MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by miltonlost | 2026-02-25 19:00:47+00:00
> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)

I also never found the economic argument entirely convincing. If slavery were so economically disadvantageous in an industrialized society, why are there still slave labor in industrialized countries around the world today?
by JuniperMesos | 2026-02-25 19:01:58+00:00
This is precisely why I don't care very much about accusations that there's big money in politics. Of course there is - there's huge numbers of people and institutions with money, using that money to advocate for the political change they want to see, and an important strategy for doing this involves promulgating information that they think is favorable to their cause. Everyone is doing this all the time.

Nonetheless, everyone supports some political faction (even if you do nothing, there are
Nonetheless, an individual citizen still has to support some political cause (even if you are completely politically disinterested, there are multiple factions claiming that your inaction is tantamount to support for their opponents). Whatever information about the world you think is true, or whatever political cause you think is in your interests, someone else can point to a monied interest who supports similar things. There's no way to use the absence of big money as a heuristic for what political causes are good or bad for you to support.
by hirsin | 2026-02-25 19:02:19+00:00
Which of the cities used as examples in the articles are "sparse"? LA? Pittsburgh is one of the smaller ones listed and while the bus network there is very hub and spoke, it's also still semi usable.

But to call NYC, LA, Philly, Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston, etc sparse doesn't seem very accurate. Yes, LA is vast, but I wouldn't call it sparse.
by rsynnott | 2026-02-25 19:02:27+00:00
> I have a map from the 50s on my wall and the bus routes are the same, including numbers, as they are today

A surprising number of bus routes in Dublin still follow, to a large extent, tram routes laid out in the 1870s. And use the same numbers. This stuff is _sticky_ (partly because significantly redesigning an existing route tends to annoy people; there's a fairly strong tendency to just make a new one and leave the existing one running in some capacity).
by colechristensen | 2026-02-25 19:02:45+00:00
What will come with the approaching boom of guilt-free energy is public support for doing more things with more energy, and instead of stagnated per-capita energy use a return to more-than-linear energy usage growth.

With that you get flying cars, space tourism, AI, cities in deserts with free water through desalination, better indoor climates with freer ventilation with the outside, cities skies free of ICE smog and probably a whole lot of things which are hard to imagine.
by tootie | 2026-02-25 19:02:51+00:00
What is the volume of fossil fuel we extract from the ground every year and try to imagine getting there from zero. Fact is we have easily 100K sq miles of useless desert as-is. We can fit a Rhode Island-sized solar farm in Nevada and nobody would notice. China built a solar farm of 162 sq mi in Tibet and are still expanding it. But realistically we will also be building wind, hydro and enhanced geothermal along too. It will be a lot of work, but it's absolutely achievable in a matter of decades with enough popular and political will.
by chris_money202 | 2026-02-25 19:03:08+00:00
I see this even within the developer community, people who understand systems programming is becoming rarer and rarer. Developers are constantly looking for GUI solutions and don't bother understanding how to script. I think this likely stemmed from a similar issue as introducing the smartphone, we software engineers separated the disciplines of DevOps from Software Engineering, this led to people not caring about the infrastructure at the background of their solutions.
by frozensecurity | 2026-02-25 19:03:13+00:00
Hi,

My name is Neevai. I’m building a new Bitcoin custody product called Frozen.

The idea is simple:

Your private key is not stored in any device.
It exists only as a physical metal plate that you hold (about the size of a physical key).

When you want to sign a transaction, you insert the plate into a dedicated device.
The device reads it, signs the transaction, immediately clears all key material from memory — and only then broadcasts the transaction.

There is no digital private key stored at rest.
No secret sitting in firmware, flash, or long-term memory.

We’re launching soon and looking for feedback from serious Bitcoiners before we go live.

If this sounds interesting (or controversial), I’d genuinely appreciate thoughts from this community.

Website: https://frozensecurity.com
Happy to answer technical questions here.

— Neevai
by eptcyka | 2026-02-25 19:03:15+00:00
Sure, lets have the minority of the population force us into design choices that are detrimental to the majority of bus users.

When living in many a European city, I have chosen to walk instead of using a bus route due to the frequent stops making the bus trip a lot more expensive and marginally quicker. I have also lived in places where the eldery get a separate service, tailored to them, if they need it. Works a lot better IMO.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-02-25 19:03:16+00:00
> Which? US currently has a rocky status due to Trump's interference

In non-dollar terms, the US markets have been flat since 2025 (so basically since "liberation day").

> fix their structural issues of low birthrates,

This is a problem basically everywhere. It's definitely worse in Europe than in the US, but the US is on the same trajectory (modulo immigration).

> crazy high debt welfare speeding

Where exactly are you talking about? The US government has been spending more than it takes in for the past decade at least, mostly on entitlements (i.e. welfare spending).
by iracigt | 2026-02-25 19:03:25+00:00
Not only that, they use the gravitational potential of the falls to store massive amounts of energy when there's a surplus. Way cheaper to hold or even pump the water back up to the reservoir at the top than build lithium batteries. So yeah, as a local, can confirm they turn Niagara Falls (partially) off at night. Thanks to the Falls and several nuclear plants on Lake Ontario, Upstate NY and Southern Ontario have some of the lowest carbon electricity in the countries. Quebec is even better with basically all of their power coming from hydro.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Control_Dam
by hparadiz | 2026-02-25 19:03:28+00:00
I did a short contract a few years back where multiple WordPress plugins were pulling different versions of guzzle and I had to use a namespace rewriter to be able to run multiple guzzle versions at the same time.

The thing about WordPress is you can put it on a box and lock it down so hard you just treat it as an untrusted process on your server.
by rob | 2026-02-25 19:04:03+00:00
Most of the bots I've caught on here don't really use em dashes at all.

For example, here's an active bot that posted 30 mins ago (as of this comment):

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=aplomb1026

Examine the last two detailed comments it made and you'll see the timestamps show they were posted < 30 seconds apart:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47155655

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47155648

If it wasn't for them misconfiguring their bot and having it post so quickly, these would go by undetected and most people would engage with them. The comments themselves seem "normal" at first glance.

---

Other bots:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dirtytoken7

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=fdefitte
by DrewADesign | 2026-02-25 19:04:22+00:00
> I tried talking to my children about leaving as clean of a footprint on the internet as one can in anticipation of future people/systems taking that into consideration.

I don’t think you’re wrong, but the fact that people consider it inevitable we’ll all have an immutable social acceptance grade that includes everything from teenage shitposts to things you said after a loved one died, or getting diagnosed with cancer, makes me regret putting even a moment of my professional energies towards advancing tech in the US.
by palmaltd | 2026-02-25 19:04:47+00:00
Not sure how this comment got upvoted; calling skepticism of an emerging industry a "mental breakdown" and suggesting those "suffering" from it to talk to a therapist doesn't really clear the bar for discussion here. This reads more like a manager being salty that their team isn't using up all the Grok budget this quarter or whatever.

And let it be clear that nobody is being "actively hurt" by legitimate economic/business grievances. This is victim-blaming and disgusting rhetoric.
by brandall10 | 2026-02-25 19:04:54+00:00
IME, Claude is more powerful, but Codex follows instructions better. So the more precise the context, the better results you'll get with Codex.

Claude OTOH works better with ambiguity, but it also tends to stray a bit off spec in subtle ways. I always had to take more corrective action w/ the PRs it produced.

That said, I haven't used CC in 3 months and the latest models may be better.
by MichaelNolan | 2026-02-25 19:04:58+00:00
Kind of a weird headline. It makes it sound like this just happened. But it happened almost 2 years ago. Reading the article is also a bit confusing. I finally figured out they are only referring to utility scale solar and not total solar (utility plus behind the meter)

My overlay of the data:
https://eia.languagelatte.com/

Raw data:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/0
by iso1631 | 2026-02-25 19:05:00+00:00
He talks about transport and heating

That doesn't leave much left when you look at the energy flow once you remove domestic, commercial and transportation usage and replace it with electricity. A tiny amount left for plane s(and reducing per flight as planes get more efficent and battery planes start coming to market), and industrial gas usage.

https://www.energyvanguard.com/attachment/llnl-us-energy-flo...
by jmyeet | 2026-02-25 19:05:03+00:00
Except that slaves also make new slaves that can be sold.

I really dislike this idea that slavery was just a cultural aberration and not economic. For one thing, that lightens the moral stain of slavery adjacent activity, most notably colonialism and the exploitation of the colonies. This never went away. Economic colonialism exists to this day. We just call it “outsourcing”, “offshoring” and “subcontracting”.
by jarek83 | 2026-02-25 19:05:12+00:00
So this happened only because google is so big, that it can point to any website and say that it's not safe. Even if owner of a site just don't want to be in their search engine in the first place.

How on earth we ended up with this company bother anyone including those that want their services? Imagine that you could get your driving license banned because you did not buy a toyota...
Show HN: My focus had a pattern. I built a macOS app to make it visible
by suvijain | 2026-02-25 19:05:13+00:00
I work long hours with headphones on, and I kept running into the same pattern: I’d start a session feeling fine, then a couple hours later I’d realize I’d been leaning forward or holding my head in one position without noticing. Not because I was trying to. Just because focus has a way of quietly rearranging you.

I tried a few “reminder” style approaches and apps, but they didn’t stick. The problem wasn’t motivation. It was awareness. I didn’t want an app telling me what to do. I wanted something that simply showed me what was happening, in the moment, with zero friction.

So I built Headjust: a small native macOS app that lives in the notch area and visualizes head movement from AirPods (or compatible Beats). You can start and stop sessions while you work, then look back at simple session insights and trends with head movement visuals for better readability.

What surprised me after using it myself is how quickly it changed my behavior without any prompts. Just seeing the pattern made it easier to reset between tasks, notice when I’d gone “still” for too long, and make small adjustments before hours passed.

What it does:

- Live head-movement visualization in the notch area

- Start/stop sessions anytime during work

- Session analytics and history to spot patterns over time

- Lightweight and designed to stay out of the way

Public beta (TestFlight): https://testflight.apple.com/join/55JfhrPA

Website: https://headjust.app/

I’d love feedback on:

- whether the session flow fits naturally into real work

- whether the notch UI is unobtrusive (especially on external monitors)

- which insights feel meaningful, and what’s missing

Thanks for taking a look!
by willturman | 2026-02-25 19:06:17+00:00
Lake Powell behind Glen Canyon Dam is currently at 23.6% of capacity.
Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam is currently at 29.7% of capacity.

Given the current state of the Upper Colorado River basin snow pack, there is a not-insignificant chance that Lake Powell will recede below a minimum power generating level by the end of this year for the first time ever.
by logifail | 2026-02-25 19:06:49+00:00
> In my experience, the bus is not a nice experience. The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile.

This depends very much on where you are in the world.

Full disclosure: I have visited a lot of cities/countries, approx 70k flown miles last year. I almost always try to use public transport where possible.

The last "not nice" experience in a bus was in SFO, travelling back to my hotel from the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption. Make of that what you will.
by natemcintosh | 2026-02-25 19:06:49+00:00
I used Texmacs all through my Master's degree. I loved it because it was excellent for quickly writing math, and building tables (I had to do this often). It would not have been excellent if I hadn't dedicated time to learning the keyboard shortcuts, but once I did, I could write math faster than writing it, and much faster than writing it in LaTeX. In timed take-home exams, I would just write the whole exam in texmacs because it was the fastest way for me to work.

To a lesser degree I also appreciated that the files have a similar feel to XML; I think it makes a lot of sense for this type of document.

I remember hearing about the macro system, but never looked into it. It sounded neat though.

When creating a technical document these days, I'd probably reach for typst though.
by linkjuice4all | 2026-02-25 19:07:09+00:00
LA is fortunate in that it doesn't suffer from freeze/thaw cycles and can put down a lot more concrete without worrying about expansion/contraction and water ingress.

I've noticed that a fair amount of concrete sidewalk in Los Angeles appears to have been poured when the neighborhoods were first developed (as in post-WW2) and haven't been removed or updated since then (at least based on the date/contractor stamps). Again, the lack of freezing weather, wide streets that don't necessitate parking/loading on the sidewalk, and fewer tree roots to uproot/disturb the gutters and sidewalks means that the original infrastructure is still in use.

More to the point - creating curb cuts is more than just customizing concrete forms. Oftentimes you'll need to regrade the surrounding area to reduce slope, move any in-ground utilities, and revisit any other updates to building codes (such as the bike lane stuff mentioned in the article). Not everything in/under the streets is owned by the same city/county/state/federal department/private org so that further complicates the work.

If only the real estate speculators that settled this swampy valley had considered this stuff in the early 20th century...
by ctoth | 2026-02-25 19:07:22+00:00
"Don't Make Me Think" wasn't descriptive. It was prescriptive that became descriptive. An entire professional class, PMs and UX designers, adopted as axiomatic that cognitive effort is friction, friction is bad, therefore understanding is a design failure.

Then they spent 25 years engineering understanding out of every single interaction, and now point to the resulting learned helplessness as validation. "See? Users don't read!" No, you spent decades training them not to by ensuring that reading was never rewarded and never necessary.

My read has always been it was painful for a certain type of PM to think and so they assumed "minds like mine" and ... here we are.
by dghlsakjg | 2026-02-25 19:07:28+00:00
That would be true if busses didn't have to accelerate, decelerate, open doors, kneel and go through the many parts of stopping that aren't strictly people getting on or off.

The counterpoint is any bus route that has an express option that runs in parallel. Every time I have taken the express route, the bus can be full to the gills, but is always faster than the non-express bus.
by abustamam | 2026-02-25 19:07:35+00:00
Yeah that's a good point that I certainly didn't think about it that way, but it's something that the ID verification people never quite address.

When I was a kid, I played neopets. For whatever reason, they age gated some content (maybe messaging or other social features) because when you sign up you have to specify your age. I was young, so I didn't know I could lie on the internet, so I said I was 10 or something. And then my friend who did lie and say he was 18+ wanted to be my friend on neopets, but I couldn't be his friend because I needed to get parent permission to access that feature.

Anyway, I printed out a permission slip, asked my mom to sign it, and she signed it without looking at it. I mailed it to neopets (we didn't have a scanner) and soon enough I was playing with the big kids!

Anyway, one could say that my mom was neglectful for having not read it before signing it, or one could say that she merely trusted me that I wasn't asking her for permission to watch porn. But it's not a stretch to think that even with ID laws, parents can still let their kids access whatever they want by giving them access to accounts or devices that have already verified identity. Granted, I don't see parents giving their kids their PornHub password, but kids can be crafty, if they want to access adult content, they'll find a way. I don't know if this is true, but someone on discord said they just uploaded an AI generated license and got age verified.
by Arrowmaster | 2026-02-25 19:07:46+00:00
I'm currently in the endless email loop because someone named Raymond used one of my Gmail names to register with State Farm. One of their agents even emails me directly when he gets really behind on his payments but won't do anything when I tell them it's the wrong email.

In the past when this happens I usually reset the password and change the email to some anon throwaway but I can't do that without Raymonds DOB (don't quote me on that, been a while since I tried).
by tootie | 2026-02-25 19:07:59+00:00
> The bus feels dirty, unsafe and hostile

Low ridership actually makes public transit feel even worse. Encourages loitering and restricts ridership to only the most desperate people. In NYC at least the buses tend to be pretty heavily utilized and I've personally never felt unsafe or put off by the condition of a bus. It's marginally more pleasant than riding the subway.
by giantrobot | 2026-02-25 19:08:05+00:00
People very commonly equate linguistic fluency with intelligence and the lack of fluency with stupidity. LLMs are very good at linguistic fluency which I think is one of the major triggers of the consciousness pareidolia (I like that term).

When previous generation LLMs spit out absurdist slop I think it was much easier for people avoid the fluency trap.
by d1sxeyes | 2026-02-25 19:08:11+00:00
Well they don’t have to agree with all of it. The Geneva convention is (primarily) an agreement between parties that “we’ll follow these rules so we don’t end up killing civilians and razing cities to the ground”. When the opposing side is doing that, what good does it do you to say “but under subsection 17 b of paragraph 11…”
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-25 19:08:38+00:00
Yes, but I feel it's similar to wealthy individuals putting their homes into generic-named trusts, offering a simple shield from simpler surname database searches.

i.e: yes, my vehicle is now "white car, obscurred plate" — but if Officer Joe Blow is searching for my specific license plate... he'd have to try harder (e.g. I have intentionally sped past a traffic camera to see if I get the ticket — have not, to date [0]).

Obviously if you make yourself too big a target (i.e. manhunt level searching) this won't work. See <https://xkcd.com/1105/>. I roll around GTA-one-star (or less), so this is helpful.

[0] My state has entirely banned the enforcability of photo citations (except passing school bus == good), but a private company still sends out speeding notices — my obfuscation bare minimum saves somebody the postage fees.
by e2le | 2026-02-25 19:08:39+00:00
> human using AI to 'improve' the quality of their comment

I want to hear people in their own voice, their own ideas, with their own words. I have no interest in reading AI generated comments with the same prose, vocabulary, and grammar.

I don't care if your writing is bad.

Additionally, I am sceptical that using AI to write comments on your behalf creates opportunities for self-improvement. I suspect this is all leading to a death of diversity in writing where comments increasingly have an aura of sameness.
by kode-targz | 2026-02-25 19:09:00+00:00
this. just like how when you start playing a hard esoteric game like an RTS or MOBA, they ask you what your degree of comfort/experience with the genre is to avoid making a pro player go through the tutorial and vice versa.

In an ideal world where governments and corporations weren't trying to lock us into a closed system for massive surveillance and control, during the installation/setup of a mobile phone should be a question about tech literacy and protection. Selecting any option that isn't "I'm tech illiterate, please protect me" should be very annoying. There should be many warnings in uppercase bold red letters telling the user it can be dangerous and listing those dangers. But if I'm a developer and want to patch my kernel or modify the system as I please, I should be able to do so. If i want to install a malware app in a burner phone to study its behavior (or just for fun) I should be able to do so.

There would probably be one or two grandmas that would still somehow choose the pro hacker mode and get scammed down the line, but I think that minuscule amount of harm done is very much preferable to closing out *literally everyone else* from using the devices THEY BOUGHT.
by jacobolus | 2026-02-25 19:09:01+00:00
BART is full of white-collar people who use it to commute and to travel around the area (alongside all sorts of other kinds of people, as you would expect for a broadly used service).

Ridership collapsed in 2020 because of the pandemic, for obvious reasons, but it's hard to really blame that on the service itself, or the riders.

Ridership has been gradually recovering since then. Total trips are now up to something like 70% of 2019 levels, and continuing to rise. Number of unique riders is actually above the 2019 level now.

Maybe you haven't tried riding BART again within the past several years?