MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by donmcronald | 2026-02-25 23:31:44+00:00
The good outweighs the harm until it happens to you. The problem is that even if the failure rate is low, the failure can be catastrophic for the people suffering from it.

I use Ubiquiti as an example for an update they pushed to their UniFi systems a long time ago (5+ years). Some people were configuring their devices to use an https URL to connect to a management console when it was supposed to be http. Before the update, the console accepted http on the https port. After it didn't. That caused devices to disconnect from the management portal and remain offline.

When people complained, Ubiquiti said they realized it would happen, but it "would only affect a tiny percentage of customers." However, most customers that were affected had a 100% rate of failure. One person had something like 600-700 devices that got disconnected and required manual reconfiguration.

A 1% failure rate might be ok for the company, but it shouldn't be if the 1% of people affected suffer 100% failure. The distribution of the failures needs to be considered.

I had my primary domain that my entire family has used for 25 years put on that blacklist. If I hadn't been able to get it removed it would have had a massive negative impact on my life. Had it been suspended by the registry the way the OP of this article describes, I'm not sure how it would have worked out.

So it may be a false positive of .0000000001%, but would have ruined my life. I have 900 entries in my password manager and probably half of them are tied to that domain. Is my entire digital life acceptable collateral damage? Is yours?
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-25 23:32:11+00:00
> They’re also cutting dependence on Visa/Mastercard because tying your payment rails to a declining, unstable empire is a bad long-term bet.

People need to get real here and I've got numbers: Europe is the declining, unstable empire.

The US is the US and in three years there's going to be another president. But the EU's problems are much deeper.

Inflation-adjusted, since the 2008 crisis, the Eurozone's GDP barely grew while both China and the US' GDPs grew like crazy.

2008 to 2025 Eurozone's GDP: $14 trillion USD to $17 trillion USD (+18%, inflation adjusted it's basically zero)

US same period: about $15 trillion to $30 trillion [1]

China same period: $4 trillion to $19 trillion, going from not a quarter of the Eurozone's size in 2008 to surpassing the Eurozone in 2025 FFS! In 17 years. This is jaw dropping.

That's when reality should kick in for people who believe the EU is not declining.

At this rate it's not even declining: it's falling from a cliff.

Now, sure, the Eurozone ain't the entire EU and countries outside the Eurozone like Poland are, thankfully, doing better. But things still look terribly bad.

Moreover The EU managed to shoot itself in the foot by destroying the biggest export of its biggest economy: german cars. They handed over the market to chinese EVs.

The EU also managed, when the US advised it not to, to become dependant on Russia for energy. And of course four years ago we now all know how well that played for Germany: Russia wasn't our friend anymore and energy price --and the industries in Germany do need lots of energy-- skyrocketted.

The EU is destroying itself both economically and culturally. Things are looking terribly bad over here.

I don't know how anyone can look at the US and at China's GDP growth compared to the Eurozone and believe that somehow Europe is doing fine.

Europe is not doing fine: Europe is definitely a declining, unstable (lots of far-right vs far-left parties opposing themselves in elections in many EU countries now) empire.

That said I very much welcome ditching MS software.

[1] round numbers but it is what it is: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP
by cube00 | 2026-02-25 23:32:51+00:00
> they don’t do proper testing

They bring down production because the version string was changed incorrectly to add an extra date. That would have been picked up in even the most basic testing since the app couldn't even start.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46532075

The fix (not even a PR or commit message to explain) https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/commit/63eefe157ac...

No root cause analysis either https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/16682#issue...
by themafia | 2026-02-25 23:32:53+00:00
> Usa still don't even have universal social security

It does though. There are several programs, some administered by the federal government, and some by the states. We don't have "single payer" but we absolutely have "universal social security."

> and medications are overpriced 10 time more.

If you use the sticker price. Sure. It looks that way. If you use the actual pharmacy receipts the story is far different.
by tom_ | 2026-02-25 23:33:11+00:00
It's not just an icon in the notification area though!

There's a keyboard shortcut for it. I never figured out quite what it was, but every now and again Copilot would open itself while I was using Visual Studio or Emacs on my Windows 11 desktop PC. I assume I'm either hitting the shortcut, or a ghost key on my keyboard is stepping in and hitting it for me. (I could never reproduce this by pressing Windows+C.)

Copilot does stuff in the background. What stuff? I don't know. But, occasionally, on my desktop PC, I'd get a message box popping up saying that Copilot was unable to open this or that file. (Though, yes, perhaps it is just opening that file for no reason. Hard to say.)

(Both of these went away when I removed all the Copilot apps from the list of startup stuff.)

Copilot can be persuaded to get itself into a state where it expects you to log in. I had this happen on my old Windows 10 laptop somehow, when I logged in as my (local only) work user, something that existed to let me sign in to my old employer's Teams setup, their VPN, and use Remote Desktop to my work PC. And each time I logged in to my laptop, Copilot would pop up a login dialog. Though I can't deny that this was a handy reminder to remind me to quit it.
by Zopieux | 2026-02-25 23:33:11+00:00
It is not even controversial or anormal. If nobody cares about an infrastructure and reluctantly maintains it only because it _has_ to (e.g. by federal mandate), then yeah, you get bottom-of-the-barrel service and a negative feedback loop (no ridership → cuts).

Successful transit systems work when the political will is there to support it.
by easygenes | 2026-02-25 23:33:15+00:00
I do like the ArchWiki, but have found that some of their admins suffer from the same sort of petty tyranny and procedural injustice that commonly befalls internet moderation staff. I have seen the moderators go on unprompted rants against users in comment pages, be met with patience and understanding, and then try to hide the conversation when it wasn't going their way, without explanation.
by dataflow | 2026-02-25 23:33:20+00:00
> No notice that I had better have access to that "recovery" email address that I hadn't bothered to keep up to date

The rest of your complaints make sense but this one is bizarre. It's a recovery email, isn't having access to it the entire point? Like what else did you think it was supposed to be there for beside being accessible?

Google clearly misused it for something else, and you have a strong argument they shouldn't have. This one sentence just needlessly weakens the argument.
by 5o1ecist | 2026-02-25 23:33:44+00:00
> and then posted a solution that only someone technical could actually use.

What do you mean by that? I don't understand.

I really don't think this requires someone "technical" anymore. ChatGPT might not give a python script, but a powershell script. Or possibly create a batch file.

Generally, since the default assumption is that the user is a moron, it chooses the path of least resistance, meaning that it all boils to the user being able to process written words and following instructions.

Nowadays, it seems to me that the real hurdle is the fact that far too many people can't properly read, write or express themselves anymore, let alone ask questions that might expose ... inadequacies.
by MaKey | 2026-02-25 23:34:10+00:00
This is not a technical issue - it's a societal one. Do we want online ID verification? Are the trade-offs worth it? Do we want to make the internet a place that requires an ID everywhere for age verification or to prove that you're human? What would the implications be?

Regarding your implementation: Most people don't have a passport, so it's a non-starter - but again, this topic is not a technical issue.
by ryanobjc | 2026-02-25 23:34:11+00:00
Paint VOCs sounds fine, until it's done at industrial scale, and it's also your neighbor, and also all the children in the neighborhood have asthma, and also healthcare is a lot more expensive...

This list isn't things you "cant do in california" but "polluting things you can't do in highly populated cities".

I'm not sure what the conclusion here is other than health is not important.
by throwaway3060 | 2026-02-25 23:34:16+00:00
What is ample? Can you provide any evidence that Gaza can be put in the same breath as Leningrad? Russia calls all the West "Nazis", should we just listen to them?

I think you really need to learn more about the eastern front, if you're going to keep making or supporting comparisons based on incomplete knowledge. There is no comparison between the experiences in France and the experiences in Ukraine during WW2. There is a reason why historian Timothy Snyder titled one of his books "Bloodlands".

Gaza is no Leningrad or Stalingrad.
by observationist | 2026-02-25 23:34:23+00:00
They just really, really want to be European.

Just look at what they've done about rebuilding the Palisades, and the nonsense they've perpetrated, allowing people to live and build in places that are completely impossible to make safe to live because of incredibly stupid bureacratic policy conflicts. And then the staggering mismanagement of water resources, allowing huge tax breaks and claims on water rights to giant corporations, then completely taxing and running out farmers and landowners with legacy rights, making it impossible for them to live there.

At least if they drive everyone productive out of the state, the environment will be pristine.

It's like some insanely scaled up version of gentrification, but in the most aggressively, offensively stupid way possible. California is a tasteless joke.
by UqWBcuFx6NV4r | 2026-02-25 23:34:54+00:00
What’s the point of your comment?

We know that markdown is text, we understand that text is text.

LLMs have very obviously been intentionally trained to work with markdown, specifically. Its prominence in LLM output far outweighs the real-world existence of raw Markdown online.

That’s the point that was being made.

What’s next. Are you going to say stochastic parrot?
by throwyawayyyy | 2026-02-25 23:35:29+00:00
What I find interesting, and reflects my ignorance of how these things are used, is that if you look at, say, FAANG companies, Office isn't used. I've worked for two FAANGs over the past couple of years, and everything is done via Google docs. Replacing a giant suite like Office looks hard, replacing something simpler like Google docs looks very much simpler, and surely should suffice?
by mxuribe | 2026-02-25 23:35:41+00:00
I'm in a similar boat...and over the weeks where i have been sending the requested docs/files...Apple reps come back and state that one of docs i sent them was not valid...so i ask them to clarify their "definition" of the doc..and they just either reply with unhelpful comments, or delay a little and delay things further. When someone asks for a copy of a payslip and you send it...but then Apple says its not a payslip, i genuinely am sad about the overall state of the world...I dislike apple and all these big tech providers for their abusive control/power and at the same time vast layers and levels of incompetence. :-(
by pibaker | 2026-02-25 23:35:56+00:00
> That's the depressing part in modern (western) society

Do you think the average medieval farmer was questioning how everything around him worked while he worked day and night trying not to starve? Do you think today the average Japanese person knows more about water supply than the average American? This is such a weirdly romantic view about the past that I don't know where to even start.

> Food comes from trucks distributing from a factory that gets ingredients from farms and other types of food procurement.

This is like saying the internet is when two computer send 1s and 0s over copper wire. A technically correct description that lacks so much detail that it is practically useless.
by arjie | 2026-02-25 23:36:01+00:00
Neat idea. I suspect that it will suffer just like comment karma does now. I think the practice of the matter for me is that dimension reduction to 1d didn't work. Other people have an opinion of text that is clearly radically different from mine. An example of something that I dislike reading is kvetching about how "corporations are ruining this and that". It's not that I disagree and don't want to see the opinion. I believe that the SNR on that is low. It's usually the 500th time I'm going to see that comment and there's rarely anything novel in it. But comments like that are popular amongst others.

So clearly opinions vary, and I'm a fan of that. The past version of social networks involved moderators who acted like the steering committee of the place and kept the culture going. But social networks like HN are very big now, and big social networks do have lots of advantages, but they come with the other side of things: I no longer have a way to select the people I want to listen to (especially on a flatspace like HN).

So I cannot rely on all other people, and I cannot rely on moderators. Realistically, an arbitrary person cannot also rely on me. But maybe some people can rely on me. And maybe there are some people I can rely on. So I'd rather treat my network as an overlay over a fundamental larger network. And I'll be missing in many people's overlay and others will be missing in mine and I like that.

But still, perhaps better 'karma' alternatives exist. If your score works, I'd be thrilled!
by philwelch | 2026-02-25 23:36:02+00:00
Private car ownership is a better everyday solution for almost anyone who can afford it, which includes the vast majority of Americans. If buses tried to compete with cars, they would lose. The only remaining niche for the bus is as a public accommodation for the poor, disabled, and elderly, or occasionally in dense city centers.

At least that’s what I think. But if you’re right, and there’s a version of bus transport that’s viable without subsidy, then there should be a market opportunity for a private business to provide that type of bus transport. This actually exists for long range intercity buses already, but you’d think it should be possible inside of some cities. I haven’t looked into this in a lot of detail but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was effectively impossible to try and start a private bus service in most cities, specifically because that would reduce ridership of city transit and threaten all of the unionized public sector jobs in that system. In which case the bus system isn’t really even for the poor and elderly anymore; it’s for the transit workers union, which undoubtedly is a player in city politics.
by altairprime | 2026-02-25 23:36:13+00:00
How can I apply this system to a random discussion archive page at HN in order to evaluate it more efficiently as a discussion guidance mechanism? I don't want to see usernames in that example, and I don't want a dynamic example either — but I think it would be much easier to convince HN that your AI product is worthwhile if you present an HN-specific example. Specifically, I suggest you take an HN discussion (the HTML is very simply structured), pipe each comment through your engine, and append the <div style="background-color: soft-blue;"> "Your comment etc etc" responses that would have been shown to each comment in the discussion.

Looking at the most popular results for " " on HN Algolia, I would recommend selecting a post that has at least a few hundred comments and is also about HN or YC or YC-adjacent people (since the mods are extra light-touch on such posts), in order to take the best possible sample for unmoderated discussion to evaluate Respectify against. This post is a good example that fits those criteria; I didn't pay attention to it at the time and I haven't assessed the discussion beyond 'total comment count >= 500': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40521657

I recognize that's theoretically a lot of effort, but from a coding standpoint, it's simply `for $comment in $dom.xpath(/blah/blah/comment) { $ai.eval($comment); undef $comment.username; $comment.append($respectify.bulleted_list_with_html_colors); }` for what has the potential to be an extremely convincing demo to the target audience of us here.
by bsder | 2026-02-25 23:36:27+00:00
> I have personally met Caltrans engineers who might as well have stepped out of a time machine from 1970.

This is the problem with outsourcing everything in the name of "efficiency".

If you don't actually do things in house, you don't know how to do them.

Everybody wants the US to manufacturer and build more until they have to cut a check.
by oblio | 2026-02-25 23:36:51+00:00
> Then they can put all their data in EU servers and not worry US authorities can look at it even with a valid warrant and a court order.

Ah, Americans. "Valid warrants and court orders" are national. Unless there are international agreements (of which there are many), whatever Bumf** PD, Oregon does should have no impact on what a Lithuanian server hosting company does. Of course, this is not how it works in real life and many non-Americans consider that abusive, and rightfully so.

FYI - this kind of extra-territoriality was what started WW1. An ethnic Serb Bosnian (Gavrilo Princip) shot the Austro-Hungarian heir apparent and as a result Austria-Hungary sent Serbia an ultimatum.

The ultimatum contained lots of harsh terms, which Serbia accepted, except for 1. The term they refused was to allow Austro-Hungarian police, prosecutors, judges to directly investigate, arrest, prosecute and imprison Gavrilo's possible collaborators. And the reason they refused that was because it's basically giving up sovereignty. Once you let another country send their police force investigate, arrest, prosecute and imprison whomever they want, they have full control. They can imprison your prime minister and you have no recourse except for starting a war.

So Serbia accepted that if it wanted to remain independent, it would have to accept fighting a war.
by 5o1ecist | 2026-02-25 23:37:19+00:00
I fail to see your point. That's not what this is about.

I wrote "Welcome to 2026", because the user, apparently, did not yet know that it only takes a few sentences for having it create a simple notepad clone.

If I had asked pqtyw to write me a barebones notepad clone, 20 years ago, would pqtyw have done that? For free? Within a single minute?

No!
by raziel2701 | 2026-02-25 23:37:21+00:00
Are other states building all this manufacturing/semiconductor capacity? I think it's an overall USA thing, we just don't do manufacturing anymore because it's cheaper to do it in another country.

Not sure what the point of the website is. To me it looks like a bad faith argument. The secular trend in the US has been to increase margins by moving manufacturing to other countries.

The tariffs are certainly not making it easier to manufacture domestically.
by OsrsNeedsf2P | 2026-02-25 23:37:45+00:00
So much incorrect and misinformation in these comments. As someone who is building an agent[0] with MCP tools, neither the MCP tool description nor the response is the problem. Both of those are easily solved by not bloating them.

The real killer is the input tokens on each step. If you have 100k tokens in the conversation, and the LLM calls an MCP tool, the output and the existing conversation is sent back. So now you've input 200k tokens to the LLM.

Now imagine 10 tool calls per user message - or 50. You're sending 1-5M input tokens, not because the MCP definitions or tool responses are large, but because at each step, you have to send the whole conversation again.

"what about caching" - Only 90% savings, also cache misses are surprisingly common (we see as low as 40% cache hit rate)

"MCP definitions are still large" - not compared to any normal conversation. Also these get cached

We've seen the biggest savings by batching/parallelizing tool calls. I suspect the future of LLM tool usage will have a different architecture, but CLI doesn't solve the problems either.

[0] https://ziva.sh, it's an agent specialized for Godot[1]

[1] https://godotengine.org
by dh2022 | 2026-02-25 23:37:52+00:00
Not anymore. Today I tried to copy paste a string of 15 ascii characters into an Excel cell. Excel spun around for 20 seconds then blurted out an error that "the data is too big". I hit F2 (enter cell Edit Mode), pasted the 15 characters in the edit window and this was I was able to get the data in the cell.

Excel has gone downhill massively.
by entrustai | 2026-02-25 23:38:00+00:00
Interesting layer to enforce policy at. You're governing what the
agent can do — filesystem, shell, execution. There's a complementary
problem one layer up: governing what the agent can say before output
reaches a user or downstream system.

The failure modes are different. An agent that deletes the wrong file
causes immediate visible damage. An agent that outputs a guaranteed
return, a clinical claim it can't support, or a sycophantic opener
in a regulated context causes liability that surfaces weeks later in
a compliance review.

The audit trail approach you've taken with HMAC on approvals is the
right instinct for the action layer. The same logic applies to the
output layer — you need to prove not just what was blocked, but that
the check happened at all, against a specific versioned policy, at a
specific time.

Good work on the blast radius simulation — that's the kind of
deterministic pre-flight check that makes governance defensible.
by davidguetta | 2026-02-25 23:38:51+00:00
So if i understand your point you are saying "LLMs are not gonna do better that a (possibly imperfect) average human consensus if we don't actively bias them" ? First of all it does not seem that bad if that's the case.

Secondly trying to go further seem to edge to the entire question of 'is there an actual truth and can LLMs be trained to find them?'.

My opinion is that in many cases there is 'truth', and typically the human consensus, when acting in good faith, is trying to converge into it. When it's not necessarily possibly to have a "truth" (like in history for example where perspective is very important), "consensus" tend to manifest into several thought currents exisiting at the same time. If a LLM is able to summarize them, this is already coolgreat.

In some domains like math however there IS truth and LLM have shown great proficiency to reach it. However it is an open question to 1/ what is the nature of it 2/ do humans have a innate sense of the concept beyond statistical approximation or strong correlations and 3/ and machine can reach it too.

I had a very long conversation with ChatGPT on this that seemed to get very deep into philosophical concepts i was clearly not familiar with but my understanding was there IS a non zero possibility that it is possible to train a model to actually seek truth and that this ability should not be contained to humans only.

I won't have additional arguments to convince you of the above, but at the end i still at the moment prefer the Grok approach (if it is truly what they do at X) to 'seek truth' than someone giving the fight saying "eh everything biased so let's go full relativism instead to not offend people or look too whateverculture-centered"