MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mmooss | 2026-02-08 22:29:36+00:00
Denounce also creates liability: you are slandering someone, explicitly harming their reputation and possibly their career.

I'd hesitate to create the denounce function without speaking to an attorney; when someone's reputation and career are torpedoed by the chain reaction you created - with the intent of torpedoing reputations - they may name you in the lawsuit for damages and/or to compel you to undo the 'denounce'.

Not vouching for someone seems safe. No reason to get negative.
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-02-08 22:30:13+00:00
<< As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme.

It.. feels accurate. I don't frequent FB or other mainstream social spots, but even on HN, the pattern is relatively clear. Vocal minorities tend to drive the conversations to their respective corners, while the middle quietly moves to, at most, watch at a safe distance.

Part of me is happy about it. The sooner we get out of the social media landscape, the better the society as a whole will be.. in my opinion anyway. Still, we have already lost so much of the original internet. That loss makes me sad.
by leecommamichael | 2026-02-08 22:30:18+00:00
That's fair, I was considering just after I posted that I was framing this in a black-and-white manner. It leaves the reader to decide what it means for it to "work" or not. That might be a useful thing for people (including me) to consider when talking about this stuff. Where's the bar? Is the benefit worth the cost?
by mindslight | 2026-02-08 22:30:53+00:00
How about we start recognizing that the occasional nuisance scaled up turns into real harm, and prohibit drones owned/operated by non-individuals from flying over anything that isn't a public way or a consensual waypoint?. This retains the ability for individual personal use and even innovation (with one's own skin in the game), while mostly heading off the perverse incentives of businesses creating externalities at scale and then ultimately enclosing the commons.

In general our society desperately needs to stop denying this basic division, and burden individuals less while applying heavier regulations to corporations/LLCs - ie artificial legal entities created by government whose sine-qua-non is already large amounts of paperwork. For another example, most of the opposition to digital privacy regulation would become moot.
by galleywest200 | 2026-02-08 22:31:31+00:00
> Across platforms, political posting remains tightly linked to affective polarization, as the most partisan users are also the most active. As casual users disengage and polarized partisans remain vocal, the online public sphere grows smaller, sharper, and more ideologically extreme.

I keep saying to my internet friends that the vast majority of people do not share political opinions online and you have to apply skepticism about what people actually think about political topics when scrolling through social media “takes”. Seems my intuition was not that far off.
by D-Machine | 2026-02-08 22:31:48+00:00
> You, on the other hand, claim that there are infinite firsthand sensory experiences (maybe we can call them qualia?) that fall in between the cracks of language and are rarely communicated (though we use for that a wealth of metaphors and synesthesia) and can only be understood by those who have experienced them firsthand.

Well, not infinite, but, yes! I am indeed claiming much world models are patterns and associations between qualia, and that only some qualia are essentially representable as or look like linguistic tokens (specifically, the sounds of those tokens being pronounced, or their visual shapes if e.g. math symbols). E.g. I am claiming that the way one learns to e.g. cook, or "do theoretical math" may be more about forming associations between those non-linguistic qualia than, say, obviously, doing philosophy is.

> I'm not sure they constitute such a big part of our thought and communication

The communication part is mostly tautological again, but, yes, it remains very much an open question in cognitive science just how exactly thought works. A lot of mathematicians claim to lean heavily on visualization and/or tactile and kinaesthetic modeling for their intuitions (and most deep math is driven by intuition first), but also a lot of mathematicians can produce similar works and disagree about how they think about it intuitively. And we are seeing some progress from e.g. Aristotle using LEAN to generate math proofs in a strictly tokenized / symbolic way, but it remains to be seen if this will ever produce anything truly impressive to mathematicians. So it is really hard to know what actually matters for general human cognition.

I think introspection makes it clear there are a LOT of domains where it is obvious the core knowledge is not mostly linguistic. This is easiest to argue for embodied domains and skills (e.g. anything that requires direct physical interaction with the world), and it is areas like these (e.g. self-driving vehicle AI) where LLMs will be (most likely) least useful in isolation, IMO.
by appreciatorBus | 2026-02-08 22:32:38+00:00
A few comments:
- a "corporate" encyclopedia does not mean all articles are biased, but it does mean that you know who wrote it and you can use knowledge of the author's biases to inform your interpretation of the text
- Walmart may be bad in all kinds of ways, but it's not at all comparable to autocracy

I'm not trying to argue that Wikipedia or any other source can meet some utopian ideal of objectivity, but I am concerned that the anonymity of Wikipedia allows it to be weaponized in new ways, and despite this, it retains a gloss of "community" and "grassroots" that was undoubtedly appropriate at one time, but probably isn't any more.

This would, IMO, be bad enough when humans were the main consumers - they could be mislead in subtle ways that influence their political opinions & actions, but at least it was possible for the affected humans to update their opinions with other sources. However if AI is treating Wikipedia as basically fact and encoding it within the model, then it's not clear how mistakes can be corrected or even noticed.

IMO a worse problem than collectivists arguing for Walmart is collectivists slowly whitewashing the murderous historical record of collectivist regimes.
by magicalhippo | 2026-02-08 22:33:06+00:00
> It’s strange that we still haven’t setup any sort of authenticated form of communication with official parties.

My alarm company had me come up with challenge and response words. Yet when they call they want me to say my word first. Like how do I know they are who they say they are? Caller ID can easily be spoofed.

So so much for that idea...
by tmp10423288442 | 2026-02-08 22:33:24+00:00
What's the plan to avoid a Bluesky-like bubble from forming around Vouch projects? Say what you want about wanting to avoid politically disagreeable people, but Bluesky has been shrinking gradually since the 2024 election, as people interested in political effectiveness or even avoiding a hugbox have drifted away. Or think about how new projects are generally not started as GPL anymore (except if they want to charge money by making their open source version AGPL), due to similar viral dynamics discouraging potential contributors.
by yusufnb | 2026-02-08 22:33:56+00:00
At my work I interview a lot of fresh grads and interns. I have been doing that consistently for last 4 years. During the interviews I always ask the candidates to show and tell, share their screen and talk about their projects and work at school and other internships.

Since last few months, I have seen a notable difference in the quality and extent of projects these students have been able to accomplish. Every project and website they show looks polished, most of those could be a full startup MVP pre AI days.

The bar has clearly been raised way high, very fast with AI.
by btbuildem | 2026-02-08 22:33:59+00:00
The paper (rightfully) does not address this, but I'd like to speculate about the reasons why, overall, usage has been dropping.

I think it's because social media, as a whole, stopped providing any value to its users. In the early days it did bring a novel way to connect, coordinate, stay in touch, discover, and learn. Today, not so much.

It seems we are between worlds now, with the wells of the "old order" drying up, and the springs of the "new order" not found / tapped just yet.
by HumanOstrich | 2026-02-08 22:34:19+00:00
I used this for a while. What I don't like is that it updates its database by creating an entirely new copy and then deleting/renaming. For me that meant a several-hundred-MB file was being unnecessarily rewritten on a regular basis. It's a rather excessive waste of resources and not a polite thing to do when a lot of people have SSDs now.

I uninstalled it for that reason.
by sarchertech | 2026-02-08 22:35:16+00:00
The reason this works for compilers is because machine code is so low level that it’s possible to easily prove semantic equivalence between 2 different sets of instructions.

That is not true for an English language prompt like “send and email with this specific subject and body”. There are so many implicit decisions that have to be made in that statement that will be different every time you regenerate the code.

English language specs will always have this ambiguity.
by Jolliness7501 | 2026-02-08 22:35:17+00:00
This is most often used tool in my daily work.

I work on win11. I don't use native search because it sucks and is slow as tar drip experiment.

Onedrive/sharepoint files content search at least works at all but only in web version. Still slow as hell, unreliable, ui/ux is crap.

With Everything I search >500k real files/folders + >300k fake files in milliseconds.
by nbaksalyar | 2026-02-08 22:35:35+00:00
> only to have it completely obsoleted a few years later

Not really. There aren’t as many fundamentally new ideas in modern tech as it may seem.

Web servers have existed for more than 30 years and haven’t changed that much since then. Or e.g., React + Redux is pretty much the same thing as WinProc from WinAPI - invented some time in ~1990. Before Docker, there were Solaris Zones and FreeBSD jails. TCP/IP is 50 years old. And many, many other things we perceive as new.

Moreover, I think it’s worth looking back and learning some of the “old tech” for inspiration; there’s a wealth of deep and prescient ideas there. We still don’t have a full modern equivalent of Macromedia Flash, for example.
by dhawalrathore | 2026-02-08 22:36:31+00:00
Location: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes (Canada)

Technologies: Spark, Python, Java, C, C++, SQL, R, Bash, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript

Resume/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AmgYoafsQvld56PRgW9eYRlTu9g...

Email: dhawalrathor12@gmail.com

UBC CS and Stats student, Data and Software Engineer focused on designing high-performance, scalable data infrastructure using OOP principles and statistical rigor. Recently engineered critical ETL pipelines using PySpark and Airflow, achieving over 2x performance gains through parallel processing and reducing pipeline deployment times by 80% via custom library development. Dedicated to building robust, efficient systems, I am currently seeking internship opportunities for Summer 2026 to apply this expertise.
by Lammy | 2026-02-08 22:36:53+00:00
Your memory is correct! They released GTA1 (all expansions) and GTA2 as free “Rockstar Classics” in 2003 and 2004 respectively: https://web.archive.org/web/20130116055920/https://www.rocks...

One can get those versions here: https://archive.org/details/rockstar-classics_202107

They're great on XP-era machines! I have both installed on my HITACHI FLORA 270HX
by reify | 2026-02-08 22:37:42+00:00
red rag catnip to a booster,

they can smell an agent at 50 yards and have wet dreams over them.

I can hear it all now.

Our agent-to-agent is so good, they made a baby-agent just by sending copied code back and forwards to each other. they were really talking and having sex together, just like humans.
Show HN: Poisson – Chrome extension that buries your browsing in decoy traffic
by daringdesigns | 2026-02-08 22:37:54+00:00
I built a Chrome extension that generates noise traffic to dilute your browsing profile. Instead of trying to hide what you do online (increasingly difficult), it buries your
real activity in a flood of decoy searches, page visits, and ad clicks across dozens of site categories.

The core idea is signal dilution — the same principle behind chaff in radar countermeasures and differential privacy in data science. If you visit 50 pages today and Poisson
visits 500 more on your behalf, anyone analyzing your traffic (ISP, data broker, ad-tech) sees noise, not signal.

How it works:

- Uses a Poisson process for scheduling, so timing looks like natural human browsing rather than mechanical intervals
- Opens background tabs (never steals focus), injects a content script that scrolls, hovers, and clicks links to look realistic
- Batches tasks within Chrome's 1-minute alarm minimum, dispatching at calculated Poisson offsets
- Four intensity levels: ~18/hr to ~300/hr
- Configurable search engines, task mix (search/browse/ad-click ratio), and site categories

What it explicitly does NOT do:

- No data collection, telemetry, or analytics
- No external server communication
- No access to your cookies, history, or real tabs
- No accounts or personal information required

Every URL it will ever visit is hardcoded in the source. Every action is logged in a live feed you can inspect. The whole thing is ~2,500 lines of commented JS.

I know this approach has real limitations — it doesn't defeat browser fingerprinting, your ISP can still see the noise domains, and a sufficiently motivated adversary could
potentially distinguish real traffic from generated traffic through timing analysis or behavioral patterns. This is one layer in a defense-in-depth approach, not a complete
solution.

Similar prior art: TrackMeNot (randomized search queries since 2006) and AdNauseam (clicks all ads to pollute profiles). Both from NYU researchers. Google banned AdNauseam from
the Chrome Web Store, which says something.

Code: https://github.com/Daring-Designs/poisson-extension

Not on the Chrome Web Store — you load it unpacked. MIT licensed.
by c0_0p_ | 2026-02-08 22:38:19+00:00
All true, except I think you've conflated software and software product a bit. The author is mourning the craft, the same way the boot makers or furniture makers probably mourned the decline of their craft. We'll still have boots, furniture, and software, but those craftspeople who take pride in it can justifiably feel melancholy about it all.
by asdff | 2026-02-08 22:38:29+00:00
Do you play other 3d games? I've seen a lot of difficulty for people not growing up with 3d games just managing the camera + movement. Kind of how I feel looking at high level Fortnite play where the rapid fire build play layered on top of usual fps gunplay is just one layer too much complexity for my experiences growing up with fps only video games.
by Nevermark | 2026-02-08 22:38:34+00:00
The default could should be to refund.

That would make not-refunding culturally crass unless it was warranted.

With manual options for:

0. (Default, refund)

1. (Default refund) + Auto-send discouragement response. (But allow it.)

2. (Default refund) + Block.

3. Do not refund

4. Do not refund + Auto-send discouragement response.

5. Do not refund + Block.

6. Do not refund + Block + Report SPAM (Boom!)

And typically use $1 fee, to discourage spam.

And $10 fee, for important, open, but high frequency addresses, as that covers the cost of reviewing high throughput email, so useful email did get identified and reviewed. (With the low quality communication subsidizing the high quality communication.)

The latter would be very useful in enabling in-demand contact doors to remain completely open, without being overwhelmed. Think of a CEO or other well known person, who does want an open channel of feedback from anyone, ideally, but is going to have to have someone vet feedback for the most impactful comments, and summarize any important trend in the rest. $10 strongly disincentives low quality communication, and covers the cost of getting value out of communication (for everyone).
by nl | 2026-02-08 22:38:53+00:00
This thought pattern leads to crypto.

In that world there's a process called "staking" where you lock some tokens with a default lock expiry action and a method to unlock based on the signature from both participants.

It would work like this: Repo has a public key. Submitted uses a smart contract to sign the commit with along with the submission of a crypto. If the repo merges it then the smart contract returns the token to the submitter. Otherwise it goes to the repo.

It's technically quite elegant, and the infrastructure is all there (with some UX issues).

But don't do this!!!!

I did some work in crypto. It's made me realize that the love of money corrupts, and because crypto brings money so close to engineering it corrupts good product design.
by jeffbee | 2026-02-08 22:38:54+00:00
This sucks because the web should be the perfect, safe platform for this kind of application, but it isn't. Technically all the features exist in the browser such that you could write a homedir cleaner, space analyzer, etc purely in a browser tab, but because of the misguided (in my opinion) way that browsers refuse to do open a homedir, it's impossible.
by kayo_20211030 | 2026-02-08 22:39:03+00:00
ARY all the time, if necessary; AI or no.

DRY is a comforting illusion, based on a misapprehension of how mid-scale enterprise code is actually developed. DRY's assumption is that there's sufficient organizational capacity to coherently design the "thing"; and that only one thing should be done in only one place according to some overarching vision - observationally, a vision missing in most mid-scale companies. My experience is that there's almost never a coherent, managed design in any but the smallest and the largest organizations. The former because of social scale, and the latter because of a necessity to deliver at scale.

In the middle bracket, it just doesn't happen.

Mid-scale applications are mostly developed in a form of loosely managed anarchy. Different teams, different incentives, different approaches - all without a competent traffic cop i.e. an architect. Those 10x architects just do not exist in the mid-scale companies, in my experience. The good ones move to high-scale companies, and the peter principle kicks in below.

If your team is responsible for a feature: repeat yourself as much as you need in order to ship the product. If it's really important, you'll come back and correct it later - within you sphere of responsibility and according to your incentives. Absent a competent architect's direction and managerial instruction, just repeat yourself as often as you need in order to keep the context sufficiently local to deliver what you're paid to deliver.
by throw234234234 | 2026-02-08 22:39:22+00:00
Domain knowledge and gatekeeping. We don't know what is required in their role fully, but we do know what is required in ours. We also know that we are the target of potentially trillions in capital to disrupt our job and that the best and brightest are being paid well just to disrupt "coding". A perfect storm of factors that make this faster than other professions.

It also doesn't help that some people in this role believe that the SWE career is a sinking ship which creates an incentive to climb over others and profit before it tanks (i.e. build AI tools, automate it and profit). This is the typical "It isn't AI, but the person who automates your job using AI that replaces you".
by spockz | 2026-02-08 22:40:44+00:00
That it actually quite simple and nifty. It reminds me of the 4 priorities RPC requests can have within the Google stack. 0 being if this fails it will result in a big fat error for the user to 3, we don’t care if this fails because we will run the analysis job again in a month or so.

IIRC in macOS you do need to pass the voucher, it isn’t inherited automatically. Linux has no knowledge of it, so first it has to be introduced as a concept and then apps have to start using it.
by resquawk | 2026-02-08 22:40:48+00:00
These contain links to sample outputs:

* Quality/Hygiene: https://github.github.com/gh-aw/blog/2026-01-13-meet-the-wor...

* Documentation: https://github.github.com/gh-aw/blog/2026-01-13-meet-the-wor...

* Code improvement: https://github.github.com/gh-aw/blog/2026-01-13-meet-the-wor...

* Refactoring: https://github.github.com/gh-aw/blog/2026-01-13-meet-the-wor...
by notnullorvoid | 2026-02-08 22:40:49+00:00
Great article, nice to see some actual critical thoughts on the shortcomings of LLMs. They are wrong about programming being a "chess-like domain" though. Even at a basic level hidden state is future requirements, and the adversary is self or any other entity that has to modify the code in the future.

AI is good at producing code for scenarios where the stakes are low, there's no expectation about future requirements, or if the thing is so well defined there is a clear best path of implementation.
by mindcrime | 2026-02-08 22:41:16+00:00
This weekend I've been going through a bunch of stuff with A2A, building little samples and just getting my head around it. Threw together this repo[1] with a bunch of the stuff I'm doing, if anybody else is interested.

Also, watching a bunch of videos and reading docs on OpenClaw. I had thought I'd do an install of it sometime this weekend, but I don't know if I'll get to that at this point or not.

And lastly, messing with Spring AI[2]. I wanted to get a local build of that going so I can dig into the bowels of it and hack on it a bit. So I got that repo cloned and ran a quick build, and now I plan to start exploring the codebase.

[1]: https://github.com/mindcrime/A2ASandbox

[2]: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-ai
by manuelabeledo | 2026-02-08 22:41:17+00:00
> I don't know who those "most people are". Most developers already hand those tasks to LLMs, and more will in the future, as it's a market/job pressure.

This is definitely not true. Outside of the US, very few devs can afford to pay for the computer and/or services. And in a couple years, I believe, devs in the US will be in for a rude awakening when the current prices skyrocket.
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-02-08 22:41:45+00:00
This is probably as good an example as any. I can almost immediately guess the camp you are in, the narrative you want to advance just be the loaded terms you choose to use ( 'assassinate', 'kneeling' ). Overton window is a thing, but it would help if we did not have to communicate in a weird mix of what basically amounts to socially approved catch phrases.

edit: and to all the lazy downvoters. argue with me ye bums ( name calling very much intended here ). if you cant even manage that, what are you doing here?
by rorylaitila | 2026-02-08 22:42:48+00:00
A couple different projects. I've been cataloging and publishing my vintage ad collection at https://adretro.com. It's starting to get a lot of organic traffic after about a year online, which is cool.

I'm also working on a new strength gains-tracking app that is a lot more intuitive, motivating and friend first. I've been using it with some friends for the last 10 weeks and everyone making is consistent gains. It is my first full PWA, vanillaJs, backend is Lucee & MySQL. Works great on iOS and Android, no one has any complaints. The web stack has come a long way I am probably not going to do a native mobile app for a while. I'll probably make it public in a couple weeks.