MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JuniperMesos | 2026-02-25 18:53:18+00:00
What specific educational test would you like to see for someone to be legally eligible to vote in some jurisdiction? SAT score higher than a certain threshold (what specific threshold?). What if huge numbers of people cheat on the test in order to be able to legally vote? What if instead the educational criteria is a degree from some credited educational institution? Who decides what institutions will be authorized to grant people the right to vote or not? What if some authorities within those educational institutions believe in universal suffrage and so make sure to give suffrage-granting degrees to literally everyone who sets foot in their institution, regardless of their academic performance? (During the Vietnam War in the US many college professors gave passing grades to all males in their classes, in order to allow them to keep their student draft deferments, to try to prevent them from being drafted into the US military to fight in Vietnam).

There's a set of similar questions one could ask about exactly how you implement a ban on "voting yourself other people's stuff", in an adversarial political system where everyone has a different idea of what that means and is motivated to use whatever constitutional framework exists to ensure that their idea gets structurally advantaged.
by margalabargala | 2026-02-25 18:53:21+00:00
> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north.

That doesn't tell the whole story though. If you own 100 slaves, you need to spend nonzero resources maintaining them, or else they will starve and then you have zero slaves. So the owner has less wealth than the equivalent person in the North that has the same income but zero slaves. You can't directly compare GDP per capita excluding enslaved people.

I do agree with your broader point about usage of labor and how being able to have leisure via slavery is economic.
Show HN: Elev8or Run Creator Marketing Like Paid Ads
by Sourabhsinr | 2026-02-25 18:53:25+00:00
Hi HN,

We built Elev8or to solve a problem we kept seeing: brands run influencer marketing like spreadsheets, not like performance marketing.

Elev8or is a creator marketing platform that helps brands discover creators, manage campaigns, collaborate, and track ROI in one system.

Our goal is to make creator marketing structured, measurable, and scalable — similar to how paid ads platforms work.

We’re early and would genuinely appreciate feedback from founders and builders here. Happy to answer technical, product, or strategy questions.

Thanks!
by giraffe_lady | 2026-02-25 18:53:55+00:00
I know on reddit since basically the very beginning there has been a market for accounts with authentic but anodyne histories. It ends up being easier to make them yourself and then just occasionally use them for whatever guerilla marketing, astroturf campaign, or propaganda operation is your actual goal. But still until recently you pretty much had to pay people to sit and post on social media on a bunch of accounts to generate these histories.

This use was one of the first things that occurred to me when LLMs started getting genuinely good at summarizing texts and conversations. And I assume a fair bit of this has always happened on HN too. I've never moderated here obviously so I have no first hand insight but the social conventions here are uniquely ripe for it and it has a disproportionate influence on society through the dominance of the tech industry, making it a good target.
by Moldoteck | 2026-02-25 18:54:01+00:00
The most important factors for public transport usage is reliability (it comes on time) speed and frequency(under 5-10 min wait time depending on area). For high demand areas- trams, for lower demand - trolleys or busses.

To achieve reliability speed and frequency transport needs own lanes and semaphore priority. If there are too few lanes - make one lane dedicated to pub transport and another - single direction for cars. Voila. You can start at worst with 15-20 min wait time, but reliable, and increase nr or units where demand is higher up to using a tram

Everything else has secondary priority. Even the mentioned safety aspect - it'll matter much less if the next bus will come in 5-10 mins and you can skip the current one because of some drunk ppl.
by white_viel | 2026-02-25 18:54:03+00:00
Finally managed to kill the traffic:
1. renamed the worker - the bot was bypassing the route on the domain and using the worker.dev domain
2. add WAF rules to block gptbot in user agent
3. serve zip bomb on request from GPT.

interesting that GPT was accessing the worker directly to bypass the WAF rule son Cloudflare
by fn-mote | 2026-02-25 18:54:08+00:00
This argument doesn’t mesh with what I experience in my daily life.

Busses go places I care about: two blocks from my work, and to the airport.

My US city is dense. Not like Europe, but unless the argument is that major metropolitan areas in the US are not dense enough (LA?), I don’t buy it.

Bus transit has problems, but I don’t think it’s as simple as the parent is asserting.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-02-25 18:54:25+00:00
As the author notes,

> Here’s the fun bit: as of right now, there are essentially zero RVA23-compliant RISC-V boards you can actually buy. They’re coming – a handful of promising-looking boards from Sipeed, Milk-V, Banana Pi and others are expected around April/May 2026 – but they’re not on shelves yet. Even the Orange Pi RV2, released in March 2025, is RVA20 only, which means it already can’t run Ubuntu 25.10. Ouch.

I'm not familiar enough with Ubuntu or Snaps to say how much of a pain it would be to just use an older OS version, but if someone is in the Ubuntu ecosystem I certainly wouldn't blame them for not wanting to spend money on hardware that the OS has already deprecated.

(And IMHO the complete lack of available hardware means that Ubuntu made a poor choice here, but that's rather beside the point; this author is working inside a specific existing ecosystem, and their choices seem reasonable in that context.)

Although, thinking further.... I do wonder if it wouldn't be better to explicitly use RVA20 with a compatible OS (probably Ubuntu 24.04) in order to ship binaries that are as compatible as possible. Like, if you ship a snap that uses RVA23 instructions, your app won't work on existing hardware, right? (Whether that hardware is running Ubuntu 20.04, or Debian, or Gentoo, or...)
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-25 18:54:37+00:00
The US spends $1B/year on climate change related weather disasters. Waiting is not affordable nor sustainable. Gas cars already get a free ride by not paying for their externalities, the true price of gas, if priced in, would be closer to ~$8/gallon. The longer we wait, the more expensive it will be to remediate harm incurred by not getting off of fossil fuels sooner. It is, simply put, stealing from the future.
by ryandrake | 2026-02-25 18:55:01+00:00
There have always been a handful of Internet Tough Guys saying things on forums like "LOL Nuke them! hur hur hur hur!" Totally disregardable vibes and memes. Now, we have an actual US government administration that is run on the same Tough Guy vibes and memes. I don't think it matters what most people think. The people in power might just do it for the lulz.
by tomxor | 2026-02-25 18:55:05+00:00
> the number of bus stops might matter at the margins, we’re not talking about a system where marginal improvements will matter

Did you read the article? The central argument of reducing stops is bus speed, not margins. It doesn't matter how economical buses are if they are 1/10th the speed of driving.

I am not in the US, but I have personally experienced a transition in bus route speed between city outskirts and a city centre, it changed buses from completely impractical last resort to a competitive commuter option, and I stopped driving. A central aspect to bus speed was reducing number of stops and differentiating between medium distance and short distance local buses to avoid highly convoluted routes for commuters.

Another factor was eliminating boarding inefficiency by removing ticket purchases while boarding, tickets can be bought on phones or at a digital kiosk at bus stops. It used to be common to wait minutes at bus stops while people board, now it's seconds.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-02-25 18:55:06+00:00
Like, no kidding I think the thing I'm expressing. Why state that?

One reason might be to acknowledge that you're not being prescriptive, but leaving room for a subjective POV in situations that call for it.

Likewise, the GP's use of "actually" acknowledges the contrast between what one might expect (that some preliminary type-checking might happen during initial parsing) and what in fact happens (no type checks occur until the template is used.) It doesn't seem out of line in that case.
by spogbiper | 2026-02-25 18:55:22+00:00
I think it started with IBM: System/360 and /370, PS/2, OS/2, PL/I

And then Gary Kildall also seemed to like it with CP/M and PL/M, but those were after IBM had used it and I'd guess Gary was just copying IBM.

Between just those two influences you cover a huge portion of the mainframe and micro computer worlds during the 60s-80s
by chung8123 | 2026-02-25 18:55:30+00:00
Public transport has an identity problem in the US. Trying to serve 100% of your market will result in a worse service for everyone. It needs to decide if it is for the handicap, the people that don't drive, the people that want to commute, etc.

Making fewer stops helps the commute people and those that are able bodied. It doesn't help serve the people that are handicap.
by elliotbnvl | 2026-02-25 18:55:37+00:00
I have a goal of setting up solar on my property in the woods that goes directly to a wall of batteries, maybe Tesla, maybe something else. But definitely not going back into the grid. Does anybody have suggestions or advice on how to do this?

Who are the best companies doing this right now in New England? What products are folks using to store electricity? Are there any good resources for this kind of thing?
by rubenflamshep | 2026-02-25 18:55:39+00:00
I've found VSCode _ok_ to work with across across different workspaces/projects. The window memory is hit and miss. There's a secondary side bar I've been trying to NOT have open on startup but always seem to stick around. I'd prefer to programmatically manage the windows so I can tinker with an automated setup but the VSCode API/Plugins for managing this are terrible and tend to fail silently.

CLI within VSCode is workable but most of my VSCode envs are within a docker container. This is a pattern that I'm moving more and more away from as agents within a container kind of suck.
by akramachamarei | 2026-02-25 18:55:51+00:00
IIRC it's use is to distinguish vowels that belong to separate syllables with vowels which form a diphthong. I think this could be beneficial to language learners, to give them a hint that cooperate is pronounced "ko ah puh rayt" instead of "ku puh rayt", and likewise naïve as "nah eev" than "nayv" or "nighv".
by ajsnigrutin | 2026-02-25 18:55:58+00:00
On one hand, it's a "people problem"... on the other, it's a software problem too.

"back in my time", you'd have some c code, one .conf file, you'd "make", edit the config (or hope it works with default settings), run, and you'd have a program running. Now you need five different services running, it comes in a docker, running on some random port, proxied to another random port, the configs are split into 12 yaml files, plus it needs 7 gigs of hdd space...

..sometimes providing the same functionality as the old 300kB software of the yesteryear.
by Peanuts99 | 2026-02-25 18:56:20+00:00
Context on the first one, she wasn't jailed for the post itself. She pleaded guilty (against her own legal advice apparently) to the crime of inciting racial hatred which carries a prison sentence.

There were other people also arrested at the time who did not plead guilty to this and were not charged.

Also she did call for a hotel filled with migrants to be set on fire while people were actively trying to do just that.
by Moldoteck | 2026-02-25 18:56:38+00:00
I'm not a fan of busses and use em only by necessity. Otherwise I prefer trams and bicycles much more. Trams are more chill due to less hard turns and more space, bicycles are a beast for fast arrival if infra is ok. In Zurich trams are very nice, but bike infra comsi comsa up to bad depending on area.
by skybrian | 2026-02-25 18:56:41+00:00
How about taking a small, real open source project that has an AGENTS.md and showing how to add evals and optimize it?

The question I have is: what are we optimizing for and how do we measure it?

In your own repos, I see you have a fork of safepass, which seems like a nice simple project, but it doesn't have an agents file yet.
by kstrauser | 2026-02-25 18:56:41+00:00
I think it’s more like you registered the car in their name. Now they’re allowed to use it, and also responsible for the thing which they didn’t want.

Consider that the “imposter” starts uploading child porn or something, and it’s on an account registered to your address. I think it’s perfectly A-OK to tell the service that it’s not be using the thing and I want them to close the account someone created in my name.
by shagie | 2026-02-25 18:56:45+00:00
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbruner/2011/10/20/the-high-s... has some interesting data on the Columbia River and its dams.

From that https://youtu.be/jvnaiHFT6nQ is a visualization of the water releases for the river to allow the water to get to the right dam for the anticipated power use.
by observationist | 2026-02-25 18:57:04+00:00
Current AI requires a human in the loop for anything non-trivial. Even the most used feature, coding, causes chaos without strict human oversight.

You can vibe-code a standalone repository, but any sort of serious work with real people working alongside bots, every last PR has to be reviewed, moderated, curated, etc.

Everything AI does that's not specifically intended to be a standalone, separate project requires that sort of intervention.

The safe way to do this is having a sandboxed test environment, high level visibility and a way to quickly and effectively review queued up actions, and then push those to a production environment. You need the interstitial buffer and a way of reverting back to the last known working state, and to keep the bot from having any control over what gets pushed to production.

Giving them realtime access to production is a recipe for disaster, whether it's your personal computer or a set of accounts built specifically for them or whatever, without your human in the loop buffer bad things will happen.

A lot of that can be automated, so you can operate confidently with high level summaries. If you can run a competent local AI and develop strict processes for review and summaries and so forth, kind of a defense in depth approach for agents, you can still get a lot out of ClawBot. It takes work and care.

Hopefully frameworks for these things start developing all of the safety security and procedure scaffolding we need, because OpenClaw and AI bots have gone viral. I'm getting all sorts of questions about how to set them up by completely non-technical people that would have trouble installing a sound system. Very cool to see, I'm excited for it, but there will definitely be some disasters this year.
by GeoAtreides | 2026-02-25 18:57:10+00:00
>One, the article asserts that too many stops is the main cause of low ridership in the US. I didn’t even see a correlation (which would still not prove one causes the other) between number of stops and ridership. This is the central thesis of the article.

With all due respect, I feel the one asserting things without argument might be you. The whole article is about how number of stops is too high and so drives low ridership.

I am incapable of even trying to provide quotes from the text, as that would mean simply restating the text in its entirety.
by ashwindharne | 2026-02-25 18:57:37+00:00
Looks great -- always wished the admin panel came with more configurable bells and whistles. I've been exploring Quarkus recently (https://quarkus.io/), and it has a Dev UI with a similar extensible "panels" pattern. It's a bit different than Django since it's not for running in prod, but nonetheless it's pretty helpful.

sort of a tangent, but quarkus also has a concept of "dev services" that are monitorable via the dev UI. It uses Testcontainers to start and autowire runtime deps (postgres, redis, keycloak, etc.). Pretty pleasant experience to get the whole stack spun up and observable alongside the dev server.
by WorldMaker | 2026-02-25 18:57:59+00:00
Citizens United was a 2010 decision. Several of the judges on that case are still sitting judges in the Supreme Court. Since then one of the Congressional oversight decisions on vetting replacements for Supreme Court judges has been whether or not they (at least claim to) agree with the Citizens United decision.

The decision was made in the modern eye, in my lifetime. (The country needed modern Campaign Finance Reform before that point as well, but that decision marks an inflection point from Campaign Finance Reform feeling possible through normal means and court decisions to nearly impossible to overturn in our lifetimes.)
by MereInterest | 2026-02-25 18:58:31+00:00
> Making these extra stops causes the bus to 'miss' the light cycle at almost every stop.

This would be a much bigger change, but it's also possible for the lights to give priority to buses. When a bus approaches a light, that should trigger the lights to advance to the part of the cycle that gives the bus the green light. That way, you prioritize the 20 people in the bus rather than the 10 people each in their own car.
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-02-25 18:58:34+00:00
I'm using Helcim here in Canada. It's not great. Stripe used to be far nicer to use, has become fairly bloated and messy, yet it's still far nicer to use in general. The developer-first roots are still apparent.

Helcim takes ages to respond to tickets. They still haven't fully set up my account after weeks. You can't just do sandboxes or dev mode by default; you have to speak to a human via email who sets it up for you and provide the test card numbers. It takes ages.

The rates are much better and once it's fully set up and integrated, I guess it'll be fine? I'm not looking forward to needing support and adding further integrations.

I guess the moral here is that Stripe has gotten worse for small projects, but it's still really good.
by mrandish | 2026-02-25 18:58:53+00:00
Prior to the rise of LLM-written posts and the natural reaction of hair-trigger suspicion, I used to em and en dash fairly often in posts on HN. No reason really other than being a bit of a typography geek who happens to have always used dashes in casual writing instead of semicolons. So when I was setting up a modifier-key keyboard layer with AHK many years ago I put the em dash on modifier+dash just because I could - which made it easy.

Now someone may search old posts without a time cutoff and assume I'm an LLM. That combined with the fact I sometimes write longer posts and naturally default to pretty good punctuation, spelling and grammar, is basically a perfect storm of traits. I've already had posts accused twice in the past year of being an LLM.

Kind of sad some random quirk of LLM training caused a fun little typography thing I did just for myself (assuming no one else would even notice) to become something negative.
by sailingparrot | 2026-02-25 18:59:04+00:00
> Two, removing stops will likely not make the remaining stops nicer. Cities aren’t thinking about how to allocate a fixed bus budget.

But that’s not at all what the article is about?
The thesis is not that having bus stops with music and heating and free drinks will make more people take the bus, it’s that in the U.S., the slowness of buses is making them an unattractive option. And stopping too often is a major reason.

As someone living in SF I 100% agree. The bus stops all the time. The muni is also crazy slow on the west side because it has to mark every single stop at every block just like any car instead of just having priority.
by the_snooze | 2026-02-25 18:59:38+00:00
You see it in how services have twisted the meaning of "saving" something. Very rarely does it mean actually putting a file on your computer for you to access on your own terms as long as you have possession of it. More often, it just means associating something to your account, which is ultimately subject to the whims of the service provider.

It's engineered dependency.
by surgical_fire | 2026-02-25 18:59:43+00:00
> openai is subsidising their models so much that each year the keep doing it 20x and eventually reached 100x reduction

If that's the truth, then originally they were subsidizing their models by the same factors.

This is not a great argument no matter how you cut it. And even then I would need to see evidence that this is true.

> all the investors are stupid and they still invest in openai despite unprofitability

Much to the opposite, those people are very smart. OpenAI can be extremely unprofitable and they can still profit massively through an exit event.

> employees of openai and anthropic who have claimed that the unit costs are not high are also lying

Possibly? Especially if they are in the position to profit in the case of an exit event, they would have every incentive to paint a rosier picture about the company.

> all other providers are in on the lie

I have no idea who you are talking about.

> the chinese models like Deepseek is also in on the lie by posting research that is not plausible

As I previously stated, I have no idea if Deepseek is profitable. By the looks of things, neither do you. Mentioning Deepseek's research is a non-sequitur.

> the fact that you can run models in your laptop today that beat previous years models is also not enough

This has no bearing on the cost of inference.
by neko_ranger | 2026-02-25 19:00:23+00:00
Alignment of AI is hard, and aligned to whom? I just finished the safety chapter in Stripe Press's "An Oral History of AI", and there's a good quote in it: "It's an interesting question, how to tell the difference between a hallucination and deception." (I'll let you figure out who said it, you know their name).
by georgefrowny | 2026-02-25 19:00:34+00:00
That's exactly the point. It's a state (that of being boiling) that matter (some water) is in. Which is not the same as "state of matter", the compound word that is in the dictionary.

In talking about the validity of the suggested compound word "boiling water", an example of exactly what the article is talking about arises: when exactly does a sequence of invididual words (state, of, matter) become more than the sum of its parts? A further question raised by your comment is does the existence of a compound word with a specific meaning then rule out use of the words in a less specific manner. Perhaps for maximum clarity of expression, it's confusing, but is it wrong?

The general consensus among the HN crowd here seems to be quite vehement that "boiling water" has not reached the point where it "deserves" a dictionary entry. But there are words in many dictionaries like "cherry blossom" that I would say are little more deserving.
by giantrobot | 2026-02-25 19:00:42+00:00
With LLM's their internal state is their training + system prompt + context. Most chatbot UIs hide the context management. But if you take an existing conversation and replace a term in the context with another grammatically (and semantically) similar term then send that the LLM will adjust its output to that new "history".

It will have no conception or memory of the alternate line of discussion with the previous term. It only "knows" what is contained in the current combination of training + system prompt + context.

If you change the LLM's personal from "Sam" to "Alex" in the LLM's conception of the world it's always been "Alex". It will have no memory of ever being "Sam".