MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-28 17:56:10+00:00
> If openly bribing a crony gov to cancel your competitor is now the de-facto standard of making business in the US

It very clearly is, the present AI instance is far from the only recent case.

> I don't see how any rational investor could still see US companies as a secure investment.

They evaluate the propensity and ability to profitably engage in open corruption the same as they evaluate other capacities of the company. “Secure” isn't a binary category, and the risk here is much like any other risk.

> When the rule of law degrades into pay-to-play politics, the inevitable result is a mass exodus of both capital and top-tier talent.

That is the expected result of increasing perceived risk. yes, probably one of those “slowly and then all at once” things.
by arw0n | 2026-02-28 17:56:44+00:00
This is assuming a coherent national security strategy, which is unlikely. We know a lot of generals disagree with the attack on Iran, and none of the geopolitical experts I trust think it is a good idea, be they conservative, realist, liberal, leftist or something else.

There's a number of reasons this is happening now that I think are more plausible than American interest:

- Saudis want Iran weak as they are primary geopolitical rivals. There are deep ties between the Saudi dynasty and the Trump dynasty. Without Iranian support, the Houthis will have a much tougher time. (Although they should not be underestimated regardless. They are not an Iranian proxy, but an ally, and field one of the strongest armies in the whole region.)

- Israel wants Iran weak, and pro-zionism is a strong wedge in American politics. Again, there's also a lot of personal business interests involved. Iranian allies and proxies are the chief causes of grief for Israel's expansionist agenda, and a very credible threat to their national security.

- This war conveniently moves the headlines away from a faltering economy, the Epstein files, and ICE overreach. There's probably hope that it will improve chances with the 'war president bonus' in the mid-terms. It could also be a convenient cover for and excuse to increase rigging in the elections.

Expecting positive regime change after bombing a school full of little girls is... naive. This is not how you turn an enemy into a friend.
by ceejayoz | 2026-02-28 17:56:51+00:00
> Why is that unthinkable?

Because it’s unthinkably stupid.

> I know why Ukrainians don't want that, but the demographic costs of tens to hundreds of thousands of "military age men" dying are so huge that any plausible alternative should be considered, even if it's very unpleasant.

And you imagine they won’t die in your guerrilla war? Or the next invasion after an emboldened Russia regroups?
by skyberrys | 2026-02-28 17:56:56+00:00
Your writeup accurately captures the big concerns I have about using AI coding tools. One extra thing I have noticed around this is I have a similar feeling about driving and self driving. I really love driving but since I was able to better arrange my life and no longer am a commuter driver I don't get as much daily practice so now when I do take the occasional long drive I don't have as much skill and expertise. It is the same with AI coding tools, I need to put them down from time to time and exercise my mental sharpness to prevent losing my abilities to be a senior engineer.
Ask HN: Is the 'natural language analytics' unsolved or just unsexy?
by esawyer | 2026-02-28 17:57:00+00:00
Tools like Looker, Hex, and ThoughtSpot have been trying to make analytics accessible to non-technical users for years. LLMs have reopened that conversation. But most of the new wave of products still require you to have a warehouse first — which means they're selling to data teams, not operators.

I'm looking at a different wedge: be the warehouse AND the query layer, and target the segment that has never had either. Sync Stripe, Shopify, Meta Ads, HubSpot, etc. directly, and expose everything through natural language.

Curious what HN thinks: is the real barrier warehouse setup, query complexity, or trust in the output? And is there a segment of user you think this genuinely serves?
by aaravchen | 2026-02-28 17:57:11+00:00
All the immutable system solutions out there pretty much all make your rootfs immutable, but leave your home folder and system config folders (i.e. /var and /etc) as mutable. It's pretty obvious that if you make the config folders and/or home folder immutable it starts causing most people problems, since in the vast majority of cases people just want to be able to persistently change the desktop background color or spaces vs tabs setting in their IDE without having to locate the setting in a full system config, set it, and regenerate.

This does cause some interesting tension in the immutability though. /etc in particular is really a mix of things that a sysadmin should really only be setting, and things a regular user may set indirectly. This usage has grown organically over time with the tools involved in the implementation, so it's not at all consistent which are which. The immutable system solutions recognize this by usually handling the whole /etc folder the same way package managers handle package installs that include /etc file: by doing a 3-way merge between the old provided files, the new provided files, and the current existing files to see if the existing are unchanged from the old provided and can just be directly replaced by the new provided or if a merge conflict needs resolving. Additionally, a separate copy of /etc is maintained associated with each available bootable system version so when you roll back you get the old /etc files you had before. Though this does introduce a system-unique variation since you now have new /etc being affected by the state of /etc when it was forked.

If you want all your home folder and system config to be identical, nix or guix really are your primary way to go, that extra lockdown of the user and system config is exactly what most people don't want for usability reasons.

I personally use nix home-manager on top of Aurora DX from Universal Blue. I have my nix home-manager config setup to manage only the things I want to be locked down in my home config, and to provide some extra tools that are easier to manage/supply via Nix than a system package manager (where I would need to do a whole system update to get the new version). My IDE for example is installed on a specific version via Nix, but I don't have Nix manage the settings of it so I can separately tweak as needed without need a home-manager rebuild.

EDIT: typo
by cf100clunk | 2026-02-28 17:57:24+00:00
Maybe a buying trip north of the border might suit some U.S. folks alarmed by the TPMS blabbermouth data. Although Canadian-spec new vehicles usually have TPMS monitoring, it is not mandated, so some vehicles will display a dashboard icon or menu warning if no TPMS signal is seen, while others just ignore the issue. Given that many Canadian consumers have dedicated sets of winter and summer tires/wheels, this is sensible to not require TPMS systems. I have no idea whether recertifying a new Canadian vehicle for the U.S. (i.e. changing kph speedo to mph, etc) involves changing such software capabilities.
by 9dev | 2026-02-28 17:57:36+00:00
> I've only ever seen the AI adoption approach work on fully functional teams.

It's not that the team isn't functioning, it's that it's a pretty diverse team in terms of experience, which means things just used to take a while to finish.

> The concern as well is that by forcing the AI onto developers, they eventually throw their hands up and say "well they dont care about code quality anymore, neither should I" and start shipping absolute vibeslop.

This is IMHO avoidable by emphasising code reviews and automated tooling; my general policy is still that everyone is responsible for what they push, period. So absolute vibeslop isn't what I'm seeing, rather an efficiency miscalculation on which parts should be written by humans and which by the AI.
by lich_king | 2026-02-28 17:58:06+00:00
I have an opinion about the editorial style of Quanta that I don't think it's popular here (judging by how often they get upvoted), but I think it's a symptom of that.

They cover science, but the template they follow pretty consistently is a vague title that oversells the premise and then an article filled with human-interest details and appeals to implications. This makes it easy for everyone to follow along and have an opinion, but I feel like science is te backdrop, not the subject.
by mikepurvis | 2026-02-28 17:58:11+00:00
A lot more men than women are able to be content with the comfortable mediocrity that is bringing in the paycheque, doing the chores, getting laid once or twice a month, but otherwise not really feeling much passion or enthusiasm or joy with their partner.

It's not the life you hope for, but there's a lot of social messaging that that's just the way it is, it's what you signed up for, you would be selfish to leave, the grass won't be greener, and also it's probably your fault anyway for not being a better husband. The messaging to women in romcoms and the like is much more toward you deserve better, be brave, junk the loser, go get the life you want.
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-28 17:58:56+00:00
> Paul Graham is famous for sure (at least in HN circles), but I never considered him an exceptional or good programmer at all.

pg wrote a Lisp dialect, Arc, with Morris. The Morris from "the Morris worm". These people are at the very least hackers and they definitely know how to code.

I don't think a "not good programmer" can write a Lisp dialect. At least of all the "not good" programmers I met in my life, 0% of them could have written a Lisp dialect.

It's not because Arc didn't reach the level of fame of Linux or Quake or Kubernetes or whatever that pg is not a good programmer.
by samtheDamned | 2026-02-28 17:59:16+00:00
Because of how silent enshittification is becoming the norm, whenever I find a new service or program or app that I like I always wonder how long I actually have to enjoy the app before it starts removing features, ends interoperability, shuts down their APIs, or sells out to someone else who will do it for them. I'm not necessarily an open source ideologue, but it's the only type of software I feel moderately safe with making a part of my digital routine.
by wesselbindt | 2026-02-28 17:59:21+00:00
> Arms control treaties are effective only if they are banning weapons that aren't useful. The problem is that landmines are incredibly useful weapons

There is not a single doubt in my mind that mines are useful. As are executions of people suspected of collaborating with the enemy. As is instituting precautionary concentration camps to round up folks who might have some bond with the enemy. The utility of dropping atom bombs on civilian centers is probably extremely high in negotiating with the enemy. But, like mines, these things are unconscionable, and when you start using these highly effective means, you should really ask yourself: "am I the good guy in this conflict?"

For me, the answer is no. I don't think we should commit war crimes, which somehow has become a controversial opinion.
by cowlby | 2026-02-28 17:59:51+00:00
Yes my hot take is that the real risk isn't skill atrophy... it's failing to develop the new skill of using AI. It's all abstraction layers anyway and people always lament the next abstraction up.

0/1s → assembly → C → high-level languages → frameworks → AI → product

The engineer keeps moving up the abstraction chain with less and less understanding of the layers below. The better solution would be creating better verification, testing, and determinism at the AI layer. Surely we'll see the equivalent of high-level languages and frameworks for AI soon.
by nullocator | 2026-02-28 18:00:02+00:00
You are conflating issues. As a foregone conclusion the U.S. bombing the sovereign citizens of Iran is acceptable to you, only afterwards are you and other's justifying this by cherry picking recent events. If Iran hadn't just killed protesters, it'd be because they were working on nukes, or because they've launched missiles across borders.

You blind yourself to the dozens of countries around the world doing these things and worse every day while picking and choosing enemies that are acceptable for the United States to attack like al la carte menu items. Justifying those attacks is an after thought.
by sigmoid10 | 2026-02-28 18:00:33+00:00
If that were true Meta and Google wouldn't be so desperate to get in the game. And don't think that other nations would step in against abusive marketing practices. The EU has been battling uphill for decades and the only ones who had some moderate success for user rights are private groups like NYOB. There is no law that will save the old tech companies and they know it.
Show HN: Name-classifier – infers attributes about a person from a name
by defgeneric | 2026-02-28 18:01:23+00:00
This was based on an old project that I resurrected, improved, and repackaged with claude code.

It's useful for estimating demographics in large datasets from limited information, i.e. just a name.

It's also fairly good at separating given name and family names across a wide variety of languages and contexts.

Contains a standalone binary, embeddable shared lib, and a python wrapper.

Examples

CLI:

user@box » ./build/name-classifier -j -c "Carlos Eduardo Fernando Salazar Montemayor" | jq .

{
"input": "Carlos Eduardo Fernando Salazar Montemayor",
"script": "latin",
"components": [
{
"token": "Carlos",
"role": "given",
"index": 0,
"surname_score": 0.009
},
{
"token": "Eduardo",
"role": "given",
"index": 1,
"surname_score": 0.001
},
{
"token": "Fernando",
"role": "given",
"index": 2,
"surname_score": 0.01
},
{
"token": "Salazar",
"role": "family",
"index": 3,
"surname_score": 0.998
},
{
"token": "Montemayor",
"role": "family",
"index": 4,
"surname_score": 0.975
}
],
"attributes": {
"gender": {
"male": 0.9938,
"female": 0.0062,
"neutral": 0
},
"origin": {
"english": 0,
"french": 0,
"germanic": 0,
"nordic": 0,
"iberian": 1,
"italian": 0,
"eastern_european": 0,
"arabic": 0,
"east_asian": 0,
"south_asian": 0,
"southeast_asian": 0
}
},
"calibrated": true,
"model_version": "embedded",
"provenance": {
"gender": {
"lexicon": 0.598,
"ngram": 0.302,
"neural": 0.101
},
"origin": {
"lexicon": 0,
"ngram": 0,
"neural": 0
}
}
}

Python:

from name_classifier import NameClassifier

nc = NameClassifier(args.model_dir)

nc.classify("Kateryna Olha Mykhailivna Shevchenko")
by bojan | 2026-02-28 18:02:05+00:00
> Given unlimited money and time, many engineers, arts, etc will write and rewrite something to perfection

This is a common trope, but in my experience many engineers I met know that's not how a business runs. Dealing with the constraints and weighing them out is one of the essential skills of any engineer. Knowing when a product is just good enough is one of the things that make you senior.
by y-c-o-m-b | 2026-02-28 18:02:43+00:00
I know a lot of the responses are skeptical (for good reason), but the opportunity is certainly there. The pro-regime population is aging out, with the more secular youth taking hold. There has always been an appreciation for American culture (specifically) amongst the general population. This was true when I was there in the 80s and increasingly more true over the decades since. Concessions by the regime over the hijab laws is one example of the society drifting more towards Western norms. Alcohol and western style parties are way more present in the society than ever before. Basically, the foundation for it is certainly there.

Furthermore if Reza Pahlavi does manage to integrate into the society, he will most certainly use his business and political ties here in the US to westernize the society. He's said as much. Some of the more well known Iranian-American business leaders here in the US (CEO of Uber, CEO of intuit, founder of eBay for example) I'm sure would contribute to work towards this also.

There will be push-back from rural areas (just like anywhere else) and the regime will not go away overnight, but the possibility does exist for this outcome. I think the biggest roadblock would be America and Israel intentionally preventing this outcome for the reasons that suit them geopolitically.

EDIT: should have mentioned that after decades of widely known voter manipulation and more or less "mock" elections, Iranians would be happy to finally participate in actual democratic processes where their votes and voices matter
by jorvi | 2026-02-28 18:02:53+00:00
AI is good at the first 80% but terrible at the last 20% of producing good code. And you need to through that first 80% to really understand what the code is scaffolded to do, which writing it yourself will vastly improve. And typing speed has never been the bottleneck for coding.

Even worse, whole generation of devs are being trained to not care of learn about that last 20% because the AI does it """all""" for them. That last bit is an unknown unknown for the neo developer nee prompter.
by kid64 | 2026-02-28 18:02:54+00:00
Only in 2nd-brain mythology, which holds that you'll discover connections between your notes that you didn't realize was there. I think it started as eye candy to confuse prospective users considering Roam Notes. They later did something similar with their "Canvas" feature. So, these are features you get with their lack of coherent vision, rather than basic usability and a safe plugin ecosystem, neither of which Obsidian plans to deliver..
by kakacik | 2026-02-28 18:03:28+00:00
How else do you suggest common folks are supposed to view world, or well anything?

Americans do the same, hence whole world got ttump. 95% of the world aint US, so such logic is even easier for almost whole mankind - is US force of good or evil? Different places would give you different answers, and most americans would not like the actual spread these days.
by zeroonetwothree | 2026-02-28 18:03:55+00:00
The problem with this is when something breaks and your manager says “why haven’t you figured it out yet” as you spend hours digging into the 200 PRs of vibe slop that landed in the past day.

Now you could say that expectation has to change but I don’t see how—the people paying you expect you to produce working software. And we’ve always been biased in favor of short term shipping over longer term maintainability.
by jauntywundrkind | 2026-02-28 18:04:18+00:00
Ilium was my first Simmons & I was glued to it. The mem/meme "brane" portals to other realities still anchors so much of my thought, frames my perception signficiantly.

It also featured giant space crustaceans! Or at least one, the moravec Orpho. Along with his more human Mahnmut moravec friend. This feels low key resonant with our days filled with OpenClaw.

Accelerando hit 2 years latter (2005), with much more alien space lobsters. Where-as Orpho was a moravec that picked a crustacean shape.

Some random fan art,
https://www.deviantart.com/microcosmicecology/art/Mahnmut-an...
https://www.deviantart.com/vengethenian/art/Mahnmut-and-Orph...

Someone mentioned lobsters in Schismatrix (1985) reminding me that I haven't read it!!
by BinaryIgor | 2026-02-28 18:04:20+00:00
"I have a hard time imagining a future where knowing how to solve problems with computers and how to control the complexity of those solutions is less valuable than it is today, so I think it will continue to be a viable career even with the advent of AI tools."

Exactly! So the nature of what we do might change; but, solving problems with computers will always be the thing. And the most capable people of doing that will be those we call programmers - what does it mean exactly, the nature of exact activities they perform will continue to change (as it arguably always have been), but there always be somebody who is significantly more adept at solving problems and create solutions using software - that somebody we will continue to call a computer programmer/software developer.
by nr378 | 2026-02-28 18:04:33+00:00
Oh that's quite a nice idea - agentic context management (riffing on agentic memory management).

There's some challenges around the LLM having enough output tokens to easily specify what it wants its next input tokens to be, but "snips" should be able to be expressed concisely (i.e. the next input should include everything sent previously except the chunk that starts XXX and ends YYY). The upside is tighter context, the downside is it'll bust the prompt cache (perhaps the optimal trade-off is to batch the snips).
by bigyabai | 2026-02-28 18:04:50+00:00
> I mean, by the letter of things I am assuming that Jason is supporting the genocide of Palestinians.

> Nobody living would care anymore, I guess.

You might want to brush up on HN's guidelines if you think that these comments are acceptable here:

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by kyboren | 2026-02-28 18:05:02+00:00
> fake WMD fiasco

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-stored-highly...

The IAEA estimates that Iran had 440.9 kg of uranium enriched to up to
60% before last year's Israeli-U.S. attacks - enough, if enriched further,
for 10 nuclear weapons, according to an IAEA yardstick.

The agency and Western powers believe the bulk of that is still intact.
Washington wants Tehran to give it up.

I seem to have missed the IAEA report on Iraq's 400+ kilos of HEU.
by zargon | 2026-02-28 18:05:37+00:00
Explain what about that statement is false. Your original Q4_K_XL quant was broken. People noticing that it was a total outlier among other quants is what prompted this "research". Your own data proves that your new release fixes the bugs of your original, in order to match AesSedai's PPL. Fixing bugs is great. Searching for the best quant mix is helpful. I use your quants and appreciate your work. But whitewashing this situation dilutes trust and good will.
by sloum | 2026-02-28 18:05:46+00:00
From the bill:

> "Covered application store” does not mean an online service or platform that distributes extensions, plug-ins, add-ons, or other software applications that run exclusively within a separate host application

There is a reasonable argument that a linux distribution is, itself, a host application. This is clearly an argument against their intention... but makes perfect sense to me. With this argument, the law does not apply to pretty much any environment where the applications are scheduled and run by a supervising process, at least by my reading.
Show HN: Which VCs are Tier 1?
by nezaj | 2026-02-28 18:06:20+00:00
Saw some discussion on twitter on which firms are considered tier 1. Was inspired to make a little game where users choose their favorite and least favorite firm to get a term sheet from when presented with four choices.

At the end of the game you can see your own ranking as well as an aggregated results from the crowd.

I went with the choose favorite/least favorite mechanic because it felt like a better experience then just doing head to head.

With ~20 firms that's a lot of pairs you need to go through.

If you do triplets that reduces the pairs, but it was still too many rounds.

By doing min/max four at a time you can efficiently get implied preferences in ~20 rounds. This make it take only about 3-5 minutes to finish the game!
by JPLeRouzic | 2026-02-28 18:06:21+00:00
Thanks for the answer.

Long time ago I used a fetal Doppler to detect heart failure in adults. It was not based on LLMs (2016) but on a HMM to learn the hidden states: The heart beats.

It was tested with the Physionet database. It performed quite well, but I didn't invent the algorithm; it came from a Physionet competition.

It could run on low power computers.

https://github.com/JPLeRouzic/Hjerte