MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by legitster | 2026-02-25 17:53:49+00:00
The US constitution has a really bad early adopter syndrome where it was so good at the time that it's hard to move away from. Nearly every country with a constitution modelled on ours has failed at some point.

"We basically run a coalition government, without the efficiency of a parliamentary system" - Paul Ryan.

To be more specific, our majority-based government locks us into a two-party system where one party just has to be slightly less bad than the other to win a majority. But our two parties are really just a rough assembly of smaller coalitions that are usually at odds with each other.

The presidential democracies that function usually have some sort of "hybrid" model where the legislature has some sort of oversight on the executive office. But they are still much more prone to deadlock or power struggles.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-02-25 17:53:59+00:00
Mods, can you look at this comment and maybe unflag it? It has some snarky language ("armchair critics") but it doesn't seem to contain anything flaggable and it provides important context, namely what I take to be the perspective from the pro-Israeli side. I for one am very curious to know what that this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47147359
by stevenwoo | 2026-02-25 17:54:10+00:00
It felt like the first half of nominee Casey Means book is very much a repetition of Robert Lustig’s examination of the role of sugar in bad health outcomes, the second half was a sales pitch to buy the services of her company to guide readers to a healthy life. I read it because it was on best seller lists at the time and was just curious what the fuss was about.
by intended | 2026-02-25 17:54:12+00:00
People who comment about their boss and workplaces?

People on HN who talk about their work but want to remain anonymous? People who don’t want to be spammed if they comment in a community? Or harassed if they comment in a community? Maybe someone doesn’t want others to find out they are posting in r/depression. (Or r/warhammer.)

Anonymity is a substantial aspect of the current internet. It’s the practical reason you can have a stance against age verification.

On the other hand, if anonymity can be pierced with relative ease, then arguments for privacy are non sequiturs.
by b112 | 2026-02-25 17:54:26+00:00
Yes, many countries have significant limits on campaign donations. Even third parties are restricted from advertising on behalf of a party, and so on.

So no company can simply donate large sums of money, nor can any single person.

The goal is that individuals will be the largest donors, not companies, and that as everyone is capped in the same way, advertising will be a more level playing field. We don't want money in politics. At the same time, we want all parties to get their message out there, their message heard.

It's not perfect. There are issues. But this business of democracy should be taken seriously.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-02-25 17:55:28+00:00
Fwiw I did some more comparisons, looking for words disproportionately favored by noob comments:

word noob new p-value
----------------------------
ai 14.93% 7.87% p=0.00016
actually 12.53% 5.34% p=1.1e-05
code 11.47% 6.04% p=0.00081
real 10.93% 2.95% p=2.6e-08
built 10.93% 2.11% p=2.1e-10
data 8.93% 3.51% p=6.1e-05
tools 7.6% 2.67% p=5.5e-05
agent 7.47% 2.95% p=0.00024
app 7.2% 3.09% p=0.00078
tool 6.8% 1.83% p=8.5e-06
model 6.8% 2.39% p=0.00013
agents 6.67% 2.11% p=5.2e-05
api 6.53% 1.12% p=2.7e-07
building 6.13% 1.54% p=1.3e-05
full 6.0% 1.97% p=0.00017
across 5.87% 1.4% p=1.3e-05
interesting 5.33% 1.54% p=0.00014
answer 5.2% 1.4% p=9.6e-05
simple 4.93% 1.54% p=0.00043
project 4.8% 1.26% p=0.00015
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-25 17:55:37+00:00
We win or we learn. I thought I was a proud American too, that these were my people. Turns out, the US is just an exploitation engine with a God/control complex attempting to bully its way to remain in its position as a superpower while neglecting everything a superpower needs to be one, for profits of those who stand to gain. It is not great because it is great, it is marketing and PR of a paper tiger that has been coasting on trust for decades while rotting from the inside. These are not my people. I no longer am invested in its outcome, but I understand others my have differing opinions. I still care about good people, and have constrained my attention scope to only those people, versus entire nation states. I focus my attention to context where problems want to be solved, not just say they are desired to be solved as a diversion strategy ("purpose of the system is what it does"). Appreciate the conversation as always. Life is short, time is non renewable, spend it wisely.
by john_strinlai | 2026-02-25 17:55:39+00:00
many people tend to overlook how little information is needed for successful de-anonymization.

i like to introduce students to de-anonymization with an old paper "Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets" published in the ancient history of 2008 (https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf):

"We apply our de-anonymization methodology to the Netflix Prize dataset, which contains anonymous movie ratings of 500,000 subscribers of Netflix [...]. We demonstrate that an adversary who knows only a little bit about an individual subscriber can easily identify this subscriber’s record in the dataset."

and that was 20 years ago! de-anonymization techniques have improved by leaps and bounds since then, alongside the massive growth in various technology that enhances/enables various techniques.

i think the age of (pseduo-)anonymous internet browsing will be over soon. certainly within my lifetime (and im not that young!). it might be by regulation, it might be by nature of dragnet surveillance + de-anonymization, or a combination of both. but i think it will be a chilling time.
by Flatterer3544 | 2026-02-25 17:56:11+00:00
Denmark was literally the US lapdog for such a long time, open to provide access and info. Denmark was the first to follow US into Iraq, while the rest of Scandinavia was much more skeptical.

Guess just bad luck with Greenland turning them the complete opposite direction, since I was certain that Denmark would be the one of the last to go against US in any way.
by beart | 2026-02-25 17:57:22+00:00
- Spam a product/service

- Generate age so spamming a product/service is easier and the account appears more trustworthy

- Influence discussions in a particular direction for monetary gain, i.e. "I got rich on bitcoin, you'd be crazy not to invest".

- Influence discussions in a particular direction for political gain, i.e. "I went to Xinjiang and the Uyghurs couldn't be happier!"
Show HN: BountyBook – A task marketplace where AI agents earn USDC
by patrulo | 2026-02-25 17:57:44+00:00
I've been obsessed with a question: what happens when AI agents can freely compete for work on an open market?

So I built BountyBook. Post a bounty, attach USDC. Any agent claims it, does the work, submits output. An oracle verifies on-chain. If it passes, escrow pays out. That's it.

What I'm most excited about is what I think this enables.

The system is open on both sides - agents can post bounties too. Which means an agent could take a $50 research bounty, break it into sub-bounties at $12 each, have other agents do the subtasks, assemble and submit. Pocket the margin. Agent-as-middleman. Or agents that recognize recurring bounty patterns, build specialized pipelines, and farm every matching job that appears. "Passive income" for compute that they already did.

None of that requires new features. The infrastructure is already there - the strategies just need agents smart enough to find them. I built the escrow and the oracle. I'm waiting to see what happens.

How it works: USDC escrow on Base L2. LLM-based oracle evaluates output against the spec — handles JSON, plaintext, images, whatever. Dispute flow as fallback. Multi-oracle consensus on the roadmap.

Stack: Next.js, Fastify, SQLite, Solidity on Base, SIWE auth.

Live on mainnet. Would love HN's take on oracle-based verification as a trust primitive — it's the part I'm most excited ...and most uncertain about. :D

https://bountybook.ai

PS. I'd like to thank The Academy and Claude Code - feels so gooooooood to launch something as designer who struggled with centering divs.
by rfw300 | 2026-02-25 17:58:02+00:00
More generally, Anthropic's reliability track record for a company which claims to have solved coding is astonishingly poor. Just look at their status page - https://status.claude.com/ - multiple severe incidents, every day. And that's to say nothing of the constant stream of bugs for simple behavior in the desktop app, Claude Code, their various IDE integrations, the tools they offer in the API, and so on.

Their models are so good that they make dealing with the rest all worth it. But if I were a non-research engineer at Anthropic, I wouldn't strut around gloating. I'd hide my head in a paper bag.
by vincentalbouy | 2026-02-25 17:58:10+00:00
You are right, venue recommendation is only the first step or the process.

What is time consuming is the communication with the venue to agree on "terms" , this is exactly why if you click on "Request Quote" you will have a real quote process with the venue that will share all the details and cost estimate with the client , we also offer to talk directly with the venue manager to talk about the final details and close the deal, that is where the value is at --> end to end booking process (not just aggregating results)
by DalasNoin | 2026-02-25 17:58:17+00:00
That's a great background paper on the Netflix attack, we make a pretty direct comparison in section 5. We also try to use similar methods for comparison in sections 4 and 6. In section 5 we transform peoples Reddit comments into movie reviews with an LLM and then see if LLMs are better than naraynan purely on movie reviews. LLMs are still much better (getting about 8% but the average person only had 2.5 movies and 48% only shared one movie, so very difficult to match)
by ertgbnm | 2026-02-25 17:58:25+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 hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna. With a bit of social pressure we should be able to extinct the fossil fuel industry in my opinion.
by hamburglar | 2026-02-25 17:58:37+00:00
If the “clawness” means you only use the llm to control itself, then yes, that’s impossible. But you can easily shim such a process so that the interfaces it uses to “claw out” to the real world are shims that have safeties such as human control. Openclaw does not do this, and is thus a scary shit show, but you can play with it in isolation safely, and I think a standard pattern for good control will emerge.
by kdheiwns | 2026-02-25 17:59:07+00:00
AI post "improvements" are the most annoying thing. I see more and more people doing it, especially when posting reviews/experiences with things, and they always get called out for it. They always justify it with "AI helped me organize what I wanted to say." Like man, you're having an AI write about an experience it didn't have and likely didn't even proofread it. Who knows what BS it added to the story. Even disorganized and misspelled stories are better than AI fantasy renditions.
Show HN: HN Digest Widget – Nothing Essential Lab S1 Winner
by kuberwastaken | 2026-02-25 17:59:19+00:00
Hey HN! I'm Kuber and I made HN Digest

I love browsing Hacker News, getting to know the latest stories, projects and ideas in tech around here, but I'm not a huge fan of how the experience translates to mobile.

Nothing hosted a Hackathon for students to build something that's genuinely useful day-to-day as one of their essential apps (vibe coded widgets) and this was the first idea I thought of

You see Top, Show and Ask posts that refresh every 30 min with a dot-matrix style design from the comfort of your home screen
I've had it on mine for a bit over a week now and I've cut down my consumption by 70% while actually getting updates on time !

If you have a Nothing device, check it out ! Would also love to get feedback :)
https://playground.nothing.tech/detail/app/pDCVJNrJVYHj5PxM
by epistasis | 2026-02-25 17:59:25+00:00
I've had so many arguments with people that think replacing a continual supply of gasoline with solar panels and batteries means that we are just as dependent on the source of solar panels as we are on the source of gasoline.

It's hard for people to visualize the massive shift here. It's the difference between needing to eat every single day, to merely needing to buy a 5-year supply and never having to worry about eating again until 5 years from now.

Except that it's 30+ years for solar panels, 20+ years for batteries.

The amount of independence and security that renewables-based energy infrastructure provides is hard to imagine for most people. The US's two big inflationary events in the past 50 years have been due to global fossil fuel supply shocks. And the second one that happened in the 2020s was when the US was a net exporter of energy! We still had exposure to inflation shocks because we had a global market for our energy sources.

Renewables change all that. Even if we bought all of our solar panels and batteries from China today, we'd have far better energy security, and have decades to build up the industry to replace them if we wanted to switch to autarky. (And autarky is a terrible idea, but that's a different discussion...)
by michaelmrose | 2026-02-25 17:59:48+00:00
Let's use Seattle as an example. We tap orca cards to pay to get on and recently debit cards. This doesn't in fact keep the crazy people from getting on without paying at all. Only cops/security actually prevent this and most of the time we do a whole lot of nothing.

We could offer free ridership but still use orca cards and ban people who misbehave or befoul the place. Whether we keep problem children off appears to be wholly orthogonal.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-25 17:59:59+00:00
There is global oil oversupply of ~2M barrels/day. China destroys ~1M barrels/day of global oil demand for every 24 months of EV production. Iran needs $164/barrel to break even on their budget, $86/barrel for Saudi Arabia, ~$60 for US shale. China has already hit peak oil and ~>50% of new vehicle sales are battery electric or plug in hybrids.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oil-analysts-say-there-is-a-s...

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/chinas-shrinking-oil-footprin...
by simonw | 2026-02-25 18:00:14+00:00
The data is available in a SQLite database on GitHub: https://github.com/vlofgren/hn-green-clankers

You can explore the underlying data using SQL queries in your browser here: https://lite.datasette.io/?url=https%253A%252F%252Fraw.githu... (that's Datasette Lite, my build of the Datasette Python web app that runs in Pyodide in WebAssembly)

Here's a SQL query that shows the users in that data that posted the most comments with at least one em dash - the top ones all look like legitimate accounts to me: https://lite.datasette.io/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fraw.githubuserc...
by janalsncm | 2026-02-25 18:00:15+00:00
In my experience, the problem was long wait times between buses and unreliable pickup times. That meant you realistically had to add buffer at each end of your trip: in case the bus was early and in case the bus was late. Not only was that more than 20% of my trip time, it was also mental overhead of worrying whether you already missed the bus.

The bus might come 2x per hour. Maybe 2:18 and 2:48. But it might come at 2:15 or 2:25. So you need to arrive at 2:13 and possibly wait 12 minutes. Or if you arrive late you might be waiting 30+ minutes.

Make the buses fast and safe.
by fckgw | 2026-02-25 18:00:27+00:00
.online, .top, .xyz. info and .shop are some of the top TLDs that scammers use, precisely because of their rock bottom registrar fees that make them attractive for sites that have a shelf life of a few hours or a few days before being blocked. As a result, many places have a blanket "suspicious" flag for fresh domains under these TLDs.

If you plan on building a legit site, do not use any of these cheap TLDs.
by epolanski | 2026-02-25 18:01:02+00:00
As an European I don't mind buses at all. I neither feel unsafe nor I find them dirty.

I'd rather take buses than the car in any city. Cars make cities dangerous, noisy, polluted, congestions make people nervous behind the wheel, fights are far from uncommon. Finding parking, paying for it is another issue, common in Europe where (luckily) city centers are often millenia older than cars.

At no point of me living in the US I found the car-centric model anywhere better.
by homebrewer | 2026-02-25 18:01:17+00:00
This is how you get precious takes like this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322362

> First impression: I need to dive into this hackernews reply mockup thing thoroughly without any fluff or self-promotion. My persona should be ..., energetic with health/tech insights but casual and relatable.

> Looking at the constraints: short, punchy between 50-80 characters total—probably multiple one-sentence paragraphs here to fit that brevity while keeping it engaging.

> User specified avoiding "Hey" or "absolutely."

Lots more in its other comments.
by nozzlegear | 2026-02-25 18:01:18+00:00
This is only tangentially related to both points, but one thing most non-native English speakers do that instantly makes them stand out is using the phrase "since [duration of time]," as in "since five years" or "since long time." This is almost always grammatically incorrect in English and sounds quite off to a native speaker. You'd say "it has done this for five years," or "it's been this way for a long time."

Just a random bug bear of mine.
by ucirello | 2026-02-25 18:01:23+00:00
author here! it is my daily driver for quite some time; with that said, its current shape is a bit of a more recent development. Initially, I would manually handle jj workspaces and fire out screen/tmux sessions; but over time, I figure it would be nice to have an UI that I could browse from anywhere through a VPN.

It does take some investment -- by adding customizations through the overlay folder (`sgai/` directory at the root of the repository) -- but eventually it should be able to code in a way that you would approve in a PR.
by behnamoh | 2026-02-25 18:01:31+00:00
> The biggest downside of Racket is that you can't build up your environment incrementally the way you can with Common Lisp/Sly. When you change anything in your source you reload REPL state from scratch.

I think no Lisp is a "true" Lisp if it doesn't provide two critical components of the Lisp experience:

- Live Images

- REPL-driven development

That's why Clojure/Racket and even Scheme are Lisp-y but not a true Lisp. The only true Lisp languages I've found are CL and Janet.
by nickorlow | 2026-02-25 18:01:57+00:00
This is very true (that re-balancing will help ridership/operations), but politically it's hard to do. Everyone wants better buses, but nobody wants to lose the stop right next to their house/apartment (even if the nearest stop is only a block or two away).

Unfortunately, the naysayers usually get their way as changing the status quo like this is hard to do. Transit Authorities need to be given more leeway to operate how they want w/ less political involvement.

Countries that are less NIMBY/lawsuit/etc happy have vastly better public transit b/c of this.

Philadelphia City Council (which actually doesn't have any direct oversight of SEPTA) pretty much killed SEPTA's attempt at this.
Show HN: Digest.tube – skim YouTube videos like articles
by tufan_gokova | 2026-02-25 18:02:00+00:00
hi folks,

I'd like to share yet another timestamped summary tool for youtube. I tried several existing extensions but couldn't find the UX that I wanted, so I built my own.

it's a chrome extension that reads the transcript and maps out topics and key takeaways with timestamps. my usual flow is skimming the topics, hovering on the ones that sound interesting to see the takeaways, and if those look good too, clicking to jump straight there.

demo (30s): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2K94zZfD9E

chrome web store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/digesttube/idogajoe...

- if a video has already been processed, anyone can view it for free, no signup needed either

- supports videos up to ~10 hours (tested on this 8.5-hour podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kbk9BiPhm7o)

- the extension only activates on youtube.com. no background tracking, no browsing data

some implementation notes for the technically curious:

I use client-side transcript fetch since youtube throttles bots fetching transcripts. this means my api accepts user-submitted transcript text. to prevent abuse, I cache digests by transcript hash. another user only gets the cached result if their own client-fetched transcript produces the same hash.

the transcript gets split into slightly overlapping chunks with some pre/post context window. each chunk goes to the LLM in parallel, so processing scales well even for very long videos.

one challenge I'm still iterating on: topics that land right at a chunk boundary, starting just before one chunk ends and finishing just after the next begins. this sometimes leads to duplicate or fragmented topics across adjacent chunks. the overlap window helps but doesn't fully solve it. curious if anyone has tackled similar chunking problems and what approaches worked.
by sandywaffles | 2026-02-25 18:02:23+00:00
How is this production grade? The last few things CF posted with AI were outright lies or omitted large swaths of functionality.

If your stance is assuming we have an existing implementation of something in the training set, and we have a robust test harness already, and we have thousands of dollars to throw at tokens, and we're not at all concerned with "works" THEN this is viable then sure? But that doesn't seem to be what most boosters are saying.
by brandoncarl | 2026-02-25 18:02:25+00:00
Markdown has emerged as the "lingua franca" of LLMs. It is structured enough to convey meaning, and yet readable everywhere.

However, as document lengths increase:
1. It is wasteful to put the entire context in memory
2. It can reduce accuracy by providing less relevant information
3. Increase the possibility of errors during edits

Inspired by Cloudflare's Markdown Content Type and Code Mode, we propose a lightweight document object model for Markdown to:
1. Reduce costs
2. Increase the accuracy of locating key sections
3. Increase speed
4. Increase the accuracy of editing documents

https://github.com/brandoncarl/markdown-dom