MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DroneBetter | 2026-02-23 15:59:24+00:00
counterpoint to
> easily four or five years of study just to play around a bit
it depends significantly on the branch of maths you choose! I've been told by a professor of fluid mechanics that he has difficulty posing and approving subjects of undergrad dissertations because the knowledge threshold for contributing meaningful ideas reliably is so high, but in my primary interest (combinatorics) this is very much not the case.

the OEIS is replete with old sequences that no-one has considered in much detail in a decade or two, and have a lot of 'low-hanging fruit' for one willing to toy with them.

https://oeis.org/A185105 is a good example of such a sequence; "sample the elements of a random permutation of [n] in a random order and record each one's cycle (under repeated iteration), then T(n,k)/n! is the expected of the kth distinct cycle recorded," which seems like it would have been of some interest to someone in the last ≈13 years (since ie. it's well-known that the first cycle's length is uniform in [1..n]), but didn't receive any formulas until I happened upon it recently with my own toolbelt (which is quite modest and certainly could be learned in less than 4 years).

the OEIS is an excellent resource for both readinh and sharpening one's amateur teeth on novel (ie. unexplored, or at least undocumented) problems and very rewarding, if that's your goal with learninh maths
by zerkten | 2026-02-23 15:59:43+00:00
I think it's reasonable to distinguish which side drove this. RAM prices are going up but it's not engineered primarily by RAM manufacturers. They are naturally jumping on the bandwagon and responding, but they aren't the drivers. Of course, how they respond matters. They could make other choices. Over time we'll see how this goes because AI could cool and then RAM manufacturers end up in a spot where they choose to manipulate prices to keep them higher.
by kreerc | 2026-02-23 16:00:14+00:00
Introducing WebAccessBench, a novel benchmark for AI language models to assess accessibility quality and WCAG conformance in generated web interfaces under realistic prompting conditions.

I did a bit of research and found that LLMs are incredibly bad at basic digital accessibility tasks. You can compare models and read the full white paper at conesible.de/wab.

Overall data shows that guiding a model with expert-grade prompts has very little effect over a small nudge. The benchmark results suggest that objective error count is too high to rely on LLM technology at all in digital accessibility work, even under explicit expert guidance. It also suggests massive implications for society at large, and major discrimination of people with disabilities.
by willio58 | 2026-02-23 16:00:43+00:00
Based on that list it boils down to 2 things it seems:

- cost (no longer a problem)

- too much code needed and it bloats the data pipelines. Does anyone have any actual evidence of this being the case? Like yes, code would be needed, but why is that innately a bad thing? Bloated data pipelines feels like another hand-wave when I think if you do it right it’s fine. As proven by Waymo.
by AdamN | 2026-02-23 16:00:43+00:00
I'm an outsider (not Catholic, raised Methodist) who just happens to be attending church this year; I'm not a member. The church is interesting because it's an immigrant church which is truly global (in Berlin with English speaking people from all over the place).

'Fear' is a strong word but I mean it in the same way as I do when talking about reading comments in the Wall Street Journal- I'm afraid by the realization of who I'm surrounded by in the world. With that said I really, really appreciate the social justice statements I hear from the pulpit and from the congregants.
by AStrangeMorrow | 2026-02-23 16:00:54+00:00
Same here. As much as I enjoy a lot of the technical stuff, I never click on 80% if it because it is often “thing that already exist but in lisp/rust/etc, new tool similar to X to free/one extra feature/lightweight”. So unless it is a strong interest of mine, my area of expertise, or something that makes me curious it is a skip.

Stuff like that though always makes me curious
by mft_ | 2026-02-23 16:00:59+00:00
I agree that HN is not representative, but amongst my definitely-not-tech-aware friends, there's certainty awareness about privacy and social media. This might manifest in avoiding specific apps (for example, I have a friend who refuses to install TikTok, despite being active in Instagram) or strict controls of their children's use.

There's another group who don't necessarily take any action immediately, but might switch if there was a competitive alternative. But of course there's a network effect: being an early adopter of Signal (over Whatsapp) was lonely but eventually enough people came along. Bluesky is doing okay vs. Twitter. Without people trying to offer an alternative, nothing will ever change.
by Nifty3929 | 2026-02-23 16:01:08+00:00
It's not a matter of "can't be bothered." Engineers are constantly fixing things and rolling out new features. "Error budgets" are an acknowledgement of the tradeoff between these two things, and making a conscious choice about the balance between them, according to the business requirements of the application in question.

Keep in mind that "fixing things" is essentially a Sisyphean task - no matter how much you do there's always more you can do. Just like adding features. You have to have some kind of guideline on when enough is enough.
by 0x000xca0xfe | 2026-02-23 16:01:12+00:00
If you don't keep and cross-reference documents it is really easy to circumvent, e.g. by kids asking their older siblings to sign them up.

I don't think a bulletproof age verification system can be implemented on the server side without serious privacy implications. It would be quite easy to build it on the client side (child mode) but the ones pushing for these systems (usually politicians) don't seem to care about that.
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-23 16:01:13+00:00
SQL's terrible name is IBM's fault for multiple reasons. They were going to spell it Sequel but IBM's lawyers found another company had a trademark on Sequel and forced them to rename it to avoid lawsuits. Rather than pick a new, more original name they instead shrunk the acronym and then IBM's legal also made them tell people to spell it out instead of call it "sequel" to continue to avoid the other company's trademark. So IBM made sure the name and its pronunciation was always a mixed message from very early in the language's history. Thanks, IBM

(I've always pronounced PNG "ping". It's interesting that there is a split there, I'm not sure I would have expected a large one.)
by slfnflctd | 2026-02-23 16:01:33+00:00
Unfortunately, those laws are not currently enforced.

I see another reply is arguing that religion is inherently political. I disagree. Modern politics did not exist at the time the world's major religions were being formed. Attempting to twist them to fit with a particular party or candidate is a terrible idea all around in my book, for many reasons.

The state can cause a lot of damage by endorsing religion, the historical record is overflowing with examples. I'd argue that a religious body endorsing a state is every bit as potentially destructive. The government is at its best when it is neutral on the subject of faith and crafts policy in evidence-based ways that people of all (or at least most) faiths can agree upon. In this situation, there is no reason for a religious organization to promote such a government because their interests are orthogonal. They can cooperate, but there is a clear line between that and acting subservient, or declaring some sort of 'divine mandate' has been bequeathed upon a government institution or official.
by ninjagoo | 2026-02-23 16:01:57+00:00
Oh, do you mean the terms in Section 6 of the Additional Terms of Service, in which Section 2, four paragraphs before Section 6, exhorts one to read "... carefully, starting with the Universal Terms ...", which is 23 pages long when printed?

'the plans for the destruction of your house were on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'
by rurp | 2026-02-23 16:02:08+00:00
Google will happily screw over users with 2FA as well. A few years ago I was out of state for the funeral of someone very close to me. I lost my phone and then needed to get into my email urgently. I didn't have my computer or any other devices with me and no way to get to them. Fortunately I had actually planned ahead for something like this and added my partners phone number as a 2FA method. So I tried to login with that and Google refused!

Google said that because I had more secure 2FA methods configured it wouldn't allow my to use one of the methods that I had very intentionally configured for exactly this scenario. My opinion of the company was already pretty low but I was still shocked that they would simply discard my security settings without any warning or override option. They made one of the worst trips of my life even more miserable. Google hates their own users so much.
by TZubiri | 2026-02-23 16:02:47+00:00
>"None of this is an argument against protecting children online. It is an argument against pretending there is no tradeoff"

Tradeoff acknowledged, and this runs both sides, there's hundreds of risks that these policies are addressing.

To mention a specific one, I was exposed to pornography online at age 9 which is obviously an issue, the incumbent system allowed this to happen and will continue to do so. So to what tradeoffs in policy do detractors of age verification think are so terrible that it's more important than avoiding, for example, allowing kids first sexual experiences to be pornography. Dystopian vibes? Is that equivalent?

Or, what alternative solutions are counter-proposed to avoid these issues without age verification and vpn bans.

Note 2 things before responding:

1)per the original quote, it is not valid to ignore the trade offs with arguments like "child abuse is an excuse to install civilian control by governments"

2) this was not your initiave, another group is the one making huge efforts to intervene and change the status quo, so whatever solution is counterproposed needs to be new, otherwise, as an existing solution, it was therefore ineffective.

If any of those is your argument, you are not part of the conversation, you have failed to act as wardens of the internet, and whatever systems you control will be slowly removed from you by authorities and technical professionals that follow the regulations. Whatever crumbs you are left as an admin, will be relegated to increasingly niche crypto communities where you will be pooled with dissidents and criminals of types you will need to either ignore or pretend are ok. You will create a new Tor, a Gab, a Conservapedia, a HackerForums, and you will be hunted by the obvious and inequivocal right side of the law. Your enemy list will grow bigger and bigger, the State? Money? The law? God? The notion of right and wrong which is like totally subjective anyways?
by jcgrillo | 2026-02-23 16:02:47+00:00
The Honeywell thing I bought on amazon turned out to not be analog after all. It's got an Atmel Atmega something or other in it. It obviously can't connect to the internet through its 24VAC 3 wire interface but it's running software I can't inspect and therefore assume to be completely riddled with bugs. It's going back to be replaced with Whites-Rodgers Emerson unit.
by RoyTyrell | 2026-02-23 16:02:50+00:00
My FB is generally like that. However I have noticed I see more more delayed posts from friends, and it's starting to recycle posts from friends I've seen already. I'll see a friend post pics of a vacation they took but I won't see that post for 3-5 days, and in the mean time I'll see some other old posts from them that were from 1-3 weeks ago come up multiple times.

Occasionally I do get blasted with AI slop and random accounts for a few days. When that happens I keep selecting to stop showing me that because I'm not interested.

I join groups for my interests. I never interact with random groups that pop up. I'm pretty diligent about scrolling past ads and I report a ton of them that are AI bs or selling lies (like "tonics" that cure cancer).
by anishathalye | 2026-02-23 16:03:30+00:00
We returned to MIT last month to teach a revised version of Missing Semester, six years after the original debut (which has been extensively discussed on HN, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22226380 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34934216).

We’ve updated the course based on our personal experiences as well as major changes in the field (e.g., the proliferation of AI-powered developer tools) over the past several years. The 2026 course includes revised versions of four lectures from the previous course, and it adds five entirely new lectures:

- Development Environment and Tools

- Packaging and Shipping Code

- Agentic Coding

- Beyond the Code (soft skills)

- Code Quality

We’d love to hear any feedback from the HN community to improve the current or future iterations of the course. In particular, we’re curious to hear the community’s take on our inclusion of AI-related topics (e.g., dedicating an entire class to the topic of agentic coding; though we tried to counterbalance it with plenty of disclaimers, and a dedicated section on AI etiquette in Beyond the Code).

--Anish, Jon, and Jose
by AnotherGoodName | 2026-02-23 16:03:34+00:00
The points linked repeatedly focus on cost and complexity as justification, even explicitly stating musks desire to minimise
components in Kaparthy’s list.

They don’t focus on safety or effectiveness except to say that vision should be ‘sufficient’. Which is damning with faint praise imho.

If that link was to try and argue that the removal of sensors makes perfect sense i have to point out that anyone that reads that would likely have their negative viewpoint hardened. It was done to reduce cost (back when the sensors were 1000’s) and out of a ridiculous desire by Musk for minimalism. It’s the same desire that removed the indicator stalk i might add.
by condiment | 2026-02-23 16:03:47+00:00
You seem to have missed requirement #3 -> tracking and identifying reuse.

An 18-year-old creating an account for a 12-year-old is a legal issue, not a service provider issue. How does a gas station keep a 21-year-old from buying beer for a bunch of high school students? Generally they don't, because that's the cops' job. But if they have knowledge that the 21-yo is buying booze for children, they deny custom to the 21-yo. This is simple.
by tim-tday | 2026-02-23 16:03:57+00:00
Why would anyone come to the USA?

Check the coverage maps of the big three and see who has best coverage where you live and work. (ATT, Verizon, T-Mobile)

I think if you BYOD you can get something without a contract. You can buy a refurbished 2 generation old phone on eBay for two hundred.

There are discount carriers but they piggyback on the big carriers and are probably not worth the trouble.

In the US it is legal (for some insane reason) to lie about “unlimited” so read the fine print. Get an “unlimited plan” that meets your needs and don’t worry too much about it. I’d get one where they don’t charge extra for hotspot.
by klsdjfdlkfjsd | 2026-02-23 16:04:07+00:00
In my state, I caught a circuit court judge shilling on a certain well known "social media" site for the establishment of a lottery in our state. He framed it as a "We the People vs the corrupt politicians" issue--with him being firmly on the side of We the People of course.

When I challenged him on his rhetoric, my comment INSTANTLY disappeared. I thought maybe it was a fluke, so I tried again, and the next comment insta-disappeared also.

Soon thereafter I was locked out of the account and asked to provide a "selfie" to confirm my identity. (I declined.)
by 2duct | 2026-02-23 16:04:39+00:00
Some people would argue though that if the friend group is on Facebook/Discord or whatever, and they aren't going to move off to cater to the person rejecting those services, then those services are at least essential to maintaining those social ties. They decided that giving up their data was a tradeoff worth it.

What remains to be seen is if the outcome of teenagers becoming social pariahs is really worse than the alternatives.
by gen220 | 2026-02-23 16:04:40+00:00
That's interesting! How do you see "oversupply of hardware" playing out?

Is it because we stop doing ~2024-style, large-scale training (marginal returns aren't worth it)? Or because supply way outpaces the training+inference demand?

AFAIU if the trend lines /S-curves keep chugging along as they are, we won't hit hardware oversupply for a long, long time without some sort of AI training winter.
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-23 16:05:08+00:00
> there is a lot of coordinated astroturfing.

Interesting. Are you saying all the concerns raised by the proponents of ID verification are invalid and meritless? For example,

1. Foreign influence campaigns

2. Domestic influence campaigns

3. Filtering age-appropriate content

I’m sure there are many other points with various degree of validity.
by thewebguyd | 2026-02-23 16:05:46+00:00
There is no problem to solve, though.

“Sideloading” is disabled by default on all new android devices. You have to go through deliberate steps to enable installation from outside sources.

End users are ultimately responsible or their own devices and choosing what software to run and not run. That some people can get scammed by someone on the phone walking them through how to enable sideloading, and telling them to ignore all the warnings that currently pop up, is not a problem that Google, Apple, etc. need to solve. It is already solved, via the disabled by default setting and all of the warnings.

We don’t need further restrictions on creation and distribution of software. We need end users to step up and educate themselves on how to use and operate technology safely.
by _wire_ | 2026-02-23 16:05:49+00:00
> The model can write an entire Three.js application....

Once you are willing to question the referential basis of measurement, please go on to question the terms chosen as the basis of performance:

For example, saying a model "writes" the application.

It can also be said that the model "retrieves" the application.

The term write in context amplifies the term intelligence, becoming arbitrarily anthropomorphic and implying human creativity.

But what computational theory explains the machine's creativity? Is there any theory of human creativity?

This distinction is important by virtue of the principle of Occam's razor: If a question must be begged for an explanation, prefer the simplest question.

The term retrieval is with respect to computation ipso facto. To say the model retrieves avoids any need for a theory of creativity and its corresponding anthropomorphism.

By extension, any appearance of intelligence manifest by the model is understood truly as artificial. A taxonomic circuit is closed without need for a mysterious antecedent of creativity.

Assuming any intelligible theory of creativity can be formed, this must regarded as significant in the entire history of thought, not sidelined as a semantic quirk in the field of AI.
by Keyframe | 2026-02-23 16:05:58+00:00
- Don't host email yourself

- Don't host your website yourself

- Don't operate your servers yourself

- Don't even own a website yourself

- Don't allow robots onto your site

- Don't allow cookies by default

- Don't do this and that and you'll disappear from "the internet" (google, now llms)

- Don't..

How about we bring internet back to its roots? Let's keep own directory of websites like in ye good old times and be done with it. Internet became a garden of few big companies. 1995-2005 RIP
by data_ders | 2026-02-23 16:06:07+00:00
TIL about Verse looks cool I'll have to check it out.

> SQL is not a pipeline, it is a graph.

Maybe it's both? and maybe there will always be hard-to-express queries in SQL, and that's ok?

the RDBMS's relational model is certainly a graph and joins accordingly introduce complexity.

For me, just as creators of the internet regret that subdomains come before domains, I really we could go back in time and have `FROM` be the first predicate and not `SELECT`. This is much more intuitive and lends itself to the idea of a pipeline: a table scan (FROM) that is piped to a projection (SELECT).
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-23 16:06:14+00:00
My favorite answer to the GIF pronunciation debate is to prefer the Old English pronunciation from back before the noun "gift" picked up that extra consonant at the end, which Old English pronounced it rather like "hyeef". (Similar to what a "g" will do in some latinx dialects.) That pronunciation splits the difference and makes some of both hard and soft "g" proponents angry, which is to say that pronunciation is also a gift from the past.
by worldsayshi | 2026-02-23 16:06:23+00:00
There are better and there are really really bad ways to do ID checks. In a world that is increasingly overwhelmed by bots I don't see how we can avoid proof-of-humanity and proof-of-adulthood checks in a lot of contexts.

So we should probably get ahead of this debate and push for good ways to do part-of-identity-checks. Because I don't see any good way to avoid them.

We could potentially do ID checks that only show exactly what the receiver needs to know and nothing else.
by co_king_5 | 2026-02-23 16:06:35+00:00
> Both Clinton and Obama deported way more people than Trump.

You are correct. Further, I suggest that Democrats and Democrat-controlled media cultivate a delusional worldview which allows their supporters to ignore the right-wing brutality consistently and continually imposed by Democrat leaders.

How do you feel about the second Trump admin's nationwide, made-for-TV DHS/ICE siege?
by jerf | 2026-02-23 16:06:48+00:00
We really need a ban on leveraged buyouts where the leverage becomes the responsibility of the purchased entity. You shouldn't be able to borrow money to buy a company, then transfer the debt used to buy the company on to the company itself. Any theoretical arguments about why this is OK or a good idea should fall silent against the repeated observations of what happens in practice and the observable incentive structure created.
by bikenaga | 2026-02-23 16:06:54+00:00
"Abstract. Extreme humid heat is projected to increase markedly by the end of the century, particularly in the tropics. Yet, the case of small islands is ambiguous because the available studies are based on coarse global climate models (GCMs) that ignore them. Here, statistically downscaled, bias-corrected GCMs at weather station sites are used to assess present and future extreme humid heat conditions on various tropical islands. The latter are estimated with the Heat Index (HI) combining temperature and humidity. Similarly to continents, extreme humid heat intensity is projected to reach particularly dangerous levels by the end of the century, with higher HI values for islands located closer to the equator. Longer, more common humid heatwaves are also notably projected to increase in frequency, with more pronounced increases equatorward, because of the lower seasonal variability of HI. Such severe conditions threaten the lives of millions of island inhabitants across the tropics."
by burnt-resistor | 2026-02-23 16:07:27+00:00
In terms of physical media:

For 1/8" cassette tape, KCS appeared in 1975 but the tape itself was in use 20+ years prior: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_standard

½" consumer tape of Betamax and VHS didn't arrive until the same year.

¼" QIC DC300 appeared ~1972 but was largely inaccessible to hobbyists and home users until around 1995/1996 with QIC-40 and Travan.

There were also home 1/4" reel-to-reel home audio systems from roughly mid '50's onward.