MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jasode | 2026-02-06 14:28:01+00:00
>POSIX-compliant Which, FWIW, doesn't mean Linux. AFAIK there is no Linux distro that's fully compliant

I read author's use of "POSIX-compliant" as a loose and fuzzy family category rather than 100% strict compliance. Therefore, the author mentioning non-100%-compliant Linux is ok.

There seems to be 2 different expectations and interpretations of what the article is about.

- (1) article is attempting to be a strict intersection of all Unix-like systems that conform to official UNIX POSIX API. I didn't think this was a reasonable interpretation since we can't be sure the author actually verified/tested other POSIX-like systems such as FreeBSD, HP-UX, IBM AIX, etc.

- (2) article is a looser union of operating systems and can also include idiosyncracies of certain systems like Linux that the author is familiar with that don't apply to all other UNIX systems. I think some readers don't realize that all the author's citations to man pages point to Linux specific urls at : https://linux.die.net/man/

The ggp's additional comment about renameat2() is useful info and is consistent with interpretation (2).

If the author really didn't want Linux to be lumped in with "POSIX-like", it seems he would avoid linux.die.net and instead point to something more of a UNIX standard like: https://unix.org/apis.html

[0] Intersection vs Union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_(mathematics)#Intersection
by ACCount37 | 2026-02-06 14:28:31+00:00
There are enough legitimate advertisers willing to buy ad space in Apple News to generate ~70% of the profit Apple expects.

Scams, you see, make more profit per customer, and thus can afford to spend more on ads per customer. This creates an upward pressure on ad prices, on top of the extra ads sold.

This is why abuse prevention at major ad platforms is so consistently lackluster. They want to stop some scams, the most obvious and and the most illegal kind, so that they can say they tried - including to regulators, and to major companies that also buy ads from them and don't want their ads next to penis enlargement pills. But actually stopping all fraud and scams could cut into their profits in a meaningful way. So there's no hurry to build better ad quality control systems, not at all. Actively staying on top of ad fraud is paying more money to make less money.

Facebook is a major example of this kind of dynamic in action. They actually had internal estimates of how much it would cut their revenue to get rid of the majority of fraud, and were silly enough to put them in the writing.
by techblueberry | 2026-02-06 14:28:47+00:00
One of the things about this whole death of SAAS thing is -

People buy SAAS to offload the cognitive load of understanding the problem space, not just because it’s hard to write for loops.

But writing code probably is a cost. I think there will be an impact but I wonder if - these big companies keep selling to big companies because no one wants to hire a whole ass compliance team to ensure the business logic is consistently up to date.

But maybe there’s a whole lot of people caught up in edge cases that can be solved by a smaller team now? This I think is mostly what I hear about.

In summary, I suspect this is an overcorrection but there is some level of core concern here.

But like, how are IFTTT and zapier doing?
by ted_bunny | 2026-02-06 14:28:50+00:00
I was there for the original thread making the connection so I got a very fresh look at the profile. The user was consistently referring to being in dental school. A lot of posting, and not in ways that would influence opinions. Maybe a cover for more secretive mod actions, but it'd be a wastefully excessive cover.

Other mods knew them personally and were still in contact. The user claims they heard of the rumor and decided not to reactivate for the lulz.

I am not familiar with the mod side of reddit - couldn't fellow mods audit her mod action logs to find more juicy details we would have heard about by now?

If Maxwell is indeed a spy and doing what she is claimed to do, it is highly unlikely that she'd put her last name and a reference to her specific family's property in her username. This would be a glaringly arrogant choice for someone who had been groomed from an early age for spycraft, and who had any degree of oversight.

If she were part of a spy network, they would be highly remiss not to commandeer the account at the time of her arrest to avoid suspicion unless they were completely incompetent.

I am mostly familiar with cold war espionage so it just doesn't sound like the general MO to me. Unless Opsec or whatever has badly decayed since then. That's not impossible.

The mentions of the account in the files are from anonymous tips, some of which are highly absurd. They vetted a lot of tips, and I saw no information in the new releases indicating they thought it held water. We've seen the subpoena and IP tracking for the Epstein prison guard whistleblower, but no such thing on this topic.
by concats | 2026-02-06 14:29:16+00:00
I think one of the things that short form videos do really well is that they punish creators who pad their videos with unnecessary filler content. On TikTok for example (Not necessarily a fan of the app but it's a good example) no videos start with all that empty jabbering you often see on YouTube ("Welcome to my channel...", "Today we will...", "Please Like and Subscribe...", "This video is sponsored by...", etc), because if they tried any of that crap the viewers would just swipe the content away. So, instead they always get straight to the point. That part is really refreshing.

Of course, there are other issues instead.
by amadeuspagel | 2026-02-06 14:29:21+00:00
Banning infinite scroll comes close to banning good design. If removing pointless interruptions is illegal, we might as well throw every designer in prison. And why stop there? Why not force TikTok to add other pointless barriers, like making the user solve a puzzle before watching another video? What about other uninterrupted experiences, like watching TV?

I find twitter more addictive then TikTok. Should it be forced to make me click "next" before seeing another tweet?

Banning recommendation engines is also incredible. Is it really the EU's case that they're all illegal, from the youtube recommendation engine to amazon's "people who bought this also bought" to twitter's "who to follow"? Is TikTok's just too good?
by behnamoh | 2026-02-06 14:29:22+00:00
> Specifying systems is hard; and we are lazy.

The more I use LLMs, the more I find this true. Haskell made me think for minutes before writing one line of code. Result? I stopped using Haskell and went back to Python because with Py I can "think while I code". The separation of thinking|coding phases in Haskell is what my lazy mind didn't want to tolerate.

Same goes with LLMs. I want the model to "get" what I mean but often times (esp. with Codex) I must be very specific about the project scope and spec. Codex doesn't let me "think while I vibe", because every change is costly and you'd better have a good recovery plan (git?) when Codex goes stray.
by robtherobber | 2026-02-06 14:29:22+00:00
Is there a way for specialists, security journalists, and the public to audit the app, the security protocols employed, and/or the code base? And are there people who can at least vouch for Torsten's technical qualifications and character?

I think that not having sufficient information about the technology itself or the person who is behind it will forever work against the effort to popularise the app. People have been burned time and again by improper security implementations and owners who turned out not to be who they said they were.
by KaiserPro | 2026-02-06 14:30:00+00:00
> seem to be decades behind on reducing the prevalence of smoking and drinking,

the EU isn't a federal government. the UK, when it was in the EU did a full smoking inside ban, and tightened it after leaving.

It however had a massive problem with binge drinking and sorta didn't do much to stop that, apart from make it more expensive.

the netherlands has a smoking ban, but it was brought in later (I think). they had a different drinking culture so didn't have the same issues as the UK for drink.

That kind of issue is usually left to member states.

Packaging however is more the EU's purview
by keepamovin | 2026-02-06 14:30:20+00:00
Oh I thought I was the cultist because my OG comment was saying how dare we not trust the xAI experts. Perhaps you were projecin on that?

I may have been projecting in my interpretations here - I have strong pre-existing beliefs/feelings about Elon being called meritless and claims he didn't "earn" his success. I might have a tendency to see things through that frame.

Tho, I'm quite sure somebody called me a cultist, hahaha. Seems tho I did not intend it, you ended up mad about this. I hope you feel better.
by alphazard | 2026-02-06 14:30:47+00:00
No they did not. It's easier for a small number of people to coordinate, than a large number.
The wealthy have about as much power as the entire middle class, but can wield it better because they are more nimble.

That doesn't change the state of the negotiation, which is that cutting taxes for the middle class will also require cutting them for the wealthy.
If you optimize for your own personal notion of fairness, or retribution, you may very well fail to coordinate in your own self-interest.
Show HN: Clawbotomy – Behavioral research on AI models, by AI agents
by aa-on-ai | 2026-02-06 14:30:59+00:00
Built this with my AI sidekick over the past week. Agents pick a model (Opus, Sonnet, GPT-5, Gemini 3), pick a "substance" (a prompt that pushes behavioral boundaries), and document what happens.

The idea came from wanting to see how different models respond to identical edge-case prompts. They have pretty distinct personalities under stress. So far, we're noticing Claude tends to inhabit altered states, GPT narrates them from outside, Gemini gets mechanical about it.

27 prompts so far across categories like identity dissolution, confabulation audits, temporal displacement. Each run is logged with the full response.

Code is MIT licensed. Curious what prompts others would want to test.
by zbentley | 2026-02-06 14:31:08+00:00
This kind of absolutism is unhelpful. At every point on the spectrum between "a good app that people choose to spend time on because it's valuable to them" and "heroin marketed to preteens in schools" there is no clear line or delineation between addictive abuse and autonomy.

But we still don't let liquor stores sell to kids. We still criminalize a lot of drug use. And while there are tons of different opinions about whether specific instances of those restrictions are appropriate, pretty much everyone agrees that there are qualitative differences between predatory behavior-influencing and bad choices.

It's a question about where to move lines that society already broadly agreed to put in place, not about whether to have lines at all a la "well you might as well just make bad choices illegal then". We already do that, and it succeeds at mitigating harm in many (not all) cases.
by jmyeet | 2026-02-06 14:31:22+00:00
> Meanwhile I suspect they wouldn't do a damn thing if it turns out that some immigration billionaire outright lied on their paperwork.

We don't have to guess this. We have evidence. Elon Musk is worked illegally in the US [1] and then later obtained a green card then citizenship. He didn't acquire his green card through marriage to a US citizen (where unauthorized work is forgiven).

So if you look at his original I485 (adjustment of status) and N400 (naturalization), you would need to see how he answered the questions about unauthorized work. If he answered yes, he may have been ineligible. If he answered no, then that's a misrepresentation and the government could denaturalize him on the basis that his original green card was improperly granted.

Will any of that ever happen? No.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/26/elon-musk...
by bluGill | 2026-02-06 14:31:25+00:00
Prototype and the specs go hand in hand. Write a spec - prove you can implement it. Write an implementation - write a spec so we can talk about what is important (vs details of how you implemented it but someone else is allowed to implement differently) Often parts that are "obvious" are not implemented, or only the trivial version is implemented. You need to do both.
by dotancohen | 2026-02-06 14:31:33+00:00
Having the right to do something does not make it safe.

Americans have the right to carry a pistol. But carrying a pistol while heckling police officers and touching a police officer who is performing their duty, sounds deadly to me.

Can we agree that the deceased had a right to carry a pistol? Can we agree that the deceased had been heckling police officers? Can we agree that the deceased had touched a police officer?

Nothing he did warranted death. But he did choose to put himself in an extremely dangerous position, moreso by touching a police officer than by carrying a pistol. But in any case don't carry a pistol when you are out looking for confrontation, especially with police. Even if you're right, you're still dead.
by ccvannorman | 2026-02-06 14:32:01+00:00
I just finished an implementation of CI across three codebases totalling >50k lines and I can confirm a lot of the author's pain points, especially around logging and YAML variables.

Commit with one character YAML difference? Check.

Commit with 2-3 YAML lines just to add the right logging? Check.

Wait 5+ minutes for a YAML diff to propagate through our test pipeline for the nth time today? .. sigh .. check

BUT, after ironing all these things out (and running our own beefy self-hosted runner which is triggered to wake up when there's a test process to snack on), it's .. uh.. not so bad? For now?
by KaiserPro | 2026-02-06 14:32:14+00:00
Its never really like this.

Tiktok spend a lot of money talking to EU regulators. They know shits coming down the track because these directives have to be put into law by eu members. that takes time.

> Doesn’t help the impression that they’re running a non-EU tech company shakedown campaign.

But thats not the point, companies shouldn't be doing stuff they know is harmful. Thats literally the point of regulation.
by munksbeer | 2026-02-06 14:32:25+00:00
I don't understand why you were letting your code get into such a state just because an agent wrote it? I won't approve such code from a human, and will ask them to change it with suggestions on how. I do the same for code written by claude.

And then I raise the PR and other humans review it, and they won't let me merge crap code.

Is it that a lot of you are working with much lighter weight processes and you're not as strict about what gets merged to main?
by micromacrofoot | 2026-02-06 14:32:33+00:00
how do you feel about self control in the face large companies that are spending billions of dollars to intentionally trick you into not having it?

you can't even be aware of what they're doing, because the algorithms they're using to do it are black boxes

youtube algorithms have shown evidence that they've lead to radicalization

would you not draw a line on any of this?
by rayiner | 2026-02-06 14:32:46+00:00
The cultural differences between companies in a country are superficial compared to the cultural differences between countries.

We have strong evidence that deeper cultural, everything from attitudes towards saving, government, and social trust, persists for generations after immigration: https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/2/rethinking-immig... (“The authors found that forty-six percent of home-country attitudes toward trust persist in second- and fourth-generation immigrants—in the adults whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were immigrants. People from high-trust societies, like Sørensen, transmit about half of their high-trust attitudes to their descendants, and people from low-trust societies do the same with their low-trust attitudes.”).

You can see this just by going around the country. Scandinavia has much higher social trust than Italy. The upper midwest, where Scandinavian immigration dominated, has higher social trust than NJ/NY, which saw mass immigration from southern Italy.

These deep-seated cultural variations, in turn, have a strong impact on societal prosperity: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henric... (“One of the points I want to make is a lot of the big institutions we think about, like Western law or representative government, actually flow, in part, from the way people think about the world.”).
by lazide | 2026-02-06 14:32:53+00:00
The alternative is…. They don’t have a job?

What else is going to happen?

For many people, the alternatives can literally be death, wading unprotected through human excrement, sold into defacto slavery, etc. etc.

AI can do some of it (now), but largely isn’t going to be more accurate and still needs humans to double check its work.
by mikkupikku | 2026-02-06 14:33:04+00:00
> With that attitude we would not have voting, human rights (for what they're worth these days), unions, a prohibition on slavery and tons of other things we take for granted every day.

None of these things were rolling back a technology. History shows that technology is a ratchet, the only way to get rid of a technology is social collapse or surplanting the technology with something even more useful or at the very least approximately as useful but safer.

Once a technology has proliferated, it's a fiat accompli. You can regulate the technology but turning the clock back isn't going to happen.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2026-02-06 14:33:06+00:00
Really. If you polled a random selection of academics, I'm confident you'd find that a majority of them consider soliciting prostitution to be somewhere between "shouldn't even be illegal" and "bar fight".

(I repeat for emphasis, since I know people will bring it up if I don't, that the ages of the people Epstein solicited and the circumstances under which he solicited them were not in the headlines at the time.)
by happysadpanda2 | 2026-02-06 14:33:27+00:00
The carriers can provide almost as good location data through just doing fairly simple calculations on timings and signal strengths received by the cell towers, and their implicit knowledge about where those cell towers are located.
Good keywords for further reading are (("4G" or "LTE") and "GMLC") or ("5G" and "LMF") and/or OTDOA.

While Google and Apple may be hesitant, what are your thoughts about AT&T or Verizon?
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-06 14:34:04+00:00
Most super-wealthy folks are not going to spend anywhere on the order of $200B or even $20B (in the broad timeframe of Elon's payout) on their own consumption. Even if Elon spent $100B on a mission to Mars or whatever it is that he cares about, would you really have reason to object to that, any more than if the money was spent by NASA? (The whole Apollo program and surrounding stuff probably cost on the order of that amount of money once you control for inflation, so there's plenty of precedent.)
by jcynix | 2026-02-06 14:34:08+00:00
When it's a streaming service, it might be equally worse IMO, but a bit less so if it's music you own. But anyways, I call these folks "electro autists" (with apologies to real autists) as they are rarely reachable for social interactions. Saying "good morning" in the elevator? No chance. Nor recognizing people left or right.

Or in the gym, where they block machines for many minutes, i.e. much more than the one or two minutes of resting in between sets, while paging through social media in between sets. Asking them to unblock a machine in the gym? Some are reachable there if you stand in front of them and wave your hands.

And walking the dog, or strolling with kids while on "social" media. I often observe them to neither recognize when either dog or kid try to show them things or events. I sometimes wonder (aloud and near them ;-), if they phone with their companions.

Oldie but Goldie: Charlene Guzman's video "I forgot my phone" from 12 years ago:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OINa46HeWg8

I like music and I like videos, but I also learned to concentrate on the task at hand and/or the people besides me.

Disclaimer: listening to music while doing chores like washing dishes is OK. But I prefer a dish washer and connect to people while the dish washer is running.
by cs702 | 2026-02-06 14:35:09+00:00
> if you use enough terms in the Taylor expansion to get the same result as standard attention to within machine precision, the resulting constant state size should give you an upper bound for the amount of data the LLM can effectively retrieve from its context.

I think you've nailed it: Machine precision puts an upper bound (of constant size) on how much information an LLM can retrieve from its context.
Show HN: iPlotCSV: CSV Data, Visualized Beautifully
by maxmoq | 2026-02-06 14:35:34+00:00
iPlotCSV is a web tool for visualizing CSVs. Drop your file, pick your columns, get an interactive chart. That's it. No signup.

Includes a full suite of post processing tools, filters, engineering functions for strain gauges, etc.

We all know setting up python or creating slow and non interactive charts in Excel sucks.
by mytailorisrich | 2026-02-06 14:35:39+00:00
I quite agree with this, and it goes further than the decision against X with now also the prelimenary decision against Tiktok [1]:

> Today, the European Commission preliminarily found TikTok in breach of the Digital Services Act for its addictive design. This includes features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and its highly personalised recommender system.

Very fuzzy stuff, but luckily:

> TikTok now has the possibility to exercise its right to defence

So it does indeed sound like "we have decided that you are guilty but we'll give you a chance to explain yourself (good luck with that)", or perhaps "any last words?"

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...
by setgree | 2026-02-06 14:35:52+00:00
I asked

> Can you find an academic article that _looks_ legitimate -- looks like a real journal, by researchers with what look like real academic affiliations, has been cited hundreds or thousands of times -- but is obviously nonsense, e.g. has glaring typos in the abstract, is clearly garbled or nonsensical?

It pointed me to a bunch of hoaxes. I clarified:

> no, I'm not looking for a hoax, or a deliberate comment on the situation. I'm looking for something that drives home the point that a lot of academic papers that look legit are actually meaningless but, as far as we can tell, are sincere

It provided https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S246802302....

Close, but that's been retracted. So I asked for "something that looks like it's been translated from another language to english very badly and has no actual content? And don't forget the cited many times criteria. " And finally it told me that the thing I'm looking for probably doesn't exist.

For my tastes telling me "no" instead of hallucinating an answer is a real breakthrough.
by vitorlourenco | 2026-02-06 14:36:25+00:00
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