MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bugufu8f83 | 2026-02-25 22:42:05+00:00
>And this gives away why they do it: the long-term aim is to cultivate voting rings to influence the narratives and rankings in the future. For now, this is only my theory but it may be a real monetization strategy for them.

I don't think it's clear at all why people do this. I suspect a large amount of it, at least on a site like HN, is just hapless morons who think it's "cool".
by tolerance | 2026-02-25 22:42:41+00:00
There’s a git repo associated with this article?

I’m curious because to tell you the truth the novelty struck me as similar to comparisons I’ve toyed with using LLMs on my own. The AI-generated logic between comparing two dissimilar things is too sterile for my liking.

I understand that this is appearing in technical publication, but for some reason that invites even further scrutiny on my behalf.

Please share more reasons behind your suspicions.
Show HN: LazyViewer – TUI code viewer with Git diff previews
by xiphias2 | 2026-02-25 22:42:50+00:00
Hi HN,

While I was coding with Codex I missed a tool that - like Cursor - shows diffs inline while it is able to do both tree navigation easily with keyboard and navigate the source code without changing mode (like in vim).

My favourite tool in TUI was lazygit, but I wanted a way to see the diffs inside the whole source code.

As this looked like a nice little project to vibe code in a few days, I did it and tried to perfect the integration of the few features that I wanted together:
- Full easy keyboard + mouse navigation
- Multiple tree support (unlike VS code / Cursor)
- Inline diff
- Ripgrep fast search
- Sticky function/class headers

I tried tools like ranger and other navigators, and vim NeoTree preview, but none of these tools were really good for my use case.

Now what I got is an ugly code base in a super functional tool
by arjie | 2026-02-25 22:43:23+00:00
I think the better model is to just block everyone who isn't useful to communicate with. For instance the top of this HN page reads (for me): 68 comments | 11 hidden | 3 blocked

The hidden comments are from people in the Top 1000 by word count (who I usually don't want to hear from but if there is not much content I might click to toggle). The blocked are people I've seen argue with others in a useless way because they don't understand them or because they're just re-litigating or whatever (which I cannot toggle). I think it would be cool if people all published their blocklists and I'd pull from those I trust. Sometimes I open HN on my phone through the browser and I'm baffled by all these responses I got which are useless.

I'm surprised by how much more high quality comment threads are now to me and I frequently find that I want to respond to everyone. It's like in old-school mailing lists or forums where you were having a conversation so the other people are worth talking to.

Attention is precious and I wouldn't want to waste it on boring things. And it goes both ways. I communicate incompletely and there are people out there who get what I'm saying and there are people who need me to be more explicit. I would prefer that the latter and people who find me boring just block me.
by lozf | 2026-02-25 22:43:55+00:00
Really nicely done. I usually settle for

xclock -analog -update 1 -norender -hl grey -fg grey -bg black

(You can put a `TZ="Wherever"` variable at the start for different timezones, and those that don't like the seconds ticking can pass e.g. 0.01 instead of 1 to the -update option).

Brits of a certain age will recall (and might appreciate) the clock faces available at https://625.uk.com/tv_logos/flash2.htm#clocks too.
by ak217 | 2026-02-25 22:44:03+00:00
> Civil engineers don’t tell your mayor or your highway commission what to build, their only job is to figure out how it can be built.

I would disagree. The engineers absolutely steer the space of available solutions. Caltrans is a prime example, I have personally met Caltrans engineers who might as well have stepped out of a time machine from 1970. This absolutely influences the priorities of both the state and the cities that depends on the framework it sets up.

And yes city politics is separately a major problem.
by rob | 2026-02-25 22:44:08+00:00
> They're all sloppy. It reads nothing like an LLM.

I love how the bot forgot to read CLAUDE.md or whatever persona it set up (e.g., "make me text all lowercase, use -- instead of em dashes pleaseeee") for this single comment mixed in with the other ones:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47132431

Sadly, I think that bot comment without the 'snowhale' persona filter applied is what a lot of people here still think every bot is going to look and sound like, because the amount of people I've seen on here getting tricked by them and interacting with them has been a bit worrisome.
by selridge | 2026-02-25 22:44:38+00:00
Alignment is impossible here. “Nearly certain” odds for success for a sports team might be 20:1, but that’s a little worse (not much!) than for a launch vehicle and not at all good for a web server. No one would say “it is nearly certain that I’ll serve a web request” based on two 9’s, but they would say “it is nearly certain the team will win today” given the same odds. That’s just between humans.
by mcv | 2026-02-25 22:44:41+00:00
Self-driving cars still take up space on the road. Even more than human-driven cars, because now there will also be cars transporting 0 people. It's going to make congestion worse. Public transit is the solution to congestion. Well, one of the solutions, because bikes are probably a better solution for most people: they do start in front of your home, can park anywhere, and don't cause congestion the way cars do.

We're talking about cities, of course; in rural areas, nothing beats cars.
by xenadu02 | 2026-02-25 22:44:50+00:00
Indeed, the problem is the same in Texas which is about as opposite California as you can get. Sprawling suburbs over old farm fields. Installing infrastructure is vastly cheaper when you are doing so in an unoccupied empty field.

None of those cities are saving money or even _planning_ for the inevitable repaving, pipe re-lining, etc. Worse: many of them were built up in waves so much of the city's infrastructure will "come due" around the same time.

I never imagined we would see San Francisco (of all places) overhaul its permit process. I can now build a deck in my backyard, add a story to my house, or build an ADU without having to pay DBI to send certified letters to all my neighbors asking if they'd like to object, then being forced in front of the planning commission when they do so. That's a direct result of the pro-housing legislation at the state level, something Wiener has been heavily involved in.
by janalsncm | 2026-02-25 22:45:13+00:00
Marginal changes cut in both directions. The transport duration between A and B is only one part of the calculation. A rider also needs to get from their starting point to A, and from B to their destination.

Decreasing the number of As and Bs by half might reduce that 20% start/stop time by half, shaving 10% off the total time. (This is ignoring the fact that more people will need to board and leave at each stop, which might mean in reality you’re saving like 8%.)

But you will also increase the distance walked to the bus stop. That means battling cars and weather.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-25 22:45:47+00:00
At my work, one thing that I've often had to explain to devs is that the Parallel collector (and even the serial collector) are not bad just because they are old or simple. They aren't always the right tool, but for us who do a lot of batch data processing, it's the best collector around for that data pipeline.

Devs keep on trying to sneak in G1GC or ZGC because they hyper focus on pause time as being the only metric of value. Hopefully this new log:cpu will give us a better tool for doing GC time and computational costs. And for me, will make for a better way to argue that "it's ok that the parallel collector had a 10s pause in a 2 hour run".
by porphyra | 2026-02-25 22:45:50+00:00
If notepad were to support Markdown by giving it a nice syntax highlighting and niceties like clickable links and automatic list numbering, while preserving the monospaced font, then that would be great. But with rich text formatting it has all the pitfalls of WYSIWYG editors like accidentally changing the style of something, having "formatting typos" where you tried highlighting only part of a word before making it bold, using the wrong header type, etc.
by jmyeet | 2026-02-25 22:46:10+00:00
Yeah, that's a lie. It's propaganda.

Consider as just one example the lawsuit over child slavery against Nestle, etc [1]. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Nestle can't be held responsible for the child slavery even though they have full knowledge of it happening. Go figure. In fact, that's what they pay for.

The whole shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh is incredibly dangerous for those involved and couldn't possibly be done in any developed nation.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/12/m...
Show HN: AI-runtime-guard – Policy enforcement layer for MCP AI agents
by JimmyRacheta | 2026-02-25 22:47:17+00:00
I built this after realizing that AI agents with filesystem and shell access can delete files, leak credentials, or execute destructive commands — and there's no enforcement layer stopping them at the execution level.

ai-runtime-guard is an MCP server that sits between your AI agent and your system. It enforces a policy layer before any file or shell action takes effect. No retraining, no prompt engineering, no changes to your agent or workflow.

Your agent can say anything. It can only do what policy allows.

What it does:
- Blocks dangerous commands (rm -rf, dd, shutdown, privilege escalation) before execution
- Gates risky commands behind human approval via a web GUI
- Simulates blast radius for wildcard operations before they run
- Creates automatic backups before destructive actions
- Full audit trail of everything the agent does

Works with Claude Desktop, Cursor, Codex, and any stdio MCP-compatible client. Default profile is basic protection out of the box — advanced tiers are opt-in.

Validated on macOS Apple Silicon. Linux expected to work, formal validation coming in v1.1.

Would love feedback from anyone running AI agents with filesystem access.
by originalvichy | 2026-02-25 22:47:18+00:00
This is something even defense analysts have been hammering about tirelessly. The American pivot to counter China should not come at the cost of the Atlantic relationship. Using Cold war scare tactics against China will not work, because China is not in the sphere of European countries that were under the shadow of Russia. China’s language and culture are so far removed from the rest of the world that the risk of direct conflict would not be a matter outside of Taiwan, and cultural hegemony will not take place in the same way Russia tried and at times succeeded.

It feels doubly stupid that not only did American Business sell out their nations’ economic base to Chinese competitors decades back, they fumbled again and sold out to the guy who (yet again) damaged relations of countries funding the service, finance and defense sectors of the US. So now you lost the manufacturing base and you lost the other money-makers. No wonder they are going all-in on fossil fuels to Europe.

No other company is as clear an example of this double whammy as Tesla. Move manufacturing to China to lose the technological edge, and alienate end-users, to lose the customer base.
by legitster | 2026-02-25 22:48:08+00:00
The full preamble of the Mississippi declaration is fascinating, and further shuts down doubters that the civil war wasn't about slavery and racism:

> Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin

Also, they clearly make the case that cotton was the most important good in the world, perhaps imploring the intercession of foreign powers.

I think it's worth pointing out though that these people were not being honest with themselves - nothing in their argument about the importance of cotton suggests it couldn't have been done with wage labor. They are dancing around the fact that only a very few benefit from slavery.
by scoofy | 2026-02-25 22:48:19+00:00
When I say "trivially fix" I mean that, if the City/State wanted to fix the problem, they could.

>Re-zoning only works if there are developers who want to redevelop the land.

Developers very obviously want to redevelop the vast majority of LA. The marginal cost of a housing unit is vastly higher than the cost of building that unit. To raise long-term tax revenues, LA could not just legalize redevelopment. They could actually incentivize it.

>For existing neighborhoods this means buying dozens of SFH from people who don't want to move.

The people living in SFH don't want to move exactly because they're not generating enough tax revenue to keep the city afloat (mostly due to Prop 13). Eventually the city will start having to raise taxes very dramatically or declare bankruptcy. That's the entire message from Strong Towns.

The more we put it off, the bigger the impact will be. When your city is effectively long-run insolvent, but you have the ability to change that even if it's politically unpopular (and LA does), then it's "trivially" doable, it's just that people don't want to.

That's not the case in many other cities.

In other cities demand isn't there. People will just leave when taxes go up, and the town will declare bankruptcy. At that point, they will effectively lose most of their population, or people will just live without things like clean water. An example of this happening is Jackson Mississippi, where the water system failed, and the city didn't have the money to fix it. The ultimate solution was just a federal bailout, which is not sustainable if these types of crises become endemic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Mississippi_water_cri...
by api | 2026-02-25 22:49:42+00:00
Re: slavery: I've wondered before if the arrow of causation might go both ways. Slavery has existed throughout history. With slaves, what's the incentive to industrialize? You have "free" and captive human labor. But take that away, and suddenly the idea of machines doing stuff for you seems a lot more compelling.

Slavery also displaces industry in the economy. Slave-driven industries compete with industrial development for investment funds and production driven by slave labor can compete with mechanized production. But if labor is suddenly expensive, mechanized production has an advantage, and if former slaves are now getting paid there are also more customers for the output of that production.

So industrialization may have played some role in abolition, but did abolition also drive industrialization? Slavery was abolished in Britain in the early 19th century and Britain was also the cradle of the industrial revolution, which started to hit very shortly after. America did not explode industrially until after it abolished slavery.

If we'd abolished slavery in Roman times we might have terraformed Mars by now.
Ask HN: Is meaningful privacy possible with hosted AI models?
by heimdallr | 2026-02-25 22:49:59+00:00
I've been thinking about the privacy tradeoffs when using frontier AI models like Claude or chatgpt.

Even with a VPN, providers still see prompts, and usage is tied to accounts and payment methods linked to identity in some way.

I've been trying to find a way to access these models without creating provider-specific accounts tied to my identity. Ideally, through some kind of intermediary that abstracts identity and doesn't retain prompts.

From a technical and economic perspective, would that kind of setup meaningfully improve privacy, or does it just shift trust? Is meaningful privacy with hosted AI fundamentally unrealistic regardless of architecture?
by deadbabe | 2026-02-25 22:50:11+00:00
Doesn’t all this deanonymization stuff depend on one fatal assumption: that people are actually being truthful with what they say about themselves?

If you’re basically LARPing a new personality every time and just making up details about where you live or what your life is like then how is this ever going to work? Someone could say they live in San Francisco while actually living in Indiana.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-25 22:50:39+00:00
Yeah, but everything since then has been evolutionary.

There's nothing really new in computing at the moment. We've made transistors smaller so memory is denser and processors are faster. We've made better batteries. Really the big step change was flash memory and Li-Ion.

What's the Big New Thing going to be, what's the 21st Century's PDP11 going to be?
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-25 22:51:01+00:00
notepad is supposed to be like the 'nano' for windows. it's already bloated.

But this is just following a pattern, the enshittified even calc.exe and mspaint. Previewing pictures in windows is shamefully slow because the previewer is also a bloat.

My diagnosis is that Microsoft doesn't have good technical leadership. It has spread the risk of bad decisions by individual leaders by spreading it amongst too many decision makers, and those people aren't always technically apt, or they have aptitude within their specific domain of expertise. Why is the start menu in react native for example.

they also have a crippling illness in the form of sunken-cost fallacy. Even when no one is especially depending on it, they go all-or-nothing on tech stacks and design patterns. Marketing and branding ultimately, I think is their biggest problem. You know how they name everything terribly? that's trying to capitalize on existing branding. This is fundamentally the mindset of salespeople. they could be spinning a new app, or making a vscode-lite ship with windows, but brand familiarity is why they're messing with notepad.

It is truly dumbfounding, they're being run like HP and IBM but because of how much the world relies on them, and because of Azure they're making so much profit.

Why are the shareholders no enraged even more? To have such a vast marketshare and failing to capitalize on it is terrible. They could be doing better than Apple. Even apple sees the writing on the wall and adapts their strategy fundamentally by starting to make their own silicon. It's like having a barn full of chicken that lay golden eggs, but the farmer is slaughtering them for their meat, and the farmer's employer doesn't care because chicken meat is still making good enough profits.
by simonw | 2026-02-25 22:51:02+00:00
> You believe that we'll all become cyborg centaurs, while the managers believe we'll all become redundant

I hope that we'll all become cyborg centaurs, and that people who think software engineers will all become redundant will be proved very wrong.

I'm trying to use what little influence I have to push things in that direction by ensuring software engineers have the knowledge and tools they need to become cyborg centaurs.

There is a very real chance that you're right, and that the way LLMs are going will massively disrupt the lives of software engineers in a very bad way.

I don't think that's a foregone conclusion yet, and I'm continuing to hope (and in my own tiny way push) for a better path.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-25 22:51:10+00:00
> In an alternate universe, public transport is run to compete with the car, and attracts all demographics. Day-to-day operations are un-subsidised, and therefore relatively expensive. It competes on value. People use it because it's a better experience than driving.

The problem with this in the US is that it's nearly impossible for the bus to be faster than a car without making the car slower on purpose, and the latter is the thing which is going to create the most opposition, because you're essentially screwing people over during the transition period -- which would take years if not decades.

In the meantime people still can't take the bus because the higher density housing that makes mass transit viable where they live hasn't been built yet etc., and as long as they're stuck in a car they're going to fight you hard if you try to make being stuck in a car even worse.

Meanwhile, cars are expensive. ~$500/mo for a typical car payment, another $100+ for insurance, another $100+ for gas, you're already at $8400+/year per vehicle before adding repairs and maintenance etc. For a two-car household that's more than 20% of the median household income. Make mass transit completely free and people start preferring the housing where mass transit is viable, which means more of it gets built, which is the thing you need to actually make it work.
by aceelric | 2026-02-25 22:51:15+00:00
After reading Cloudflare's Code Mode MCP blog post[1] I built CMCP[2] which lets you aggregate all MCP servers behind two mcp tools, search and execute.

I do understand anthropic's Tool Search helps with mcp bloat, but it's limited only to claude.

CMCP currently supports codex and claude but PRs are welcome to add more clients.

[1]https://blog.cloudflare.com/code-mode-mcp/
[2]https://github.com/assimelha/cmcp
by TLDRisk | 2026-02-25 22:51:38+00:00
It's the registry, not the registrar. I made a website that tries to help explain some of the lesser known nuances and risks relating to domains. The section about domain reclassification is based on first hand experience and is especially interesting IMO:

https://tldrisk.com/beyond-basics/reclassification/

> This basically makes the entire TLD unviable for serious use.

It doesn't just make the TLD in question unusable. I think it makes most of the new gTLDs unusable. Registries can enact policies and systems like this, regardless of the detriment to registrants, due to a lack of oversight and registrant consideration by ICANN. That creates uncertainty and makes it pragmatic for registrants to simply choose the gTLDs with lots of history and precedence; .com, .org, etc..

The only two TLDs I'd personally rely on are .com (gTLD) and .ca (ccTLD).
by jmyeet | 2026-02-25 22:51:52+00:00
My two thoughts:

1. China has been completely vindicated for blocking US tech domination of their local economy and creating Chinese versions of basically everything. Tech independence has become an issue of national security; and

2. There's no putting this genie back in the bottle. At some point the EU is going to make it a priority to replace all US tech companies with local alternatives. The EU is kinda dysfunctional so they won't see the success China has but I now consider this outcome inevitable.

This is the insanity of the current administration: it's done so much to destroy US soft power.
by mlsu | 2026-02-25 22:52:13+00:00
I mean, is the goal of an elite college to educate? Or is the benefit to sift through the population and pluck out its masters?

I don't really care that UC has a lower "reputation" than Harvard or Stanford. The fact is, the UC system has produced more fundamental research and more actual value for the population and the world at large than Harvard or Stanford. Even if a UC degree is not quite the "golden ticket" that an Stanford degree is.

Concentrating individuals into a smaller and smaller elite benefits them and only them. The U.S. has done this with capital allocation in its economy and it has and will continue to be a century long arc bending toward utter disaster.

What do we actually care about here? Education?