MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by blurbleblurble | 2026-02-06 19:37:49+00:00
Take a look at the actual 2019 OLA report McKenzie cites. This characterization is wrong in ways that matter.

The "50% fraud" claim? It comes from one investigator (Swanson) using what the OLA explicitly calls "a higher level view, a view that does not require the kind of proof needed in a criminal or administrative proceeding." His methodology? If kids are poorly supervised, "running from room to room while adult employees spend hours in hallways chatting".... he counts the entire payment as fraud. That's not "billing for phantom children" it's "I don't like how this daycare is run."

The OLA's actual finding: "We did not find evidence to substantiate the allegation that the level of CCAP fraud in Minnesota is $100 million annually." Proven fraud over several years was $5-6 million.

Terrorism? "We were unable to substantiate the allegation that individuals in Minnesota sent CCAP fraud money to a foreign country where a terrorist organization obtained and used the money." They checked with the U.S. Attorney's Office.. none of Minnesota's terrorism cases involved CCAP money.

McKenzie writes "beyond intellectually serious dispute" about claims the primary source he cites explicitly could not substantiate.

Meanwhile the president is posting videos of the Obamas as apes and calling Somalis "garbage", having federal prosecutors throwing out arbitrary $9 billion estimates in press conferences.

See for yourself: https://www.auditor.leg.state.mn.us/sreview/ccap.pdf
by nosianu | 2026-02-06 19:37:56+00:00
> It was you who brought the former into the conversation.

Liar! That is mentioned by many throughout this discussion!

> Which British parties are active in the United States?

What does THAT have to do with anything??? Why do YOIU suddenly limit this international phenomenon to just the US? I explicitly pointed out that it is older and international and not recent and US-only! If you cannot cope with that information, it is your problem, not mine.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-06 19:38:44+00:00
> Because if my tax dollars enable otherwise less well off people to live a lifestyle closer to my own

That's a very big 'if'. Less well off people have to pay taxes too, such as payroll taxes on their labor income, or sales taxes on essential purchases that amount to a large fraction of what they spend money on. And government redistribution is extremely inefficient. They'd be far better off if most of these taxes were done away with for lower-income folks, letting them keep far more of what they earn from their work.
by martythemaniak | 2026-02-06 19:38:59+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone

A critical part of media literacy is not just evaluating a piece of work at face value, but considering who wrote it, why they wrote it, why they wrote it now, what they didn't write etc. The article itself is actually not really interesting, but why this person wrote this article now is interesting.
by comboy | 2026-02-06 19:39:39+00:00
OK, but is it a problem if you get recommended repos on github? What I mean that perhaps it's not the good recommendation algorithm that is the problem? It seems like banning tcp/ip because porn is bad.

In China for example (IIRC) below 18 you cannot use these apps past some hour and not above some time limit per day. That seems far from correct solution but seems better than banning it outright and seems to be addressing most concerns.

Personalized content is crucial for functioning information platforms. Imagine if usenet had a single group only. The information sea is vast and the ways to browse and access it seem to only be diminishing. Relaying solely on LLMs outputs does not seem like a safe bet. We've been living off black boxes outputs since altavista, but it's nice to at least have many different black boxes to chose from.

(HN is very much a FYP, it's just that.we like similar stuff)
by mbreese | 2026-02-06 19:39:55+00:00
I don’t think PCR is necessarily relevant here. I had the impression that this would be lost useful at linking multi-kb fragments together. If we are looking at sizes much above 2kb, PCR is going to struggle to generate full length fragments efficiently.

I didn’t see this technique as having DNA modification per-se, but a novel way to managing the hybridization process. It’s stock (well engineered) oligos, if I read it correctly.
by coffeemug | 2026-02-06 19:40:14+00:00
I've recently switched to Claude for chat. GPT 5.2 feels very engagement-maxxed for me, like I'm reading a bad LinkedIn post. Claude does a tiny bit of this too, but an order of magnitude less in my experience. I never thought I'd switch from ChatGPT, but there is only so much "here's the brutal truth, it's not x it's y" I can take.
by rrrx3 | 2026-02-06 19:40:25+00:00
As a former adtech guy, as a general rule of thumb, I consider _all ads everywhere_ to be scams.

Apple using Taboola is so hysterical because of their claim to focus on user experience. Taboola ads are a chumbox of the absolute worst bullshit ads on the market. The only thing worse is the zergnet stuff.
by potsandpans | 2026-02-06 19:40:51+00:00
To be a bit pedantic, I'm not accusing you of being a Luddite. That would mean that you were fundamentally opposed to a new technology that's obviously more useful.

Instead, in my opinion you are not giving enough grace to what is being demonstrated today.

This is my analogy: you're seeing electrical demonstrations in front of your very eyes, but because the charlatans who are funding the research haven't quite figured out how to harness it, you're dismissing the wonder. "That's all well and good, but my beeswax candles and gas lamps light my apartment just fine."
by ericskiff | 2026-02-06 19:41:11+00:00
Wooooow, I LOVED this site when it first came out and I still reference it when I talk about the early web and how it enabled me to learn things I never would have otherwise. I can still picture the animation of the wankel rotary engine from this site whenever I think about it.

This and howstuffworks.com made me so hopeful for the future of the web when I was young
by mothballed | 2026-02-06 19:41:14+00:00
Sure, for instance, SCOTUS justice RBG once wrote a minority opinion in Rice v Cayetano that it is OK to ban certain races from voting in certain public elections. Obviously, RBG was a flaming racist and thankfully her opinion was overruled.

So yes I would say people like Ruth Ginsberg who didn't believe in the 15th amendment allowing equal voting rights with regards to race, are racists.
by moltymolt | 2026-02-06 19:41:25+00:00
That's an interesting idea. It's a good solution to the problem of sharing all your passwords with your loved ones posthumously. Typically that'd involve keeping everything in a vault which will automatically be released to your person of choice if you failed to reset it. The annoying part is having to reset it indefinitely. I like your idea where you share it with multiple people in advance but they would have to collectively decide to unlock it.
by layman51 | 2026-02-06 19:41:26+00:00
Your post reminded me of a video on the an imported TVR Tuscan, filmed by Doug DeMuro where he covers this too. The TVR Tuscan is one of those cars where if the rear trunk is open, you can’t see the turn signal lights. In the video it is claimed that because of that, by laws in the UK, the trunk must have a triangular exclamation point sign as a safety precaution to let other drivers know when the vehicle is immobile.

That is around the seven minute mark of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32u6KPTALxg
by TZubiri | 2026-02-06 19:41:33+00:00
This is quite on brand for China. I think they are experts at reverse engineering and learning 'from context' rather than by formal consumption of foreign training material.

The fictional training data with a made up country and laws was a very interesting experiment design, I can imagine that's how they approach making business with other countries. Like an alien made up system they have to learn on the spot.
by orwin | 2026-02-06 19:41:39+00:00
Really depends on the company. For me it isn't true, but it used to be when i worked at a bank with terrible management. Nowadays i'm in a tooling team (for Network and security teams), where my "clients" are other devs from the same company. Of course we still have negotiation, but i'd say 60-80% of my time is spend coding, and that's with me being basically a "senior".

And by the way, one thing is missing from the OP graph: i now spend maybe 50% less time writing my own code, and 100% more time fixing my juniors PRs and fixing production issues after my reviews miss issues...
by nerdsniper | 2026-02-06 19:41:51+00:00
I think Elon announced Tesla was ditching LIDAR in 2019.[0] This was before Mobileye offered LIDAR. Mobileye has used LIDAR from Luminar Technologies around 2022-2025. [1][2] They were developing their own lidar, but cancelled it. [3] They chose Innoviz Technologies as their LIDAR partner going forward for future product lines. [4]

0: https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/22/anyone-relying-on-lidar-is...

1: https://static.mobileye.com/website/corporate/media/radar-li...

2: https://www.luminartech.com/updates/luminar-accelerates-comm...

3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vvg9heQObyQ&t=48s

4: https://ir.innoviz.tech/news-events/press-releases/detail/13...
by 9rx | 2026-02-06 19:41:53+00:00
> If you ask the compiler to compile the same input, it will produce the same output.

As with LLMs, unless you ask for the output to be nondeterministic. But any compiler can be made nondeterministic if you ask for it. That's not something unique to LLMs.

> With LLMs the output depends on the phases of the moon.

If you are relying on a third-party service to run the LLM, quite possibly. Without control over the hardware, configuration, etc. then there is all kinds of fuckery that they can introduce. A third-party can make any compiler nondeterministic.

But that's not a limitation of LLMs. By design, they are deterministic.
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-02-06 19:42:00+00:00
I tried qualifying for PBP with some friends and we were fried on the 600. We did some longer rides, but never so intensively and without rest. Such good times. Maybe one day (likely when my kids are grown) I'll try again. I still dream of eating so much French food after annihilating myself on a bicycle. It sound incredible.
by codexon | 2026-02-06 19:42:34+00:00
Top AI researchers like Yann LeCunn have said that LLMs are a dead end.

It seems to me that LLM performance is plateuing and not improving exponentially anymore. This recent hubbub about rewriting a worse GCC for $20,000 is another example of overhype and regurgitating training data.

You don't know for sure if it is going to "snow" (AI reaches general intelligence) Snow happens frequently, AI reaching general intelligence has never happened. If it ever happens, 99% of jobs are gone and there is really nothing you can do to prepare for this other than maybe buy guns and ammo, and even that might not do anything to robotic soldiers.

People were worried about AI taking their jobs 60 years ago when perceptrons came out, and anyone who avoided a tech career because of that back then would have lost out majorly.
by joshuamerrill | 2026-02-06 19:42:36+00:00
It’s impressive to see simulation training for floods, tornadoes, and wildfires. But it’s also kind of baffling that a city full of Waymos all seemed to fail simultaneously in San Francisco when the power went out on Dec 22.

A power outage feels like a baseline scenario—orders of magnitude more common than the disasters in this demo. If the system can’t degrade gracefully when traffic lights go dark, what exactly is all that simulation buying us?
by nosianu | 2026-02-06 19:42:49+00:00
> that does not automatically mean that the former implies the latter

Why do you invent something I didn't say? I know why: People like you, when they don't have any arguments they just go and invent something and pretend like they just scored a point. If you are inventing stuff, you may as well chat with yourself, since you don't care what the other person actually says.

Also, your argument is arguable at best. What is a border when crossing it without permission is not illegal? So yes, now that you bring it up, I would actually very much argue that one implies the other.
by palmotea | 2026-02-06 19:43:25+00:00
> It’s just like… why?! I can’t wrap my head around it. There’s no downside to being able to top off on milk and eggs by taking a leisurely stroll on a sunny Saturday morning. That sounds downright idyllic.

Traffic? Parking?

Yesterday I went to a neighborhood corner coffee shop that I'd never been to before. They had a little parking lot across the street that was full (and a disaster, I had to back out onto the street), so I had to park around the block in front of someone's house. All the street parking near the shop was full.

I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.

> People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away

There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away." I can literally drive all the way across my metro area in about 45 minutes, passing dozens and dozens of grocery stores, coffee shops, and restaurants during the journey. A 45 min drive is a huge distance.
by munk-a | 2026-02-06 19:43:26+00:00
Things need to be paid for but not everything needs to be paid for by everyone and most things are far cheaper than you'd expect. I played a MUD (and met my partner there!) for several years in college and afterwards. Initially I offered no financial support (since I was a starving college student) but when I had a job I sent in 10 bucks a month. That was a quarter of the cost to run a server, website and forum for about 120 people, we were generally overfunded but that was the cost of a wow subscription at the time and this was worth more to me.

Usually a few enthusiasts can just bear the lion's share of the cost to create the infrastructure for a community, excess can go to long term contingency funding and, in the unfortunate case that a community completely runs out of funds then it'll stop existing until people care enough to create a new one.

Video hosting and the like are dramatically more expensive but they can be reasonably subscription based (see Nebula and Dropout[2] neither of which have the VC backing to light piles of money on fire just to sustain a user base) but not everything needs such a high level of technology.

Heck, back in the day the majority of traffic that a website that was ad-driven needed to host was the ads - if you were half-decent at writing asset caching rules images became a non-issue that were usually handled by proxies/other intermediaries.

Everything costs money - but it's important to remember that a lot of services charge a lot more money than they cost to run and that ad money is a lot less money than most people realize[1].

1. A big exception to this being things like newspapers which really are in a hard place. Their expense isn't in hosting or other technical doodads (e.g. the NYT Crossword puzzle) - the subscription you're paying is to afford the huge team of reporters and editors that are needed to produce the information gathering and presentation.

2. Edited to add - Dropout is probably a terrible example here since it's a lot more like a newspaper, only a sliver of the cost is technical, most of it goes to the production team and talent they're retaining. But I'll leave it in there unedited.
by AngryData | 2026-02-06 19:44:46+00:00
Have you ever tried to pull or push a wheeled cart up a large hill? Wheels are not super useful on steep terrain or unbroken ground and are often a liability without a bullet proof brake to stop it from trying to roll away when you stop. If the land isn't super rough or steep then wheels are great, but when it is you are going to have to work twice as hard.
by joriJordan | 2026-02-06 19:45:00+00:00
Physics is ageist. Our financially engineered economy GenX is currently benefiting from is ageism against youth.

I am an older Millennial who has worked with GenX for two decades.

They have been the worst colleagues. More often sexist, racist, classist, nihilistic than Boomer colleagues who kept it polite.

GenX make up a huge chunk of the anti-woke crowd. Hop on TikTok and witness all the 50+ Kid Rock Stan's complain about blue haired lesbian GenZ women and trans people.

Millennials and GenZ aren't pushing those memes with the same numbers.

GenX is the only generation that has not soured on Trump since he started his second term.

I have been paying attention.
by nicoburns | 2026-02-06 19:45:27+00:00
> They'd be far better off if most of these taxes were done away with for lower-income folks, letting them keep far more of what they earn from their work.

Well I'd certainly be in favour of a more progressive taxation system that taxes higher earners more and lower earners less, and puts more emphasis on wealth and income (incl. capita gains) taxes and less on sales taxes.

But I'm also realistic that as a software engineer, my salary is above the average, and thus in such a setup I'd likely end up paying more.
by hackrmn | 2026-02-06 19:45:56+00:00
Thanks for this gem!

This brings back _memories_! I think I won't even stand out from the crowd here mentioning me and the gang watched the hell out of the VHS back when, in our circle it was a different world than I suppose even for people in the West who loved it. We're so far removed this became a cult classic long before it became cult classic everywhere else. Needless to say, Angelina Jolie's character made quite an impression on this young mind :-) Damn, quotes from this movie live rent-free in my head. I was already quite a fan of Orbital when I saw Hackers for the first time. It was also at the end of "Mortal Kombat", by the way -- but Hackers used it marginally better still IMO.

Hacker had HEART, man. It was cheesy but the feeling it left in an entire sub-culture of a generation, cannot be underestimated. I am reading some of the other stories here, and it brings smile to my face knowing me and my gang weren't the only ones the movie imprinted on.

Woha, this isn't woodshop class?!
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-06 19:45:59+00:00
> journalists that felt compelled to point out that whilst evidence of daycare fraud by Somalis in Minnesota definitely existed, Shirley's videos probably shouldn't be considered part of it.

Ah they pulled out the classic 'this wasn't "real" journalism so you should all ignore it'.

Of course so called journalists in the legacy mainstream media would be compelled to say that, because people like Nick SHirley are a threat to their jobs, so their only defence to save face on how this happened under their noses while they failed to report on it when investigating stuff like this is their literal job, is to slander those independants like Nick SHirley that exposed their incompetence and threaten their multi billion dollar media empire who wishes to have the monopoly on what's "the truth" or what's "journalism".

The usual counter argument to this is "but the real journalists already reported once about the fraud six years ago". And my answer to that would be Oh, so the fraud was knowingly going on for six years already and still not done anything about it?!
by kristjansson | 2026-02-06 19:46:02+00:00
> Responsible actors in civil society have a mandate to aggressively detect and interdict fraud. If they do not, they cede the field to irresponsible demagogues. They will not be careful in their conclusions. They will not be gentle in their proposals. They will not carefully weigh consequences upon the innocent. But they will be telling a truth that the great and the good are not.

Leaving this to the conclusion does the piece a disservice. One can quibble (and it would be good to here) the extent to which the government isn't pursuing the sorts of fraud discussed, but this as a thesis makes clearer the argument throughout for earlier and more aggressive pursuit.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2026-02-06 19:46:24+00:00
If true, what difference would this make to the end user stuck with Windows

A dissatisfied Windows end user might reason this only makes the company look more pathetic

As if "100,000 engineers" is not enough to fix or replace Windows

Possibly these "100,000 engineers" do a wide variety of tasks, including producing high quality software, but to the outside observer producing better Windows software is not amongst them

Perhaps these "100,000 engineers" love working for Microsoft and they think Windows is good enough

As such, a dissatisfied Windows user such as the parent commenter might have no reason to care that these "100,000 engineers" exist, what they produce or the allleged quality of their work product

The perspective of (a) someone promoting "AI" alongside Microsoft, (b) a satisfied Windows user, (c) a Windows developer, (d) etc., might be different. Depending on their situation, different people may have different opinions

Moreover, the issue being addressed by this "library OS"^1 and by the parent commenter is _trust_, which of course is broader than product quality ("good vs bad")

Microsoft, its leadership, has violated the trust of so many people for so long, going back to its earliest days as a company, it is entirely reasonable to distrust Microsoft no matter how many people collect a paycheck from the company, what any of those people do or whether what they do is "good" or "bad"

1. The Reddit commenter seems to suggest publishing this source code may be a preemptive measure aimed at Azure "Confidential Computing" customers who have been alarmed by recent events

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2026/01/22/micro...
by nickff | 2026-02-06 19:46:36+00:00
If you want a TLDR; style take-away, the last paragraph is a good place to start:

>"Responsible actors in civil society have a mandate to aggressively detect and interdict fraud. If they do not, they cede the field to irresponsible demagogues. They will not be careful in their conclusions. They will not be gentle in their proposals. They will not carefully weigh consequences upon the innocent. But they will be telling a truth that the great and the good are not.

The public will believe them, because the public believes its lying eyes."
by kccqzy | 2026-02-06 19:47:04+00:00
Remembering state is a giant oversight on many apps for content consumption, Apple News included. I sometimes read long articles on Apple News. I could be interrupted by a call or some messages. When I return to Apple News, it displays my half-finished article for a split second and returns to the home screen.

This is worse than using reading news on a browser. Browsers either don’t kill your tabs on its own (desktop browsers) or at least try to remember your scroll position. Even if it fails at doing that, it at least has a history feature. Apple News just makes your half-read articles disappear into the void.
by Tor3 | 2026-02-06 19:47:33+00:00
"There are examples of tribal humans not being able to perceive a green square among blue squares, because their language does not have a word for the green color.

Similarly, some use the same word for blue and white, and are unable to perceive them as different colors."

Both of the above is false. There are a ton of different colors that I happen to call "red", that does not mean that I can't perceive them as different. That I don't call them "different colors" is completely irrelevant. And unable to perceive blue and white as different colors? You must be joking. Even a hypothetical language which only used a single word for non-black items, say, "color", for everything else, would be able to perceive the difference with zero problems.

Japanese use "aoi" for a set of colors which in English would be separated into "blue" and "green". I can assure you (from personal experience) that every Japanese speaker with a fully functioning visual system is perfectly able to perceive the difference between, in this case, blue and green as we would call them.