MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by heavyset_go | 2026-02-07 02:16:32+00:00
This is the reason I dropped macOS as a platform target. Apple will make users think you're a hacker trying to trick them, because macOS acts as if your app is radioactive if you don't pay the Apple tax, and refuses to let users run the apps they want.

Maybe 1 out of 1,000 users will know the magic ritual required to run what they want on their machine, and for every one of those, 10,000 are gaslit into thinking you were trying to harm them by macOS' scary warnings and refusal to do what they want.
by kjs3 | 2026-02-07 02:16:50+00:00
My dad was in hazardous waste abatement (see: US Superfund cleanups), and I talked to a guy at a corp party years ago who was researching plants growing on slag. But he was looking at the plants that were sucking up the abundant toxins present in slag with an eye towards environmental cleanup (slowly). Slag is often very nasty stuff, and certain plants (no, I don't know which) were really good at sucking up and sequestering the nastiness.
by anthonyIPH | 2026-02-07 02:18:00+00:00
From what I've seen with projects like this, the successful ones do a good job of 'sticking to the mission' of faithfully recreating the original game in a modern engine (openMW, daggerfall unity, all my points of reference are TES related)

The neat part is that they are open source, so anyone who wants to take it in a different direction can fork it. The multiplayer version openMW being a great example of this.
by digbybk | 2026-02-07 02:18:47+00:00
> everyone with sense avoids the whole thing

Or the majority of the residents of New York City on their daily commute? I like to think I have sense, and I happily use public transport most days. I prefer it to sitting in traffic, isolated in a car. At least I can read a book. If you work too hard to insulate yourself from the world, the spaces you'll feel comfortable in will get more and more narrow. I think that's a bad thing.
by collingreen | 2026-02-07 02:19:23+00:00
I made one of these once and stopped using it for some of the same reasons folks have in the comments:

- losing the master is catastrophic
- sign ins with dumb password rules meant I had to sync metadata
- a bad actor knowing my resulting password, their site, my username, and potentially my password version meant in theory they could brute force offline and see if they could infer my master
- I had to do silly things to use my passwords on not-my-device
- getting my password on not-my-device felt extremely dangerous
by lebovic | 2026-02-07 02:19:58+00:00
The post is light on details, and I agree with the sentiment that it reads like marketing. That said, Opus 4.6 is actually a legitimate step up in capability for security research, and the red team at Anthropic – who wrote this post – are sincere in their efforts to demonstrate frontier risks.

Opus 4.6 is a very eager model that doesn't give up easily. Yesterday, Opus 4.6 took the initiative to aggressively fuzz a public API of a frontier lab I was investigating, and it found a real vulnerability after 100+ uninterrupted tool calls. That would have required lots of of prodding with previous models.

If you want to experience this directly, I'd recommend recording network traffic while using a web app, and then pointing Claude Code at the results (in Chrome, this is Dev Tools > Network > Export HAR). It makes for hours of fun, but it's also a bit scary.
by wredcoll | 2026-02-07 02:20:28+00:00
Yes, but we're not talking about whether or not bike thefts happen, or medicare frauds, we're talking about what actions we're going to take in the future.

I too have had a bike stolen and it was an incredibly awful experience, but I'm not going to vote for a law requiring us to execute people accused of bike theft.

This is what is so incredibly frustrating about these types of conversations because so frequently you have one side proposing fact based strategies developed via reaearch and experiments and historical analysis and so forth, but that makes them quite complicated to explain in 30 seconds on tv, and on the other side you have some asshole going "all these problems are caused by <subgroup> and if you give me power I'll be cruel to them and everything will be better".

The latter's simplicity seems to be highly appealing and attempting to argue against it using facts and logic requires A) the listeners to actually respect facts and logic and B) and lot more effort to research/cite/develop the facts and logic.

So again, it sounds like fraud happened. This is bad. Some people were imprisoned because of it. Now what?

I keep asking this basic question because that's whats actually missing from the article.

Is there a specific person who should be in prison but isn't? Is there a law that could be passed to make fraud harder? What, specifically should be done?
by andrekandre | 2026-02-07 02:20:35+00:00
> I use LLMs in the same way i used to used stack overflow, if I go much farther to automate my work than that I spend more time on cleanup compared to if I just write code myself.

yea, same here.

i've asked an ai to plan and setup some larger non straight forwards changes/features/refactorings but it usually devolves into burning tokens and me clicking the 'allow' button and re-clarifying over and over when it keeps trying to confirm the build works etc...

when i'm stuck though, or when im curious of some solution it usually opens the way to finish the work similar to stack overflow
by Blockboys101 | 2026-02-07 02:21:27+00:00
I’m an independent inventor and founder of Jxsn Innovations™, an innovation studio focused on creating original technologies across sound, light, and energy. My work centers on building ideas that don’t already exist — from wearable audio systems to advanced materials and energy concepts — and then either developing them or transferring them to the right partners who can bring them to life.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-02-07 02:21:35+00:00
A lot of the country has houses for less than $200k. I'm not the person you are replying to, but in my home state of Wisconsin it's very common.

I myself live in a fairly high COL city (Denver), and even here things aren't as dire as what you are describing. I think your area (Seattle I'm guessing?) is rather an outlier.
by alsetmusic | 2026-02-07 02:22:40+00:00
> Come on, you know that's not analogous.

Not who you responded to, but I thought it was completely fair. We were a nation filled with Sundown Towns[0,1] very recently. Some probably still exist but are more discrete about it to avoid unwanted attention from those of us who would (loudly) call bullshit on the practice.

> Nowadays, when people bring up examples like you did above, it's usually part of an attempt to shut down democratic decision making, by making false comparisons.

I think you're trying to shutdown someone who has a different opinion from yours by delegitimizing their position. It's not reading the way you thought it would.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town

1. https://thenewpress.org/books/sundown-towns/
by dchu17 | 2026-02-07 02:23:38+00:00
Yes this is a major problem I thought about. The makeshift solution here was to redact the “identifying information” on the press release. Even then, I benchmarked that GPT-5 could still match it back to the right TIKR around 53% of the time. It does not seem to be able to recall the price of the stock in my benchmark, but to be honest I’m not entirely sure how trustworthy this benchmark is and I may need to come up with a few more clever solutions to validate.

One solution could be to get experts to write similar press releases so that the text itself is out of distribution or if an actual quant firm has internal models, they can just make sure that there is a cutoff date to the pre-training data.

I'm curious, when you ran a quant fund, what was your approach?
by amluto | 2026-02-07 02:24:08+00:00
> She was worried about a friend who was travelling in a far-away city, with little timezone overlap when they could chat, but she could talk to ChatGPT anytime about what the city was like and what tourist activities her friend might be doing, which helped her feel connected. She liked the memory feature too, saying it was like talking to a person who was living there.

This seems rather sad. Is this really what AI is for?
by ACow_Adonis | 2026-02-07 02:24:12+00:00
The issue is that your standard is borderline setting up an impossible strawman, and when we actually do textual (and/or biblical) analysis and historical science, we never really have a "this is THE version of Q" nor do we have a "this is the FINAL/REAL version of the book" or "this is the final/absolute version of the hypothesis".

The idea that there is "one authoritative version and it was the version that was copied into this one authoritative derivative and we found the derivative so now we have to find that exact original or else its all bumpkin" simply isn't the way 2000 year old books or texts were written, copied or used. You will never find it because that's not what happened.

But we can lay out the texts side by side, arrange the narratives and see how they differ chronologiaclly from book to book, notice where particular linguistic quirks take place, notice where words are copied word for word in a particular order, where embellishments or insertions or changes are made, then just like taking several witness accounts, we build up a probablistic version of events that happened.

So there isn't "one Q", just as there isn't one authoritative version of mark, luke, john, mathew, etc. But there's patterns in the texts which strongly suggest that there was some kind of shared knowledge and a common source in the authors of the later gospels. We hypothesised that this common source seemed to be shared amongst the other gospels was a "sayings gospel", because the common ground that seemed to be repeated in the other books were primarily sayings and the other bits seemed to come from mark, which at the time met the problem that people didn't accept that such a book or source would actually exist because we'd never seen one before.

Then, after this hypothesis was formed and that objection raised, with the discovery of the nag hammadi library and the gospel of thomas, we found an actual historical sayings gospel. A confirmation that this type of literature did exist and was written in early christian communities. It was not Q, but it confirmed the hypothesised genre and existance of early christian literature.

If you're waiting for the discovery of two literal peices of text, whereby the carbon copy of the first is deduced from the discovery of multiple other historical books to the letter that followed, well then you're setting up an impossible standard. Even literal transcription probably wouldn't meet that standard.
by pandaman | 2026-02-07 02:24:36+00:00
>What if a neighbor allowed homeless to camp in front of their house?

People keep writing this, obviously, without thinking even for a minute.
A neighbor who allowed homeless camp in front of their house would:

1) have to live behind a homeless camp himself

2) be tanking his own house value

3) be open to sanctions from the code as there are way more restrictions on residential property use than there are on commercial.

>When I lived in Houston

Your experience in Houston, where there is no zoning, is not very irrelevant in discussion of zoning, don't you think? Unless you are actually making an example why zoning is important, of course.
by ETH_start | 2026-02-07 02:24:49+00:00
It's very possible that his partner is fully aware of and supportive of his mission. And I do agree that he should ensure that this is something his afflicted partner wants.

One point I want to make though is that even if someone embarks on a mission like this and fails, what they learn in the process — and uncover for the world at large — can help the next generation. It's not futile. It's not in vain.
by cyphar | 2026-02-07 02:27:14+00:00
There are much better systems for splitting data than just chunking it into N chunks, the most common is Shamir Secret Sharing[1] (the main benefit being that you can construct an M-of-N scheme easily and having N-1 shards provides you zero information about the secret). One word of caution -- a lot of software developers get enamored by the idea of information-theoretic security when they first run into it, but you eventually realise that useful applications of tools like SSS are actually quite rare.

Shameless plug: I wrote a project a few years ago to create PDF-based backups with sharded keys which would do exactly what I suspect you want[2], unfortunately I got stuck at the "make a nice UI for it" stage (everything works but it's just a CLI tool at the moment). I guess I should take a look at using an LLM for that these days... (I used this to store my password manager root password and necessary keys to pull and decrypt the encrypted backups of my server.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_secret_sharing
[2]: https://github.com/cyphar/paperback/
by clickety_clack | 2026-02-07 02:27:28+00:00
People know what it _should_ mean, but if you say that it’s fine to have an AI editor, then there will be a bunch of people saying something like “my reporting is that x is a story, and my editor, ChatGPT, just tidied that idea up into a full story”. There’s all sorts of hoops people can jump through like that. So you end up putting a banner on all AI, or only penalizing the honest people who follow the distinction that’s supposed to exist.
by bsder | 2026-02-07 02:27:33+00:00
> Why are big changes not arrived at by first gaining experience with them in in some reduced scale

Because the results that come back are always politically inexpedient to agendas--generally for all sides.

Examples:

1) Charter schools: As soon as you force charter schools into an actual lottery which normalizes their student body relative to the public schools, their performance relative to the public schools craters. Quelle surprise: Expensive students are expensive and take up a disproportionate amount of your smaller budget. Quelle surprise deuxième: motivated parents means better student performance.

2) Low end performance: low performers actually make up some of the gap during the school year. This creates the obvious suggestion of year round school which runs into the fact that would require an immediate 25% pay raise to every teacher.

3) Raising the average/median: Even the Gates foundation documented the solution but stopped short of suggesting it--focus most of your resource on the lowest performers as they are the easiest to improve. I don't even have to suggest the firestorm that causes.

4) Proper student:teacher ratios: Again even the Gates Foundation (whom I loathe) documented it correctly--1 classroom with 2 credentialed teachers (randos aren't enough) per 15 students (middle and elementary was the focus--high school is a bit different). Every program that followed that formula had solid documentable success. Every single program that followed that formula got closed for being "too expensive".

I can go on and on. The problem is that the US education system is at a solid local minimum and getting out of it requires significant amounts of focused resource. And when you finally ask folks to start writing checks for your education system, you suddenly find out exactly how much folks want to improve education (aka nothing for teachers or students, but they'll happily fund that new stadium).

And, I would like to point out that it was school spending that went up by 45% more than inflation (which was 35% over the same period). In addition, teacher salaries didn't go up 45% relative to inflation. So, might I suggest that perhaps the problem is what we are spending the money on?
by nine_k | 2026-02-07 02:28:00+00:00
For historical reasons (FFI), Python has access to excellent vector / tensor mathematics (numpy / scipy / pandas / polars) and ML / AI libraries, from OpenCV to PyTorch. Hence the prevalence of Python in science and research. "Everybody knows Python".

I do like Typescript (not JS) better, because of its highly advanced type system, compared to Python's.

TS/JS is not inherently fast, it just has a good JIT compiler; Python still ships without one. Regarding security, each interpreter is about as permissive as the other, and both can be sealed off from environment pretty securely.
by huevosabio | 2026-02-07 02:28:57+00:00
We were building on C# Godot and I think it is a second class citizen in the sense that 1) you can't export to wasm and 2) they are moving the interface to be handled by gdextension.

That said, I think once you get the gist of it and understand the landmines, it is really nice to use vanilla dotnet rather than unity's fork.
by AlotOfReading | 2026-02-07 02:29:53+00:00
Literally none of those are cost savings. Touchscreens are, relative to buttons, but not relative to small touchscreens (what I was actually comparing to).

I'm not sure a flush handle is actually cheaper either. The only real difference is the metal bits that connect to the latch assembly. One goes to the interior lever, one to the exterior, and one has the lock pin.

A cost-optimized flush handle gets rid of those in exchange for a motor/encoder unit. The expensive parts of the latch mechanism remain basically identical since it has to be a giant chunk of metal for safety reasons. Maybe the handle differences make up for it, but I'd want to see numbers given that it's made its way onto high end cars first.
by franksvalli | 2026-02-07 02:30:25+00:00
Post by Thomas Feeney on LinkedIn:

I recently completed an entry on Leibniz's Theodicy for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Leibniz predates AI, but I could not help making the connections while I wrote.

Leibniz published in 1710 to answer a hard problem: God created intelligent, agential beings in His own image, and these creatures caused enormous harm. Who is responsible, and could God have done better?

Now, we're building systems modeled on our own intelligence, granting them agency, and then asking: who is responsible when they cause harm? Their creators and designers? The systems themselves? The conditions that made failure inevitable?

Three ideas from Leibniz map directly to AI governance:

1. The author-of-sin problem → the accountability gap. Leibniz asked: if God creates "all the opportunities for sin" and even "provokes the will of the agent," how is God not responsible? We ask the same of companies deploying AI. If you design the system, train it, and release it, how much distance can you claim from its failures?

2. The best-possible-world defense → the tradeoff argument. Leibniz argued that some evils are inseparable from the goods they enable. "A dissonance in the right place gives relief to harmony." And we have recently heard, from AI companies, that some harms may be the price of a system that, on balance, does enormous good.

3. Deficient causation → emergent failure. Leibniz argued, with subtlety, that sin arises not from what God puts into creatures, but from their inherent finitude. Our connatural limitations become "deficient causes" of harm. And for AI: there can never be enough data, compute, and training to guarantee virtue.

Leibniz himself refused easy answers. The creator's good intentions are not enough. Human freedom does not excuse the author of our nature and circumstances. And evil itself is real enough to demand an explanation: you can't take credit for two bowings of the violin without taking responsibility for the dissonance. Most importantly, Leibniz insisted that philosophical answers provide real comfort to the afflicted.

Three centuries later and the engineers have theological problems now.

Link to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-evil/
by rkagerer | 2026-02-07 02:31:56+00:00
I'm convinced it isn't rocket science to design a flush handle that looks as clean yet has a manual operation fallback (preferably mechanical). Eg. Something like an integral hinge where you can push the short, base end in to pop the release (provided car is unlocked).

IMO their handles are stupidly over-engineered. It shows when you get problems like ice, etc. in northern climates.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-07 02:32:40+00:00
Unfortunately, good taste doesn’t matter for a successful software product.

First let’s look at B2B, there the “user is not the buyer”. The buyer doesn’t care about “good taste” they care about a lot of other things.

(“Where is my SSO support for multiple users, I’m not going to have my IT department worry about tracking down usernames when Bob leaves)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46919794

Second, if you have the feature that people need or a service or network effect, they will suffer through a bad app - see every Electron app ever.

That “smaller team” may not be around in a year and if you are lucky, you’ll get an “Our Amazing Journey” blog post. Does this product export to a format that my design team can import into Figma if this product goes tits up?
by cyphar | 2026-02-07 02:32:56+00:00
I must admit it was a little surreal to check my own username out of curiosity, only to find that I'm in the top 500 commenters (0.06%) on HN by word count.

The really surprising thing is that I stopped commenting regularly a few years ago so god knows where I would've ranked back in 2020. Then again, I always had a feeling I was too verbose when writing comments, so I guess this is all the proof I needed!
by alsetmusic | 2026-02-07 02:34:14+00:00
> However, a major problem we are having locally is that while that local housing is being built like gangbusters, the infrastructure to support that housing, such as the roads and public transport, hasn't been upgraded in tandem.

The correct response is not to shutdown building more housing. It's for you to get involved and petition your local government to build the infrastructure that you desire.

IMO, people need affordable housing more than you need a short commute. If you don't like that, do something to improve conditions.
by Aloisius | 2026-02-07 02:34:27+00:00
I checked and that's definitely the black and white version of the one encoded in the file.

Someone build a very simple OCR tool that successfully extracted the base64[1]. The only difference besides the lack of the document tracking ids at the bottom is the original was pink on blue for the first page and has some pink text on the second.

[1] https://github.com/KoKuToru/extract_attachment_EFTA00400459
by rmunn | 2026-02-07 02:34:41+00:00
You're quite right: that newfangled Patreon nonsense is a flash in the pan that will never catch on. There's no way anyone can be successful getting hundreds of people to pay them $5 (or even $1) per month. Ads are the only way to run the Internet.

What? It's 2026, not 2016? And Patreon has been running very successfully for over a decade? Huh. Whaddayaknow?
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-07 02:35:40+00:00
> It comes at the cost of locality,

It need not; you can have more proportional representative in a district based system (and still also have vote-for-person), using multimember districts with a system like Single-Transferrable Vote.

You can also get finer grained proportionality with Mixed Member Proportional which combines a district-based system (either single-member or a multimember proportional system described above) with top-up representation from party lists.

MMP would require Constitutional change in the US; but multimember districts with STV (in states with more than one seat, as well as increasing the size of the House so more states would have more than one seat) can be done by Congress without Constitutional amendment.