MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yomismoaqui | 2026-02-25 17:45:30+00:00
I did something like this passing some of my comments here and then prompted Gemini to identify my native language by reading my not-so-good english.

And surprise, a tool made for processing text did it quite well, explaining the kind of phrase constructions that revealed my native language.

So maybe this is a plus for passing any text published on the internet through a slopifier for anonymization?

EDIT: deanonymization -> anonymization
by vunderba | 2026-02-25 17:45:45+00:00
Nice job. ReadSVP (an offline tool) is probably one of the most popular focal-point based speed readers out there but I've seen a few online ones pop up on HN in the past few months as well.

WordBlip

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46643246

SpeedWave

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44079218

Some Feedback:

You've got speed as WPM which implies a constant word rate but it clearly slows down in relation to the length of the current word. Nothing wrong with that, but are you factoring these unequal times such that the overall speed still matches the designated WPM?
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-25 17:45:46+00:00
People will accuse of all types of stuff, regardless if you use em-dashes or not. The way I write apparently is familiar to some as LLM-jargon they've told me, I'm guessing because I've spewed my views and writings on the internet for decades, the LLMs were trained on the way I write, so actually the LLMs are copying me! And others like me.

But anyways, you can't really control how people see your stuff, if you're human I think the humanness will come through anyways, even if you have some particular structure or happen to use em-dashes sometimes. They're so easy to prompt around anyways, that the real tricky LLM stuff to detect by sense and reading is the stuff where the prompter been trying to sneakily make them more human.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2026-02-25 17:45:48+00:00
My work machine is Win11 and the new Notepad is hilariously buggy. Repeatedly encountered bugs where the screen fails to paint, takes multiple seconds to load, hard refuses to open files of a certain size, etc.

Notepad was never fancy, but it was a reliable tool to strip formatting or take a quick note, and now I cannot even count on that.
by craftkiller | 2026-02-25 17:45:58+00:00
I had some time to check today, and it seems the suspend feature is disabled by default. I just enabled it so I'll see how that goes. Thanks!

> Have you updated the modem firmware?

Nope, but I just looked it up and Purism's site states:

"These files are controlled by a third-party and are not publicly accessible. Contact Purism Support to request these files for a firmware update"

Yikes....
by dang | 2026-02-25 17:46:01+00:00
Posting like this will get you banned here. No more of this, please.

Edit: since we've asked you to stop doing this many times (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37951771), and you've continued to do it—not just in this one post, but many—I've banned the account.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
by stuxnet79 | 2026-02-25 17:46:03+00:00
Relationships, healthy ones anyway, are a two way street & need to be nurtured. Like OP I realized over time that most people are lazy and expect a lot out of their relationships without putting any effort in. I like the way OP put it as them being "passive" passengers in the whole relationship journey. It can make for some very exhausting interactions if the bulk of your relationships are like this.

There is a cultural aspect to this. In my opinion American culture because it is so individualistic and market-driven encourages transactional, superficial relationships.

OP's approach might not be palatable to everyone but really any tactic that allows you to filter these people out is going to lead to a more sustainable dynamic. Just my 2 cents.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-02-25 17:46:07+00:00
Markdown support isn't a bad idea, actually, as long as they don't break the most important (IMO) property of Notepad: binary WYSIWYG. I.e. if I type in some plain text and then open the file with anything else (including after moving to another machine/platform, or even viewing raw data stream in transit or on drive), I can trust to see that text, as is, and nothing else. In particular, if I restrict myself to lower 127 bytes, I expect byte-to-byte correspondence.

(Modulo CR/LF, of course.)
by sillyfluke | 2026-02-25 17:46:44+00:00
A few days before this article was posted to HN, I had commented (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47086836 ) on a post triggered by the drop in quality or engagement of the Show HN page. I was playing with the phrase "everyone and their dog" that the person I was responding to used and saying the "and their dog" part was more problematic than the "everyone" part, drawing a parallel between the dog and an LLM by implying that the solutions they both would produce would lack the guarentee of human intentionality and ownership.

And then your dog read my comment and said "hold by biscuits" I guess.
by _DeadFred_ | 2026-02-25 17:46:52+00:00
That is the whole point of copyright/patent law. Society benefits by having interesting ideas brought to market, and society misses/looses out when people who bring ideas to market are punished by copycats, stopping new ideas/innovation.

You wouldn't have had an industrial revolution without copyright/patent laws.

In the modern world where we have done most of the low hanging fruit a new novel idea could be even more valuable for society to protect.
by xlii | 2026-02-25 17:46:59+00:00
I read long time ago opinion that anonymity and privacy are merely temporary side-products and rather short lived at that.

Piece argued that in medieval times and small cities people knew each other well and gossiped heavily (due to lack of other form of entertainment) and thus noone was truly anonymous. Privacy was taken away through prying eyes looking. According to it the only age of anonymity came before age of information which made it possible to crossreference various source of information which make it a blip on a human history timeline.

And today I'd say we're in the age of hyperinformation where enormous bodies of knowledge are compressed into (relatively) tiny LLMs which make crossreferencing even easier than before.
by delichon | 2026-02-25 17:47:13+00:00
> He remembers when that building came up, back in 2001, replacing a grove of elm, beech, and oak trees on campus. The old arts center hadn’t been cheap: $17 million was real money at the turn of the millennium.

They tore down a building less than twenty five years old to build a fancier one with fewer actual teaching spaces. This institution is the top recipient of federal research funding. Their fiduciary responsibility with our tax dollars appears to be in name only.
by david_shaw | 2026-02-25 17:47:13+00:00
> What does "solving" coding mean?

Maybe this was sarcasm, but it's a good point:

"Coding" is solved in the same way that "writing English language" is solved by LLMs. Given ideas, AI can generate acceptable output. It's not writing the next "Ulysses," though, and it's definitely not coming up with authentically creative ideas.

But the days of needing to learn esoteric syntax in order to write code are probably numbered.
by jpau | 2026-02-25 17:47:47+00:00
> For venue recommendations [...] we do not rely purely on the language model. We embed both user requirements and venues into vector representations and retrieve candidates using similarity search. Hard constraints such as capacity and dates are applied first, and results are ranked before being presented.

Huh this surprised me as a forgone opportunity.

I heard second-hand about the process for organizing our last offsite. Searching for venues was not the time-consuming part.

The time-consuming part was actually engaging with the venues to confirm specific details not available online. Our teammate who did this engaged with _hundreds_ of venues. It was a lot of work on their part ... and probably not the most fun part of their job.

That seems like an ideal agent scenario?
by Aurornis | 2026-02-25 17:48:06+00:00
Some of the AI comments end with a link to something they're plugging. "If you'd like to learn more about this I have a free guide at my website here". Those get flagged quickly.

Other accounts might be trying to age accounts and dilute their eventual coordinated voting or commenting rings. It's harder to identify sockpuppet accounts when they've been dutifully commenting slop for months before they start astroturfing for the chosen topic.
by brandensilva | 2026-02-25 17:48:11+00:00
We might be witnessing some survivor bias here based on our own human conditioning. Successful PRs aren't going to make the news like the bad ones do.

With that said, we are all dealing with AI still convincingly writing code that doesn't work despite passing tests or introducing hard to find bugs. It will be some time until we iron that out fully for more reliable output I suspect.

Unfortunately we won't be able to stop humans thinking they are software engineers when they are not now that the abstraction language is the human language so guarding from spam will be more important than ever.
by sarchertech | 2026-02-25 17:48:13+00:00
There is no system that is immune to takeover from a demagogue. There's not even any hard evidence that any system is more resilient to it than the US is. It's all just tradeoffs.

Germany had 7 major political parties in the run up to 1933. In fact if you look at the history of dictatorships that took over democracies, having 2 to 3 stable institutionalized parties is actually protective. The other thing that appears to be protective is a history of peaceful transitions of power, which the US has the longest or second longest.
by coffeemug | 2026-02-25 17:48:37+00:00
I've been using Racket to work through The Little Learner[1] and it's been a good experience. You need minimal Racket to work through the book (lambda, let, define, map; I think that's about it). But I branched out to learn more about the language and the standard library, and it's a fun and surprisingly powerful system to explore.

The biggest downside of Racket is that you can't build up your environment incrementally the way you can with Common Lisp/Sly. When you change anything in your source you reload REPL state from scratch. After CL it feels incredibly limiting in a Lisp. Incremental buildup is so valuable, if I wanted to do any Lisp work again I'd reach for CL before Racket just for this reason.

BTW, the book is _great_. Quick, easy to get through, very easy to understand, and teaches you everything from soup to nuts. If you're familiar with lisps you can get through the book in two weeks. It's then easy to get into any deep learning tutorial or project you want, or even start implementing some papers. The book manages not to water down the material despite not using any math at all. Although if you know some linear algebra or multivariable calculus you'll appreciate the beauty of the field more.

[1] https://www.thelittlelearner.com/
by noelwelsh | 2026-02-25 17:49:06+00:00
When I was at university, my institution was investing $millions in building various new building. A grumbled to my supervisor, who explained to me that this was important to attracting new students.

It's an unfortunate truth that decisions to attend a given university are often made based on an image in the student's (or their parents) head about what a university should look like, rather than things like academics.
by habinero | 2026-02-25 17:49:12+00:00
Nope, not in the US. It is perfectly legal to say, for example, "Kyle Rittenhouse is a murderer" despite him being acquitted. You're entirely free to disagree with the result, that is an opinion. Any opinion based on public knowledge is ok. It doesn't even have to be reasonable or rational.

What you can't do is imply non-public knowledge, aka "I heard from my cousin who works in law enforcement that Kyle murdered a hobo when he was 12 but the records were sealed", or state specific facts that can be proven true or false: "Kyle murdered a hobo on September 11, 2018 out back of the 7-11 in Gainesville, FL"

The standard for libel/slander is much, much higher than people think. It's extremely difficult to meet them, and for public figures, it's almost impossible.
by lavelganzu | 2026-02-25 17:49:31+00:00
Meanwhile here in central Austin, it's a 0.9 mile walk from my door to the nearest bus stop that I can use to commute, walking along major stroads some of which don't even have sidewalks, much of the year in Texan heat with no scrap of shade. Then it's up to a 30 minute wait for the delayed or canceled bus, then almost exactly a 1-hour ride on the express 801 to go 7 miles to work downtown.

Somehow we combine inaccessibly rare bus stops with speed barely over walking.

The solution, I imagine, requires many changes that are politically infeasible. First, double the number of buses to reduce the wait between them. Second, add neighborhood circulator buses to get people from the neighborhoods to the express buses. Third, either add dedicated bus lanes in congested areas or, in an ideal world, make all congested inner-city roads toll roads, and use the tolls to subsidize buses.
by basch | 2026-02-25 17:50:26+00:00
same character, used differently?

i call it a super comma when its separating a list with commas within the sets.

so if i am listing colors like green, blue, red; foods like apple, orange, strawberry; and seasons like winter, summer, fall.

it's one use case for an em-dash, because whatever you have inside it has commas in the phrase.

square and rectangle situation. a supercomma is a subset of semicolon.
by AnotherGoodName | 2026-02-25 17:50:48+00:00
One nice thing about what’s happening is that politics are losing to reality. I’m not even sure how this became a left vs right issue in the first place (isn’t the right meant to be pro free market!?) but it doesn’t matter at this point anyway.

Eg. Texas is doing really well in renewable rollouts (see the amount of battery capacity they are putting in - https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/energy-envi...

It’s certainly not because of Texan politics either. It’s just cold hard reality. Renewables won’t be stopped at this point. Even the executive orders to halt wind farms don’t make a dent in what’s happening. We may end up a few years later than other nations but at least it’s unstoppable.
by kakacik | 2026-02-25 17:50:51+00:00
I'd expect everything. HN ain't some local forum but place where opinions form and spread, and these reach many influential and powerful (now or in future) people. Heck there are sometimes major articles in general news about whats happening here.

To reverse the argument - it would be amateurish and plain stupid to ignore it. Barrier to entry is very low. Politics, ads, swaying mildly opinions of some recent clusterfuck by popular megacorp XYZ, just spying on people, you have it all here.

I dont know how dang and crew protects against this, I'd expect some level of success but 100% seems unrealistic. Slow and steady mild infiltration, either by AI bots or humans from GRU and similar orgs who have this literally in their job description.
by patcon | 2026-02-25 17:51:03+00:00
Beautiful essay. Such quiet scathing critique. Written from the POV of a history professor witness:

> The university’s vice provost of student affairs gives the final speech. She has the students stand up and applaud the university president, to thank him for the hats. From the podium, she turns to face the president and applauds along with the audience. Here’s a woman who knows on which side her bread is buttered. The professor recognizes the name: she’s the official in charge of disciplining students who protest genocide in Gaza.

These days, I think often about the historical turn of events in Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, where the reign of the adhocracies started by taking over buildings like Convocation Hall (mid-lecture) at University of Toronto...
by pkulak | 2026-02-25 17:51:13+00:00
The experience I shared was on a city bus.

My point is that you're totally disregarding everything a bus does to stop apart from waiting for passengers to board and de-board. At the very least it has to slow down, then accelerate. Half the time it has to swing the ramp out, which takes forever. Maybe someone has to load or unload a bike. Then it has to re-merge with traffic, and maybe every 10th car will let it in, so that can take a long time too. There's also a good chance it stopped before a light, which is now red. I don't even know if waiting for passengers is _half_ the time spent, let alone all of it.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-25 17:51:31+00:00
I was working in digital libraries circa 2005 and we had that bubble pop when people understood the business model was "get a $100,000 grant and spend $20,000 a year maintaining the product in perpetuity." I tried to convince management that if these were part of a system designed for maintenance in mind we could get that $20,000 to $500-$2000 a year, but it seemed the institutional response to this situation was "let go of the most productive people and keep the least."
by rfw300 | 2026-02-25 17:51:42+00:00
I have little doubt where things are going, but the irony of the way they communicate versus the quality of their actual product is palpable.

Claude Code (the product, not the underlying model) has been one of the buggiest, least polished products I have ever used. And it's not exactly rocket science to begin with. Maybe they should try writing slightly less than 100% of their code with AI?
by janalsncm | 2026-02-25 17:51:46+00:00
I believe the central thesis of this article is unsupported, and other assertions are false.

One, the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US. I didn’t even see a correlation (which would still not prove one causes the other) between number of stops and ridership. This is the central thesis of the article.

Two, removing stops will likely not make the remaining stops nicer. Cities aren’t thinking about how to allocate a fixed bus budget. They’re asking themselves how much they have to spend on buses. This is the core of the problem: low cost services are in a death spiral in the US. Budget cuts -> services get worse -> reduced users -> more cuts.

In my experience, the bus is not a nice experience. The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile. Further, the arrival times are not reliable and are often a long time apart. This means you need to arrive ~10 minutes early and time your bus so that you also arrive at your destination early. You will be wasting possibly 20+ minutes each way. Of course you are also standing in the sun or the cold or the rain while you wait, and probably walking on a hostile stroad and across several lanes of traffic before that point.

So while the number of bus stops might matter at the margins, we’re not talking about a system where marginal improvements will matter. If you want to improve ridership, you need to make the bus an attractive option for more people.
by meken | 2026-02-25 17:51:56+00:00
> The biggest downside of Racket is that you can't build up your environment incrementally the way you can with Common Lisp/Sly. When you change anything in your source you reload REPL state from scratch.

I don’t quite understand… I’m using Racket in emacs/SLIME and I can eval-last-sexp, regions, etc.
by epistasis | 2026-02-25 17:52:02+00:00
Having grown up in the US, and been very proud of it despite some egregious mistakes that happened when I was of voting age that I could not stop (e.g. Iraq War), it's very hard to bet against the US. And in the past it's always been a bad idea. But you make a very compelling argument, and the returns on the US vs. international stock markets over the past year make a very objective argument that I'm investing in the wrong places.

I still feel an obligation to fix the mess here, as much as possible, and will continue to do so, but full minimization of US-exposure has never sounded so good.
by michaelmrose | 2026-02-25 17:52:20+00:00
It's arguments is that all the better things are impossible to do without political will and money and therefore we should implement their bad idea.

Bus stops at the margins are actually cheapest because it often consists of a pole which is skipped 90% of the time. At the margin you already have fewer stops further apart and there is basically nothing to trim. If nobody is at the stop 90% of the time does it mean we don't need it? No. Your riders in that area may largely not be commuters and grandma needs to get out of the house and go to the store periodically.

You are paying near zero for 10 stops over 5 miles so that each run the bus can stop at a different 2 at a cost of 30 seconds per run.
by SubiculumCode | 2026-02-25 17:52:31+00:00
"The first is the finalization of the Schedule F rule. The Trump administration has moved forward with a personnel policy that could strip civil service protections from thousands of federal workers. The Office of” Personnel Management estimates the rule would affect 50,000 positions across the federal workforce. For the NIH, the concern is specific: program officers and other grant-making officials could be reclassified as Schedule F employees, making them significantly easier to dismiss and far more vulnerable to political pressure over their grant decisions. The rule explicitly states that such workers can be fired for “subverting Presidential directives.”

The second pressure is less dramatic but equally corrosive. NIH staff are now required to connect at least one of their 2026 performance goals to the President’s Management Agenda, a federal website whose stated priorities include “eliminating woke, weaponization, and waste,” “downsizing the federal workforce,” and ensuring that “grants go only to high-performing recipients to advance America First priorities.”
by Griffinsauce | 2026-02-25 17:52:52+00:00
I've been pushing our apps at work in this direction and it's definitely worth it.

If you're relying on webpack plugins heavily, I'd consider that a liability either way. It's going to seriously hamper your portability to other frameworks and build tools and even new versions of the current ones.

You can easily run turbopack for development / preview environments and webpack for production(-like) ones btw. as long as you don't rely on custom magic.
by sp1nningaway | 2026-02-25 17:53:09+00:00
This kind of release shows Anthropic as a company is suffering from the same thing we all are right now. Removing the friction from having an idea and executing it stops you from remembering The Point. Yes, programming from your phone is an exciting modality and maybe even the future of how we work, but coding from your bedroom, AND the toilet, AND the woods AND your office is definitely (hopefully) not the future.

I wonder if is anyone working on an AI framework that encourages us to keep our eye on the big picture, then walk away when a reasonable amount of work is done for the day.

Yes, individuals are creating cool mobile coding solutions and Anthropic doesn't want to get left behind. I know I'm working my ass off at work right now because LLM coding makes it fun, but I also often don't prioritize what I'm doing for the big picture because I just try every thing that comes into my inbox, in order, because it's so fast to do with Claude Code.

We all sense it!:
<https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/ai-promised-to-free-up-wo...>
<https://ghuntley.com/teleport/>
<https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai-vampire-eda6e4f07163>
by allears | 2026-02-25 17:53:30+00:00
The main function of any bureaucracy is to consolidate and increase its own power and scope. This is similar to (or is it the same as?) Pournelle's Law. Generally, any subset of an organization always wants more budget and scope, but in the case of bureaucrats, they have their hands on the knobs and levers. This makes dislodging them very difficult.