MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vladms | 2026-02-27 15:33:17+00:00
I find "morals" difficult to evaluate objectively. Some people might find it "moral" that women do not have any education and just stay at home, which I find terrible.

But if most people in a society find something "wrong" generally they will organize to prevent that (even if it has value for a part of the society). I think it is simpler for everybody that economics (how we produce and what) is separated from morals (how we decide what is right and wrong).
by xpe | 2026-02-27 15:33:32+00:00
I read the articles. As far as factual reporting, I will tentatively take them at face value. But in terms of their editorializing, it is frankly weak by my standards. It would not survive scrutiny in a freshman philosophy class.

Ethics is complicated. I’m not saying this means it can’t be reasoned about and discussed.
It can! But the sources you’ve cited have shown themselves to be rather shallow.

I encourage everyone to write out your ethical model and put yourself in their shoes and think about how you would weigh the factors.

There is no free lunch. For many practical decisions with high stakes, many reasonable decisions from one POV could be argued against from another. It is the synthesis that matters the most. Among those articles, I don’t see great minds doing their best work. (The constraints of their medium and funding model are a big problem I think.)

Read Brian Christian’s “The Alignment Problem”’s take on predictive policing if you want a specific example of what I mean. There are actually mathematical impossibilities at play when it comes to common sense, ethical reasoning.

Common sense ethical reasoning has never been very good at new or complicated situations. “Common sense” at its worst is often a rhetorical technique used to shut down careful thinking. At its best, it can drive us to pay attention to our conscience and to synthesize.

I suggest finding better discussions and/or allocating the time yourself to think through it. My preferred sources for AI and ethics discussions are highly curated. I don’t “trust” any of them absolutely. * They are all grist for the mill.

I get better grist from LessWrong than HN 99% of the time. I discuss here to make sure I have a sense of what more “mainstream” people are discussing. HN lags the quality of LW — and will probably never catch up — but it does move in that direction usually over time. I’m not criticizing individuals here; I’m commenting on culture.

Please don’t confuse what I’m saying as pure subjectivity. One could conduct scientific experiments about the quality of discussions of a particular forum in many senses. Which places are drawing upon better information? Which are synthesizing it more carefully? Which drill down into detail? Which participants have allocated more to think clearly? Which strive to make predictions? Which prioritize hot takes? Which prioritize mutual understanding?

It isn’t even close.

Opinions and the Overton window are moving pretty rapidly, compared to even one year ago.

* I’ve written several comments about viewing trust as a triple (who, what, why).
This isn’t my idea: I stole it.
by japhyr | 2026-02-27 15:33:49+00:00
You're absolutely right that some individuals will be able to sign up for this program, and remember to cancel at the end of the six months. However, when companies choose to implement a policy like this they're acting on well-established statistics. They know that a meaningful percentage of people will forget to cancel, and the company will end up with increased revenue. There might be a bit of good will here, but in the end a program like this with these clearly-spelled-out terms is not much more than marketing.

This feels especially ugly to me because maintainers of large open source projects will feel pressure to keep using tools that let them work in an AI-assisted world. This really feels like it will make life harder for open source maintainers in the end, rather than easier. That's the opposite of what a meaningful open source campaign should look like.

At the very least, it puts maintainers right back in the position of having to beg giant companies for handouts.
Any Swiss devs found a "cheap" way to acces Banking APIs for a small project?
by darktoto | 2026-02-27 15:34:03+00:00
Salut / Hello everyone,

I’m currently building a small financial tracking app for rental owners and I’m hitting a wall regarding banking integration in Switzerland.

In the EU, there are a lot of cheap and easy solutions which made things somewhat affordable, but here it feels like the "Wild West" (or rather, the "Expensive East").

I've looked into SIX bLink, seems to be the gold standard, but the entry barrier for a small bootstrap project is huge (onboarding costs + monthly minimums).

My question: Has anyone found a workaround or a "lightweight" provider that doesn't cost a lot, just to get read-only access to transaction history for the main Swiss banks (UBS, Raiffeisen, ZKB, PostFinance)?

Is there a Swiss-specific aggregator I’m missing, or maybe a way to leverage the "Common API" initiative without breaking the bank?

I’m currently stuck with CSV imports (which works but the UX is... 2010), and I'd love to offer a more "2026" experience.

Thanks for any tips or leads!
by cube00 | 2026-02-27 15:34:16+00:00
In the interests of transparency it should be noted you are the 4th top contributor to this repo [1].

If that test summary was generated by Claude without intervention it wouldn't have estimation tildes all over the counts.

Why would you bother with any intervention on Claude's output if it was only a joke, wouldn't you just dump the output and move on?

[1]: https://github.com/tldraw/tldraw/graphs/contributors
by 7402 | 2026-02-27 15:34:48+00:00
Hamas has a one-state transition plan: kill or drive out the Jews, or enslave the ones with technical expertise. The Israel far right has a transition plan: kill or drive out the Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza, except for the few that don't cause them problems.

Partition of disputed territory is the least bad solution in the world we live in. "One world" government remains a utopian fantasy. Dividing the world up according to a mix of consideration of peoplehood, self-determination, and whoever won the most recent war is what humankind has figured out so far.

People who disagree with that will want to start wars. Wars are bad.
by plqbfbv | 2026-02-27 15:34:52+00:00
> Postmarketos clearly exists and works, EVEN if LLMs were absolutely perfect for speeding up development ten folds, is there any absolute moral necessity to use them?

There's no moral necessity, but if you want to survive as a project moving forward, you'll have less and less velocity compared to projects using LLMs, so you'll eventually shrink and die as a project, because less people will contribute to a project that gets less features and bug fixes.

I don't understand why these projects have such a strong "moral" stance of "no AI ever", and instead they don't deploy LLMs to automatically review PRs based on their own guidelines, so that if the contribution is valuable, it gets through no matter if it was written by an LLM or not.
by n_e | 2026-02-27 15:35:14+00:00
I have a SaaS project where the backend is in JS. I also have some data processing to do with large file (several TB). Doing it is in JS is more convenient as I can reuse code from the backend, and it is also the language I know best.

Performance-wise, I get about half the throughput I had with the same processsing done it rust, which doesn't change anything for my use-case.

However that's not really relevant to the context of the post as I'm using node.js streams which are both saner and fast. I'm guessing that the post is relevant to people using server-side runtimes that only implement web streams.
by ZenoArrow | 2026-02-27 15:35:19+00:00
> I don't have anything to win either.

Sure you do, you can prove those that doubt your views wrong.

> Sounds exactly the kind of stuff coding agents thrive at - a verifiable loop. And they can do it 24x7 until done.

Go for it then, you're not putting in any work into it other than giving it a task to do.
by ontouchstart | 2026-02-27 15:35:39+00:00
That is correct. And also simple `man bash`:

REDIRECTION
Before a command is executed, its input and output may be redirected
using a special notation interpreted by the shell. Redirection may
also be used to open and close files for the current shell execution
environment. The following redirection operators may precede or appear
anywhere within a simple command or may follow a command. Redirections
are processed in the order they appear, from left to right.

In the following descriptions, if the file descriptor number is
omitted, and the first character of the redirection operator is <, the
redirection refers to the standard input (file descriptor 0). If the
first character of the redirection operator is >, the redirection
refers to the standard output (file descriptor 1).

The word following the redirection operator in the following
descriptions, unless otherwise noted, is subjected to brace expansion,
tilde expansion, parameter expansion, command substitution, arithmetic
expansion, quote removal, pathname expansion, and word splitting. If
it expands to more than one word, bash reports an error.

Note that the order of redirections is significant. For example, the
command

ls > dirlist 2>&1

directs both standard output and standard error to the file dirlist,
while the command

ls 2>&1 > dirlist

directs only the standard output to file dirlist, because the standard
error was duplicated as standard output before the standard output was
redirected to dirlist.

...
by lehmacdj | 2026-02-27 15:37:19+00:00
I'm pretty ambivalent about generative AI's effect on my happiness/motivation.

Often talking to Claude/using AI agents to build software is really enjoyable/motivating, and it also makes it easier to get the satisfaction from completing projects.

But it also tends to make me think about how quickly the technology is developing. This makes me anxious about x-risks from AI, which makes it harder to get work done.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-27 15:37:38+00:00
> You said that no fixed response -whether that is allow unexpected billing to increase without limit upon a surge vs serving error pages- will be accepted by the clientele, because some want it one way and others want it the other way.

No, it's because people dislike both of those things and don't want either one of them, and frequently fail to realize ahead of time that choosing between them is even necessary and then get upset by whichever one actually happens.

> Why would you force a single shoe size onto a population?

Here's my original post:

> The main thing Google is screwing up here is not giving you the choice between them.

> And it doesn't have to be just those 2 options

We're talking about an API used by programmers. You don't need them to give you any of that, all you need is for the API to tell you what your current usage is -- and even that is only necessary if something other than your own code is racking up usage. When you're the one making queries and the price of each one is known ahead of time or available via the API, you can already implement any of that logic yourself.
by randusername | 2026-02-27 15:37:51+00:00
There's this saying that if you owe the bank a million dollars, you have a big problem, but if you owe the bank 100 million dollars, the bank has a big problem.

Is the same thing true for corporations? At some point the numbers are so wild the entire economy must help you succeed? I don't mean "too big to fail" exactly, more like "so big eventual success is guaranteed at all costs"
by muzani | 2026-02-27 15:38:02+00:00
Something about the grass being greener on the other side.

Many of the former colonial superpowers collapsed but never found their way back up again. The core problem might not be fixed.

But people still evaluate them as if they own half the world. In terms of GDP (per capita), quality of life, healthcare, they're not much better than the countries they once colonized.

Then again, Turkey is one of those countries, so OP might have better luck elsewhere.
Show HN: Pitch An App – Crowdsourced app ideas with voting and revenue sharing
by eibrahim | 2026-02-27 15:38:17+00:00
Pitch An App (https://www.pitchanapp.com) is a platform where users submit app ideas, the community votes on them, and ideas that hit the vote threshold get built.

Submitters earn revenue share when their app generates income. Voters get 50% off forever.

9 apps have been built through the platform so far.

The core assumption: non-technical people have good software ideas but no way to act on them. Community voting serves as demand validation before any development starts.

Honest limitations: the vote threshold model means only popular ideas get built, so niche-but-valuable ideas might not make the cut. Working on ways to address that.

Happy to answer questions about the model or the tech.
by jasnell | 2026-02-27 15:38:19+00:00
Heh, I was using emdashes and tricolons long before LLMs appropriated the style but I did let the agent handle some of the details on this. Honestly, it really is just easier sometimes... Especially for blogs posts like this when I've also got a book I'm writing, code to maintain etc. Use tools available to make life easier.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-27 15:38:23+00:00
Depends on which GC language, people keep forgeting many have C++ like capabilities, besides having a GC.

D, C#, Swift, Nim,.....

Agree that in Julia's case the flexiblity is not quite there, still much better than using Python and then going to write most of the work in C, C++, Fortran,.....

Which is a thing that gets lost quite often in these discussions, just because the last 5% might be a bit harder, doesn't mean we have to throw everything away and start from scratch in another programming language, with its own set of problems.
by dec0dedab0de | 2026-02-27 15:38:35+00:00
That never works for me. I try to only sign up for things that I can cancel immediately and continue to use for the rest of whatever time period I signed up for.

Instead of potentially getting billed for some trial I forgot about, I would rather pay for a month, immediately cancel, and then repeat every month when I realize it's not working.

Besides helping me keep my expenses under control, it doubles as an evaluation of the company. If they make it difficult to cancel, or do not let me use the rest of my paid time, I know they are not a company I want to do business with.
by tclancy | 2026-02-27 15:38:43+00:00
I've found something similar. I've been using Claude Code to build lots of things I would but fear failing at or hitting an iceberg. Having seen success for that, I've started rubber ducking it through a number of things. Changed the carburetor on my snow blower for the first time ever and with minimal pain mainly because "asking Claude about it" meant making myself stop and think through the process, plan an approach and put together a mise-en-place rather than starting, realizing I needed a couple of tools, leaving things a mess and not coming back due to anxiety.

Basically, it helps me avoid what they called "gumption traps" in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-27 15:38:43+00:00
> They have defined an approach to strong arm problem solving and weaponisation of the government that anyone that works for them is implicitly allowed to use

And one of the few constraints in their approach is not to fuck with the Dow. Expropriating Anthropic’s IP would trash the AI sector, and by extension, the Dow. (Even designating it a supply-chain risk sets a material precedent that a future administration could use against OpenAI and xAI.)

Hegseth is bluffing on his most destructive fronts, even if he doesn’t know it.
by inanutshellus | 2026-02-27 15:38:56+00:00
I honestly didn't feel like the article even feigned rigor.

It felt like some parent's personal blog ruminating on an idea, not an "article".

Claude followed links on a single Wikipedia article and visualized the results geographically for one image so the author could keep talking about how we (and he) know basically nothing.

Doesn't seem like it belongs on HN.
by no_wizard | 2026-02-27 15:39:00+00:00
>What no_wizard and others in this thread are upset about is the owner/leadership of a company firing employees from that company. no_wizard goes so far as to suggest that that's "entitled" behavior.

It is entitled behavior. In the very literal sense of the word entitled. They wouldn't have such power to affect so many people unless they had a form of entitlement.

>We have at-will employment in 49 out of 50 states for a reason. You're adults entering into a mutually agreed upon contract where you trade money for services rendered. Your company is not your parent/nanny/caretaker who owes you continued employment and predictability in life. And vice versa, if you are a company owner, your employees are not your slaves who owe you work or continued employment.

We don't have at will employment because workers decided its what's best for the arrangement. There's been systematic efforts by business lobbying politicians. Its a well documented history. At will employment overwhelming benefits employers, not employees. Its not an equal relationship. The reason we have at will employment so prevalent is because it undermines unions. Its not because its the best and most equitable arrangement between employers and employees

>What is entitled is the belief that you are somehow owed your job (or vice versa, that you are owed continued tenure by your employees), and that for them to cancel the at-will contract when they no longer want it is worthy of punishment.

Who said anything about owed a job? What I'm saying is there is a lack of consequences for executives and by extension companies.

Triggering a wealth tax would be one. Companies that are profitable laying off thousands of people being required to pay fairer severances would be another form of consequence.

The specifics of all that can be debated, what I'm saying head on though is there should be higher consequences for their stupidity and inability to deploy resources effectively.
by epistasis | 2026-02-27 15:39:16+00:00
I don't see the analogy at all.

Anthropic is in negotiation with Hegseth/DoD. Pointing out all the specific actions that Hegseth is doing are fair game to show that Hegseth is nuts.

Bringing in other complaints against other parties, however bad those other parties are behaving, shows a pattern in other people, which might be helpful too. But hegseth's direct actions are stronger evidence.
by hielke | 2026-02-27 15:39:19+00:00
With exec you can open file descriptors of your current process.

if [[ ! -e /proc/$$/fd/3 ]]; then
# check if fd 3 already open and if not open, open it to /dev/null
exec 3>/dev/null
fi
>&3 echo "will print on fd 3"

This will fix the error you are describing while keeping the functionality intact.

Now with that exec trick the fun only gets started. Because you can redirect to subshells and subshells inherit their redirection of the parent:

set -x # when debugging, print all commands ran prefixed with CMD:
PID=$$
BASH_XTRACEFD=7
LOG_FILE=/some/place/to/your/log/or/just/stdout
exec 3> >(gawk '!/^RUN \+ echo/{ print strftime("[%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S] <PID:'$PID'> "), $0; fflush() }' >> $LOG_FILE)
exec > >(sed -u 's/^/INFO: /' >&3)
exec 2> >(sed -u 's/^/ERROR: /' >&3)
exec 7> >(sed -u 's/^/CMD: /' >&3)
exec 8>&1 #normal stdout with >&8
exec 9>&2 #normal stderr with >&9

And now your bash script will have a nice log with stdout and stderr prefixed with INFO and ERROR and has timestamps with the PID.

Now the disclaimer is that you will not have gaurantees that the order of stdout and stderr will be correct unfortunately, even though we run it unbuffered (-u and fflush).
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-27 15:39:47+00:00
It's this kind of dynamic that makes me pull back on my otherwise pretty AI-forward stance. There's an entire community of people who passionately believe it's obvious and undeniable that Elon Musk has solved problems that he has not solved and his companies deliver things they don't deliver. Tesla is absolutely unambiguous in their marketing material (https://www.tesla.com/fsd) that they do not have autonomous driving, but you're far from the first person I've encountered who's been tricked into believing otherwise.

I don't think that's my relationship with AI, I'm hardly an uncritical booster. But would I know if it was?
by cperciva | 2026-02-27 15:39:58+00:00
Sure. They're still figuring out exactly how to decide who qualifies for this -- seriously, 5000 github stars or 1M monthly NPM downloads? -- and they don't want to make long-term promises to people who might not qualify under future better-thought-out rules.

That doesn't mean they're not going to continue this, it just means they're being careful not to make promises which they'll want to roll back later.
by collabs | 2026-02-27 15:40:04+00:00
This is an interesting concept. Thank you for sharing. I have an export.sh or export.ps1 script that takes the relevant files in my repository and puts them in a `dump.txt` file inside `docs/llm`.

I am not very good with AI though. Is there a quick and easy way to calculate token count and add this to my dump.txt file, ideally using just simple, included by default Linux tools in bash or simple, included by default Windows tools in powershell?

Thank you in advance.
by eqrio | 2026-02-27 15:40:07+00:00
The article was too long already to get into this, but it's a good question. Getting browser vendors to standardize a new IDL is a non-starter. My personal preference is to derive WIT/component interfaces from WebIDL, and I've done enough research to believe it's feasible. I'll talk about that more in the future. There are some other options too if that is a dead end.
by Ntrails | 2026-02-27 15:40:21+00:00
> automatically kicking a user off would also probably be bad.

No. "Sorry, subscription has expired, please re-up your account" is an extremely reasonable UX.

The whole "free period but we'll auto bill you after" is a shitty dark pattern that mostly exists to extract value from life admin errors. The people who got enough value to justify the cost would've paid anyway.
by markemer | 2026-02-27 15:40:28+00:00
Also Environmental regulations are like vaccines. They're victims of their own success. In the late 1960s early 1970s, before the EPA, the air and water in the US was a disaster. The EPA documented it:

https://www.businessinsider.com/what-us-cities-looked-like-b...

https://catalog.archives.gov/id/542493
by wongarsu | 2026-02-27 15:40:30+00:00
OpenAI has all the name recognition (which is worth a couple billion in itself), but when it comes to actual business use cases in the here and now Anthropic seems ahead. Even more so if we are talking about software dev. But they are valued at less than half of OpenAI's valuation

What is somewhat justifying OpenAI's valuation is that they are still trying for AGI. They are not just working on models that works here and now, they are still approaching "simulating worlds" from all kinds of angles (vision, image generation, video generation, world generation), presumably in hopes that this will at some point coalesce in a model with much better understanding of our world and its agency in it. If this comes to pass OpenAI's value is near unlimited. If it doesn't, its value is at best half what it is today
by matthewdgreen | 2026-02-27 15:41:30+00:00
We could add new states. For example, Washington DC has 702,000 people with zero Congressional representation, and they're currently occupied by Federal troops without any voting recourse. If they were made a state, they'd be bigger than Wyoming and Vermont. Puerto Rico is also a US territory with 3.2 million people and zero Congressional representation. As a state it would be larger than 20 existing states. This doesn't "fix" the problem but it does ensure that more U.S. citizens gain access to representation in Congress, while also shifting power to more densely-populated areas.