MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pizlonator | 2026-02-23 18:56:35+00:00
Here's the problem. If you told me that you rebuilt the Linux userland with Rust but you used C ABI at all of the boundaries, then I would be pretty convinced that you did not create a meaningful improvement to security because of how many dynamic linking boundaries there are. So many of the libraries involved are small, and big or small they expose ABIs that involve pointers to buffers and manual memory management.

> There is a second claim in your comment about a "safe ABI", but that is something that neither C or C++ offers right now.

Of course C and C++ are no safer in this regard. (Well, with Fil-C they are safer, but like whatever.)

But that misses the point, which is that:

- It would be a big deal if Rust did have a safe dynamic linking ABI. Someone should do it. That's the main point I'm making. I don't think deflecting by saying "but C is no safer" is super interesting.

- So long as this problem isn't fixed, the upside of using Rust to replace a lot of the load bearing stuff in an OS is much lower than it should be to justify the effort. This point is debatable for sure, but your arguments don't address it.
by tim-tday | 2026-02-23 18:56:38+00:00
The Auto repair hobby offsets $90/hr shop labor. (Money saved is worth ~30% more than money earned due to taxes and the fact that it takes time to earn money)

If you make less than ~$120/hr and own a car it’s worth it to learn to do some things ourself. The payoff is instant and stackable. (Change your wiper blades, check your tire pressure, buy an emergency jump pack)

It also gives you a sense of peace and control to be able to diagnose your own car trouble. And it keeps you safe because you understand the capabilities and limitations of your car.

For example no knowledgeable car person would ever ride in a Tesla without knowing how to open the doors from the inside in case of an accident (because we know that an accident often disables the electronic door controls and the battery is highly flammable). Dozens of people have died trapped in burning teslas because they didn’t know where the hidden manual door release was.

Knowing about cars saves you money, increases life satisfaction, and could literally save your life.
by com2kid | 2026-02-23 18:56:45+00:00
The majority of those microwaves pulse the power on and off at intervals, sometimes very long intervals (measured in seconds!).

Good microwaves, with an inverter (see the thread above!) actually adjust the power being output. You can evenly heat a cup of liquid to any desired temp using these microwave ovens. They are well worth the few extra $s (although mine actually cost less than a fancy smart microwave!)
by thatguy0900 | 2026-02-23 18:56:50+00:00
Except that the venture capitalists definition of walking dead also includes companies that are profitable and healthy but not perpetually expanding and multiplying revenue every year. God forbid a company grow, reach some sort of local cap on size, then just comfortably exist to deliver a good service without trying to extract everything it possibly can from every customer. That's not walking dead and if all of the companies in the US were satisfied doing that this would be a much better country to live in.
by philwelch | 2026-02-23 18:57:10+00:00
By 1066, not quite. That was an invading army led by the King of Norway to press his claim on the throne of England. I’m sure many of the soldiers in that army had been Vikings but at that time they were soldiers of a Christian king, which would have been considered much more legitimate than being a heathen raider.

I guess the Normans were also of Nordic descent but they had given up the Viking way of life a century before.
by zug_zug | 2026-02-23 18:57:45+00:00
Probably worth clarifying that when you say "But, the pro-legalization folks would..." you mean some stoners you met in college.

Because there are plenty of proponents who are not that... in fact 64% of Americans support making weed legal (2025), so it'd be really unfair to judge that movement based on those old experiences.
by ASalazarMX | 2026-02-23 18:57:54+00:00
I don't think so. I didn't use hateful language, and while I see religion, specially for-profit religion, as a net societal loss, I don't think I worded my argument as seething hatred.

I can see how a strong disagreement can be dismissed as hate, though. It preserves the cognitive dissonance between reality and belief.
by ribosometronome | 2026-02-23 18:57:57+00:00
>I get your position ... There is almost literally documented examples of Facebook executives twirling their mustaches wondering how they can get kids more addicted. This isn't a few bands

Their position was to compare it to alcohol, guns, and tobacco, not bands using naughty words. Alcohol and tobacco definitely enter mustache swirling territory, getting children addicted and funding misinformation on the harms of their product.
by agentifysh | 2026-02-23 18:58:02+00:00
he raises some good stats and examples of "slop" and dooming around code gen hitting a ceiling coupled with humans being bottlenecked all very true statements but overall lacking in showing that actually lot of people are using AI coding gen in open source with good success.

btw am I talking to a bot? all of your comment history is pretty similar with lot of emdash.
by mrguyorama | 2026-02-23 18:58:02+00:00
>Usually I spend the time up to T-3s wondering how the crazy beepers on microwave ovens is still a thing, generations after the novelty has worn of.

Because, for at least 40 years, it has always been something you can turn off. It's like two sentences in the manual. They often have more options than off/on too.

It's astonishing to me how often people own something, don't read the manual, and then complain about something that already exists.

I read every instruction manual I ever had access to. There used to be tons of great info in them, niche use cases explained clearly, things to watch out for, how to know if it needs maintenance etc.

But nobody every read it, so now manuals have nothing, and the people who used to be paid to write all that important info are gone, and all the features they helped sell and the quality they helped emphasize is gone. I'm so sad.
by Noaidi | 2026-02-23 18:58:21+00:00
> these systems would be highly phishable

Well this is true of all of the internet, yes?

https://bankingjournal.aba.com/2025/08/report-financial-inst...

https://www.cyberdefensemagazine.com/the-rise-in-phishing-sc...

Your example about migrant workers is not an internet problem, it is a government problem. And a capitalism problem. I mean migrant workers? Why do these workers need to migrate? Usually because the U.S. has probably decimated their country.

But never mind, I agree that this is an unsolvable problem, not from lack of capability, but because we are ruled by sociopaths and most humans have been hacked by their addiction pathways. And I do not care about Saudi Arabia or Asia because I do not live there. And I do not care if they block all of the internet. We do not need it for anything, even less so for organizing.

Maybe we should just leave the internet, which is only a capitalist and government collusion to make people spend money. All the internet did was concentrate power to a few oligarchs. For everything good that the internet has provided I can show you ten things that are not only bad, but 1000 times worse, like monkey torture video sharing.

If I had kids today they would not even use the internet until they were out of my care. I only have six accounts on the internet. Including HN. I do not view porn, gamble, have any social media, and in fact I am trying to became un-homeless so I can go back to a flip phone.

IMHO, the answer is not a fee internet, the answer is leaving the internet. But it seems you made and make a nice living at all of this so I see what a sacrifice that would be for you. You are probably part of the reason I am homeless today, with the separation for wealth and all that. I see that you dnated to a bunch of neoliberal types and that fits. Seems you had over $17,000 to give to politicians. That is more than I survive on for a year. I mean, you do not need to do any work at all today. You could retire right now.

Sorry for the unrelated rant, but needed to get that off my chest for myself. Just tired of wealthy people trying to perfect a horrible system and technology that keeps making them money. You pretend like you care about the poor, like the migrant worker, but that is just laughable. If you did you would be against capitalism. You would give up all you own and follow Christ or Buddha or whatever. I mean you got $20 million and what did you do? You started making addictive games. And then you donate to these neoliberals who are no different than the neoconservatives.

Love, a old homeless guy who left Cisco in 1999 because he saw where all of this was going and who is currently sitting in a hotel he cannot afford because the 2002 minivan he lives in just lost its water pump.
by baerrie | 2026-02-23 18:58:21+00:00
A relationship with an instrument takes time. There are more factors than the mechanical use of an instrument, our hands and bodies feel things on subconscious levels, leading to emergent qualities that don’t fit neatly into “sounds better or worse”. For musicians and artists this is a no brainer, for those that haven’t experienced this I understand why you are incredulous but it doesn’t mean it is a throwaway factor.
by epistasis | 2026-02-23 18:58:24+00:00
I know that the whole following-the-law thing is not en vogue in DC these days, but what was the procurement process that could have ended up with Grok as the supplier for this task?

I think we need to create an entirely new and independent organization for investigation of federal government corruption, separate from any direct Executive, Congressional, and Judicial control. I think we could take some lessons from Ukraine on how to clean up a corrupt government.
by kunai | 2026-02-23 18:58:33+00:00
The fact that whether or not doing something like this (which is bizarre, incredibly unhealthy, and just not how humans are wired socially) is considered at all in the AI space and met with a "oh well, we'll wait and see long-term" is sort of a microcosm of how out of touch the push behind LLMs is. Anthropic, OpenAI, etc have thrust a poorly functioning product with unhealthy obsequiousness and a clever obfuscative instinct to hide its numerous limitations upon a legion of unsuspecting normal people who mistake its cleverness for true wit and insight. And now these people are blowing up their relationships, their passions, and their hobbies, and for what? What, actually, would routing your texts through Gemini or ChatGPT possibly do for your relationship? Is the onus not on us when we individuate and socialize to take it upon ourselves to learn how to communicate our feelings and emotions with each other? What sort of Kafkaesque absurdity are we living in?

I suppose Zizek predicted all of this years ago with his little anecdote about how in the future, I paraphrase, but he suggested even sex will be outsourced to technology; perhaps on a date one will purchase an artificial phallus and the other a male pleasure item, and the two will sit on the floor and watch their pleasure objects mating with one another. That's about how absurd this reality is that the genAI pushers seek to impose upon the world.
by chasd00 | 2026-02-23 18:58:58+00:00
i think Apache sets this up by default or use to. Every user on Linux would get a www, or maybe it was htdocs, folder in their home directory when they were added to the system. Any file you put there is served by Apache at resource /~<username> which was reading from /home/<username>/www on the file system.

There use to be lots and lots of ISPs and so they were small enough to have a single webserver with all their customers setup as users and Apache serving content. They'd also setup FTP on the same server so you could get your html files into your www folder. Software like Dreamweaver had a ftp client built in, so you'd click like a "publish" button and it wold login to FTP and transfer your files.

i would imagine this went away because it got expensive as the customer base grew and ISPs consolidated and it made no money. Other options with php, mysql, and other services cropped up and could offer more and charge for it so I think ISPs just preferred to concentrate on network access and not hosting websites.
by bluejekyll | 2026-02-23 18:59:20+00:00
A discussion on licenses will go sideways very quickly. GPL does limit the adoption of software in certain environments. So it really depends on your goals. Do you want an OSS project that will be useable by everyone (including corporations) or do you want to guarantee that the software will always be OSS and guarantee that Corporations can’t benefit from it without contributing back (potentially requiring them to open their own proprietary code).

There’s a lot of moral perspective that people apply to this decision, but not all developers have the same goals for their software. MIT is more flexible in its use than GPL, but doesn’t help ensure that software remains open.
by daymanstep | 2026-02-23 18:59:26+00:00
Recalculating the path every game tick is too expensive. What brood war did was to just have units wait for a second when they collide with something before recalculating the path. This resulted in horrendous "traffic jams".

It's also why Brood War players got into the habit of spam-clicking, because the game would recompute paths every time you issued a command, so spam-clicking resulted in smoother movement.
by ticulatedspline | 2026-02-23 18:59:53+00:00
I guess the question is the value negative?

If you engage the product with good intent does it provide good value? If the advice is actually sound and it helps people engage conversations about diet then it would have positive value.

I guess what I'm getting at is "I spent my evening gaslighting an LLM to give me a recipe for gravel soup" is about as interesting as "I stuck my dick in the blender and it hurt so we should not have blenders"

I'd rather see an honest review of use as intended to see if it produces harmful output, going absurdist just covers up legitimate complaints with clickbait.
by Ginden | 2026-02-23 19:00:14+00:00
"Age-restriction laws push platforms toward intrusive verification systems that often directly conflict with modern data-privacy law" - when you make rules contradictory, someone always violate these laws, and you can use selective persecution to "convince" companies to favor you, the incumbent politician. You don't even have to use such power, just a "joke" may be enough to send have any rational CEO licking your shoes.

European proponents of "anti-big-tech action" make it pretty explicit - broad discretionary power should be given to executive branch, because otherwise "international corporations" will use "loopholes" (and these "loopholes" are, in practice, explicitly written laws used as intended).
by chris37879 | 2026-02-23 19:00:14+00:00
Those execs were also using the tactics to addict adults, and while they may have targeted teens, the problem is, at its core: humans. So no amount of nannying by either the company nor the government will solve this issue.

Who would be responsible if a child developed alcohol addiction? A nicotine problem? Any other addiction?

Exactly. The same people that should be responsible for giving them unfettered access to an internet that is no longer safe. Even adults have to be wary of getting hooked on scrolling, and while I agree that the onus is on the companies, it has been demonstrated over and over again that they will not be held to account for their behavior.

So the only logical choice left that actually preserves freedom is for parents to get off their ass and keep their child safe. Parent's that don't use filtering and monitoring software with their children should be charged with neglect. They are for sending a kid into the cold without a coat, or letting them go hungry, why is it different sending them onto the internet?

And to your last point: You are dead wrong. No government anywhere in the world has demonstrated that they have the resources, expertise, or technical knowledge to solve this problem. The most famously successful attempt is the Chinese Great Firewall, which is breached routinely by folks. As soon as a government controls what speech you are allowed to consume, the next logical step for them is to restrict what speech you can say, because waging war on what people access will always fail. I mean, Facebook alone already contains tons of content that's against its terms of service, and they have more money than God, so either they actually want that content there, or they are too understaffed to deal with the volume, and the volume problem only ever increases.

So in my view, you are the one against freedom by advocating for the government to control the speech adults can access for the sake of "protecting the children" when the actual people that are socially, morally, and legally culpable for that protection are derelict in their duties.
by jmadeano | 2026-02-23 19:00:42+00:00
I enjoyed the article, but I’m skeptical of the “democratize via hardware + networking” path. Most people won’t run a Pi, manage updates/backups, or debug home networking, and that’s fine (as you note).

But I do think we’re reaching a turning point on the software side. The barrier to building custom, personalized apps is trending toward 0. I’m not naive enough to think every grandma will suddenly start asking ChatGPT to “build me an app to do XYZ,” but with the right UX it can be implicit. Imagine you tell an assistant: “My doctor says my blood sugar is high. Research tips to reduce it.” -> it not only replies with tips, it also proactively builds a custom app (that you own and control) for tracking your blood sugar (measurements, meals, reminders, charts, etc.). You can edit it by describing changes (“add a weekly trend graph,” “don’t nag me after 8pm,” etc.).

This doesn’t fully solve your Big Co control issue (they own the flagship models today), but open-weight + local options keep improving. I'm hopeful we have a chance to tip the scales back toward co-owner and participant.
by bubblewand | 2026-02-23 19:00:42+00:00
I use gummies, ~4-5mg THC (ideally with some of the other TH- chemicals in it), deliberately kept my tolerance low so it doesn’t get more expensive (and I almost only use it for sleep, purely “fun” use is maybe a couple days a year). Take in the evening, start an MST3K episode about an hour later, really enjoy the back half of it, go to bed and fall asleep instantly, wake up feeling like a million bucks. Perfect evening.
by viharkurama | 2026-02-23 19:00:51+00:00
Hi HN — I work on Plane.

Our mobile app has to connect to Plane Cloud (always latest), self-hosted instances that can lag by weeks/months, and some fully air‑gapped deployments with no outbound internet.

We ended up making the app assume nothing about the server: after login it does a single "instance discovery" call to fetch metadata (including backend version + deployment flags), then routes everything through a small compatibility engine:

- hard minimum supported backend version (blocked below it)
- a central feature registry (feature → minimum backend version)
- version-aware API behavior (pick endpoints/request shapes based on what the server supports)

Air‑gapped support mostly became "use the same mechanism, but enforce no external network calls/telemetry."

Would love feedback / other patterns folks have used for mobile + self-hosted version skew.
by Wobbles42 | 2026-02-23 19:01:55+00:00
A single word for boiling water would be like the single word "slush" we have for ice in water.

It likely could apply to other liquids in the same mixed state, but would be assumed to refer to water (or solutions or colloidal mixtures primarily consisting of water) in common speech.

Water is extremely common, and has anonymously high heats of crystalization and vaporization, so it is the most common example of a mixed phase system and the only one most people encounter in everyday life.
by mlnas | 2026-02-23 19:02:23+00:00
Security tools have always worked backwards. You write code, push it, and then find out something was wrong. Would it not be so much better to flag and fix a vulnerability right there and then when it's made, not as a blocker in CI/CD or a ticket from a post-scan report that nobody wants to action.

Arko is an IDE extension that lives in your IDE. As you code, it flags insecure patterns, exposed API keys, PII handling issues, and compliance risks (GDPR, EU AI Act) all in plain language, not generic scanner output. It's like having a your own personal DevSecOps co-pilot right along your AI coding co-pilot.

It's free, takes less than 2 mins to install. Would greatly appreciate feedback and happy to answer any questions
by n_e | 2026-02-23 19:02:24+00:00
> but I still think the developers of both engines banter over who is really producing the True WDL numbers for a given position

In fact, stockfish's WDL is very rudimentary: it is a function of the centipawn evaluation of the position and the value of the remaining material.

See https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/blob/a6d055d...
by LZ_Khan | 2026-02-23 19:02:30+00:00
If you care about improvement of models, you would support the US labs here.

It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to train a frontier model. It's not just "scraping the web."

Distillation allows labs to replicate these results at 1/100th of the cost. This creates a prisoner's dilenmma which incentivizes labs to withhold their models from the public.
by jaredklewis | 2026-02-23 19:02:59+00:00
So I guess the lesson is that ideas can turn into successful, profitable businesses even if there are a lot of legitimate criticisms of those ideas?

Or maybe it is that HN tends to correctly point out flaws in ideas, but maybe doesn’t also point out the good points of ideas, which can give readers an incorrect impression that those projects can’t succeed?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder I suppose, but as for me, I would be very happy with myself if I had founded Dropbox, even if it isn’t a flawless business.
by mikkupikku | 2026-02-23 19:03:10+00:00
You're just regurgitating old arguments which were once used to persuade Americans that outsourcing manufacturing to China was in America's best interest. Few Americans still find this persuasive, you can find senile babyboomers who still profess these kind of beliefs, but that's about it.

Besides, in trying to formulate an explaination for how offshoring is actually in America's interests, aren't you tacitly acknowledging that it is only right and reasonable to expect American voters to vote for what they perceive to be American interests?
by CobrastanJorji | 2026-02-23 19:03:13+00:00
You're understating the US's policy on recklessness. We have "attractive nuisances," which means that if you put a trampoline in your backyard, and a kid passing through sees it, decides to do a sick jump off of it, and breaks their leg, that was partly your fault for having something so awesome that kids would probably like.