MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 9rx | 2026-02-06 18:48:30+00:00
There is still some room for improvement where trying to introduce LLMs into chaotic codebases and whatnot. LLMs continue to struggle there. Although so do humans, to be fair. Chaos is plain hard. However, in a lot of cases AI is already as good as it can get. "Won't improve much" is a fair take.

Technology has plenty of room to keep marching forward, but the next substantive improvement here will see it no longer be AI. It will become AGI.
by ceejayoz | 2026-02-06 18:49:14+00:00
> Where do you draw the line? Being able to concretely define a line here is something I've seen privacy proponents be utterly incapable of doing.

There are many things in life where the exact location of the line isn't clear, but quite a few cases are clearly over said line.

As examples: Fraud, threats, child abuse/neglect, obscenity.
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-06 18:49:35+00:00
> Yeah but calling someone a racist is a serious accusation, you better bring receipts or be liable for defamation

There are a large number of countries with their own systems of law, and its possible that in one of them calling someone a racist might be subject to defamation law, but in most I am aware of that's going to be a problem because its not even a well-enough-defined fact claim to be legally true or false.
by tock | 2026-02-06 18:49:43+00:00
> tiktok as some weaponized addiction machine

It is.

> Is it really bad to give me woodworking and learning chinese videos if that's what I'm interested in at the moment?

Youtube shorts is pretty similar to tiktok imo.

> is it really different if he scrolls through tiktok or watches the same thing put into longer videos on TV or some other site?

Yes because TV is just stuff shown to everyone. You aren't getting personalised content.

> Should we ban bikes if they are the most efficient transportation mode in given area because people get addicted to them?

Do people get addicted to bikes? People do get addicted to drugs. Maybe we should ban drugs? Oh wait we do.
by vee-kay | 2026-02-06 18:50:22+00:00
>Your primary point is "the study harmed participants, and Gates is responsible"
But your own report contradicts this, and finds the deaths unrelated.
>You also argue that Gates is suspect, because HPV vaccine trials were only done in India. This is also false,

You like to be caught at lies, don't you?

HPV vaccine deaths in India:
Parliament panel indicts PATH, health officials. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) funded agency (PATH) bypassed ethics and rules while conducting clinical trials for vaccine which was administered to girls, says parliamentary panel.

https://www.downtoearth.org.in/environment/hpv-vaccine-death...

India’s Ban on Foreign Money for Health Group Hits Gates Foundation:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/20/world/asia/india-health-n...

The art of Gatescrashing democracy: Journalist Tim Schwab says his book probing the Gates Foundation is a case study for the larger problem of extreme wealth and how it threatens democracy:
https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/interview/journalist-tim-sc...
by tanseydavid | 2026-02-06 18:50:36+00:00
The entire side topic of guns and revolt seems misplaced in this thread.

The original Luddite movement arose in response to automation in the textile industry.

They committed violence. Violence was committed against them. All tragic events when viewed from a certain perspective.

My rhetorical question is this: did any of this result in any meaningful impedance of the "march of technological progress"?
by wtetzner | 2026-02-06 18:50:46+00:00
> But why is the cost never discussed or disclosed in these conversations?

And not just the monetary cost of accessing the tools, but the amount of time it takes to actually get good results out. I strongly suspect that even though it feels more productive, in many cases things just take longer than they would if done manually.

I think there are really good uses for LLMs, but I also think that people are likely using them in ways that feel useful, but end up being more costly than not.
by seanw444 | 2026-02-06 18:50:59+00:00
Super useful website.

Knots seem like boring and obscure useless knowledge from a time long gone, but since gaining an interest in them as a result of getting into bushcrafting, I'm shocked at how often knots come in handy even in day-to-day life. When I was a boy scout, and I was doing my knot merit badge, they did not put any effort into demonstrating the use cases of the knots they taught us. If they had, I'd have been hooked then. Took over a decade before I revisited it and realized how cool knots are.

A skill I will definitely be teaching my boys in a more practical way when the time comes.
by ASalazarMX | 2026-02-06 18:51:14+00:00
At first I gave him the benefit of the doubt, like that weird decision of Steve Jobs banning Adobe Flash, which ran most of the fun parts of the Internet back then, that ended up spreading HTML5. Now I just think LIDAR he refused LIDAR on purely aesthetic reasons. The cost is not even that significant compared to the overall cost of a Tesla.
by itsdesmond | 2026-02-06 18:51:22+00:00
It depends. Are the inputs to the algorithm themselves discriminatory? If so, then yes that would be appropriate. But that is a different conversation. They determined the passenger may be unsafe and did nothing.

Mind you, these companies work very hard for us to not know how they match A to B, usually so we don’t notice things like their disregard for safety.
by i_love_retros | 2026-02-06 18:51:31+00:00
AI chat for research is great and really helps me.

I just don't need the AI writing code for me, don't see the point. Once I know from the ai chat research what my solution is I can code it myself with the benefit I then understand more what I am doing.

And yes I've tried the latest models! Tried agent mode in copilot! Don't need it!
by epistasis | 2026-02-06 18:51:46+00:00
It's also important to consider what the code is, anywho decides it, and for what reasons.

Most cities adopt a mishmash, but they take them from large private organizations that publish big books of code, and how that whole process happens is far more opaque than most standards bodies because it's so obscure. Is there evidence backing the changes? Is it vibes? Is there financial benefit for the code writers for certain choices?

This mishmash of choices by local cities also greatly reduces building efficiency, because even if I learn the fine details of my city, that doesn't guarantee I can apply my hard won code knowledge a few miles away.

Building code is important and I wouldn't go as far as saying "if you own the house you don't have to follow anything" but our current situation is also not providing much safety in the US. Code mostly exists to justify checks, not improve safety. A simpler, more uniform code, with clearer motivations and evidence would go a long way to reducing unnecessary costs.
by Tachyooon | 2026-02-06 18:51:49+00:00
Agreed, I'm not sure if it can be made to work either. I have an inkling of a thought that instead of an egalitarian society being required for lottocracy to work, an egalitarian society can be created using lottocracy. But it's just a thought. Hopefully that book holds something close to an answer, but I'll see :)
by bpt3 | 2026-02-06 18:51:54+00:00
YIMBYs in my area are almost exclusively terminally online young adults who are bitter that they can't afford to live precisely where they like with their single 20-something income, and basically want to make desirable areas more affordable (aka less desirable) so they can move in. The worst of them are openly hostile to anyone who made the apparent mistake of choosing to live in an upper income area.

I am pretty much in favor of people being able to do what they want with their properties, as long as they are responsible for any externalities the changes create, and I still largely find these groups insufferable (in case you couldn't tell from the paragraph above).

NIMBYs are mostly people who have other things to do with their day than agitate to make their neighborhood worse (where worse is a change from the status quo, which they presumably are at least okay with given they live in the neighborhood), so you don't hear much from them most of the time.

In short, there is no need for advocacy for the status quo unless someone is attempting to modify it, as it just continues on by default.
by Quarrelsome | 2026-02-06 18:51:56+00:00
> But saying that Facebook or Myspace wasn't that bad does nothing to support this position, so why did you bring those up?

Because I'm making the argument that lean startup culture is one of the biggest factors in creating this problem and early Facebook and MySpace were around _before_ lean startup culture.

> Its you that never understood why I objected to you and not the other way around.

Oh it only works one way round I see. Por que no los dos?
Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?
by eljojo | 2026-02-06 18:51:58+00:00
Due to bike-induced concussions, I've been worried for a while about losing my memory and not being able to log back in.

I combined shamir secret sharing (hashicorp vault's implementation) with age-encryption, and packaged it using WASM for a neat in-browser offline UX.

The idea is that if something happens to me, my friends and family would help me get back access to the data that matters most to me. 5 out of 7 friends need to agree for the vault to unlock.

Try out the demo in the website, it runs entirely in your browser!
by zemo | 2026-02-06 18:52:31+00:00
> memcached is multithreaded, so it scales up better per node.

redis i/o is multithreaded, it's just the command loop that's single-threaded. If all you're doing is SET and GET of individual key-value pairs, every time I've seen a redis instance run hot the bottleneck was the network card, never the CPU.

I ... actually think scaling redis for simple k-v storage is already pretty easy so I dunno that that's much of a concern?

mcrouter ... damn I haven't thought about mcrouter in at least 10 years.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-06 18:52:48+00:00
5 years ago. And it looks like the state was actually taking pretty aggressive moves against the fraud including ongoing investigations and legislation to shut down the fraud. [1]

There was active prosecution ongoing literally right up until Shirly's video. That's taking the matter seriously.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020s_Minnesota_fraud_scandals
by ceejayoz | 2026-02-06 18:53:10+00:00
> Only the rapist is guilty of rape.

Sure. If Uber was convicted of the crime of rape here, that'd be weird.

They were found civilly liable. Because of things like this:

> Over three weeks, jurors weighed the harrowing personal account of Ms. Dean as well as testimony from Uber executives and thousands of pages of internal company documents, including some showing that Uber had flagged her ride as a higher risk for a serious safety incident moments before she was picked up. Uber never warned her, with an executive testifying that it would have been “impractical” to do so.
by bastard_op | 2026-02-06 18:53:10+00:00
I tried an iphone once about 6 years ago, but once I realized all browsers were essentially safari and there WAS NO ADBLOCKING, I was disgusted to emphatically go back to Android and Firefox with ublock plus. Apple is like the US government protecting pedophiles, but protecting adware and everything wrong with the internet, forcing people to be insecure and watch ads. I feel bad for apple users unable to use a clean ad-free internet.
by anon291 | 2026-02-06 18:53:44+00:00
Nice visuals, but misses the mark. Neural networks transform vector spaces, and collect points into bins. This visualization shows the structure of the computation. This is akin to displaying a Matrix vector multiplication in Wx + b notation, except W,x,and b have more exciting displays.

It completely misses the mark on what it means to 'weight' (linearly transform), bias (affine transform) and then non-linearly transform (i.e, 'collect') points into bins
by vee-kay | 2026-02-06 18:54:59+00:00
Since you haven't bothered to reply, I'll do what you are afraid to do.

1. HPV vaccine deaths: India's Parliamentary panel Parliament panel indicts PATH organization, health officials. PATH bypassed ethics and rules while conducting clinical trials for vaccine which was administered to girls, says panel.

Tens of thousands of minor girls were given HPV vaccines under false aegis and without informed consent. Several patients died, more than hundred minor girls were hospitalized with adverse effects from the vaccines.

"The interest, safety and well being of subjects were completely jeopardized by PATH by using self-determined and selfservicing nomenclature which is not only highly deplorable but a serious breach of law of the land."

"Had PATH been successful in getting the HPV vaccine included in the universal immunization programme of the concerned countries, this would have generated windfall profit for the manufacturer(s) by way of automatic sale, year after year, without any promotional or marketing expenses."

"The Committee feels that there was serious dereliction of duty by many of the Institutions and individuals involved. The Committee observes that ICMR representatives, instead of ensuring highest levels of ethical standards in research studies, apparently acted at the behest of the PATH in promoting the interests of manufacturers of the HPV Vaccine."

2. The PATH agency was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), says final report by panel.
by ndesaulniers | 2026-02-06 18:55:03+00:00
This work originally wasn't my 100% project, it was my 20% project (or as I prefer to call it, 120% project).

I had to move teams twice before a third team was able to say: this work is valuable to us, please come work for us and focus just on that.

I had to organize multiple internal teams, then build an external community of contributors to collaborate on this shared common goal.

Having carte blanche to contribute to open source projects made this feasible at all; I can see that being a non-starter at many employers, sadly. Having low friction to change teams also helped a lot.
by donkeybeer | 2026-02-06 18:55:46+00:00
ICE proof doesn't count for shit unless they have a real warrant. Otherwise legally they are quite limited. You still haven't been able to establish how or why or case laws citing whistling at cops is illegal. You have very deep and fundamental misunderstanding of American law. Whatever country you are from has clearly messed eith your brain to the extent you can't even imagine countries with actual free speech existing. You still do not understand, whether someones an "illegal" or not is NOT for ice or any police force to establish, its for courts to establish. You also failed to respond how any thing at all gives ICE the permission to commit terrostic acts of vile violence against innocent civilian bystanders. You are even repeating the soundly disproven lie of the terrorist "cop" beung ran into. You have very clear, very fundamental psychotic delusional disorders where repeatedly explained extremely clear things do not enter your mind and you mindlessly keep repeating disproven things like a broken record and fail to ever cite any statistics or case law despite being repeatedly asked to.
by banku_brougham | 2026-02-06 18:55:50+00:00
He makes a lot of great points, but I vaguely feel he missed the point of the book. I guess he "just couldn't like get into it man."

>In fact, in one of the more
laughable parts of the book, he goes on and on concerning the necessity of
permanent war as a means of consuming the world's production of resources
and thus keeping the social stratification of upper, middle, and lower
classes in being.
by joe_mamba | 2026-02-06 18:56:01+00:00
>There was active prosecution ongoing literally right up until Shirly's video

Oh yeah, the prosecution was sooo active that all the daycares listed as operational and receiving funding, had no kids in them, had blacked out or boarded up windows, misspelled signs, and if you went in to ask for enrollment 3 angry men would come out shouting at you. How many legit daycares have you seen that look like that?
by OutOfHere | 2026-02-06 18:56:29+00:00
Absurd and illogical. The question isn't about "who did it", but whether a rape happened at all, and if the driver did it. It would seem that anyone can accuse anyone, and get a multi-million dollar payout from a big firm. There is a systematic way to go about it, but no logical path was followed here. If the driver is not even found guilty of rape, then what gives? These days personal rights are in the trash, emotions run high, and the people are okay with it. The logical outcome of this abomination could be that women riders are unable to access rides altogether with male drivers.

People seem to have forgotten just how bad things were with taxis. They were 10x worse.
by kube-system | 2026-02-06 18:57:22+00:00
> It's not hard to imagine the partially legitimate reason that on occasion, someone will drive with the trunk open

No, it's a much more serious and likely reason -- people stopping on a highway at night, getting out, and opening their trunk for some reason (like a spare tire, fluids, etc)?-- then their lights (and the reflectors in the lamp housings) are pointed at the sky.
by StopTheWorld | 2026-02-06 18:57:28+00:00
In July 1992 five MoD members were charged with hacking, and they were basically defunct as an active hacking group after that. LoD was mostly defunct even before that, although the movie used the Mentor's manifesto. New York LoD members, or those affiliated with them, had been busted in July 1987. So yes, a lot of the 1995 movie was covering stuff that had happened from the 1980s up until mid-1992.
Show HN: Jourdle (Coop Wordle)
by furyofantares | 2026-02-06 18:57:48+00:00
You and a partner have 3 puzzles to solve in a row with a limited number of guesses - and you can see each others' previous guesses, which gives you enough info to accomplish this. If either of you gets all 3 puzzles it counts as a 3-star solve. The name is a mashup of Journey + Wordle, the hope is you have a connection with this anonymous ephemeral other player.

I've built a number of Wordle variants eg Xordle, and have been allergic to making anything other than static websites for my hobby projects.

I still kind of am, but LLM-agents have changed the calculus for me on setting up and maintaining a server, not to mention building the code. All stuff within my capabilities to begin with, but the stress and hassle feels so much lower.

So I recently made some services for my static games to let you see replays of other peoples' games as well as spectate live players solving the puzzle you just solved. That's live on Xordle, Fibble, Warmle, Shuntle and Double-Dabble. It's pretty fun.

That inspired me to go for a multiplayer game. Got it done in a literal weekend, but of course I had lots of pieces in place already as mentioned. The game is build with React/Typescript - I started with a clone of one of my other projects, and is hosted as a static project on github with cloudflare in front. That's how I do all my minigames. The services are written in Go, running on an Amazon Lightsail free instance. It was all done in Codex CLI.

If you can't find a player for the daily puzzle within a day, you get the option to play with a bot. And if your coop player disconnects there is a bot takeover. Making the bot was a lot of fun, and you can also just do practice games with the bot. It can be a little annoying if you're too much faster than it to make guesses, but it was fun to try to make it play at the right pace, and make reasonable but not perfect guesses.
by daveguy | 2026-02-06 18:58:11+00:00
> which is supposed to be somewhat universal in correcting similar OCR'd PDFs

Xerox would like a word.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29223815

Point being, "correcting" to "correct looking" may be worse than just accepting errors. Errors are often clearly identified by humans as a nonsense word. "Correcting" OCR can result in plausible, but wrong results that are more difficult for the human in the loop to identify.
by SkyBelow | 2026-02-06 18:58:19+00:00
>"One regulation was kinda bad, so we should never regulate anything again."

Please don't misrepresent what someone says. That does not lead to constructive dialog.

I gave a question challenging a specific way to regulate a specific thing, to indicate it is challenging. This is not the same as dismissing all regulations.

Also, please avoid the personal mentions.

>The onus will be on the AI companies pushing these wares to follow regulations.

That wasn't the challenge. The raised issue isn't AI companies labeling things AI. The given example included them very much following the regulation.
by nworley | 2026-02-06 18:58:39+00:00
I don’t think there’s a clean solution yet but I’m not convinced brute force prompt enumeration scales either, given how much randomness is baked in. I guess that’s why I’ve started thinking about this less as prompt tracking and more as signal aggregation over time. Looking at repeat fetches, recurring mentions, and which pages/models seem to converge on the same sources. It doesn’t tell you what the user asked, but it can hint at whether your product is becoming a defensible reference versus a lucky mention.

From someone who's built a tool in this space, curious if you’ve seen any patterns that cut through the noise? Or if entropy is just something we have to design around.

Disclaimer: I've built a tool in this space as well (llmsignal.app)
by ndesaulniers | 2026-02-06 18:58:55+00:00
> I would love to meet these imaginary people that are fine with a compiler that is straight up broken.

That's not what I said; you're attacking a strawman.

My point was more so that some people prefer the madness that is -funsafe-math-optimizations, or happen to rely on UB (intentionally or otherwise). What even is "correct" in the presence of UB? What is correct in such case was left up to interpretation of the implementer by ISO WG14.
by bradfa | 2026-02-06 18:59:01+00:00
The key seems to be that you take the transcript of a model working within a problem domain that it’s not yet good at or where the context doesn’t match it’s original training and then you continually retrain it based on its efforts and guidance from a human or other expert. You end up with a specialty model in a given domain that keeps getting better at that domain, just like a human.

The hard part is likely when someone proves some “fact” which the models knows and has had reinforced by this training is no longer true. The model will take time to “come around” to understand this new situation. But this isn’t unlike the general populous. At scale humans accept new things slowly.
Show HN: I let strangers vote on commands to a Claude Code instance with root
by zhoujianfu | 2026-02-06 18:59:17+00:00
It's an experiment in the wisdom of crowds / wiki-coding... still in process!

https://clodhost.com/chat/414 is the link to submit/vote on prompts to claude code.

https://claudecrowd.clodhost.com/ is the result!
by smallmancontrov | 2026-02-06 18:59:18+00:00
The inputs to FSD are:

7 cameras x 36fps x 5Mpx x 30s
48kHz audio
Nav maps and route for next few miles
100kHz kinematics (speed, IMU, odometry, etc)

Source: https://youtu.be/LFh9GAzHg1c?t=571
by johnsmith1840 | 2026-02-06 18:59:20+00:00
It's basically continual learning. This is beyond a hard problem it's currently an impossible one. I know of no system that solve CL even at small scale let alone large models.

Annoyingly, they have SOME inherent capability to do it. It's really easy to get sucked down this path due to that glimmer of hope but the longer you play with it the more annoying it becomes.

SSI seems to be focused on this problem directly so maybe they discover something?