MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmyeet | 2026-02-28 12:45:50+00:00
I just want to expand on this.

1. According to the US and Israel, Iran has been a week away from having nuclear weapons for at least 34 years [1];

2. It's quite clear Iran could've developed nuclear weapons but chose not to. I actually think was a mistake. The real lesson from the so-called War on Terror was that only nuclear weapons will preserve your regime (ie Norht Korea);

3. Israel is a nuclear power. It's widely believed that Israel first obtained weapons grade Uranium by stealing it from the US in the 1960s [2];

4. In a just world, people would hang for what we did to Iran in 1953, 1978-79, the Iran-Iraq War and sanctions (which are a sanitized way of saying "we're starving you"); and

5. The current round of demands include Iran dismantling its ballistic missile program. This is because the 12 day war was a strategic and military disaster for the US and Israel.

Israel has a multi-layered missile defence shield. People usually talk about Iron Dome but that's just for shooting down small rockets. Separate layers exist for long-range and ballistic missiles (eg David's Sling, Arrow-2, Arrow-3). In recent times the US has complemented these with the ship-borne THAAD system.

Even with all this protection, Iran responded to the unprovoked attacks of the 12-day war by sending just enough ballistic missiles to overwhelm the defences, basically saying "if we have to, we can hit Israel".

Many suspect that the real reason the US negotiated an end to the 12 day war was because both Israel and the US were running cirtically low on the munitions for THAAD and Israel's missile defence shield. You can't just quickly make more either. Reportedly that will take over a year to get replacements.

Thing is, pretty much all of this missile defence technology is about to become obsolete once hypersonic missiles become more widespread, which is going to happen pretty soon. I suspect that's a big part of why the US and Israel are now trying so desperately to topple the regime and turn Iran into a fail-state like Somalia or Yemen.

I'm not normally one to encourage nuclear proliferation but when it's the only thing the US will listen to, what choice do countries have?

[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2025/6/18/the-history-of-n...

[2]: https://thebulletin.org/2014/04/did-israel-steal-bomb-grade-...
Show HN: Telos – A structured context framework for humans and AI agents
by wrencanfly | 2026-02-28 12:45:53+00:00
Telos is a structured intent and decision tracking layer that works alongside Git. It doesn't replace Git — it captures the why behind code changes in a queryable, machine-readable format.

Git tracks what changed in your code. Telos tracks what you intended, what constraints you set, and what decisions you made and why. Every intent, decision, and behavioral expectation is stored as a content-addressable object (SHA-256), forming a DAG that mirrors your development history.

Telos is designed for both human developers and AI agents. Its --json output mode and context command make it a natural integration point for LLM-powered coding assistants that need to recover project context across sessions.
by krater23 | 2026-02-28 12:47:06+00:00
As German, I can say, as long as not someone used mines out of glass, they will rot away in some decades. We still have some woods where you could step on glass mines....

But happy to hear the news. Some years ago as I was urban exploring the airfield in Zeljava it has hit someone nearby the field. Happily I just saw the ambulance and the police.
by maccard | 2026-02-28 12:47:11+00:00
I’ve got two machines for work - a desktop with an i9 and a laptop with an i7 and 32GB. The laptop is honestly a disgrace - I can’t believe it is sold as it is and marketed as a premium device. It’s “fine” for some light development but it fundamentally just doesn’t work - it misses inputs, it can’t handle chrome, regularly refuses to wake from sleep, etc. it does have an EPM solution on it which definitely makes it worse, but my 17 year old MacBook which can’t even load modern websites because safari is so out of date runs better than it.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-28 12:47:15+00:00
Maybe after the civil war, certainly not during it. If I had to pick where to live, I'd pick North Korea over Ukraine right now because it's a lot easier to live in a dictatorship than an active war zone. (This isn't me saying I want to live in NK, I don't).

But I'd also point out that a lot of what makes it really suck to live in the worst places in the world isn't often the government but rather the international relationships. Turkey has a particularly brutal government, but it's Nato and EU ally status means that the civilians enjoy modern trade and travel.

The worst times to be in NK was the 90s when there was an ongoing famine and the US refused to lift sanctions thinking it'd spark a civil war that overthrew the regime. It didn't.
by DivingForGold | 2026-02-28 12:47:19+00:00
This Gov't action places Scouts between a rock and a hard place since liberals now control the United Way Fund, which controls the purse strings of significant funding (>10%) for the Scouts. Maybe Hegseth should direct his line of fire to the United Way ?
A statement from Scouting America that says they're not actually doing what Pete Hegseth says they're supposed to do. That none of the membership policies will change.
by vidarh | 2026-02-28 12:47:22+00:00
Who says anything about old models? What we're seeing is that as the frontier models get better, we get cheaper, better small models that leverage the advanced but cost a fraction. At the same time, hardware provides morez cheaper options. Sometimes far faster options too (e.g. Cerebras).

In terms of price, I can get 1m output tokens from Deepseek for 40 cents vs. 25 dollars for Opus, and a number of models near the 1-2 dollar mark that are increasingly viable for a larger set of applications.

Providers will keep running those cheaper models as long as there's demand.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-28 12:48:02+00:00
> you don't need an analyst to see who strikes first (and the frequency of that pattern) while diplomats are still at the negotiating table

Of course you do. If the diplomats' job is to stall and never make any actual concessions, that's germane. My understanding is there was a genuine desire for diplomacy on the American side. But at least this round, Tehran never conceded on any material fronts.
by propagandist | 2026-02-28 12:49:59+00:00
https://mondoweiss.net/2025/09/israel-bombed-qatar-to-assass...

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/ali-shamkhani-iranian-neg...

Not a slight against you personally, but it's genuinely frustrating discussing this with people who don't actually follow the conflict. Thank you for probing in an inquisitive manner, but please question the state propaganda, which I'm sad to say includes just about every mainstream outlet.
by spwa4 | 2026-02-28 12:50:41+00:00
Well they are doing that because of the nature of matrix multiplication. Specifically, LLM costs scale in the square length of a single input, let's call it N, but only linearly in the number of batched inputs.

O(M * N^2 * d)

d is a constant related to the network you're running. Batching, btw, is the reason many tools like Ollama require you to set the context length before serving requests.

Having many more inputs is way cheaper than having longer inputs. In fact, that this is the case is the reason we went for LLMs in the first place: as this allows training to proceed quickly, batching/"serving many customers" is exactly what you do during training. GPUs came in because taking 10k triangles, and then doing almost the exact same calculation batched 1920*1080 times on them is exactly what happens behind the eyes of Lara Croft.

And this is simplified because a vector input (ie. M=1) is the worst case for the hardware, so they just don't do it (and certainly not in published benchmark results). Often even older chips are hardwired to work with M set to 8 (and these days 24 or 32) for every calculation. So until you hit 20 customers/requests at the same time, it's almost entirely free in practice.

Hence: the optimization of subagents. Let's say you need an LLM to process 1 million words (let's say 1 word = 1 token for simplicity)

O(1 million words in one go) ~ 1e12 or 1 trillion operations

O(1000 times 1000 words) ~ 1e9 or 1 billion operations

O(10000 times 100 words) ~ 1e8 or 100 million operations

O(100000 times 10 words) ~ 1e7 or 10 million operations

O(one word at a time) ~ 1e6 or 1 million operations

Of course, to an extent this last way of doing things is the long known case of a recurrent neural network. Very difficult to train, but if you get it working, it speeds away like professor Snape confronted with a bar of soap (to steal a Harry Potter joke)
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-28 12:50:41+00:00
> conducting a live-streamed genocide

For what it's worth, I think the American activists on this issue bungled the messaging to disastrous effect (in the same way we bungled criminal-justice reform). It's a saturated issue with low political salience outside a specific (and increasingly constrained) demographic.

A win in Iran will be a short-term boost, in America and in Israel. Then we'll go back to being pissed about rising prices.
by wildylion | 2026-02-28 12:51:49+00:00
Side question, but what happens if there's a technical error with the service provider that leads to double spending?

Example: we bought tickets worth 300 EUR from Deutsche Bahn, they were hit by a DDoS and couldn't complete the transaction.

We got charged *twice* (i.e. 600 EUR and not refunded yet. AND no tickets!!!

Now they claim all they can do is to give us 600 EUR in vouchers (that are not even transferrable).

Would a Chargeback work in this case?

And my friend (who's ordered the tickets) has a very traditional bank that only gives a statement monthly, and probably accepts claims on every 29 of February, between 7 and 8 AM and only by fax (IYKYK those German companies...)
by resters | 2026-02-28 12:52:19+00:00
There will be a scene in some future movie about Trump's authoritarian rise (we are still early in it) that shows Sam signing this agreement. Sam will be played by a character actor meant to symbolize silicon valley opportunism and greed.

What sam and greg don't realize is that the many who succumb to trump's pressure tactics will all be lumped into the same category by history.

Sam and Greg are handing an authoritarian regime that has broken so many laws in the past year a superweapon.
by instig007 | 2026-02-28 12:52:35+00:00
> If the diplomats' job is to stall and never make any actual concessions, that's germane.

does this line of reasoning apply to the US only, or in general?

> My understanding is there was a genuine desire for diplomacy on the American side. But at least this round, Tehran never conceded on any material fronts.

they had an option to do it and still continue a diplomatic track, they aren't obliged to devote themselves to the US preferences at the US-preferred pace.
by wiseowise | 2026-02-28 12:52:49+00:00
Ukraine will never de jure give up those territories and majority of nations will never recognize those as part of Russia. And it’s 20%, not 30%. Pre full scale war it was 7%, now it is 19%, so during the five years they’ve captured 12% of Ukraine's territory.

Russian goals were:

- Quick decapitation - fail

- Change of government - fail

- Prove that majority of Ukrainians are phone Russians and the moment greater Russia comes everyone will see that Ukraine is not a real state - fail

- Make second Belarus out of Ukraine - fail

- Stop NATO enlargement, Finland and Sweden joined NATO essentially doubling border with NATO - fail

- Dissuade Ukraine from joining EU and make it pro Russian first - fail

- Prove that Russia is a great military power on par with US that can topple regimes at will - fail

- Make Russia strategically independent- fail, Russia is now completely dependent on China

- Destabilize EU - fail, Europe is united like never under US/Russia/China threat

This war will enter history as one of the worst blunders.
by cogman10 | 2026-02-28 12:53:29+00:00
Absolutely. No question.

War isn't glamorous. It's mechanized death and torture destroying communities, families, and loved ones. And when it's powered by foreign governments, it's worse. Because the two colliding sides are armed to the gills with the best weapons in murder along with mercenaries and no oversight.

Living in a dictatorship is hard but doable, There are literally generations of people that have survived and thrived in that sort of an environment. It's not preferable, for sure, but you still have your family, friends, and neighbors. None of them are trying to actively kill you. So long as you follow the rules, life in a dictatorship is generally predicable and the odds of the state making you specifically an example are low.
by tialaramex | 2026-02-28 12:53:59+00:00
But it isn't trivial, as I explained the leap days inserted to fix the calendar are entirely predictable. In 1752 when my country adopted this system they already knew that 1800 and 1900 would not have such a day but 2000 would. They had no idea what the year 2000 would be like but their calendar already told them it has an extra day.

In contrast leap seconds are not predictable because they're trying to smooth out spin variation and the planet's spin is affected by natural processes. The IERS measures UT1 and we add (or remove) leap seconds to make UTC try to approximate UT1, we get a few months warning at most that a new insertion or removal is needed.

And despite being very difficult all of this is also pointless because we don't care. As an astronomer you know you don't try to use a wristwatch to figure out the Earth's rotation, you can just look that up online and use your exact position. But for any other purpose except astronomy we don't need this angle information, we want a nice regular time and the atomic time, TAI, already provides that without this nonsense about leap seconds.
by heavyset_go | 2026-02-28 12:54:15+00:00
That would have to be litigated in court, and the easiest and cheapest way to avoid litigation is to do what all platforms currently do: make sure the person using their system is who they say they are via face scans and ID checks.

As a developer, that is not the kind of liability I want to take on when I can just plug ID.me, or whatever, into my app and not worry if someone writes "im 12 lol" in a comment on my platform.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-02-28 12:54:21+00:00
Anthropic's public statement declared their intent -- and in fact desire -- to allow their use of technology against me, as I'm not a US citizen.

Why should I stand with them? They only believe US citizens have democratic rights.

I'm sure Anthropic's hands are tied in so many ways, but that's no concern of mine.

I'll get by with GLM-5 and running Qwen locally.
by propagandist | 2026-02-28 12:55:10+00:00
They're interchangeable the USA and Israel, especially at this time.

Of course I mean at the state level. Individuals is a very different story.

---

Hit the rate limit so I'm attaching my response to the comment below here.

---

Fair enough. I let the current situation cloud my vision, but I genuinely mean they're interchangeable. You can look up the involvement of people like Kushner, Witkoff, Barak with Israel and see where they sit in our government. Leaving aside the major donors.

If you listen to statements made by the USG spokespeople, they literally throw US servicemen under the bus to shield the IDF. That goes both for this admin and the last.

In the previous admin, it was Biden and Blinken that made a break impossible, despite landing on different political sides from Netanyahu. Another president would have cut them off at some point.

Obama was the only one who charted an independent path in recent years (post Bush. Sr.)
by ukblewis | 2026-02-28 12:55:22+00:00
AFAIK, the U.S. government is fully entitled to serve them under the U.S. Department of War’s terms as per the Defense Production Act. The government has yet to do this, but a company acting in a way that the Department of War perceives as benefiting enemy states could certainly be a justification for declaring a supply chain risk. Anthropic’s decision timing as the U.S. has launched a war in the Middle East to save millions of Iranian lives (tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iranians have already been killed by the Islamic Regime) definitely seems to be unjustifiable and the U.S. Department of War (so weird for me to type that instead of DOD) was smart, in my opinion, not to force Anthropic to work with them but to drop all work with them and move to providers who will meet the military’s needs while at war.

(Just in case anyone was wondering, I live in Israel)
by simonw | 2026-02-28 12:55:27+00:00
It used Python as an example of why "For sandboxing arbitrary code in arbitrary languages, WASM is not yet viable." - but Python in WASM works really well, as do other languages where the interpreter can be compiled to WASM.

So while the statement is technically true that you can't run "arbitrary code in arbitrary languages", the practical reality is that for many languages WASM is a great solution despite that.
by 0x3f | 2026-02-28 12:55:31+00:00
> I never found anyone successfully argue against it.

I think what you mean is you've never found a rule you personally prefer more, based purely on vibes. Which is all moral knowledge can ever be.

It's easy to argue against the golden rule anyway, from many angles, depending on your first principles.

The simplest is: How I would like to be treated is not necessarily how they would like to be treated.
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-28 12:56:04+00:00
> does this line of reasoning apply to the US only, or in general?

Are you asking serious questions? I think the evidence shows the U.S. was negotiating in good faith in the beginning (and I'm scoping to this round of negotiations only). And then it concluded there was no deal to be had, and we probably started bullshitting as well. At the same time, I think the evidence shows the Iranian side was mostly bullshitting the whole time.

> they had an option to do it and still continue a diplomatic track

Well sure. We also had the option to terminate negotiations, ratchet up sanctions and walk away. None of that changes that the Iranians weren't negotiating in good faith. (Again, based on what I've seen. Open to changing my mind. But the lack of any discussion of what Iran did in this subthread seems to underline my point.)

> they aren't obliged to devote themselves to the US preferences at the US-preferred pace

War is politics by other means. They aren't obligated to accept the other's timeline. But I wouldn't say that's negotiating either realistically or in good faith–you can't just ignore material variables because you don't like that they exist.
by AbstractH24 | 2026-02-28 12:56:04+00:00
> I am just befuddled by how much of this violence is directly motivated by religious concerns, both on the side of Iran and on the side of Israel and USA.

Can you provide an example of this in 2026?

It seems a little tenable with the ayatollah and Iran. But even here you don’t hear much talk of this being a war in the name of religion anymore. Nowhere near a few years ago and certainly nothing like 9/11 and the Taliban.

And I hear nobody in Israel or America talking that way. Just a war defending people against attackers at the gates.
by jmcapra | 2026-02-28 12:56:19+00:00
How do you handle the Skills being task-system-specific? A skill that works for Linear tickets might embed assumptions about how Linear structures work items. If you ever want to share or compare skills across teams or projects, those embedded assumptions become a portability problem.

The confidence score is a good first step — curious whether you plan to expose that in a way teams can compare across different skill configurations, or if it's intentionally local-only.
by jmyeet | 2026-02-28 12:58:10+00:00
What I would like people to understand is that this isn't a partisan issue. As bad as Trump is, American foreign policy is uniparty. Just look at the rhetoric from the Democratic Party leadership on an Iran strike. You have the likes of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries quibbling over the procedure not the policy, saying Congress needs to approve action, not that that action is belligerent or unwarranted.

October 7 happened under a Democratic president and continued essentially unchanged under Trump. Biden consistently lied about "red lines" and seeing a ceasefire [1].

The problem here isn't one party or one persident, it's America's commitment to imperialism, of which Iran is just one aspect. Since WW2 especially there has been so much regime change done or aided by the US as well as military action, it has it's own Wikipedia page [2].

And what did Kamala Harris promise to change about Biden's Middle East policy? Absolutely nothing [3]. It's a big part of why she lost and the DNC don't want to admit that so they're trying to cover up the 2024 autopsy [4].

Don't fool yourself into thinking anything would be different under a Kamala Harris administration.

[1]: https://internationalpolicy.org/publications/the-biden-admin...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/8/8/biden-vs-harris-...

[4]: https://www.axios.com/2026/02/22/dnc-2024-autopsy-harris-gaz...
by Matl | 2026-02-28 12:58:19+00:00
> by the way, Russia and Germany did wind up going to war with each other. Same as Iran and Israel,

Are you seriously arguing that Hitler was rational for preemptively attacking Russia because AFTER Hitler attacked Russia, Russia did not simply sit back and let itself be attacked but in fact started defending itself?
And are you arguing that Israel doing the same is rational because AFTER Israel attacked Iran, Iran launched some missiles towards Israel IN RESPONSE TO THE ISRAELI ATTACK, therefore proving Israel right that Iran is going to attack them?

> that same one whose anihiliation the former has been chanting for since its revolution.

Oh and Israel has been nothing but wishing them happy Ramadan?

The reason Israel does not want the current Iranian system to survive is because it sees it as the only possible threat to its eternal domination of the Palestinians and its ability to dictate its borders in the Middle East.
by abustamam | 2026-02-28 12:58:19+00:00
This makes me feel good. My gym was one of those places that lured you in with a low monthly price then heavily upsell you on personal trainers. The trainers were fine, but they were fairly inexperienced (usually college kids who took a course and then wanted a summer job or something). And once they found something better they'd leave. Nothing against the trainers, but I prefer to have consistency with my coaches.

Anyway, when I canceled my membership, I realized a few months later they were still charging me for training sessions. I chatted with the manager and apparently I had to cancel those separately. They refused to refund me for the sessions I never took. But they had a kind offer of being able to get training without paying for membership.

Well, I wasn't buying it, so I went on Chase and initiated chargebacks for every session charged after I canceled.

I dunno what happened on their end, but I got my money back. The business is still around, so I guess I didn't hurt them that much, but it's good to know that I probably was at least a hindrance.