MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lossolo | 2026-02-12 22:48:10+00:00
Is there a lot of wasted capital? Sure but a lot of it still produces outcomes.

> A heavily bureaucratic system of bureaucrats incentivized to spend massively to boost their own appearance, and cover up losses/inefficiencies.

In China, if you want to move up politically, you generally need to show results, meaning the province or area you govern is expected to deliver measurable performance (even if politics and connections still matter too). In that sense, you could argue it's more performance driven in some respects than the US.

EVs and solar were clear priorities, and China has been very successful at scaling both and driving costs down. Domestic competition has been so intense (especially in EVs) that margins have gotten extremely thin, and officials have recently signaled they want to curb "irrational" price wars.

> Ghost cities

Sure, some exist, but many of the developments that were circulated online years ago have filled in over time. That said, there's no question a lot of projects stalled or collapsed during the property downturn, especially after China Evergrande and other developers ran into trouble.

> empty high speed rail lines,

I can't speak to every route, but overall the high speed rail network is heavily used. When I traveled in China, it was excellent and extremely extensive. Some lines and stations likely see weaker demand than others, but the idea that it's broadly "empty" doesn't match reality.

> solar cells being mass produced at a loss

With overcapacity and price wars, many firms have faced serious margin pressure and losses though that doesn't mean every producer is losing money on every panel.

In the end, the real question is whether the capital allocation is efficient enough for citizens to benefit and for the country to remain competitive. Empirically, the answer looks closer to yes in industry and infrastructure, while real estate has been a major exception, with real costs and inefficiencies.
by sunshine-o | 2026-02-12 22:49:51+00:00
Fining people and corporations as a way to project power is being overused in the EU and the UK.

As most people have once been fined unfairly they will empathize with any target.

The real problem is when the first one says "I'm not paying", then you have to seize bank accounts or project physical force.
But it get dangerous when enough people do not have much on their bank account and are getting really angry.
by orthecreedence | 2026-02-12 22:50:10+00:00
A camera pointing at the sidewalk is fairly innocuous.

A camera pointing at the sidewalk that live streams everything it sees to several megacorps and law enforcement agencies is troubling. A million cameras doing this is a surveillance state. That's bad!

Legal? Yes. Dangerous to the populous? Also yes. Something can be legal and also be very very bad. You get that, right? Your argument comes across as "well, I'm within my rights to shout the N-word in a public place!!" Sure, and you're also an asshole. Not for having a camera, but for sending the footage to a bunch of creeps and thinking that's a fine thing to do.
by nightpool | 2026-02-12 22:50:57+00:00
Well, apparently it's not even an issue for gmail users:

To unblock myself, I switched to a personal @gmail.com address for the account. Gmail's own receiving infrastructure is apparently more lenient with messages, or perhaps routes them differently. The verification email came through.

So it's only an issue for people paying for Google's hosted email—a much smaller set!
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-12 22:51:00+00:00
My take is that's wrong, you don't want "mind-full-ness" but rather "mind-empty-ness".

I had a lot of anxiety when I was young and it went away, gabapentin was probably part of it, but I think also life experience was another.

I think preparation is the answer to performance anxiety. For about a month I have been "going out" as a character for doing photography and handing out business cards which has been a stupendously effective "flywheel" to the extent that students regularly flag me down. Unlike other street performers who frankly annoy people being aggressive I frequently get approached by several people a day and my answer is having the right props and a system that "works itself"

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/foxwork

I am working on improving my repertoire but the consistent theme now is that anything new is tuned up to be "self-working" so I can do it without any effort. Similarly I have had certain situations where I "lose my shit" and I focus on not getting into those situations.
by ffworld | 2026-02-12 22:51:54+00:00
It's with much sadness that we announce the passing of our friend and colleague Ralph Giles, or rillian as he was known on IRC.

Ralph began contributing to Xiph.org in 2000 and became a core Ghostscript developer in 2001[1]. Ralph made many contributions to the royalty-free media ecosystem, whether it was as a project lead on Theora, serving as release manager for multiple Xiph libraries or maintaining Xiph infrastructure that has been used across the industry by codec engineers and researchers[2].
He was also the first to ship Rust code in Firefox[3] during his time at Mozilla, which was a major milestone for both the language and Firefox itself.

Ralph was a great contributor, a kind colleague and will be greatly missed.

[1]: http://www.wizards-of-os.org/archiv/sprecher/g_h/ralph_giles...
[2]: https://media.xiph.org/
[3]: https://medium.com/mozilla-tech/deploying-rust-in-a-large-co...
by movedx | 2026-02-12 22:52:29+00:00
So just throw away this solution then? Never use it because it can’t solve this one tiny issue you’re putting forward as an argument?

What’s your point? Everything you’re saying on this thread seems negative and puts the product (Polis) into a negative light as if somehow it’s trying to do more harm than good, or can never work because <insert extremely small issue here compared to the task of country-wide governance of millions of people>.
by tunesmith | 2026-02-12 22:52:56+00:00
While each of these are good to keep in mind while reading, I don't find them very exhaustive or derivable. I prefer the Theory of Constraints (Eli Goldratt)'s "Thinking Tools", specifically the "categories of legitimate reservation". Depending on source, there are between six and eight.

1. Is it clear?

2. Does it actually exist? Is it true?

3. Does the cause actually cause the effect?

4. For the proposed cause, do its other implied effects exist?

5. Is the cause sufficient for the effect?

6. Are cause and effect reversed?
by observationist | 2026-02-12 22:53:28+00:00
The casual ginger hate is disgusting. smh.

It's funny to think of how the US government is effectively a decentralized web of trust system. Building one that works, that has sufficient network effects, auditability, accountability, enforcability, so that when things are maliciously exploited, or people make mistakes, your system is robust and resilient - these are profound technically difficult challenges.

The US government effectively has to operate IDs under a web of trust, with 50 units sitting at the top, and a around 3,000 county sub-units, each of which are handling anywhere from 0 to 88 sub-units of towns, cities, other community structures.

Each community then deals with one or more hospitals, one or more doctors in each hospital, and every time a baby is born, they get some paperwork filled out, filed upward through the hierarchy of institutions, shared at the top level between the massive distributed database of social security numbers, and there are laws and regulations and officials in charge of making sure each link in the chain is where it needs to be and operates according to a standard protocol.

At any rate - ID is hard. You've gotta have rules and enforcement, accountability and due process, transparency and auditing, and you end up with something that looks a bit like a ledger or a blockchain. Getting a working blockchain running is almost trivial at this point, or building on any of the myriad existing blockchains. The hard part is the network incentives. It can't be centralized - no signing up for an account on some website. Federated or domain based ID can be good, but they're too technical and dependent on other nations and states. The incentives have to line up, too; if it's too low friction and easy, it'll constantly get exploited and scammed at a low level. If it's too high friction and difficult, nobody will want to bother with it.

Absent a compelling reason to participate, people need to be compelled into these ID schemes, and if they're used for important things, they need a corresponding level of enforcement, and force, backing them up, with due process. You can't run it like a gmail account, because then it's not reliable as a source of truth, and so on.

I don't know if there's a singular, technological fix, short of incorruptible AGI that we can trust to run things for us following an explicit set of rules, with protocols that allow any arbitrary independent number of networks and nodes and individuals to participate.
by reikonomusha | 2026-02-12 22:53:55+00:00
- Ease of setup and install. Turnkey. Good defaults.

- Non-buffer based workflows.

- Easy access to settings.

- Easy ways to change or switch my compiler.

- Integrated with typical lisp tooling for library, system, and package management. (For example, what Emacs button do I press to set or clear my ASDF compile cache?)

- Better integration of the profiler and debugger. When a Lisp error happens, yet another buffer pops up (breaking the arrangement of all your code windows you set up), this buffer may not even be the only one (but the others are hidden somewhere), and it's not clear what you can even click or expand to see more information (there's a tremendous amount, extremely non-discoverable).

- Good getting started: built in guide for structural editing, REPL workflow, etc.

...and much much more. I say all of this as someone who basically has only used and invested in Emacs for 20 years. I love sharing Emacs with people who like weird technologies and rabbit holes, the real "hacker"-type people. I hate sharing Emacs with people who want to be productive in an hour or so with a Lisp project, because I know within 5 minutes they'll be disappointed, and never get the best of the experience because it's too much uninteresting investment.

I prefer writing Lisp with Emacs+SLIME over anything else. It's extraordinarily powerful, and with enough grit, you can get it to do almost anything you want. But I'm also jealous of people who get to use, say, polished JetBrains products whose goal is to try to give you the best experience possible for your specific programming language.
by abbyw2002 | 2026-02-12 22:54:19+00:00
https://main.d1j1xagueqmavc.amplifyapp.com/dashboard

I built a scraper that pulls every job posting from the Who's Hiring thread, runs it through DeepSeek to parse the unstructured text into a uniform schema (role, company, location, remote, salary, stack), and presents them in a searchable/filterable UI. I know tools like this exist but I couldn't find one with the filtering and UI I actually wanted, so I built it myself.

Stack: FastAPI + Next.js + PostgreSQL, containerized on AWS ECS Fargate with an ALB. Frontend on Amplify. This is honestly my first real AWS deployment and I don't ever want to do this again. ECS alone took me a solid day to figure out. I also can't get amplify to use the domain I bought even though I set all of the DNS records up :/

Email notifications are still being worked on so right now it's just a view of all the job postings. Job match notifications and saving jobs should be up soon.

I would love feedback on the job matching and UI in the meantime (especially if you find a bug).
Happy to answer questions or hear how you'd approach the AWS side differently!
by jackcofounder | 2026-02-12 22:54:31+00:00
As someone building AI agents for marketing automation, this case study is a stark reminder of the importance of alignment and oversight. Autonomous agents can execute at scale, but without proper constraints they can cause real harm. Our approach includes strict policy checks, human-in-the-loop for sensitive actions, and continuous monitoring. It's encouraging to see the community discussing these risks openly—this is how we'll build safer, more reliable systems.
by vessenes | 2026-02-12 22:54:38+00:00
No, it’s not. This is a dangerous perspective, usually held by engineers who think that accounting doesn’t matter and don’t understand it.

You MUST accrue the lifetime value of the assets against the capital expense (R&D in this case) to determine the answer to this question.

The company (until this announcement) had raised $17B and has a $14B revenue rate with 60% operating margin.

It is only negative on margin if you assume the prior 14B (e.g. Claude 4.6 plus whatever’s unreleased) will have no value in 24 months. In that case, well, they probably wasted money training.

If you think their growth rate will continue, then you must only believe the models have a useful 9 months or so life before they are break even.

Anthropic is, according to Dario, profitable on every model <<—- they have trained if you consider them individually. You would do best to think “will this pattern continue?”
by staticassertion | 2026-02-12 22:54:54+00:00
I think this classification of "trolls" is sort of a truism. If you assume off the bat that someone is explicitly acting in bad faith, then yes, it's true that engaging won't work.

That said, if we say "when has engaging faithfully with someone ever worked?" then I would hope that you have some personal experiences that would substantiate that. I know I do, I've had plenty of conversations with people where I've changed their minds, and I myself have changed my mind on many topics.

> When has "talking to an LLM" or human bot ever made it stop talking to you lol?

I suspect that if you instruct an LLM to not engage, statistically, it won't do that thing.
by arlindb | 2026-02-12 22:54:54+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m a solo maker and got tired of spending hours writing content instead of building. So I made Blogator — a simple AI tool that turns one idea into a structured, SEO-ready blog post + social snippets in minutes.

No prompt engineering. No bloated dashboard. Just fast drafts you can actually publish.

It’s early — I’m looking for honest feedback and people who want to try it. Happy to give free access to a few testers.
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-12 22:55:08+00:00
Ah, I see what you mean. I my personal experience, those that believe in “alternative facts” typically believe in different narratives around the same thing and confuse the narrative with the fact.

For things that did not happen? Yeah. I am not sure there is something that can be done beyond pointing out inconsistencies in their reasoning and proves. However, typically, those things are about believes that mascaras as rational reasoning, and there is nothing you can do about beliefs.

Remember, after WW2 there were people in Germany who did not believe the Allies that Hitler and Co did terrible things.
by renato_shira | 2026-02-12 22:55:45+00:00
agree about the messaging, and i think this is actually the make or break problem for any new framework at this point. the react ecosystem has so many options that developers are numb to "another react framework" announcements.

the real pitch buried in the confusing docs is: same react code you already know, but running on a rust server instead of node. that's actually compelling because it's additive, not a rewrite. but it took reading the HN comments to understand that, which is exactly the problem.

fwiw the "zero to RSC in minutes" tagline the author mentioned below would've gotten me to click the docs immediately. most of us just want to ship something without a three day yak shave through webpack/vite/turbopack configuration.
by conductr | 2026-02-12 22:55:45+00:00
How would the sender know the consequences of sending without the header? You shouldn’t assume anything here. As a sender, you should include it unless you’ve already worked out what the recipient is expecting or how it will be handled. Doing this with email is silly because the client is sennding to so many different servers they know nothing about so it’s basically a requirement to include it.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-12 22:56:04+00:00
I don't know how you can write that list and come to the conclusion that it's not winner-take-all. In their home market (US), Uber is ~75%, Lyft is ~25%, and all other competitors are sub-1% combined. Didi is similarly dominant in China, and so on. "Completely different markets have different winners taking it all" does not counteract the claim of winner-takes-all in any way, nor does listing utterly insignificant players like BlackWolf. Do you think people saying "winner-takes-all" in business contexts mean literally one company with 100% marketshare globally?
by maxel1000 | 2026-02-12 22:57:00+00:00
I love Balatro. I also want to learn Swedish. So I built Language Poker — it's Balatro, but every action teaches you a language.
Same poker-hand mechanics. Build hands, chase combos, manage your deck. But every card is a word in your target language. Playing a hand means constructing something meaningful — a phrase, a sentence, a grammatical pattern. Better language, better score.
SRS baked into every action. Every time you see, play, discard, or combine a card — that's a spaced repetition event. The game tracks what you know and surfaces what you're struggling with. You don't notice you're reviewing because you're too busy trying to beat your high score.
Audio on everything. Every word is spoken when you interact with it. You absorb pronunciation hundreds of times per session without trying.
Beyond vocabulary. Cards cover grammar, full sentences, and contextual phrases. Playing a hand might mean arranging words into a correct sentence or matching a verb to its conjugation. Poker hand rankings map to linguistic complexity — a pair is a noun-adjective match, a flush is a grammatically correct sentence.
Multiplayer. Racing a friend to build a better Swedish sentence out of your dealt cards is genuinely fun. It also means you're not abandoning this after a week like you did with Duolingo.
Yes, there are jokers. Yes, there are modifiers and synergies. I kept what makes Balatro satisfying and layered language learning on top without diluting either experience.
Started with Swedish, but the system is language-agnostic. I've added Spanish & Japanese but if you're interest I can add any language you like!

This isn't gamification bolted onto flashcards — it's a real game that teaches you a language because the mechanics require it.

https://languagepoker.com/

Would love feedback from anyone into Balatro's design or SRS methodology. Drop a comment if you want to try multiplayer!
by digiown | 2026-02-12 22:57:06+00:00
> which can only destroy value

One of the stronger arguments for LVT is that land is inherently inelastic, and thus taxing it doesn't create inefficiency (deadweight loss).

Other taxes like sales tax destroy value because they create a deadweight loss by preventing transactions that would otherwise occur. Land supply is constant, so LVT is purely a wealth transfer, and does not create inefficiencies.
by dsl | 2026-02-12 22:57:11+00:00
Maybe the standards documents you are used to differ from RFCs, but here is the official language:

3. SHOULD This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there
may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a
particular item, but the full implications must be understood and
carefully weighed before choosing a different course.

SHOULD is effectively REQUIRED unless it conflicts with another standards requirement or you have a very specific edge case.
by behrlich | 2026-02-12 22:57:11+00:00
Hey, sorry I missed your comment - it can be self hosted. Both the cinch worker and cinch server are self hostable. For my projects I run a cinch worker on my local machine, and the cinch server (which receives webhooks) runs on cinch.sh. But, again, you could self-host the cinch.sh webhook receiver portion.

RE: Makefile. The point is that the runner just runs a command - meaning the CI doesn't have an opinion on what that command should be. All my projects use make - but you could just run `go build` instead! The cinch yaml typically has two keys - the build command and the release command, that's it.
by arcticfox | 2026-02-12 22:57:12+00:00
The 2006 book 'Daemon' is a fascinating/terrifying look at this type of malicious AI. Basically, a rogue AI starts taking over humanity not through any real genius (in fact, the book's AI is significantly weaker than frontier LLMs), but rather leveraging a huge amount of $$$ as bootstrapping capital and then carrot-and-sticking humanity into submission.

A pretty simple inner loop of flywheeling the leverage of blackmail, money, and violence is all it will take. This is essentially what organized crime already does already in failed states, but with AI there's no real retaliation that society at large can take once things go sufficiently wrong.
by perrygeo | 2026-02-12 22:57:13+00:00
Witness the giant leap forward in the capabilities of coding agents over the last year. There has been no such leap in LLM model performance. I think the causality is crystal clear. It's nothing about "AGI" and all about existing LLMs learning to use existing tools.

Even a sub-par LLM, put into a context where it has access to unix tools and network and files etc, is vastly more capable than the best LLM chatbot.
by Arathorn | 2026-02-12 22:57:22+00:00
That post is 2023 vintage and is both outdated and questionable in parts.

19. "media downloads are unauthenticated by default" -> fixed in Jun 2024: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/06/26/sunsetting-unauthenticate...

20. "ask someone else’s homeserver to replicate media" -> also fixed by authenticated media

21. "media uploads are unverified by default" - for E2EE this is very much a feature; running file transfers through an antivirus scanner would break E2EE. (Some enterprisey clients like Element Pro do offer scanning at download, but you typically wouldn't want to do it at upload given by the time people download the AV defs might be stale). For non-encrypted media, content can and is scanned on upload - e.g. by https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse-spamcheck-badlist

22. "all it takes is for one of your users to request media from an undesirable room for your homeserver to also serve up copies of it" - yes, this is true. similarly, if you host an IMAP server for your friends, and one of them gets spammed with illegal content, it unfortunately becomes your problem.

In terms of "invisible events in rooms can somehow download abusive content onto servers and clients" - I'm not aware of how that would work. Clients obviously download media when users try to view it; if the event is invisible then the client won't try to render it and won't try to download the media.

Nowadays many clients hide media in public rooms, so you have to manually click on the blurhash to download the file to your server anyway.
by suffering | 2026-02-12 22:57:48+00:00
Impressive! Working on Termux is the first step toward breaking free from closed platform dependencies. I am developing 'Noor' on a 6-inch screen from Yemen because sovereignty starts with the mind, not the hardware [cite: 2026-01-24]. If it weren't for the 'Code Slavery' locking my earnings (over 100 Million tokens), I’d tell you my next laptop is a gift for you. Keep coding; the future belongs to Sovereign AI.