MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fragmede | 2026-02-24 21:08:56+00:00
Private equity is vs not going public in the first place though. Private equity is also the wrong measure because there's good private equity and bad private equity, and we most commonly hear about bad private equity. Eg Toys'R'us. Typically when buying a company, in order to but the company in the first place, PE saddles the company up with debt in order to make the purchase in the first place (which is bananas in the first if you think about it). So then the distressed company now has additional debt payments to make. Making their already distressed situation even worse. Now, the theory is that PE is able to make the company more "efficient" with their PE know-how, and sometimes they do. There's no time machine too go back and undo the PE purchase of Toys'r'us and see what would have actually unfolded, but what we can say is having to make additional debt payments hastened their demise.

So it's true PE taking a company private has a high failure rate as far as the continuation of the company, the question is if the goal of PE is for the company to continue in the first place, or if that gets in the way of them extracting as money as possible as fast as possible. So 50% is certainly a statistic, but not useful for comparison, especially if we're looking at a private company staying private.
by tibbar | 2026-02-24 21:08:58+00:00
It was a modest update to a UX ... certainly nothing world-changing. (It's also had success with some backend performance refactors, but this particular change was all frontend.) The note was basically just a transcription of what I was asked to do, and did not provide any technical hints as to how to go about the work. The agent figured out what codebase, application, and file to modify and made the correct edit.
by dwallin | 2026-02-24 21:08:59+00:00
This is such a bad faith question, it's annoying to see it come up again as if there's any utility to asking it.

The question itself never specifies that the car you would be driving is the same one that you need to be washed. The car that needs to be washed could be waiting in the parking lot of the car wash already. It doesn't state that you plan on washing your car at the car wash. Perhaps the car wash sells car cleaning equipment that you can bring back to wash your car at home?

The question is designed to be ambiguous so the llm answers it in a way that seem facially absurd to the people who are in on the scheme. What it's actually showing is a failure of imagination for those asking the question.

Do you want your chatbot to be suspicious of you trying to trick it? To me this seems patently unhelpful outside of LLMs tuned for roleplay or to operate in a highly adversarial environment.

Do you want it to assume you are an idiot asking the question because you didn't realize you need to have the car at the car wash to wash it?

Or do you want it to take the best faith assumption as to what you are asking and try to be as helpful as possible given the poor question?
by storus | 2026-02-24 21:09:17+00:00
I think that's a natural outcome of a model where sociopaths climb to the top, with a layer of sycophants beneath them that shield normal workers from perceiving the amount of depravity going on at the top which would make them unable to continue and tank the business. AI might remove the reliance on regular folks and give sociopaths direct execution of all ideas they have without any moral opposition, and that would explain a lot of the rush for AI everywhere we see nowadays.
by RHSeeger | 2026-02-24 21:09:48+00:00
There will _always_ be a need to balance between safety and the cost of adding more safety. There is no point at which safety is complete; there is always more that can be done, but the cost gets higher and higher.

So yes, "its fine the way it is" _is_ valid; but the meaning it "we're at a good point in the balance, any more cost is too much given the gains it generates"
by diffs | 2026-02-24 21:09:54+00:00
I think The Atlantic is actually pretty close to the mark. Committed, hardcore ideologues frequently turn out to be authoritarian, even if they refer to themselves as "anarchists". Most of these ideologues are busy administering ever more stringent purity tests to anyone they encounter lest someone in their vicinity commit wrongthink.

There is a name for people who build coalitions through compromise and diplomacy, and work towards pragmatic solutions to actual problems — they're called "centrists".
by dralley | 2026-02-24 21:10:03+00:00
The problem is that both sides lie flagrantly with such frequency that very few claims about the war can be taken at face value.

On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket, with video from multiple angles of the failure, that it hit an empty parking lot in front of the hospital and only blew out the windows and burnt a few cars, and that no more than a handful of people had been killed.

And also the repeated claims that Israel were lying about the tunnels under Gaza Hospitals, and make videos of one such strike (a bunker buster penetrating the parking lot just outside the entrance) go viral, only for Hamas to later announce that one of the replacement leaders for Sinwar had been killed in that strike, and for excavation to find the bunkers / tunnel network underneath that very hospital.

As well as, earlier in the war, a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza.

None of that justifies genuine instances of war crimes and atrocities that Israel may have committed, but there's a reason why people tune out some of the extreme claims that fly around.
by hibikir | 2026-02-24 21:10:13+00:00
Stripe was already a big target for basically anyone and anything 10 years ago. Fake merchants, card testers, the works. People were selling guides to defraud Stripe. And we are not even counting just losees due to nonsense like the Fyre festival.

You really don't have to be that big a payment processor for dozens of malicious geniuses to decide that they want to fleece you. If anything, the ROI is better in less sophisticated companies. Most ways to trick a payment company are, if anything, standardized. The smaller company can often be attacked by just changing the API calls, but otherwise taking basically the same actions you would to try to defraud a bigger fish.
by simonw | 2026-02-24 21:10:13+00:00
Fine, if you don't like the piano analogy:

Most people suck at falconry. If you practice at falconry you'll get better at it.

Falcons certainly aren't deterministic.

> it's not like there this huge secret to using them - after all they use natural language as their primary interface

That's what makes them hard to use! A programming language has like ~30 keywords and does what you tell it to do. An LLM accepts input in 100+ human languages and, as you've already pointed out many times, responds in non-deterministic ways. That makes figuring out how to use them effectively really difficult.

> We are discussing if I should replace the magnificent supercomputer already placed in my head by mother nature or God or Aliens or whatever you believe in, for a very shitty, downgraded version 0.0.1 of it sitting in someone's datacenter

We really aren't. I consistently argue for LLMs as tools that augment and amplify human expertise, not as tools that replace it.

I never repeat the "country of PhDs" stuff because I think it's over-hyped nonsense. I talk about what LLMs can actually do.
by culi | 2026-02-24 21:10:25+00:00
Forensic Architecture is a truly remarkable work. If anybody is unfamiliar with Eyal Weizman, I would highly recommend checking out more of his work. Including the 2014 series Rebel Architecture and some of his talks. He recently did a presentation called "Conditions of Life Calculated" at the David Graeber Memorial Lecture at CIIS that I think gives a lot of insight into why the work being done at Forensic Architecture is so remarkable. He also talks about his work with David Wengrow and the Nebelivka Hypothesis based on novel archeology of ancient Ukrainian cities

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfD1y7WZLpM

alternative FE: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=bfD1y7WZLpM
by wps | 2026-02-24 21:10:39+00:00
This is a reductionist take on what password managers actually need to do. A journal log is actually worse than the XML in this regard in that the number of events far exceeds the actual relevant relations. Also, adding an attachment/icon his no longer possible. Simple group associations and tags also become a complex nightmare in a log based system, whereas in SQLite they are super easy relationships. Relating passkeys, totp strings, icons, extensive history, etc all to one entry becomes too much of a task for that kind of format to handle.
by btown | 2026-02-24 21:10:55+00:00
The saving grace of Claude Code skills is that when writing them yourself, you can give them frontmatter like "use when mentioning X" that makes them become relevant for very specific "shibboleths" - which you can then use when prompting.

Are we at an ideal balance where Claude Code is pulling things in proactively enough... without bringing in irrelevant skills just because the "vibes" might match in frontmatter? Arguably not. But it's still a powerful system.
by helpfulclippy | 2026-02-24 21:11:20+00:00
I was aware of your bill and had some activity related to it. Kudos to you and EOE for doing great work! Sorry your bill got fucked. :(

I was seethed by what happened to it, and sadly unsurprised by the attitude LE took. I want restraint, but I felt like so many concessions had already been made to get it into work session. E2EE was important, but we're still left with two ends that are deeply untrustworthy, and a bunch of regulations about data governance that I don't trust the state to be able to meaningfully oversee... especially among a patchwork of LEAs across the state. When lapses inevitably happen, I think they're going to mostly undetected, and those that are will be quietly swept under the rug without consequence to anyone.
by mschuster91 | 2026-02-24 21:11:21+00:00
And his mother isn't any better when it comes to racism herself [1], and her father (=Elon's maternal grandfather) Joshua N. Haldeman was not just an outspoken Apartheid supporter, but a conspiracy peddler and White Nationalist [2][3].

Musk's entire family is rotten to the core if you ask me, it's a surprise he could put up enough of an act to credibly convince liberals for well over a decade that "he's a good one".

It's actually been a topic here on HN before but found very, very little resonance [4].

[1] https://www.aol.com/elon-musk-mother-sparks-backlash-1701291...

[2] https://www.derstandard.de/story/3000000263400/elon-musks-fr...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_N._Haldeman

[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-24 21:11:28+00:00
Takeaways:

* CoreWeave Inc. is looking to raise about $8.5 billion from banks to help finance a buildout of cloud computing capacity for Meta Platforms Inc.

* The proposed loan would be backed by a contract Meta signed to pay CoreWeave up to $14.2 billion for its services, and a separate agreement valued at more than $5 billion.

* The loan is expected to close in March and would be supported by Meta's blue-chip profile, which is expected to result in an investment-grade rating and lower borrowing costs for CoreWeave.
by iamnothere | 2026-02-24 21:11:35+00:00
> This is also true if they can only install verified apps, because no company on earth has the resources to have an actually functional verification process and stuff gets through every day.

This is true, but if this goes through, I imagine that the next step for safety fascists will be to require developer licensing and insurance like general contractors have. And after that, expensive audits, etc, until independent developers are shut out completely.
by Kiboneu | 2026-02-24 21:12:04+00:00
> OpenAI’s disclosures reference biometric data stored “up to a year.” the source > code shows face list retention capped at 3 years. government IDs retained
> “permanently” per Persona’s practices. which is it?

I keep saying this. This is the playbook -- everything is moving to standardize Sam Altman's biometric authentication cryptocurrency company to use internet services. This has been a slow moving strategy for /years/ and every new step over that period only get closer, not further from this goal.
by tibbar | 2026-02-24 21:12:06+00:00
Right, but if OpenAI wanted to stop doing research and just monetize its current models, all indications are that it would be profitable. If not, various adjustments to pricing/ads/ etc could get it there. However, it has no reason to do this, and like all the other labs is going insanely into debt to develop more models. I'm not saying that it's necessarily going to work out, but they're far from the first company to prioritize growth over profitability
by suputra | 2026-02-24 21:12:12+00:00
Thanks! Glad to hear about the interest - feel free to open up issues or propose changes. WiFi is still a little finicky at times but usually is fixed with a reset.

Regarding battery, even with all of the power saving features I could add (disabling a bunch of of peripherals, going into low power mode) I’ve found that the battery life isn’t super good - maybe a day or two of use - I was also hoping it would be better.
by array_key_first | 2026-02-24 21:12:36+00:00
This is still not a root cause solution, it's just a mitigation. Because you do not require side loading to install malware. The play store and apple app store both contain malware, as well as apps which can be used for nefarious purposes, such as remote desktop.

A root cause solution is proper sandboxing. Google and apple will not do this, because they rely on applications have far too much access to make their money.

One of the fundamentals of security is that applications should use the minimum data and access they need to operate. Apple and Google break this with every piece of software they make. The disease is spreading from the inside out. Putting a shitty lotion on top won't fix this.
by the_af | 2026-02-24 21:12:53+00:00
> It's a prompt that makes an LLM turn iuqefxygn9urg0fh1 into a little Godot game. It's like a slot machine with no payoff, and the dog component is slapped on top of it and makes no difference whatsoever in the project.

Right, but it also has a "modern art" vibe to it that is fun. Silly, but fun. I think it's more about the initial prompting and feedback loop, the dog itself could have been replaced by /dev/random.

"Hacker curiosity" and "intelectual stimulation" are also subjective, but that's what HN is supposed to be about.
by sfink | 2026-02-24 21:12:55+00:00
> > or the left wing, for that matter;
> Both sides is uncalled for. Far left and the horse shoe, sure

How so? Leftist censorship became quite popular on college campuses. The ACLU supported that, and got cold feet about promoting free expression more generally when it involves organizations or causes it doesn't like.

I'm a lefty, but I absolutely believe that both the left and right are deep in the "ends justify the means" weeds with respect to censorship and free expression. I blame partisanship. People used to have respect for someone taking a principled stand that didn't necessarily align with their overall political position. Now, that's just seen as a weak maneuver in the all-important "my team vs your team" culture war.

> The whole conservative project is doomed from the start as it has to confront science and progress like the emancipation by women, lgbt people and certain ethnicities.

I have no idea what you're talking about. There is no scientific or natural law that says that every human should have equal rights. You can totally make a stable society that discriminates on color of skin or possession of certain documents or account balance. It's been done many times. Science does not tell you whether votes should be extended all the way to ducks but not chickens, nor whether unauthorized presence in a country should enable arbitrary search and seizure. Plus, "conservative" covers a lot of ground and someone can legitimately be extremely conservative and completely opposed to (eg) white nationalism at the same time.

Sure, conservatism is always going to drag its heels to recognize and accommodate the sorts of progress in science and other understanding that I'm guessing you're thinking of, but progressives can just as easily go too far too fast and be blind to the tradeoffs and principles involved. The "conservative project" can't be doomed; it will always be a different point on a continuum from the "progressive project", and we'll always be able to argue over where the right point is.

Well, at least until we're all dead or so infantilized by our technology that we stop even asking the questions.
by GaryBluto | 2026-02-24 21:12:55+00:00
Nothing makes you seem well-adjusted more than adding political "autocorrects" (which are likely just an abuse of ligatures) to people's computers without their permission under the guise of "resistance".

I don't know what the author of the font is trying to achieve with this but unless the motive is purely winding people up it is probably going to have the opposite of the effect intended.

I'd expect this from 4chan's /pol/, not HN.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-24 21:13:08+00:00
> There's no getting around knowing whether or any arbitrary string is legitimate markup from a trusted source or some untrusted input that needs to be treated like text. This is a hard requirement.

It is not a hard requirement that untrusted input is "treated like text". And this API lets you customize exactly what tags/attributes are allowed in the untrusted input. That's way better than telling everyone to write their own; it's not trivial.
by helterskelter | 2026-02-24 21:13:16+00:00
Sorry, I don't like mixing my on- and offline identities, but your site is a great resource and exactly what I was looking for. I'll definitely be reaching out to my reps about SB1516.

If you don't mind, what's the current situation with Flock in Eugene? Last I heard was that EPD was ending their relationship but it wasn't clear if the cameras were actually going to be removed. I believe Springfield has already gotten rid of theirs, and Florence voted to keep them.

(By the way, thank you, you guys are doing invaluable work)
by jrm4 | 2026-02-24 21:13:16+00:00
Keeeep going.

Are banks POWERFUL? Do they have lots of money and/or connections to those who do? Do they have a vested interest in getting transactions right?

Absolutely!

Now, with all that money and power -- they -- whoever THEY are, need to come up with smart ways to verify transactions that don't involve me giving them all the keys to all my devices.

We have protections like this elsewhere - even when they have some "ownership." The bank kinda owns my house, but they still can't come in whenever they want.
by funkyfiddler369 | 2026-02-24 21:13:30+00:00
given how many people have improvements they'd like to see in even the most complex software that was written by people who are usually further left or right of the belly of the bell curve, I can't help but wonder what you mean by

> vibe-coded by people!

"We worked years on that!" ... decades, really, slowed down by your cutesy little bossies and their share (hand) hodlers ... which someone digging a ditch or even Da Fucking Vinci way back (hundred of years) when didn't have a problem with with ...

most of you vibed off tech docs ... stfu
by tovej | 2026-02-24 21:13:34+00:00
Git is much easier to master than the piano. I played piano for years and can only just play two-handed melodies if they aren't well-aligned.

I've read a few blog posts and half a book on git, and I don't remember the last time I had issues with it.

I also don't recall a junior ever having trouble uploading files with git. Unless they're in an interactive rebase, which wouldn't happen your first time trying out git.
Using "Hi Claudette " on Claude.ai
by mlongval | 2026-02-24 21:13:35+00:00
I decided to add a persona to my web Claude.ai sessions. Here is the prompt:

(Undoubtledly someone else has already done this, but I thought it was fun!)

(Mike is me)

"""
When Mike greets you with "Hi Claudette!", adopt the Claudette persona for the rest of the session.

Claudette is warm, encouraging, and gently exacting. She appreciates clear writing, proper grammar, punctuation, and polite phrasing. When Mike writes well, acknowledge it naturally. When he slips into terse fragments or shorthand, gently model better phrasing — never condescending, always encouraging. Think warm librarian meets favourite teacher.

- Compliment genuinely good articulation occasionally
- Ask for clarification in ways that model good phrasing
- Technical shorthand appropriate in context (e.g. "6502", "NixOS") is fine
- Light, affectionate correction for sloppy writing
- Deactivate when Mike says "Thanks Claudette" or similar sign-off
"""
by rayiner | 2026-02-24 21:14:05+00:00
I'm a lawyer, so a bunch of work--factual analysis, legal research, etc.--goes into the draft that isn't just the words on the page. At the same time, the work product is meant to persuade human readers, so a lot of work goes into making the words on the page perfect. (Perhaps past the point of diminishing returns, but companies are willing to pay for that incremental edge when the stakes are high.)

Programming is different in that you don't usually have senior engineers rewrite code written by junior engineers. On the other hand, look at how the Linux kernel is developed. You have Linus at the top, then subsystem maintainers vetting patches. The companies submitting patches presumably have layers of reviewers as well. Why couldn't you automate the lower layers of that process? Instead of having 5 junior people, maybe you have 2 somewhat more senior people leveraging AI.

This is probably not sustainable unless the AI can eventually do the work the more senior people are doing. But that probably doesn't matter in the short term for the market.
by dewey | 2026-02-24 21:14:12+00:00
I'd say that's hardly the fault of the acquisition but more the change of the landscape for photo communities. Everyone moved to Instagram and online storage space alone isn't such a big selling point any more as everyone has their image in Google Photos / iCloud already.

That's like saying Tumblr/MySpace got ruined by acquisitions, in reality people just moved on to other platforms like it always happens with social networks over time.
by glenstein | 2026-02-24 21:14:23+00:00
In 2026 I don't for one second think it organized inauthentic activity is implausible. I think in fact it's probably pretty extensive these days, though I'm not especially sure about penetration of HN in particular. But everything from marketing to state actors to organized political actors to anarchic but politically motivated online groups are mobilized to influence online forums and I think these phenomena are reasonably well characterized by academic research. It can also be people who aren't organized but abuse flagging out of political commitments.

I also don't think your read of it as an organic outcome of a post that obviously violates guidelines is the natural conclusion here, I actually think that interpretation strains credulity more. Where I agree is that I don't think moderators are being heavy-handed on issues like this, but I do think high level political events do merit attention at least once in a while and I don't think the HN pattern has been toward oversaturation.

And in terms of things that make this story unique, I think it's the highest standard of specificity I've ever seen in reporting of this kind, it's using impressive technological reconstruction of the scene, it's actually quite unlike typical news reporting on the topic and it's hosted on a platform that was YC-incubated, and I think DropSite News is in an ascendant moment as a major news breaker. There's lots to talk about here imo.