MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bee_rider | 2026-02-23 16:23:48+00:00
I haven’t done a ton of porting. And when I did, it was more like a reimplementation.

> We’ve verified that every AST produced by the Rust parser is identical to the C++ one, and all bytecode generated by the Rust compiler is identical to the C++ compiler’s output.

Is this a conventional goal? It seems like quite an achievement.
by blub | 2026-02-23 16:24:39+00:00
I feel similar about the potential of this technique and have heard this from other C++ developers too.

Rust syntax is a PITA and investing a lot of effort in the language doesn’t seem worth the trouble for an experienced C++ developer, but with AI learning, porting and maintenance all become more accessible.
It’s possible to integrate Rust in an existing codebase or write subparts of larger C++ projects in Rust where it makes sense.

I was recently involved in an AI porting effort, but using different languages and the results were fine. Validating and reviewing the code took longer than writing it.
by mapt | 2026-02-23 16:24:56+00:00
My "Random Singles" Youtube playlist created in 2006 is approaching 1500 tracks. ~200 of them are hidden, because the video is no longer available.

It's not that I can't find other copies (although in some cases I literally can't), it's that the information has been deleted from my records. My exocortex has had a scalpel remove something, and no amount of backtracking and process of elimination is going to restore it at this large-N corpus size.

I was able to back up what was still up a few years ago, so there's a hard drive in my closet with some of it. But if I tried that at this point, Youtube is pretty determined to fight me with IP blocks.
by hellojesus | 2026-02-23 16:24:57+00:00
If you drive out everyone with identity filters, those folks will naturally flock to sites run in nations without the same controls. I don't think you really solve anything except to push traffic elsewhere.

Instead it would be more appropriate to let sites pass headers, such as "we have adult content", thst you could filter on the network or client side. It's still voluntary, of course. Anyone will just visit sites that don't have the checks if necessary.
by koakuma-chan | 2026-02-23 16:25:00+00:00
No, I am making the argument that models have poor capabilities outside of tasks they are RLed for, and their capabilities inside those tasks are only as good as capabilities of people evaluating their responses, i.e. not great. Even if you instruct the model "don't do X" or "do X this way"—you cannot rely on the model following that instruction. This means that there is nothing you can do if model makes "errors."

Not necessarily relevant, but fun, I had the ChatGPT model correct itself mid-response when checking my math work. It started by saying that I was wrong, then it proceeded to solve the problem and at the end it realized that I was correct.
by ErroneousBosh | 2026-02-23 16:25:05+00:00
I've driven some brand new 3-digit-miles Kia Niro EVs, which start off indicating 200 miles range but have dropped to 150 by the time I get across town, and after about 100 miles total driving they're screaming at me to find a charging point.

The real-world performance does not match the advertised performance.
by youngdutt | 2026-02-23 16:25:08+00:00
The founder of Contract Shield, Prince Lohia, gave one of my company's a one star review on Trust Pilot, in what is clearly a scam and false review trying to steer traffic to his website - "The product didn’t perform up to the mark. There are better and more affordable options available—like Contract_Shield.in. I’ve decided to switch to that instead." Except he isn't a customer of our product; Indeed, users in India cant even make an account on our product. So this is the kind of shady and sketchy scammer you are dealing with if you sign up for Contract Shield.
by MontagFTB | 2026-02-23 16:25:29+00:00
It is entirely possible a Rust port could have caught previously unknown memory safety issues. Furthermore, a Rust port that looks and feels like C++ may be peppered with unsafe calls to the point where the ROI on the port is greatly reduced.

I am not trying to dunk on the effort; quite the contrary. I am eager to hear more about the goals it originally set out to achieve.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2026-02-23 16:25:31+00:00
When the left is censoring more (as was true in the run-up to Trump's election), of course a free speech organization will be opposing left-wing censorship more frequently.

Censorship doesn't help your team, just the opposite. https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...

Trump's election was a reaction to left-wing cancel culture. If people had listened to FIRE, and refuted bad ideas instead of censoring them, maybe Trump wouldn't have been elected: https://qr.ae/pYCVXO
by xantronix | 2026-02-23 16:25:50+00:00
Sure, it's a pain in the ass, but why should we scare people away who WANT to self-host?

Pro tip for people with low mail volume or those who can spare a few packets on extra DNS traffic: Validating that a host has a non-provider PTR record which has corresponding A/AAAA/CNAME records resolving back to that same IP address, is enough to filter out a large bulk of spam.
by lanstin | 2026-02-23 16:26:03+00:00
Email itself cannot be regarded as a reliable delivery method. That said, I host my own email service, have for decades, and often have problems sending to people. I am not running a product on it, and so my recipients usually will check in spam since they want my email. My family knows to txt if there is an email I need to read (that isn’t a mail hosting problem but I don’t really read email consistently). I also have a small web site where I can put family recipes and my resume and the odd file that is too large for email. And a mastodon instance, sync thing, dns, and an old fingerd I wrote in Lisp in 2008 when I was done being a stay at home dad and needed an industry job.

It is a great hobby, and a good way to keep aware of current trends in internet infrastructure. And, like riding a bicycle to commute, maximally free of red tape or external regulation.
by gdulli | 2026-02-23 16:26:07+00:00
Best Buy price matches Amazon, I get what I want same day, no need to pay a monthly fee for "free" shipping. I used to browse Amazon for reviews (hoping at least some weren't fake) then buy in the real world in person, but now that Amazon is replacing access to reviews with AI summaries (there's a login barrier to see more than the first few) there's no need to go there at all.
by AndrewKemendo | 2026-02-23 16:26:44+00:00
Every single person who utilizes a navigation application to traverse a place that they have no previous independently verified experience, is taking existential risk based on a computer telling them what to do

There are literally thousands of cases of people dying or being injured because they did what a computer navigation application told them to do

This is also literally what the Target stock scheduling system does for target employees for restocking shelves

The vast majority of peoples lives are run by someone else’s computer
by thewebguyd | 2026-02-23 16:26:52+00:00
At some point, at least if businesses want to have AI “Agents” act as employees, then it needs to cease being stateless.

There’s a lot of hidden context in day to day work that a human often times wouldn’t even know to explain to the AI or even think that they’d have to include it, things that are just “known” by default of working somewhere for a long time.

With coding, there’s at least the entire codebase as context. With more creative tasks, it becomes murky. Even something as “simple” as sending a price increase notification to customers. There’s a lot of nuance in that, and customer relationship history you’d have to feed to the AI as context to get it right, yet a good CSR would just factor that context into their writing without a second thought.

There is a point, and it is reached very early, where it’s more costly and less productive to feed the AI as much context as you can try to imagine you’d need to give it vs. just doing it yourself. If I’m at the point of writing an entire document of history and context, into what’s effectively a full page prompt, then why bother with AI at that point.
by pyrale | 2026-02-23 16:26:53+00:00
> Nobody will prevent you to grow your own food and raise your own cattle like it was the case for 99.9% of humanity's time.

It certainly was not the case in most agricultural societies that people could get their own plot of land that they could cultivate without interference from the rest of the society.

To expect that people able to replace other humans completely for working purposes, especially the kind of people who end up at the head of the kind of company able to do that, would peacefully let the rest of us be, is delusional.
by snvzz | 2026-02-23 16:27:21+00:00
The solution has always been there: Assume everybody is an adult.

The only reasonable way to deal with children on the Internet is to treat Internet access like access to alcohol/drugs. There is no need for children to access the Internet full stop.

Internet is a network in which everything can connect to everything, and every connected machine can run clients, servers, p2p nodes and what not. Controlling every possible endpoint your child might connect to is not feasible. Shutting the entire network down because "won't somebody please think of the children" is not acceptable.

And, don't let them trick you. This is the endgoal. An unprecedented level of control over the flow of information.
by fxtentacle | 2026-02-23 16:28:07+00:00
This website offers a very venture capital take on ideas. They present it as if the single determining factor if an idea was great is the valuation at which it was sold. I don’t really understand why they think that should nullify valid criticism about the early beta versions of software that turned out popular later.

Also, just because a company has a lot of revenue that doesn’t automatically make it a successful company. Economics crashed and burned while still growing revenue day over day. And the jury is still out if OpenAI will ever be able to pay back the billions it borrowed.
by petcat | 2026-02-23 16:28:19+00:00
The fab that Infineon is building is vastly smaller in scale, and their tech isn't really relevant to this discussion. For instance, it doesn't produce CPU/GPU microchips or DRAM. Also only 300mm wafer technology, which isn't competitive for anything except for some narrow industrial use-cases. Glad to see the EU is doing it, but it's a completely different thing.
by 8organicbits | 2026-02-23 16:28:26+00:00
It's not about users being mindless drones, it's giving them a clear path they can follow to succeed without thinking. The book "Don't make me think" is a classic design reference that makes this point really well.

I'm not sure what sales funnel you're talking about. If you have an aversion to monetization, I'm not sure what social media you'd use except the fediverse.
by armchairhacker | 2026-02-23 16:28:47+00:00
Today, in practice it's not a choice, because even the most attentive parents fail to block internet access. Parental controls are ineffective, and all the kid's friends have access so they become alienated. https://beasthacker.com/til/parental-controls-arent-for-pare...

But laws alone won't fix this, and laws aren't necessary (except maybe a law that prevents kids from buying phones). In the article, the child's devices had parental controls, but they were ineffective. There's demand for a phone with better parental controls, so it will come, and more parents are denying access, so their kids will become less alienated.
by dang | 2026-02-23 16:28:51+00:00
What are some links to HN comments that you (or anyone else) feel is "coordinated astroturfing"?

The site guidelines ask users to send those to us at hn@ycombinator.com rather than post about it in the threads, but we always look into such cases when people send them.

It almost invariably turns out to simply be that the community is divided on a topic, and this is usually demonstrable even from the public data (such as comment histories). However, we're not welded to that position—if the data change, we can too.
by KPGv2 | 2026-02-23 16:29:10+00:00
Huh? The linked article is nothing more than "this guy is black, so therefore helping any underprivileged black people gain university admissions is bad"

It's outrageous racism. A conclusion about all minorities based on one person's math mistake, where the logic is entirely based on shared skin color.

If you replace the races and make it a conclusion about legacy admissions or something, it's obviously stupid and illogical, right?

"This white guy doesn't know Afghanistan from Kazakhstan. More proof legacy admissions is bad!"
by aidenn0 | 2026-02-23 16:29:11+00:00
> Fuck man, I can even legally give my kids alcohol - I don't see why it's appropriate to enforce what content I allow them to see.

In the USA it depends on the state. Federal guidelines for alcohol law does suggest exemptions for children drinking under the supervision of their parents, but that's not uniformly adopted. 19 states have no such exceptions, and in many of the remaining 31, restaurants may be banned from allowing alcohol consumption by minors even when their parents are there.
by blub | 2026-02-23 16:29:16+00:00
This is less about languages and more about so-called AI. One thing’s for sure: it’s becoming harder and harder to deny that agentic coding is revolutionizing software development.

We’re at the point where a solid test suite and a high-quality agent can achieve impressive results in the hands of a competent coder. Yes, it will still screw up, needs careful human review and steering, etc, but there is a tangible productivity improvement. I don’t think it makes sense putting numbers on it, but for many tasks, it looks like there’s a tangible benefit.
by apresmoi | 2026-02-23 16:29:20+00:00
I think this is exactly the kind of question the essay is trying to avoid productively.

Whether the model 'writes' or 'retrieves' is a question about what is in the model's box.

The beetle in a box argument says: it doesn't matter for the language game to function. What matters is whether the coordination works. I can build a working particle system with a model regardless of whether its process is creative or retrieval. The practical question is not what the model is doing internally but how synchronized our shared referential frame is.

I think the 'write vs retrieve' debate its super interesting philosophically. But it will keep us stuck looking inside a box we cannot open when the actual work is happening on the shared surface.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-23 16:29:23+00:00
When ID checks are rolled out there is immediate outrage. Discord announced ID checks for some features a couple weeks ago and it has been a non-stop topic here.

From what I’ve seen, most of the pro-ID commenters are coming from positions where they assume ID checks will only apply to other people, not them. They want services they don’t use like TikTok and Facebook to become strict, but they have their own definitions of social media that exclude platforms they use like Discord and Hacker News. When the ID checks arrive and impact them they’re outraged.

Regulation for thee, not for me.
by 0xy | 2026-02-23 16:29:25+00:00
Another luddite article complaining about farming automation putting farmers out of work, but a modern equivalent.

This article wrongly assumes AGI is not only possible but also imminent, because if they were taking into account only the transformation we're seeing from AI at the moment -- it wouldn't be a story as it is not job ending.

AGI, however, is mathematically impossible. The only people telling you otherwise are the CEOs of labs who need to publicly fundraise on this premise, while privately admitting bearish sentiments on AGI.

AGI bulls assume all of the following to be true: there are no constraints to grid infrastructure (clearly false), there are no manufacturing constraints for AI hardware (clearly false) and exponential accuracy, speed and efficiency improvements will continue (clearly false, it's slowing down already).

Hell, just look at local opposition to data center deployment. You can't even get DCs built in rural towns that would benefit dramatically from the 1,000+ temporary and permanent jobs. Incredibly bearish on AGI.
by tolmasky | 2026-02-23 16:29:30+00:00
I want to sincerely ask whether you read my post, because your response is so unrelated I believe you might accidentally be responding to another post? If so, please ignore the rest, which is only intended in the case where you are actually responding to what I wrote.

Your system seems to address none of the issues I listed. For example, I argue that one difficulty is in the fact that these systems would be highly phishable -- a property that is present in your described "easy" solution. Your system trains users to become accustomed to being pestered by pop up windows that ask to see their ID and use their camera. Congrats, I can now trivially make a pop up a window that looks like this UI and use it to steal your info, as the user will just respond on auto-drive, as we have repeatedly shown both in user studies and in our own lived experiences. I also explained how a system like this would assist in the practice of trapping migrant workers by confiscating their government credentials [1]. This is a huge problem today in Asia, and one of the few outlets captive workers can use to escape this control is the internet -- a "loophole" your system would dutifully close for these corporations.

I am happy to have a discussion about this -- it's how we come up with new solutions! But that requires reading and responding to the concerns I brought up, not assuming that my issue is that I can't imagine implementing a glorified OAuth login flow.

1. There's tons of articles about this, here is one of the first ones that comes up on Google: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/05/saudi-arabia-...
by groos | 2026-02-23 16:29:37+00:00
Because Tesla Clown-in-Chief asked if humans could drive with just visual input, why can't a Tesla? C-in-C conveniently ignored that, to begin with, humans have binocular vision, and his cars had none. Also conveniently ignored were the facts that human eyes have immense dynamic range, are self-cleaning, and can move to track objects of interest. On top of this, humans also have hearing, which helps gauge danger. Many of these things could be filled in by Lidar but since C-in-C apparently had a revelation from heaven, possibly caused by drugs, lidar had to go.
by jawns | 2026-02-23 16:29:40+00:00
I'm a big fan of an economic philosophy known as distributism, popularized by G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc more than a century ago.

It basically says that the economy works best when ownership of productive property is as diffuse as possible -- when a high percentage of the population has some ownership, and it's not concentrated in the hands of a relatively few wealthy shareholders (in the case of capitalism) or the government (in the case of communism/socialism).

Under distributist principles, I would say that we should pursue economic policies that allow the ownership of productive AI to be widespread, whether that's in the form of cooperatives, employee ownership, or other means of giving the average person access to that ownership. (I acknowledge that it's currently possible to invest in publicly traded AI companies, but would prefer to see other ownership opportunities as well.)
by otterley | 2026-02-23 16:29:43+00:00
I'm afraid you missed the point of my reply. You have to assume here that the people you're arguing with may, in fact, be as smart as, or even more knowledgeable than you regarding certain subjects; and that dismissive replies like "You may be failing to comprehend the concept of 'freedom'" put you way out of line and at risk of having your ass handed to you. Come armed with substance, not snipes.
by dwood_dev | 2026-02-23 16:30:04+00:00
I had a bash spaghetti code script that I wrote a few years ago to handle TLS certificates(generate CSRs, bundle up trust chains, match keys to certs, etc). It was fragile, slow, extremely dependent on specific versions of OpenSSL, etc.

I used Claude to rewrite it in golang and extend its features. Now I have tests, automatic AIA chain walking, support for all the DER and JKS formats, and it’s fast. My bash script could spend a few minutes churning through a folder with certs and keys, my golang version does a few thousand in a second.

So I basically built a limited version of OpenSSL with better ergonomics and a lot of magic under the hood because you don’t have to specify input formats at all. I wasn’t constrained by things like backwards compatibility and interface stability, which let me make something much nicer to use.

I even was able to build a wasm version so it can run in the browser. All this from someone that is not a great coder. Don’t worry, I’m explicitly not rolling my own crypto.
by bastawhiz | 2026-02-23 16:30:06+00:00
There's no reason to believe in just cameras. Cameras are easily blinded by glare and have their efficacy drop dramatically when they get dirty. Having inexpensive lidar AND cameras is the best of both worlds. When it comes to safety and comfort, we shouldn't be trying to optimize for cost. If we figure out how to make cameras alone bulletproof in the future, great. But there's not where we're at today.
by beej71 | 2026-02-23 16:30:09+00:00
It's true... maybe we can live like we did 2,000 years ago.

"Nobody will prevent you..." Can I plant on your property and keep all the produce? My property isn't big enough to support my family of two. Where shall I plant? The fiefdom?

I just don't get this take. It sounds awful for virtually everybody. We live at a scale that is not like it was when I was born. Asking everyone to raise their own beef and vegetables is a as much a non-starter as telling them they can just build their own tractors to till.

Edit: I'd like to acknowledge Poe's Law might be in effect here. :)
by bensyverson | 2026-02-23 16:30:27+00:00
Highly recommended. We got a 4K Blu-ray player recently, and I've been accumulating Blu-rays and 4Ks. You can often find kids movies for $2-5. Given that the same movies are as much as $20 to "purchase" on digital, and given how many times kids want to rewatch movies, it's a clear win.
by badgersnake | 2026-02-23 16:30:48+00:00
Lol, naive in the extreme. The majority of the slop is not eternal September noobs, it’s commercially motivated, people selling things, PR, like farming, bots astroturfing public opinion. It’s much cheaper to push slop than to moderate it.

These “small higher quality sites” will not have the resources to gatekeeper it. If, that is the at protocol world ever gets past one big site. You’ve actually got a lot more chance with smaller communities that are not connected with any protocol.