MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 13415 | 2026-02-28 16:36:39+00:00
> Can you clarify the "moral point of view", please?

The moral point of view is that a war of aggression violates the sovereignty of the people in the attacked country. Another country's officials are not elected by that country, nor do they in any other way represent the people of that country. They have no right to decide the fate of the people in another country.

> How do you know without a discussion that you are right?

I know that because I've studied philosophy and worked in ethics, though not specifically on any issues concerning international rights. I'm also overall a well-educated person with an intact sense of justice.

> This is a straw man you just made. The 1983 event is to show that Iran was in forever war with the US through either 3rd parties or directly on the territories of other states.

No it's not a straw man. You came up with the 1983 event, not me. It would have been a straw man argument if I suddenly had come up with that. My reply to your position is that there are no "forever wars" - this category does not exist in international right and obviously makes no sense. Once you start justifying your attacks with a "forever war" you're in the realm of historical justifications, and these are principally wrong. Why? Because you can find some historical justification for just about any war you want to start. The whole world would be constantly at war if historical justifications were used and deemed acceptable. They are not acceptable.

> Now it seems we are in a strange situation. If it is a war of aggression by the US, the implication is that Iran was not aggressive towards US. But we know it is not true. So, which is it?

I believe you're trolling. In any case, that is not the implication. Not every act of aggression is an act of war. However, the US military has just started a widespread bombing campaign, and that is an act of war. The US is the aggressor not just from an international rights point of view, they're the aggressor as evidenced by the speech of the US President.

> Also, how would congress authorization make US non-aggressor here?

Not at all, and I didn't say that.
by nixon_why69 | 2026-02-28 16:36:45+00:00
I'm not disagreeing with you but "Dept of War" is ENTIRELY a cosmetic change. It's literally just a name. There are people, mostly with desk jobs, who really want to feel like badasses and they really want the Dept of War. The real human consequences of this are unimportant to them and sadly unimportant to the rest of us also.
by fsckboy | 2026-02-28 16:36:57+00:00
>Yeah, Polymarket is explicitly advertising this

no, they are not.

you might have been an insider working on the Apple Newton, and being enthusiastic about it you might have broken the rules and traded on your "knowledge"... and you would have lost your shirt. Same with your very knowledgeable enthusiasm about myriad other technologies. Ever wonder why Wall St doesn't show up at HN asking everybody's opinion about AI in order to leverage that info into billions?

an important element of "the wisdom of crowds" is many bits of microknowledge. How many Teslas will be sold next year is very dependent on how much the people who buy Teslas will earn next year (or how secure they will feel in their jobs) working in myriad other industries that have nothing to do with Tesla, along with the price of lithium, tires, and even ... wait for it... gasoline.

Polymarket's words you quote can just as likely refer to the wisdom of crowds. Or even, and this is the subtle part: Polymarket's insiders may believe, like you, that they are creating a market to trade on inside information, and yet they, like you, could be made wrong by the superior sum knowledge of the crowd exerting its invisible hands all together to tank your Apple Newtons.
by gck1 | 2026-02-28 16:37:04+00:00
I do this too, but the issue I have with this approach is that it's a never ending cycle. Codex/GPT will always find holes and claude will always agree they are holes. If you teach it YAGNI, then it will always disagree even on genuine holes.

If your original plan was to add a column in your db, after several cycles, your plan will be 10,000 lines long and it will contain a recipe on how to build a universe.
by samrus | 2026-02-28 16:37:09+00:00
Great article. I agree with the argument.

But to offer a counter argument, would the same thing not have happened with the rise of high level languages? The machine code was abstracted away from engineers and they lost understanding of it, only knowing what the high level code is supposed to do. But that turned out fine. Would llms abstracting the code away so engineers only understand the functionality (specs, tests) also be fine for the same reason? Why didnt cognitive debt rise in with high level languages?

A counter counter argument is that compilers are deterministic so understanding the procedure of the high level language meant you understood the procedure that mattered of the machine code, and the stuff abstracted away wasnt necessary to the codes operation. But llms are probabilistic so understanding the functionality does not mean understanding the procedure of the code in the ways that matters. But id love to hear other peoples thoughts on that
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-28 16:37:13+00:00
> Do you know how many of those killed were soldiers and security personnel?

Do I need to?

If October 7 had solely engaged military targets, the moral contours of the entire campaign would have been different. It didn't. I'd argue couldn't. The political forces that sustained Hamas and Sinwar did not allow for targeted, strategic strikes. Just acts of vengeance played out for an audience.

Like, let's reverse it. Do you know how many of those killed by the IDF are bona fide militants? I don't. But I also don't think that's germane to e.g. "opening fire on crowds of Palestinians as they tried to make their way to the fenced enclosure to get food" [1].

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/04/middleeast/israel-military-ga...
by adius | 2026-02-28 16:37:43+00:00
Hard to tell honestly. So far there was always some surprisingly straight forward solution If had any problems with the math engine. There is actually a lot of public research how equations can be solved/simplified with computer algorithms. So I'm optimistic.
I also stumbled upon a few cases where Mathematica itself didn't quite do things correctly itself (rounding errors, missing simplifications, etc.). So maybe it's actually a little overhyped …
by thewebguyd | 2026-02-28 16:37:52+00:00
Unfortunately, it’s not just the administration. No one has to follow an illegal order.

Yet, look at how all of the media and how many people in this thread are saying Department of War instead of Department of Defense, even though legally it’s still the DoD as it cannot be renamed without congress. Just because “Trump said so” doesn’t mean something is legitimate.

Why is everyone voluntarily complying with a wannabe dictator? It’s the very people of this country that are turning his dictator fantasies into reality by not standing up to the bully.
by aaravchen | 2026-02-28 16:38:05+00:00
In fact, if you want to use something like Nix on a UniversalBlue system, you have to spin your own. The "hotfix" and chattr solutions of pre-composefs don't work anymore.
Anything that needs to go into a read only location and isn't package as an RPM requires you to "spin your own".

Luckily UniversalBlue makes it incredibly easy, they have a template repo you can use that has all the GitHub action setup included to auto-bills on every change, and directions for how to set it up. It took me about 10 minutes
by trenning | 2026-02-28 16:38:22+00:00
Ukraine’s TV personality leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy seems to be doing alright. Also went into war, but not of their own doing, and he has been measured, insightful, aware, throughout this whole war.

There’s more to it than Trump being a TV show personality. Far too complex and insidious than a simple quip.
by vunderba | 2026-02-28 16:38:34+00:00
Nice job. I have no point of comparison (having never actually used it) - but wasn't this one of the use-cases for Google's NotebookLM as well?

Feedback:

Many times when I'm reading a paper on arxiv - I find myself needing to download the sourced papers cited in the original. Factoring in the cost/time needed to do this kind of deep dive, it might be worth having a "Deep Research" button that tries to pull in the related sources and integrate them into the webpage as well.
by gruez | 2026-02-28 16:39:32+00:00
>but rather the moral duties incumbent on citizens.

Is it a "moral duty" to aid your government, especially in the current social/political environment? Conscription is theoretically still allowed in the US, and you're theoretically supposed to register for the SSS, but nobody has been prosecuted for failure to do so in decades. That suggests the "moral duty" aspect has significantly weakened. Moreover if we're making comparisons to the draft, it's also worth noting the draft allows for conscientious objection. That makes your claim of "that’s not their call to make" quite questionable.
by antonvs | 2026-02-28 16:39:34+00:00
I attended a CASE tools conference in the 1990s, which of course included a vendor exhibition. The vendors all had demos of creating an application using their tool. At multiple vendor stands I asked to see the code generated by their CASE tool. Invariably, the salespeople would start waffling about how the code was no longer important (sound familiar?), how you didn't need to examine the engine of a car while driving it, and so on. It had a very "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" feel to it. It convinced me that I didn't need to pay any attention to CASE tools, and history confirmed that.
by bell-cot | 2026-02-28 16:39:45+00:00
> ...would be happy if Iran falls.

Literally, perhaps true...at least initially. But:

- Take a look at how poorly the fall of the Iraqi gov't in 2003 actually worked out for the U.S. and its regional friends.

- Iran has 92 million people, very deep issues with being able to support that large a population, and very long borders. If things really went to crap there, it could produce tens of millions of desperate refugees.
by chiengineer | 2026-02-28 16:39:58+00:00
- semi retired IT Admin with 10+ years field experience in the toughest markets

- Nobody is learning how to use it correctly because everyone is lacking creativity and everyone is complaining instead of trying things

- I have built - scripts, 3D model pipelines for blender addons, websites, .net c# desktop apps, cloud security scripts, windows 11 tools that would take years to build in hours or days, linux tools, cli tools, assembly experiments just because, embedded projects for no reason

- I built a complete OEM Tier 1 Dyno safety tool for auto that would technically be 10 million in development - the barrier to entry for this world is almost entirely impossible but I built the damn thing anyways

- I built a quantum tool I have no idea if its actually useful or not but I still built it
https://github.com/zerocool26/Quantum-Observability-Contract...

- I test all the models to see how advanced they can get with 3D modeling and its gotten much much better especially with gemini 3

- I am now focused on working on multi platform video games built with rust, go, node and am actively searching for investors I have a working demo of a multi platform game with 6 months development on it
by K0balt | 2026-02-28 16:40:11+00:00
Hmm, isn’t it though? I mean, obviously there is a corporate policy issue here, but there is no way that bending models to suit military purposes doesn’t end up in the general training pool, especially since we use models to train models.

We have even demonstrated that wierd, “virus like” exploits specifically -not- explicit in the training data can be transmitted to a new model through one model training another, even though the “magic” character sequences are never transmitted between the models…. So implied information is definitely transmitted with a very high degree of fidelity even if the subject at issue is never trained.

So I kinda think this is all about the character of the models we decide to share the planet with, in the long haul.

Whether or not it becomes relevant before “Skynet” goes live and wiped out most of the planet, well, yeah, we should probably be keeping an eye on that too.
by patrickk | 2026-02-28 16:40:12+00:00
Several military leaders expressed surprise at how gung-ho Obama was with foreign policy regarding the gwot. He literally executed an American citizen via drone. He didn’t even pay lip service to hope and change. Dubya also ran on a non-interventionist platform, and Trump ran on “drain the swap” and non-interventionism as well.

Anyway this is missing the wood for the trees. The point is, the uniparty very much exists, despite the downvotes. Foreign policy, bailing out banks, bowing down to the military industrial complex are very much remarkably consistent uniparty positions.
by iainctduncan | 2026-02-28 16:40:48+00:00
Oh come on, that is complete nonsense. I can reunderstand complicated code I wrote a year ago far, far faster than complicated code someone else wrote. Especially if I also wrote tests, accompanying notes, and docs. If you can't understand your old code when you come back to it... including looking through your comments and docs and tests... I'm going to say you're doing it wrong. Maybe it takes a while, but it shouldn't be that hard.

Anyone pretending gen-ai code is understood as well as pre-gen-ai, handwritten code is totally kidding themselves.

Now, whether the trade off is still worth it is debatable, but that's a different question.
by Svoka | 2026-02-28 16:40:55+00:00
What an awful take devoid of context. Russia literally defaulted in 1998, and 'somehow' kept the nukes.

And today Ukraine is doing quite amazing, considering 12 years of war. I can only dream what it would be if russians didn't steal a generation. Giving up nukes was a giant mistake.

Back then, giving up on nukes never was about compromising security. In 1993, I remember being full of hope and opportunity to live in peaceful world with less nukes. It felt like we had our backs by France, UK and USA.
That was a move full of betrayed optimism, not desperation - giving up third world arsenal because the future is bright.
by tuetuopay | 2026-02-28 16:41:42+00:00
Sam Altman is lying by omission. It’s been confirmed [1] that OpenAI agreed to "lawful" use of the models. Since it’s the DoW, they can make pretty much anything lawful by invoking "national security".

[1]: https://x.com/UnderSecretaryF/status/2027594072811098230
by Varun_shodh | 2026-02-28 16:42:12+00:00
Hey HN, I built this because every AI memory system I tried (mem0, Cognee, Zep) makes 2-3 LLM API calls just to store a single memory. All of them need OpenAI keys.

I thought: why does storing a memory need a language model?

Shodh-Memory is a single Rust binary (~17MB) with zero LLM calls. Memories you use often become easier to find (Hebbian learning). Old irrelevant context fades automatically (decay). Recalling one thing brings back related things (spreading activation over a knowledge graph).

55ms to store a memory. Runs fully offline. No external databases, no API keys, no cloud.

Works as an MCP server for Claude/Cursor, has Python bindings and a REST API. I use it daily with Claude Code — it's the memory system powering its own development.

Caveats: solo project, no formal retrieval quality benchmarks yet, ~400ms warm latency for the full context pipeline.

Paper: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18816615

Would love feedback on the architecture.
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-28 16:42:26+00:00
> Please provide sources.

Sources to what? Laws of war?

W.r.t. hospitals, you can read this article: https://lieber.westpoint.edu/legal-protection-hospitals-duri...

This piece in particular:

> The ICRC’s Commentary cites as examples “firing at the enemy for reasons other than individual self-defence, installing a firing position in a medical post, the use of a hospital as a shelter for able-bodied combatants, as an arms or ammunition dump, or as a military observation post.” It also states that “transmitting information of military value” or being used “as a centre for liaison with fighting troops” results in loss of protection.

So, given that Palestinians used schools consistently to hide weapons, are you saying that it never happens? It seems to me completely unreasonable to claim that Israelis destroyed "all the schools, hospitals, universities because they want genocide" very questionable given that Palestinians used civilian infrastructure and NGOs for its resistance in the past. If they did it, why won't they do it again?

Link: https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/press-releases/unrwa-condemns...

> Genocide is not a matter of cherry-picking or of opinion.

Of course not. It is also not a a single %.

> People who take this debate seriously look into context and evidence with a level of detail that goes beyond what can be covered here. Anyone interested in arguments and counterarguments will inevitable have to refer to authorities in the matter who have the background, time and resources.

Absolutely. However, people here are using the term genocide as it is a settled matter. Moreover, their whole reasoning boils down to metrics that either show that any war is a genocide, or have no bearing at all.
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-28 16:42:27+00:00
Not sure why you are appealing to the rule on terms that aren’t defined, since the actual question is whether or not thet consider the vendor of the software powering the device as an “operating system vendor” which is, in fact, defined in the law, and the answer there seems to be hinge on whether or not they think it is a general purpose compute device, which would seem almost certain to be no for a traffic light, and likely to be no (but more debatable and potentially variable from instance to instance) in the other cases you list.

> Particularly since they don't even have accounts or users as a common-sense member of the public would understand them?

Not sure what having accounts or users “as a common sense member if the public would understand them” is relevant to since, to the extent having a “user” is relevant in the law, it to is defined (albeit both counterintuitively and circularly) in the law, and having an “account” isn’t relevant to the law at all.
by csomar | 2026-02-28 16:43:20+00:00
There is no comparison between Iran and Venezuela. Maduro had Cuban guards because his people seem to dislike him more than the US; his administration included. Also Maduro is hated by both neighboring countries elites and peasants. Situation couldn’t be more different in Iran, there are hundreds of thousands of committed supporters in Iran and Arabic countries (watch some videos where the Arabs celebrates the strikes at their own countries)

Also in power balance, Venezuela is a joke militarily. Iran has the capacity to end calm life in the GCC and possibly disrupt oil flows. Really an orange and apple comparison. Case in point today, Iran was able to project its missile to several countries in a couple hours.
by monkaiju | 2026-02-28 16:43:42+00:00
I'm regularly surprised how otherwise intelligent people with "good intentions" keep going to work at these places in the first place, then get all "surprised pikachu" when it turns out their work might go towards nefarious ends. These technologies are inherently anti-creativity and researchers have been sounding the alarms about their efficacy for mass surveillance for a long time. Even this petition only seems concerned with "domestic mass surveillance", as if the tools used by an empire abroad dont inevitably get turned inwards.

At some point its hard not to think they just cant avoid the money. At least for the SWEs these are folks who could work at much less "evil" businesses and still easily clear $150k or $200k but they just cant help themselves. This is a company that steals its training data and whose primary product is at best an anti working-class cudgel that management can use to intimidate workers and threaten them with replacement and at worse is a mass-surveillance/killing tool.
by avaer | 2026-02-28 16:43:46+00:00
I think it won't be too different once we see a few upgrades that are going to be required for reliability (and scaling up the AI assisted engineering process):

- deterministic agents, where the model guarantees the same output with a seed
- much faster coding agents, which will allow us to "compile" or "execute" natural language without noticing the llm
- maybe just running the whole thing locally so privacy and reliability are not an issue

We're not there yet, but once we have that then I agree there won't be too much of a difference between using a high level language and plain text.

There's going to be a massive shift in programming education though, because knowing an actual programming language won't matter any more than knowing assembly does today.
by chintanb | 2026-02-28 16:44:07+00:00
Thanks for checking it out.

Secryn is a self-hosted secrets vault for small dev teams (Docker Compose + MySQL) with RBAC, audit logs, and version history/restore.

Links:
Public demo: https://demo.secryn.io/
Install docs: https://docs.secryn.io/installation

Would love blunt feedback on:
1) onboarding/install clarity
2) permissions/RBAC expectations
3) what would block you from trying this
by tyre | 2026-02-28 16:44:19+00:00
> Isn't insider trading on a prediction market only wrong to the extent the insider is violating some duty of secrecy to the company?

Yes.

Prediction markets, for corruption reasons, are regulated by the CFTC. In commodities markets, actors are assumed to be making trades based on propriety information. Hedging is the whole purpose!

> …like it's a stock market where there is some society-level interest in giving participants protection from having less information than insiders.

Ah, no!

Insider trading in the stock market is (usually) only illegal in your first case: when the person trading is violating confidentiality.

It is not about fairness.

Fairness is a poor proxy for whether specific trading is illegal.

For example:

If a company accidentally leaves a press release for a merger publicly available, I happen to guess the URL, and then I trade on it: Unfair (I have access to insider information that other market participants do not) but legal!

If I work at the company, am sent the press release to copy edit, and then trade on it: Illegal. I have a duty to the company not to trade on it.
by articsputnik | 2026-02-28 16:44:44+00:00
Quoting[1] kepano (CEO of Obsidian) - Why you might use Obsidian Sync headless:

- Automate remote backups

- Automate publishing a website

- Give agentic tools access to a vault without access to your full computer

- Sync a shared team vault to a server that feeds other tools

- Run scheduled automations e.g. aggregate daily notes into weekly summaries, auto-tag, etc

...all while having the speed, privacy, customizability, end-to-end encryption of Obsidian Sync.

[1]: https://x.com/kepano/status/2027485552451432936