, when dinner comes around I likely won't have room for the additional dishes from that and would need to do a cycle before going to bed, wait for it to finish, then empty and load it with the leftovers.
by weird_tentacles | 2026-02-23 21:09:06+00:00
The core idea of Zettelkasten:

1. ONE (shared) dump-pile of all new notes. Your 2,600 pile should do fine

2. REGULAR 'cleaning' of the new notes: a) Each note gets one or many tags (#urban-decay #gaming #assets) b) Each note is trimmed down to its essence, ready to be used for reasonable purposes. (e.g further writing)

3. 'cleaned' notes are moved to your golden store, ready to be found by searching (search "#urban-decay")

You have 1. You need 2. It's slightly work-y, but interesting and ... fun. Rediscovering and polishing forgotten dust-rubies.
by kakacik | 2026-02-23 21:09:20+00:00
Nah thats a cheap excuse. Amorality of current gov was out there in plain sight, even before 2016 and definitely after. It was extremely hard for common folks to avoid it, some active acting would be required.

Then it boils down to morals, how flexible people are with them - this is weakness of character. Ability to ignore malevolent behavior if it suits me is more a ballpark of amoral sociopaths than good-hearted guy who simply doesn't have 2 hours a day to ponder philosophies of modern politics and regional historical details half around the globe. No amount of ads (which are so far trivial to avoid with reasonable lifestyle) change what a moral person considers moral.

And it couldn't have been easier this time, its not some left vs right view on things, just simple morality - lying, cheating, stealing, potential pedophilia, not hard to say of one is OK with that or not.

Sure I could eat a salad for 5$, but no I'll get a crappy burger for same amount because I like salty greasy stuff. Gee doctor why do I have bad heart, how could have I known? Must have been those evil mega corporations and their genius marketing.
by ben_w | 2026-02-23 21:09:23+00:00
Given the relatively large number of new accounts I've been seeing recently, on all threads not just in response to you, I'm torn between "Hacker News become normal-internet-famous" and "dead internet reached us".

I scored 0* on a HN-Turing-Test game: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47070537

* or less, given everything I identified was a false positive
by BizarroLand | 2026-02-23 21:09:24+00:00
Travelling to a no sales tax state for large purchases. Sales tax is roughly 10%, state with no sales tax is 150 miles away for me.

Doing the math, 300 miles round trip, 30 miles per gallon, $4/gallon for gas, if I'm buying something that costs more than $400 I get a free trip to other state.

Downside is that you're only breaking even for the time, but if you're making a $1,000+ purchase then it's definitely worth the time for me to make the trip.
by natpalmer1776 | 2026-02-23 21:10:01+00:00
I have never personally framed these unsolicited advertisements as a form of sexual harassment, rather as a man I’m expected to say no without commenting on the nature of the women making these unwanted advances and act as if nothing happened.

I’m going to start framing it this way going forward, because honestly it has a large number of parallels with casual sexual harrasment.
by cyberax | 2026-02-23 21:10:12+00:00
Yet, it's common. They typically are drop-in replacements for classic mercury switch thermostats. Mercury is not available anymore (for a good reason), and gallium alloys wet almost everything.

Bare bi-metallic strips don't work as well because contacts tend to get oxidized and/or stuck. They are also a pain to calibrate.

A small microcontroller with a relay tends to be more reliable.
by otherme123 | 2026-02-23 21:10:14+00:00
> but other ISPs are forced to do this by the courts.

They are in theory. But they were claiming "technical difficulties" to block the IPs until they also offered DAZN (socker) in their TV packages. Now they are quick to ban.

Remember how this is working: TV operator (Movistar, Vodafone, Orange) demand ISPs (Movistar, Vodafone, Orange) that they block the IP for a couple of hours. The judge, who can't tell apart an IP from a car plate, agrees to the request. Nobody can appeal in practice the block, because if your site gets blocked, the judge now say "unblock", the ISPs claim "technical difficulties" to unblock, and the two hours are gone. Sunday after sunday.

You can avoid the block just proxying you traffic through a ssh loop to localhost, but that is not the problem. 99% of people won't do that to access your online shop, they just assume your site is down and buy from you competition. And sunday afternoon is one of the busiest day of the week for online stores.
by arlogilbert | 2026-02-23 21:10:42+00:00
Just put Zvec vs LanceDB vs Qdrant through the paces on a 3 collection (text only) 10k per collection dataset.

Average latency across ~500 queries per collection per database:

Qdrant: 21.1ms
LanceDB: 5.9ms
Zvec: 0.8ms

Both Qdrant and LanceDB are running with Inverse Document Frequency enabled so that is a slight performance hit, Zvec running with HNSW.

Overlap of answers between the 3 is virtually identical with same default ranking.

So yes, Zvec is incredible, but the gotcha is that the reason zvec is fast is because it is primarily constrained by local disk performance and the data must be local disk, meaning you may have a central repository storing the data, but every instance running zvec needs to have a local (high perf) disk attached. I mounted blobfuse2 object storage to test and zvec numbers went to over 100ms, so disk is almost all that matters.

My take? Right now the way zvec behaves, it will be amazing for on-device vector lookups, not as helpful for cloud vectors.
by array_key_first | 2026-02-23 21:10:50+00:00
It's just not relevant. When I was in highschool some teachers had a thingy on the wall where you would hang up your cell phone in a pouch. If it wasn't there, you better have a good explanation, or you'll be counted absent.

The solutions are simple and effectively free. That's not the issue. The issue is nobody wants to do the solutions. Schools don't, parents don't, kids don't. Everyone is just lying to themselves.

You can't on one hand claim to care about kids and then on the other dismiss obvious tactics like banning cell phones.
by JimsonYang | 2026-02-23 21:11:08+00:00
Being someone who took a month or two to look into mcp servers, I'm geniunely surprised the monetization of mcp servers have not come yet. I was pretty positive as ai agents grow bigger then the need for paid quality servers will surely increase. That said I do understand it's still very early and 99% of people have never heard mcp servers.

My personal take is that mcp servers had very little value outside of info gathering like connecting claude code to supabase to save on token usage. But we'll obv see as the ecosystem develops and people develop new unique servers
by lambda | 2026-02-23 21:11:12+00:00
They've since added some hacks to enable it to handle more transactions and bring the price down. Effectively, the network had hit its limit on the number of transactions it could fit in a block, so you had to pay high fees to get accepted in a block, the miners simply couldn't accept all transactions; but they've added ways of fitting more transactions into a block that have helped drive prices back down again.

So now it's back to being cheaper than Paypal, but yeah, there was a time when there were $100+ transaction fees. And it may hit that again if transaction numbers go up enough to fill up blocks with the new implementation.
by snapetom | 2026-02-23 21:11:21+00:00
As late as 2012-2015 it was still extremely cheap to get suits in HK, but I'm sure that's no longer the case.

The last time I did it, I bought fabric for $60 USD at Joann's, flew to HK, and gave a guy the fabric for a suit. The suit cost $45 USD to make.
by dylan604 | 2026-02-23 21:11:28+00:00
> The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control.

The UK looks at the use of cameras and feels threatened for its Nanny State title. We Yanks have laughed at that name while the water around us slowly came to a boil.

Some cities and/or states have banned the use of cameras at stop lights to issue tickets. Not really sure what caused that to happen, except the cynic in me thinks some politician received a ticket in the mail from one of the cameras.
by SoftTalker | 2026-02-23 21:11:45+00:00
@UsagiElectric on YouTube has a series of videos on building a homebrew around the TMS9900 processor. Would be cool if a unix-like OS could be used on something like that, though sounds like this project is specifically targeting the TI-99/4A system.

The TI-99/4A was the first computer I owned as a teenager. I had used TRS-80s and Apple ][ at school. I eventually bought the expansion box and a couple of accessory cards (floppy disk drive, memory and RS232). It all went in the e-waste dumpster about 20 years ago during a move.
by silasb | 2026-02-23 21:11:51+00:00
Gemini was a good laugh as well:

Silas: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
Gemini:
….
That is a classic “efficiency vs. logic” dilemma.
Strictly speaking, you should drive. Here is the breakdown of why driving wins this specific round, despite the short distance:
...
* The “Post-Wash” Logic: If you walk there, you’ll eventually have to walk back, get the car, and drive it there anyway. You’re essentially suggesting a pre-wash stroll.
When should you walk?
…
3. You’ve decided the car is too dirty to be seen in public and you’re going to buy a tarp to cover your shame.