MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by krapp | 2026-02-14 23:44:35+00:00
>that's literally meaningless. also ahistorical, both in that this is not what happened hours after it was first posted to HN (which was months after it was originated)

Maybe it wasn't literally hours, but it was really fast. I remember noting how quickly people began to complain about it being used "improperly." The earliest instance I could find was this thread[0] from 2023 where user Gunax complained about it. I couldn't find an earlier reference in Algolia, it probably exists but I honestly don't care enough to put in the effort.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36297336

>and also in that "things become shittier" was and is still a perfectly common expression

...perfectly encapsulated and described by the term "enshittification." Which is why people use it for that now. It's more descriptive in the general sense than it is as a specific term of art. You're complaining that a word that means "the process of turning to shit" is being used to describe "the process of turning to shit." What did people expect to happen? If you want to keep it as a precise and technical term of art, keep calling it "platform decay." A shit joke is not a technical, precise term of art.

You can be as much of a prescriptivist crank about this as you want, it doesn't matter. "Enshittification" now refers to any process by which things "turn to shit."
by SonorousGarden | 2026-02-14 23:44:52+00:00
Funnily enough, from Slack's own testing they could make it that tool tomorrow by changing the input box from a single line to a multi-line input. A la the Hacker News input box we are all typing into right now.

You got me thinking about whether a pre-send message that could theoretically appear: "Given the channel that you are currently in, this might not be an appropriate message. Would you like to reword it, have AI reword it, or send it anyways?"

This presumably would feel absolutely terrible to use, but it might be a way to nudge towards community consensus for how certain spaces would work.
by serf | 2026-02-14 23:45:03+00:00
>Youtube is far too significant a video collection to risk losing it.

> Not sure whether increasing financial pressure (above what must, no doubt, build up on its own) is the right answer here.

fantastic, an appeal to personal guilt to fund large corporate money making and national/corporate-soft-power efforts.

an acquired predatory advertiser, the worlds #1 inadequate and neglectful child nanny, and world wide cultural trend-setter is also bad at making money? and they need more? and you say they won't squander it?

I think i'll donate to PBS while aiding YT archival efforts.
by zeta0134 | 2026-02-14 23:46:48+00:00
The second thing that came to mind was paywall evasion. Any time a news article behind a paywall gets posted here, someone in the comments has the archive link ready to go, because of course they do.

The incentives for online news are really wacky just to begin with. A coin at the convenience store for the whole dang paper used to be the simplest thing in the world.
by haberman | 2026-02-14 23:47:36+00:00
> So many of our foundational institutions – hiring, journalism, law, public discourse – are built on the assumption that reputation is hard to build and hard to destroy. That every action can be traced to an individual, and that bad behavior can be held accountable. That the internet, which we all rely on to communicate and learn about the world and about each other, can be relied on as a source of collective social truth. [...] The rise of untraceable, autonomous, and now malicious AI agents on the internet threatens this entire system.

I disagree. While AI certainly acts as a force multiplier, all of these dynamics were already in play.

It was already possible to make an anonymous (or not-so-anonymous) account that circulated personal attacks and innuendo, to make hyperbolic accusations and inflated claims of harm.

It's especially ironic that the paragraph above talks about how it's good when "bad behavior can be held accountable." The AI could argue that this is exactly what it's doing, holding Shambaugh's "bad behavior" accountable. It is precisely this impulse -- the desire to punish bad behavior by means of public accusation -- that the AI was indulging or emulating when it wrote its blog post.

What if the blog post had been written by a human rather than an AI? Would that make it justified? I think the answer is no. The problem here is not the AI authorship, but the actual conduct, which is an attempt to drag a person's reputation through mudslinging, mind-reading, impugning someone's motive and character, etc. in a manner that was dramatically disproportionate to the perceived offense.
by perfmode | 2026-02-14 23:47:45+00:00
The issue with this is when creating artificial general intelligence objective shouldn’t be to replicate the statistical mean of human behavior with all its frailties and crookedness. Ultimately our ambition should be to create an intelligence that is at the peak and at the frontier of cosmic intelligence so if these LLM methods are resulting in a statistical mean then they’re dead end on the AGI journey. And we need to revise our methodology in research and engineering in order to produce results at the frontier that represent frontier cosmic intelligence for lack of a better term.
by petercooper | 2026-02-14 23:47:57+00:00
This isn't to the level of the OP, but I just asked Claude "Are there any interesting Bluetooth devices in my vicinity which aren't actually mine or ones I am connected to?" and it downloaded a tool called `blueutil` and identified a variety of things.

When I complained that the results were boring, it installed a Python package called 'bleak', found a set of LED lights (which I assumed are my daughter's) and tried to control them. It said the signal was too weak and got me to move around the house, whereupon it connected to them, figured out the protocol, and actually changed the lights while I was sat on her bed - where I am right now. Now I have a new party trick when she gets home! I had no idea they were Bluetooth controlled, nor clearly without any security at all.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2026-02-14 23:48:04+00:00
I wish one of those agents was smart enough to notice that their github-action which auto closes issues is broken: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/16497. If it were maybe we could get some of these bugs fixed.

It feels like the kind of thing a human would notice, but which the agents are considering out of their scope.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-14 23:48:21+00:00
Yes I know that Google just reported YouTube’s revenue is larger than Netflix’s. But I really don’t find anything interesting on YouTube. Every time I try to find an interesting tutorial on for me AWS, if it isn’t produced by AWS itself, it’s usually subpar and I end up just paying for it on Udemy or using my company paid Pluralsight.
by tuxyz | 2026-02-14 23:49:29+00:00
Hi HN,

I’d like to introduce Tux.wf Beta 2.0, a lightweight, privacy-respecting platform that combines:

Short URL service (clean redirects, no tracking scripts embedded)

Free sub-domain hosting (e.g. yourname.tux.wf)

Simple infrastructure, built with open-source components

What’s new in Beta 2.0?

Improved routing and faster redirect handling

Cleaner sub-domain provisioning workflow

Hardened server configuration (rate limiting + abuse mitigation)

Better separation between redirect service and sub-domain vhosts

Short URL Service

The shortener is designed to be:

Minimal

Fast

Transparent

No aggressive tracking or advertising

Each short link resolves via standard HTTP redirects. The goal is reliability and simplicity rather than monetization.

Free Sub-Domains

Users can request sub-domains under tux.wf for:

Personal homepages

FOSS projects

Testing / staging

Community initiatives

DNS and vhost routing are handled centrally. The idea is to lower the barrier for publishing small projects without requiring full domain ownership.

Philosophy

The project is part of a broader open infrastructure effort focused on:

Open source stack

Transparent configuration

Community collaboration

Low-cost / free access to basic web services

No ads. No growth-hacking mechanics. Just infrastructure.

I’m especially interested in feedback on:

Abuse prevention strategies for open shorteners

Scalable sub-domain management (automation vs. moderation)

Rate limiting approaches that don’t punish legitimate users

Beta testers and technical feedback are very welcome.
by forgetfreeman | 2026-02-14 23:50:08+00:00
Having spent more hours than I care to count struggling to control my facial expressions in client-facing meetings your assertion that that friction is unnecessary is highly questionable. Having a "face man" who's sufficiently tech literate to ask decent questions manage the soft side of client relations frees up a ton of engineering resources that would otherwise be squandered replying to routine emails.
by dlcarrier | 2026-02-14 23:51:11+00:00
Doubling the number of bits squares the number range that can be stored, so there's a point of diminishing returns.

* Four-bit processors can only count to 15,or from -8 to 7, so their use has been pretty limited. It is very difficult for them to do any math, and they've mostly been used for state machines.

* Eight-bit processors can count to 255, or from -128 to 127, so much more useful math can run in a single instruction, and they can directly address hundreds of bytes of RAM, which is low enough an entire program still often requires paging, but at least a routines can reasonably fit in that range. Very small embedded systems still use 8-bit processors.

* Sixteen-bit processors can count to 65,535, or from -32,768 to 32,767, allowing far more math to work in a single instruction, and a computer can have tens of kilobytes of RAM or ROM without any paging, which was small but not uncommon when sixteen-bit processors initially gain popularity.

* Thirty-two-bit processors can count to 4,294,967,295, or from -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647, so it's rare to ever need multiple instructions for a single math operation, and a computer can address four gigabytes of RAM, which was far more than enough when thirty-two-bit processors initially gain popularity. The need for more bits in general-purpose computing plateaus at this point.

* Sixty-four-bit processors can count to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, or from -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 9,223,372,036,854,775,807, so only special-case calculations need multiple instructions for a single math operation, and a computer can address up to sixteen zettabytes of RAM, which is thousands of times more than current supercomputers use. There's so many bits that programs only rarely perform 64-bit operations, and 64-bit instructions are often performing single-instruction-multiple-data operations that use multiple 8-, 16-, or 32-bit numbers stored in a single register.

We're already at the point where we don't gain a lot from true 64-bit instructions, with the registers being more-so used with vector instructions that store multiple numbers in a single register, so a 128-bit processor is kind of pointless. Sure, we'll keep growing the registers specific to vector instructions, but those are already 512-bits wide on the latest processors, and we don't call them 512-bit processors.

Granted, before 64-bit consumer processors existed, no one would have conceived that simultaneously running a few chat interfaces, like Slack and Discord, while browsing a news web page, could fill up more RAM than a 32-bit processor can address, so software using zettabytes of RAM will likely happen as soon as we can manufacture it, thanks to Wirth's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law), but until then there's no likely path to 128-bit consumer processors.
by lich_king | 2026-02-14 23:51:22+00:00
Why is it good for the patient? I think that to claim this, you'd need to show a difference in outcomes.

Here, you have a tool with a ~100% false positive rate, so if we start administering it to everyone, it will almost certainly cost lives. Botched biopsies, unnecessary treatments, other complications. Not to mention the huge cost that would divert money from other welfare programs. So you need to show that when it actually detects something, it saves at least as many lives. And I doubt that's the case.
by enobrev | 2026-02-14 23:52:43+00:00
My house is 150 years old, but it's also been rebuilt several times in that time. My neighbors' houses are less than a decade old. We have all swapped stories about replacing things behind drywall. Leaks. Electrical issues. Ducts. Everything. Consider yourself lucky if you have not. 50 years is not the number you should bet upon.
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-02-14 23:53:09+00:00
Overall, I love this essay. However, the entire argument hinges on one assertion, buried about halfway through:

> Robots are improving fast, but I do not believe that this cute fellow will be stuffing envelopes or affixing stamps anytime soon.

Is this correct? I don't know. If it's wrong... well, then there's a missing pixel in the magic circle, and flood fill will make the whole thing recognizable.
by mgraczyk | 2026-02-14 23:53:30+00:00
Did you read my two options? Do you agree option 2 is better than option 1? If so, then scans are better than no scan

You don't need to show that it's possible to avoid false positives. That's doctors being irrational.

You only need to show that it's possible to build a diagnostic system that's better than no testing, and I have shown that already
by paulryanrogers | 2026-02-14 23:53:52+00:00
Those of us working from the bottom, looking up, do tend to take the clinical progressive approach. Our focus is on the next ticket.

My theory is that executives must be so focused on the future that they develop a (hopefully) rational FOMO. After all, missing some industry shaking phenomenon could mean death. If that FOMO is justified then they've saved the company. If it's not, then maybe the budget suffers but the company survives. Unless of course they bet too hard on a fad, and the company may go down in flames or be eclipsed by competitors.

Ideally there is a healthy tension between future looking bets and on-the-ground performance of new tools, techniques, etc.
by anon7000 | 2026-02-14 23:54:03+00:00
Backend performance issues can grind your system to a halt. It’s basically a requirement for Discord to work reliably.

Front-end performance is not a hard requirement for most end users, unless the app is actually unusable. Discord isn’t that bad compared to some software I’ve used. You have to get beach balls on startup and complete UI freezes for people to really care. If it’s good enough for most people, shaving some MB off the memory usage or small number of ms off latency isn’t important to the business
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-14 23:54:32+00:00
> I think it all boils down to, which is higher risk, using AI too much, or using AI too little?

It's both. It's using the AI too much to code, and too little to write detailed plans of what you're going to code. The planning stage is by far the easiest to fix if the AI goes off track (it's just writing some notes in plain English) so there is a slot-machine-like intermittent reinforcement to it ("will it get everything right with one shot?") but it's quite benign by comparison with trying to audit and fix slop code.
by godelski | 2026-02-14 23:54:38+00:00
What's your point?

The AI is being sold as an expert, not a student. These are categorically different things.

The mistake in the post is one that can be avoided by taking a single class at a community college. No PhD required, not even a B.S., not even an electricians certificate.

So I don't get your point. You're comparing a person in a learning environment to the equivalent of a person claiming to have a PhD in electrical engineering. A student letting the magic smoke escape from a basic circuit is a learnable experience (a memorable one that has high impact), especially when done in a learning environment where an expert can ensure more dangerous mistakes are less likely or non existent. But the same action from a PhD educated engineer would make you reasonably question their qualifications. Yes, humans make mistakes but if you follow the AI's instructions and light things on fire you get sued. If you follow the engineer's instructions and set things on fire then that engineer gets fired likely loses their license.

So what is your point?
by bsimpson | 2026-02-14 23:55:01+00:00
This partially feels like an intentional pendulum swing from Twitter/Facebook cancel culture and other forms of policing.

I'm thinking in particular about the rise of platforms like Discord where being opaque to search/archiving is seen as a feature. Being gatekept and ephemeral makes people more comfortable sharing things that might get a takedown notice on other platforms, and it's hard for people who don't like you in the future to try to find jokes/quotes they don't like to damage your future reputation.

Clearly very different than news articles going offline, but I do think there's been a vibe shift around the internet. People feel overly surveilled in daily life, and take respite in places that make surveillance harder.
by rustyhancock | 2026-02-14 23:55:29+00:00
It's not that MRIs suck at cancer. They provide fantastic structural and functional data.

The problem is the specificity of the results and the prior.

A full body MRI by definition will provide detailed views of areas where the pretest probability for cancer is negligible. That means even a specific test would result in a high risk of false positives.

As a counter point, MRS means that you can now MRI someone's prostate and do NMR on lesions you find.

Lets say someone has lower urinary tract symptoms. And is 60 years old. An MRI could visualize as well as do a analysis that would otherwise require a biopsy. With the raised prior you can be quite sure suspicious lesions are cancerous.

Similarly for CNS tumours. Where fine detail. Subtle diffusion defects can mark csncers you couldn't even see if you cut the person open.

No sensible doctor would give you a whole body CT unless there was a very good reason. That very good reason is probably "we already think you have disseminated cancer". That pushes the prior up.

And less so for a PET/CT. Lets flood you with x-rays and add some beta radiation and gamma to boot!

The danger of an unnecessary CT/PET is causing cancer, the danger of an unnecessary MRI chasing non existent cancer.
by tl2do | 2026-02-14 23:56:04+00:00
It's interesting to see IBM tripling entry-level jobs, seemingly after reassessing the immediate impact of AI. The article frames it as a proactive step to redefine roles and avoid future mid-level talent shortages. However, many "big brothers" in the tech world often seem to go forward and backward on strategic decisions, sometimes at great human cost. Enterprises certainly have the choice to pivot their strategies, but making victims of employees due to flighty decisions, especially given IBM's history with age discrimination allegations, is rude and unacceptable. While new entry-level roles are positive, one has to wonder about the broader context and the stability these positions truly offer.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-02-14 23:56:58+00:00
There's a number of extremely shitty vendor toolchain/IDE combos out there that make adding and managing dependencies unnecessarily painful. Things like only allowing one project to be open at a time, or compiler flags needing to be manually copied to each target.

Now that I'm thinking about it, CMake also isn't particularly good at this the way most people use it.
by nvanlandschoot | 2026-02-14 23:57:09+00:00
“Haiku is faster than Opus” is fine as a simple statement. But if you’re going to say “15× faster” in a model card, it should be at similar accuracy. Otherwise you’re mostly comparing different settings, as opposed to a technological leap in model performance. It’s not technically wrong, it’s just not very useful and a bit misleading as a headline.
by daxfohl | 2026-02-14 23:57:49+00:00
I mean, right now "bleeding edge" is an autonomous agents system that spends a million dollars making an unbelievably bad browser prototype in a week. Very high effort and the results are jibberish. By the time these sorts of things are actually reliable, they'll be productized single-click installer apps on your network server, with a simple web interface to manage them.

If you just mean, "hey you should learn to use the latest version of Claude Code", sure.
by doctor_blood | 2026-02-14 23:58:01+00:00
I can't even stand to visit YT without the combo of Blocktube/Unhook/uBlock Origin/SponsorBlock/Return YouTube Dislike. (Some people may also find Clickbait Remover useful.)

Blocktube is a godsend; it adds a context menu for blocking videos/channels, and you can block vids/channels/comments based on a regex or keywords (e.g. transparently remove every 'minecraft' or 'roblox' vid, or remove every comment with 'Telegram' in it). It even removes vids before the DOM rendering, so blocked vids don't show up as empty title cards or blank spaces.

Unhook lets you independently toggle visibility of the home feed, the rec sidebar, endscreen recs, comments, shorts, and the unrelated BS they ad to search results. (The latest YT update lets endscreen recs slip through again; be sure to add
youtube.com##.html5-video-player.ended-mode .ytp-fullscreen-grid to your ublock filter to get rid of them again.)

Surprisingly YouTube still generates a feed for every channel's video page, so I just add channels to my RSS reader for updates instead of bothering with the increasingly flaky subscriptions page. (If they ever break this or yt-dlp I'm not even going to bother with YT in the future.)

Remember when Google exec Prabhakar Raghavan (the man who previously ran Yahoo search into the ground) made Google Search worse so they could serve more ads?

This is the YouTube philosophy; make the platform worse to drive 'engagement', completely ignoring the second and third order effects of their 'optimizations'. Want to search by upload date? Sorry, we removed that! Have some slop! Want to look for a video? Here's a bunch of unrelated bullshit instead - have you tried some slop? Also, have some ads.

The experience for creators is even worse. The recommendation algorithm and monetization policies change every month and YT conveniently gets to collect all the ad money if you've been demonitized. They're shoving a bajillion AI tools down creator's throats and even editing videos after they've been uploaded.

In the end, YouTube caters to advertisers. You're just the product.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a bot shoving slop in a human's face -- forever.
by susam | 2026-02-14 23:58:02+00:00
Here is another one I found in the userscripts I have written for myself:

// ==UserScript==
// @name No YT Sidebar
// @match https://www.youtube.com/*
// ==/UserScript==
function noYTSidebar () {
if (document.getElementById('secondary') === null) {
window.setTimeout(noYTSidebar, 1000)
} else {
document.getElementById('secondary').style.display = 'none'
}
}
noYTSidebar()
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-02-14 23:58:40+00:00
No, he's right. One should not pin their happiness to things outside their control. If losing your job is traumatic to you, that is a sign you need to work on improving your detachment from outside factors. Obviously we all have bills to pay and would like to keep a roof over our heads, but being traumatized by losing a job is an extremely unhealthy (and abnormal) response.