MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Gormo | 2026-02-20 01:05:56+00:00
> The foundation of law is not scientific exactness or scientific empiricism. It is the mechanism by which a state establishes norms.

Exactly. So it sounds like you're agreeing with me that qualification of a particular effect as "harm" is not a matter of "medical expertise", but is rather a question of subjective norms that is in fact on the opposite side of the is-ought gap from the side at which expertise is applicable.

> A law against murder does not stop murder, but it does tell you that society does not appreciate it.

Well, not exactly. This presumes that "society" in the abstract (a) actually has a general consensus on the question, and that (b) the rules imposed by the legal system reflect that broad consensus, rather than reflecting the values or intentions of the people administering the legal system, without necessarily aligning with those of the general public.

There are a lot of questions that do have broad consensus across society, but also a lot of subjective questions that different people answer very differently. And I think that the level of consensus that actually exists in terms of considering things causing physical injury or pain as "harm" is far, far greater than the level of consensus on treating anything that causes emotional stress as "harm".

I don't think that the "negative response" criteria that you're articulating is sufficient to reveal an underlying normative consensus: I would not presume that most people would equate harm with any kind of negative reaction. For example, I would personally not consider something harmful merely on account of being annoying, insulting, or even morally questionable (though there's often overlap in the last case).
by zadikian | 2026-02-20 01:06:08+00:00
I know the Rust trait system has an answer to every OO concept. Another is that data field inheritance is replaced by composition. But these are more workarounds for the rarer cases you want to do OO in Rust, not the intended usual path, and doing OOP this way will get tedious. Otherwise, there'd be no difference and everyone would call Rust an OO language.

Not so sure about not needing GC. Many times a problem seems easy without GC until you get into the weeds. Like why did ObjC feel the need to add ARC (not GC but similar goal)?
by jimbokun | 2026-02-20 01:06:21+00:00
I would collapse the senior engineer and architect roles into a single role and only hire people capable of doing both.

Owning the modules requires understanding the overall architecture and how the module’s API needs to fit into it, when a new module is required, when the architecture needs to change, and how to pragmatically migrate from one design to another in a live system.

All of that is easier if everyone is capable of operating at any level from overall architecture to micro optimizations.
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2026-02-20 01:06:57+00:00
The thing is that the university admin are not going to apply this in good faith. We know this because the current conservative movement is a steady stream of bad faith actions. From deportations, to free speech, to corruption, to weaponizing the DOJ, to DOGE, etc. etc.
This policy WILL be used to censor anything even a tiny bit to the left of hard right and will NEVER be used to censor anything on the right side of hard right.
by rpdillon | 2026-02-20 01:07:13+00:00
The point was that all the regulation on assault weapons doesn't have a meaningful effect. At best, you could reduce gun violence by 4%.

I wouldn't over-rotate on the comparison to foreign body objects: the point is, if you rely purely on the media to inform you about gun violence, you're going to get a funhouse mirror version of reality. It's way more exciting to write about the 40 school children killed in the last two years in mass shootings than the 16,000 depressed dads that blew their heads off in their garage with a handgun in the last 12 months (spitballing a bit, but 40,000 deaths, 50% of which are suicides, 80% of those are men).
by austin-cheney | 2026-02-20 01:07:21+00:00
Politicians lie because they are incentivized to do so. The simple solution is to increase the costs of ethical violations to an absurd level and keep politicians’ conduct under constant investigation.

In the US Army, for example, 25% of general officers are constantly under investigation. This does not mean general officers are constantly breaking the law but that conduct is continuously examined in case they do. The consequences are sufficient to deter so much of the self serving behavior we commonly associate with US politicians. At that point the cost becomes too high for narcissistic personalities to enter that line of work.

Narcissistic personality deterrence is what we want from politicians, which cannot happen when politicians largely police their own conduct hidden behind secret alliances.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-02-20 01:07:53+00:00
There's so many timeless books on how to write software, design patterns, lessons learned from production issues. I don't think AI will stop being used for open source, in fact, with the number of increasing projects adjusting their contributor policies to account for AI I would argue that what we'll see is always people who love to hand craft their own code, and people who use AI to build their own open source tooling and solutions. We will also see an explosion is needing specs for things. If you give a model a well defined spec, it will follow it. I get better results the more specific I get about how I want things built and which libraries I want used.
by alphazard | 2026-02-20 01:08:31+00:00
There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software.
In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh.

In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right.
The idea of a co-worker will go away.
Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient.
We pay huge communication/synchronization costs to eek out mild speed ups on projects by adding teams of people.
Software is going to become an individual sport, not a team sport, quickly.
The benefits we get from checking in with other humans, like error correction, and delegation can all be done better by AI.
I would rather a single human (for now) architect with good taste and an army of agents than a team of humans.
by stephencoyner | 2026-02-20 01:08:31+00:00
I saw Boris give a live demo today. He had a swarm of Claude agents one shot the most upvoted open issue on Excalidraw while he explained Claude code for about 20 minutes.

No lines of code written by him at all. The agent used Claude for chrome to test the fix in front of us all and it worked. I think he may be right or close to it.
by api | 2026-02-20 01:08:34+00:00
The dilution factor is something I hadn’t thought about.

Dump a few hundred foreigners in a town of 5000 and that’s very noticeable and some people will find it jarring. Dump ten thousand foreigners in a metro of three million and nobody will notice.

The point about conformism and exile cost is good too. Cities present endless options for social circles and employment. Little towns not so much.
by Arainach | 2026-02-20 01:09:09+00:00
>Law enforcement is not an armed gang

It always has been in America. Literally, the history of policing starts with armed gangs looking for escaped slaves, and never went away from those roots. You can see this in their "us or them" combative mentalities, their utter refusal to hold officers accountable even when obviously guilty, their tactics when governments try to impose rules on them, and everything else they do.
by luqtas | 2026-02-20 01:09:30+00:00
the vast majority of indigenous people died on the 1° 100 years of colonization (from 1500 (when America was "found") -> 1600); the number goes up to 80 million people dead... the paper i mentioned says partial immunity didn't taking effect on a war past 1700! do you really think pox wasn't abused the time they were killing millions of natives per year? that's what i'm reffering to, not (somehow) recent wars
by danbruc | 2026-02-20 01:10:01+00:00
GNU Taler also has a middleman, the exchange. And they play more or less exactly the same role as my company X is supposed to do, exchange money for tokens that are handed to websites when you visit them and which they can then redeem. And I would want to avoid true micro transactions, i.e. pay amount x for looking at one article, because then the amount you spent will depend on how many pages you visited in a given month and that might make you think about each click and in turn hinder adoption. I want to pool the money of all users, divide it by the total number of payed links visited in the last month, and then pay that much per click to each participating website.
by dankwizard | 2026-02-20 01:11:41+00:00
I would leave something about the article but I can't get over the horrendous layout of this website. Why is the article using only 20-30% of the horizontal space?

Why is the left pane similar posts wrapping after 2 or 3 words?

Shocking. I'd pay $1.00 to load this article and have it look decent.
by janalsncm | 2026-02-20 01:11:56+00:00
There is a (perhaps apocryphal) story of Michael Faraday showing his new invention of an electric motor to a politician in 1821. He had invented it after investigating strange twitching of a magnetic compass needle.

After seeing the motor, the politician asked “what good is it?” and based on what I can find Faraday either said “what use is a newborn baby” or “one day you’ll be able to tax it”.

So two points: One, you don’t always know things will have a high ROI from the start. Sometimes you just have to be curious. And two, politicians care about the next election in two/four years, not planting trees that won’t bear fruit for 30 years.
by joshribakoff | 2026-02-20 01:12:18+00:00
> Some observers have pointed out cases where CCC [sic] appears to regenerate artifacts strongly resembling existing implementations, including standard headers

Its not just that, we just had another thread here on HN recently discussing how the LLMs reproduce the entire work of Harry Potter with ~99% accuracy when prompted to do so with a jailbreak. This seems to contradict the “it’s remarkable progress” statement from the top of the article.
by totally-a-human | 2026-02-20 01:12:37+00:00
I work on a large mixed Rust/C systems codebase — been converting it piece by piece for a couple years now. The author's frustrations are legit, but I think the real question is simpler: how expensive are your bugs?

If a bug in your system means silent data corruption that nobody notices for a week — and I've lived this — Rust is worth every second of compile time. If a bug means a 500 and you redeploy, you're paying for insurance you don't need. Different worlds, different tools.

The thing I actually love about Rust — and this sounds weird — is how it handles failure. In C, every function call is an implicit "and also maybe something went horribly wrong, but let's just hope it didn't." You get used to it. You stop seeing it. Then one day you're staring at a corruption bug and you trace it back to an error return that got silently swallowed six call sites ago, and you feel physically ill. Result types are annoying when you're validating form input. They're a gift from god when you're the one who has to explain why someone's data is gone.

But yeah, for web stuff? Just use TypeScript. Life's too short to fight the borrow checker over a blog.
by thegdsks | 2026-02-20 01:12:43+00:00
Hi HN. I built AskVerdict after a week at Anthropic's Claude Code Hackathon.

The core idea: instead of one LLM giving you one answer, spawn multiple agents with distinct stances that debate the question through structured rounds. Forced cross-examination, argument status tracking (standing/challenged/rebutted/conceded), and a synthesized verdict with confidence scores.

Under the hood it's a TypeScript monorepo: Hono + Bun for the API, Next.js frontend, Postgres with Drizzle ORM. The debate engine uses a multi-tier model router — heavier models for orchestration and synthesis, lighter ones for debate rounds and classification. Keeps costs under $1 per debate.

BYOK only right now. Bring your own API keys for Claude, GPT, DeepSeek, Groq, or OpenRouter. No vendor lock-in.

Opening to the first 100 beta users. Feedback welcome, especially on the debate protocol design — should agents be allowed to concede gracefully or should the system force them to defend until the end?
by jjmarr | 2026-02-20 01:13:11+00:00
Chinese is too difficult of a language.

I have spent 5 years learning it part-time and have gotten to a level I can understand 30% of a TV show and 20% of a newspaper.

Unfortunately it's two different languages and both are unlike almost anywhere else. The spoken language is tonal and the consonants don't easily match English. If I have a heavy English accent, I just don't speak Chinese instead of sounding like a foreigner. And having to memorize the tones is brutal.

Meanwhile the written language has almost no correlation with the spoken language. You're just drawing a bunch of symbols on a paper in geometrical arrangements. Which is beautiful but difficult if you're used to being able to spell words based on how they sound.

Unless, of course, you're typing on a computer. In that case you must type the latinised spelling of the characters without tones, then scroll through all the homonyms that match the spelling. Which is still extremely difficult because the consonants don't match Latin languages. And you must still learn the characters to know which one to pick.

Once you get through that, every sentence structure is different as well. Instead of "whose book is this", you say 这本书是谁的 which is like saying "this book is his" but you replace "his/他" with a generic word who/谁 representing that you want to know the person the pronoun was referring to. I can even write 这个什么是谁的 where I have replaced the word "book/书" with "what/什么", meaning I am simultaneously asking what the object is and who it belongs to.

You can effectively do this with any sentence or object. It's a much better designed language since sentences don't magically change the order of everything but it means I cannot think words in English and translate them piecemeal to Chinese. I have to know the whole sentence immediately.

Of course, once you learn this, you have to learn the Chinese idioms. And then everything gets worse because there's so many homonyms everything's a pun, which is why I'm stuck. According to Deepseek, 这个什么是谁的 actually means "what is this thing" and you don't care what the thing is, so it's not really the question. You have to reorder it and ask 这是谁的什么 which glosses as "this is whose what" which is a compound question that's grammatically impossible.

Also, I'd be taking a 50% paycut. Otherwise I'd do it anyways.
by shimman | 2026-02-20 01:13:40+00:00
Sorry to be the wet blanket but what you're arguing for, advocacy, is by far the worst and most ineffective form of doing politics. Talking about things doesn't convince anyone. Talking to the small amounts of people that agree doesn't get the balling moving.

Want to know what does? Organizing. Getting people that disagree with you, to agree with you. That never happens through advocacy, you have to organize.
by light_hue_1 | 2026-02-20 01:13:49+00:00
> The US has a global reputational advantage that will take decades to fall behind China, regardless of what any US administration does.

As a former academic at a top US university, no, the US no longer has that strong reputation. 10 years ago, if you were someone, you wanted to come to the US. The best students in the world came and stayed.

Things are radically different now. Much of the best talent no longer comes and when they do come they leave. It's night and day.

It's not a binary choice. It's not the US or China. It's the US or Canada/EU/etc. And if you're from China, you used to stay, now you leave.

This isn't reddit. I saw this first hand.
by fdefitte | 2026-02-20 01:14:05+00:00
The exoskeleton framing is comforting but it buries the real shift: taste scales now. Before AI, having great judgment about what to build didn't matter much if you couldn't also hire 10 people to build it. Now one person with strong opinions and good architecture instincts can ship what used to require a team.

That's not augmentation, that's a completely different game. The bottleneck moved from "can you write code" to "do you know what's worth building." A lot of senior engineers are going to find out their value was coordination, not insight.
by 0xy | 2026-02-20 01:14:33+00:00
Thousands of people in the UK have been arrested for social media posts, some for speech recognized as protected by international organizations.

Germany is currently actively campaigning to force everyone to use their real names on all social media and force ID checks to do so, a clear chilling effect for free speech.

Macron has been railing against free speech specifically in recent months, calling it "bullshit".

Europe is against free speech, any argument to the contrary must contend with the above examples of them trampling on rights.
by fdefitte | 2026-02-20 01:14:52+00:00
Micropayments would be devastating for news because they'd reveal what people actually value at the margin. Subscriptions work precisely because they obscure this — you pay $15/mo and read 3 articles, and the newspaper pretends that's fine.

Per-article pricing would expose that 90% of online journalism is commodity rewrites of AP wire stories. The 10% that's genuinely original would thrive, and everything else would die overnight. Which is exactly why no major outlet will ever voluntarily adopt this.
by ttul | 2026-02-20 01:15:05+00:00
What I’m noticing, overall: I’ve never cut so much code in my life. I’ve become a coding monster with one of those dark green GitHub profiles ever since 5.3-Codex gave me the confidence to load in a ridiculous number of tasks every day and let it rip. I have about three coding tasks going at once and in another window, Claude Cowork is ripping through PowerPoints and getting back to lawyers.

This tech is not going to replace us. If anything, I am becoming even more of a workaholic. But the output volume is going to pay off for those who are privileged enough to use these tools.
by dwohnitmok | 2026-02-20 01:15:18+00:00
The LLMs do play rated engines (maia and eubos). They provide the baselines. Gemini e.g. consistently beats the different maia versions.

The rest is taken care of by elo. That is they then play each other as well, but it is not really possible for Gemini to have a higher elo than maia with such a small sample size (and such weak other LLMs).

Elo doesn't let you inflate your score by playing low ranked opponents if there are known baselines (rated engines) because the rated engines will promptly crush your elo.

You could add humans into the mix, the benchmark just gets expensive.
by 1970-01-01 | 2026-02-20 01:15:34+00:00
Absolutely nothing has changed since the 90s. News should be free. Free with unobtrusive ads if you want pictures and video to help with hosting costs. Stop trying to fiddle with this formula. lite.cnn.com is all we will ever need in terms of getting the message. Mircopayments are not a solution because nothing needs to be fixed.
by Gormo | 2026-02-20 01:16:49+00:00
I'd go beyond that and even say that one might consider something harmful, but be willing to endure a certain level of harm in pursuit of something of higher value.

For example, I once asked a smoker why she smoked, and the response was "because I love it" -- when I asked if the enjoyment was worth the health risks, she said "yes; I never planned to live forever". She was making a conscious decision to seek short-term pleasure at the cost of potential longer-term damage to her health. At that point, there wasn't really anything remaining to debate about.
by redserk | 2026-02-20 01:16:52+00:00
This reads like vague posturing instead of accepting (or even just looking at...) the reality on the ground.

I have about a dozen friends spread across 8 different mid-to-high level universities around the country in biomed. Europe and Canada are definitely a preference but China is entering conversation and has been for the last few years.

The alternative is to abandon an entire career or field of interest because the funding is held up by irrational national political policy.
by Terr_ | 2026-02-20 01:17:05+00:00
Plus, I feel that's secondary "icing on the cake" to the other more-damaging part you entioned. The rest of the sentence that torstenvl chose to ignore, which is an extraordinarily suspicious thing for any commenter claiming to be a a lawyer:

> denying due process, then ignoring court orders to release them.

Even if ICE were somehow only grabbing non-citizens and only for reasons vaguely within their legal mandate, that other ICE/CBP behavior is still criminal. Those constitutional rights, and protections from the US court system, apply to everyone in US jurisdiction.

For anyone interested in more detail: "How ICE defies judges’ orders to release detainees, step by step" [0].

[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/10/ice-immigration-det...
by thomastjeffery | 2026-02-20 01:17:19+00:00
It's good enough for you, and therefore it can't get any better. Interrupting the user with pointless notifications is not security. Removing the ability to disable those notifications is only a security feature if the user wants then in the first place!

The problem here is more than the lack of interest in making a system that is both secure and usable. It's the outright rejection of usability as a goal.
by wofo | 2026-02-20 01:17:30+00:00
It's been a while since I last had a detailed look at web applications in Rust (i.e., stuff with databases, auth, etc). You could use axum for the web server, which is very mature, but I'd say it's too low-level (IIRC you cannot even generate an OpenAPI spec of your endpoints, which IMO is table-stakes). Have you found something more batteries-included, with a similar level of maturity, and actively maintained by a community you can trust? It's a very high bar.

Your reply made me curious about ORMs, btw. Which one would you recommend? Maybe things have improved since I last checked. Last time I didn't like any of them and ended up settling on `sqlx` + hand-written SQL (the code is open source, hosted at https://github.com/rustls/rustls-bench-app/tree/main/ci-benc...).
by rayiner | 2026-02-20 01:18:25+00:00
Even looking at the entire population, the U.S. has higher reading scores on PISA than the big western european countries (UK, Germany, France, Italy): https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2019/12/pisa-2018-resul.... In reading, the U.S. was basically tied with Japan and the Scandinavian countries.

That is consistent with other international measurements: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=1. For example, the U.S. is one of the top performers in the world in the 4th grade literacy--behind Hong Kong but ahead of Macau. In 4th grade math, the U.S. isn't as good, well behind Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan. But still comfortably ahead of Germany, Italy, Spain, and France.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2026-02-20 01:18:32+00:00
I have heard this for a long time, and always wondered how they trained African elephants.

There's a reason that you see working elephants all over East Asia, but not in Africa.

African elephants are pretty badass. I have not heard of them being successfully trained, but then, it's never really been a subject I studied.

Also, as we are learning, more and more, when it comes to war, big is not necessarily better. Big targets. These days, a speedboat with a missile, could take out an aircraft carrier.