MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by varispeed | 2026-02-27 16:07:50+00:00
You say the consultancy “absolutely can substitute one worker with another.” In practice, clients regularly contract for named individuals, reject substitutes, and retain the same person for years. But it does not matter, because the substitution test is never applied to them. A one-person company in identical working conditions has to defend its right of substitution. A large firm placing a single named worker in the same arrangement is never asked the question.

Now the tax argument. Picture three people sitting next to each other doing the same job at the same client. One is employed directly on £70k. One works for a large consultancy, earns £60k, and has no idea the consultancy charges £2k a day for their labour. One runs their own company and charges £600 a day.
The employee pays income tax and NI on £70k. The consultancy worker pays income tax and NI on £60k, while the consultancy captures the spread and, being a multinational, routes the margin offshore paying little or no UK tax. The small business owner pays themselves a salary, corporation tax on profits, and dividend tax on what they take out - and spends the margin locally.

From a pure tax yield perspective, the small business owner generates the most revenue for the Treasury and the most benefit for the local economy. The large consultancy generates the least. Yet the entire framing of IR35 is designed to make the two employed workers resent the business owner for “not paying their fair share,” while the consultancy quietly extracting the largest margin and contributing the least tax is never part of the conversation. Paying through dividends and salary is not avoidance, it is the normal mechanics of running a limited company, which exists precisely because PAYE was not designed for how independent businesses operate.

If a large consultancy places a single named worker at one client, on client equipment, during client hours, for four years, with no practical substitution ever exercised, why is that firm not subjected to the same deemed-employment assessment that a one-person company would be in identical circumstances?
Because the legislation is scoped by ownership. It activates when the person doing the work also owns the business providing it. A worker who builds and runs their own company is treated as inherently suspect. A separate corporate entity extracting the same margin from the same labour is not.

If you think that framing is wrong, explain why the ownership trigger exists rather than a universal status test applied equally to all companies supplying labour. That is the question.
by jonjacky | 2026-02-27 16:07:53+00:00
I'd be ok with it if it's possible to use all the insights and software from after that, we'd just be constrained by the hardware - the Amiga 4000, Apple Mac Quadra 840av 128 MB or a Pentium 66 MHz or the 486 DX2-66 with 64 MB ram.

Can't we achieve something like this now with microcontrollers like ESP32 or RP2040?

This project runs a ca. 1990 scientific workstation (not just a PC) on an RP2040:

https://github.com/rscott2049/DECstation2040
by bell-cot | 2026-02-27 16:07:55+00:00
To clarify - John Brown was an American, with a Puritan/Calvinist background, born to fairly humble circumstances. Very unlike Acton.

And Britain's record on slavery is both far more complex, and far less bad, than many modern ideologues might have us believe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Africa_Squadron
by Nifty3929 | 2026-02-27 16:08:20+00:00
Are you glad to have people spending their lives on jobs that don't contribute to society, just because the business is already profitable? Wouldn't it be better to have those people move into whatever job would contribute more to society? Have you considered that allowing people to remain in jobs that contribute less than they could in other jobs is the reason why your per-capita production lags the US?

The goal of the economy should be to move people quickly to where they can do the most good for society. Note that this has little to do with how hard these folks are working, how smart they are, or how 'worthy' they are. The point is just to have people doing the most useful work.
by rekabis | 2026-02-27 16:08:29+00:00
I can understand a paid pro tier. Content takes up server resources, after all, so this is a legitimate implementation of a subscription, as much as I might hate them.

And yet… markup is text.

Only text.

And text takes up almost no drive space at all.

Drive space - even now, with the AI datacentre bubble - is still stupidly cheap. I could understand if the subscription is metered to the amount of text; say, 10¢/mo per 1,000,000 characters. Or to a mix of characters and links.

But $29/year? How many hundreds of full-sized novels worth of text are you expecting people to link to?
by 122506 | 2026-02-27 16:08:32+00:00
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by flowerbreeze | 2026-02-27 16:08:49+00:00
I think the more generic stream concept is interesting, but their proposal is based on different underlying assumptions.

From what it looks like, they want their streams to be compatible with AsyncIterator so it'd fit into existing ecosystem of iterators.

And I believe the Uint8Array is there for matching OS streams as they tend to move batches of bytes without having knowledge about the data inside. It's probably not intended as an entirely new concept of a stream, but something that C/C++ or other language that can provide functionality for JS, can do underneath.

For example my personal pet project of a graph database written in C has observers/observables that are similar to the AsyncIterator streams (except one observable can be listened to by more than one observer) moving about batches of Uint8Array (or rather uint8_t* buffer with capacity/count), because it's one of the fastest and easiest thing to do in C.

It'd be a lot more work to use anything other than uint8_t* batches for streaming data. What I mean by that, is that any other protocol that is aware of the type information would be built on top of the streams, rather than being part of the stream protocol itself for this reason.
by nerdjon | 2026-02-27 16:08:49+00:00
Even though these tools are showing time and time again that they have serious reliability issues, somehow people still think it is a good idea to use them for critical decisions.

Still regularly get wrong information from google’s search AI.

Really starting to wonder if common sense is ever going to come back with new tech, but I fear it is going to require something truly catastrophic to happen.
by jazzen | 2026-02-27 16:09:04+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been frustrated with my AI coding workflow lately. Switching between different browser tabs and separate CLI tools for different models (Claude, Gemini, OpenAI) was constantly breaking my flow. I also wanted a way to interact with these tools away from my desk without the pain of using a standard mobile keyboard for CLI tasks. （Screenshots are available in the GitHub README linked above.）

So, I built VibeAround to scratch my own itch. It mainly solves two problems:

A multi-pane desktop workspace: It runs tools like Claude Code, Gemini, and OpenAI Codex side-by-side in a unified terminal. It behaves a bit like tmux for AI agents, letting you run tasks in parallel and compare outputs with all your context in one view.

A usable mobile terminal experience: I built a responsive mobile Web UI that connects to the local environment (e.g., via an ngrok tunnel). To make CLI work actually usable on a phone screen, I added a custom virtual keypad with essential keys like Ctrl+C, Esc, Tab, and a dedicated prompt button.

The goal is to turn your local machine into a private, multi-model AI server that you can control seamlessly from any screen, rather than relying on a single vendor's remote environment.

It is still very much a work in progress, but the core workflow is there and I'm using it daily. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the approach. How are you all managing multi-model CLI workflows locally? Happy to answer any questions about the implementation!
by cyberrock | 2026-02-27 16:09:32+00:00
>decreasing the amount of cultivated farm land

I have good news and bad news for you. Good news: we've known the solution to that for more than a century, which is to reduce livestock consumption, a cause which many smart people have dedicated their lives pushing vegetarian/vegan culture and producing alternatives. Bad news: from my point of view, the masses are not going to give up meat and eggs faster with each additional alternative meat.
by otterley | 2026-02-27 16:09:47+00:00
As an attorney (and this is not legal advice), I would argue--and the U.S. Copyright Office has already stated--that machine-generated content is not copyrightable, because it's not a form of human creative expression. https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell... ("Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.")

That said, the inquiry doesn't there. What happens next after the content is generated matters. If human creativity is then applied to the output such that it transforms it into something the machine didn't generate itself, then the resulting product might be copyrightable. See Section F on page 24 of the Report.

Consider that a dictionary contains words that aren't copyrightable; but the selection of words an author select to write a novel constitutes a copyrightable work. It's just that in this case, the author is creatively constructing from much larger components than words.

Lots of questions then obviously follow, like how much and what kind of transformation needs to be applied. But I think this is probably where the law is headed.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-27 16:10:37+00:00
"End of human-based value creation" is tantamount to post-scarcity. It "breaks" capitalism because it supposedly obviates the resource allocation problem that the free-market economy is the answer to. It's what Karl Marx actually pointed to as his utopian "fully realized communism". Most people would think of that as a pipe dream, but if you actually think it's viable, why wouldn't you want it?
by mftrhu | 2026-02-27 16:11:03+00:00
Right now, their wiki page on device support [0] lists zero actual devices as "fully supported":

> These are the most supported devices, maintained by at least 2 people and have the functions you expect from the device running its normal OS, such as calling on a phone, working audio, and a functional UI.

> Besides QEMU devices, this is currently empty. The ports we had here earlier weren't as reliable as we would have liked. We plan to add new devices here with a higher standard.

The most recent smartphone in the Community section of that page is the Fairphone 4, released half a decade ago, in 2021. Pixel devices can trivially be bootloader unlocked, but that doesn't make the work that goes into supporting them much easier: the latest device in Testing is the 6a/6 Pro, from 2022, and its device page lists all the features but the most basic (touchscreen, flash, internal storage) as "Untested".

[0] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
by iggori | 2026-02-27 16:11:08+00:00
I wrote a piece about why so many AI agents drift, skip steps, or fall apart in production even when they look solid in demos. The argument isn’t about model quality. It’s about the abstraction layer we’re using.

LLMs don’t execute instructions. They predict tokens. A prompt full of rules isn’t a rulebook to the model; it’s a set of competing statistical pulls. When those pulls conflict, the model doesn’t resolve them by hierarchy. It averages them. That’s the root of drift.

The essay looks at a few examples: OpenAI moving away from instruction‑governed plugins toward structured actions, Devin’s long‑horizon failures that look like “bugs” but are really drift, and Sierra’s constraint‑based architecture that avoids this by making certain behaviors structurally impossible.

The core idea is that instructions compete, but constraints accumulate. If you treat an LLM like software, you get drift. If you treat it like a probability field, you design the boundary layer differently.

https://productics.substack.com/p/instructions-are-suggestio...
by Gualdrapo | 2026-02-27 16:11:19+00:00
I remember Microsoft Front Page had a feature about doing buttons with image sprites and it spitted a ton of JS gibberish.

I don't think the example of the trophy in the article is a good use case this days, you could draw that trophy as a SVG and animate the flames with GSAP or something, or draw each flame frame as a <symbol> and animate that with CSS.
by thewebguyd | 2026-02-27 16:11:35+00:00
> I get all or nothing when your threat model is state actors.

The problem for those of us in the USA, that labels anyone who disagrees with the current administration and ICE as a domestic terrorist, means that now everyone's threat model is a state actor.

The threat model of every citizen that dares to exercise their first amendment rights now escalated beyond corporate agendas to "How do I make sure Israeli & Palantir spyware doesn't end up on my phone? How do I make sure if my phone does get confiscated, Cellebrite can't image it or access the data?"

Even if that weren't the case, I see no valid reason to be lax with security in 2026. There's no excuse anymore, I mean we still have OEMs selling phones that they do not issue security updates for after purchase. That's just gross negligence.
by bentley | 2026-02-27 16:11:49+00:00
Were any of the current directors or new nominees involved in the incident where F-Droid marked Bible and Quran apps as NSFW, hid them from search by default, and expressed the intent to remove them completely (https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/252#note_2578531026)? (Discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45638096)

If I’m charitable, I could assume they intended to make a controversial move to drive public attention to the growing government restrictions on innocuous apps. As far as I know, though, nobody at F-Droid admitted to this; and if they were, why didn’t they mark other widely used apps like Wikipedia and Reddit frontends that provide easy access to much more sexually explicit content in the same protest?

If I’m less charitable, and go by what F-Droid admins actually said, they took this action out of a sincere belief that these apps contained content unsafe for minors that necessitated flagging, and sincerely believed that Wikipedia and Reddit frontends somehow don’t qualify for the same. If they honestly believed this, it demonstrates (to me) poor judgment; and since the action was walked back almost immediately due to negative public response, that indicates further that they never actually believed this in the first place, and that instead somebody took it upon himself to specifically target religious apps out of his own bias.

Either way, it really soured me on the judgment of the F-Droid maintainers. After a stunt like that, I no longer trust them to fight the battle against oppressive government restrictions on operating systems effectively. Formerly an F-Droid user of many years, this caused me to switch away completely: I’ve started donating monthly to Accrescent instead, download as many apps as I can from there, and switched from F-Droid to Obtanium for any apps not yet on Accrescent.
by red-iron-pine | 2026-02-27 16:12:10+00:00
ITT: tech bro misunderstands democracy and fiat currency (and Malcom in the Middle)

i trust geohot when it comes to finding novel vulns and maybe writing code

i dgaf about anything he has to say about anything else, esp. 2nd year econ class rants about money

> It’s for children and high-end prostitutes.

I love how somehow he manages to make this about women at the end, such as the Malcom in the Middle "hot girl" take. Superlative arguement mon mi.

> A home for poorly researched ideas that I find myself repeating a lot anyway

no kidding
by lambdaphagy | 2026-02-27 16:12:14+00:00
China does not consider all lethal autonomous weapons system "unacceptable" even for use, let alone to develop, and the document you linked explains this very clearly. Here's what the document actually says, formatted slightly for clarity:

```
Basic characteristics of Unacceptable Autonomous Weapons Systems should include but not limited to the following:

- Firstly, lethality, meaning sufficient lethal payload (charge) and means.

- Secondly, autonomy, meaning absence of human intervention and control during the entire process of executing a task.

- Thirdly, impossibility for termination, meaning that once started, there is no way to terminate the operation.

- Fourthly, indiscriminate killing, meaning that the device will execute the mission of killing and maiming regardless of conditions, scenarios and targets.

- Fifthly, evolution, meaning that through interaction with the environment, the device can learn autonomously, expand its functions and capabilities in a degree exceeding human expectations.

Autonomous weapons systems with all of the five characteristics clearly have anti-human characteristics and significant humanitarian risks, and the international community could consider following the example of the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons and work to reach a legal instrument to prohibit such weapons systems.
```

Charitably, you might say that China is worried about a nightmare scenario. Less charitably, you might say that the definition of an unacceptable weapon system is so tight that it does not describe anything that anyone would ever build, or would want to build. This posture would allow China to adopt the international posture of seeming to oppose autonomous weapons without actually de facto constraining themselves at all.

This, by contrast, is what China considers acceptable:

```
Acceptable Autonomous Weapons Systems could have a high degree of autonomy, but are always under human control. It means they can be used in a secure, credible, reliable and manageable manner, can be suspended by human beings at any time and comply with basic principles of international humanitarian law in military operations, such as distinction, proportionality and precaution.
```

So as long as the system has a killswitch (something that afaik absolutely no one is proposing to dispense with?), it's Acceptable.

Meanwhile, it would certainly seem that China's defense research universities are interested in developing this tech: https://thediplomat.com/2026/02/machines-in-the-alleyways-ch....

So, I did a bit of research with my internet access-- how do my findings square with your impressions?
by travisgriggs | 2026-02-27 16:12:22+00:00
> We are so early into this AI revolution…

I keep hoping it’s almost over.

Not trying to be the Luddite. Had multiple questions to AI tools yesterday, and let Claude/Zed do some boilerplate code/pattern rewriting.

I’ve worked in software for 35 years. I’ve seen many new “disruptive” movements come and go (open source, objects, functional, services, containers, aspects, blockchains, etc). I chose to participate in some and not in others. And whether I made the wrong choices or not, I always felt like I could get a clear enough picture of where the bandwagon was going that I could jump in, or hold back, or kind of. My choices weren’t always the same as others, so it’s not like it was obvious to everyone. But the signal felt more deterministic.

With LLM/agents, I find I feel the most unease and uncertainty with how much to lean in, and in what ways to lean in, than I ever have before. A sort of enthusiasm paralysis that is new.

Perhaps it’s just my age.
by jitl | 2026-02-27 16:13:02+00:00
but instead of trying to solve that, this api is just like “too hard no one uses it let’s forget about it”.

right now when i need to wrangle bytes, i switch languages to Golang. it’s easy gc language, and all its IO is built around BYOB api:

interface Reader { read(b: Uint8Array): [number, Error?] }

you pass in your own Uint8Array allocation (in go terms, []byte), the reader fills at most the entire thing, and returns (bytes filled, error). it’s a fully pull stream API with one method at its core. now, the api gets to be that simple because it’s always sync, and blocks until the reader can fill data into the buffer or returns an error indicating no data available right now.

go has a TeeReader with no buffering - it too just blocks until it can write to the forked stream.

https://pkg.go.dev/io#TeeReader

we can’t do the same api in JS, because go gets to insert `await` wherever it wants with its coroutine/goroutine runtime. but we can dream of such simplicity combined with zero allocation performance.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-27 16:13:04+00:00
Induced demand is a rubbish theory to begin with. The effect is explained by insufficient capacity suppressing natural demand, which returns when capacity is increased and thereby consumes some or all of the added capacity until you have enough capacity for the actual demand.

But it's especially rubbish when converting an existing lane, because the existing lane will have already allowed the demand to be high, e.g. people already built houses outside the range of mass transit and those residents are now locked in to using that road in cars, and you then remove the lane even though the demand is sticky.