MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mandevil | 2026-02-25 18:02:31+00:00
Not just that the establishment, but the entire educational complex, from the large research universities like JHU to the community colleges, were built around a 1950s-1970's American economy and the society that supported that. And now that that is gone, what happens to all of the universities? They've been just as corrupted and degraded as the rest of it. My wife and I were talking last night about how Disneyland lines are the perfect metaphor for what has happened to American society.

From the 1950's to the 1990's there was basically no way to avoid standing in the lines, everyone was in it together and you just had to stand in the lines. Then in the 1990s they added FastPass and you could, if you were clever and planned a bit, skip some lines but you were still going to be standing in lines with everyone else, and they were free and reasonably fair process. Then in the 2010's they started to do book ahead FastPass and if you were staying in a hotel on site you could book all the good times for all the rides, to try and encourage hotel stays. And now with Lightning Lane's they are incentivized to make the line process so onerous to get you to fork over $25/person/ride to skip them. And that's where we are today: an enshitified product that is designed to give a good experience to the very wealthy, while making it worse for everyone else.

And that's the same path we've gone in entertainment, in housing, in education, in healthcare, in so much of modern American society.
by tim333 | 2026-02-25 18:02:43+00:00
To quote Python

"""
Always look on the bright side of life...

Life's a piece of shit

When you look at it

Life's a laugh and death's the joke, it's true

You'll see it's all a show

Keep 'em laughin' as you go

Just remember that the last laugh is on you
"""

I'm optimistic that AI will fix some of the shittiness, and something like uploading may fix the last laugh on you bit.

Anyway no harm looking on the bright side...
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-25 18:02:53+00:00
Agreed. However an unlocked bootloader or non-stock OS or not passing safety net or whatever aren't equivalent to that so I'm not sure what your point is.

"We've imagined a hypothetical" is completely different from "we directly observed something that looks criminal". Like if they see that the OS version string is "known-malicious-image" fine but that's totally different.

A good example might be the memo lines on checks. You can never be certain that a string of random numbers doesn't have something to do with criminal activity but the bank won't bother you about it. Whereas when an acquaintance tried to cash a check where someone had jokingly written "thanks for the sex" on the memo line the bank apologized for having to reject it despite realizing that it was almost certainly in jest.
by cleak | 2026-02-25 18:03:00+00:00
The model makes a huge difference. I tried this about a year ago and Claude occasionally got it right. These days, it seems to get it right on the first try most times and then always self corrects after. Codex 5.2 (I haven't played with 5.3 enough yet) gets it wrong more often than not, and frequently doesn't call the linter; I'm willing to accept that my bloated CLAUDE.md might be a bad fit for Codex and causing this to fail.
by bonsai_spool | 2026-02-25 18:04:03+00:00
> The thing I heard most often about my school's management was that over the past couple of decades, they more closely resembled a real estate holding company than a research university.

I feel a better question is what entities that are in continuous operation since the 1630s do not resemble a real estate holding company? If you analyze only the extremes of any distribution you'll find weirdness.
by maest | 2026-02-25 18:04:39+00:00
Your response is fair. I didn't present the argument fully - there is on last step which says "therefore, EU is somehow indebted to the US". That last step is, I think, less defensible.

Also, even in the absence of the "indebtedness" conclusion, the subsidy argument assumes that pharma companies would reduce their R&D spend, instead of just accepting lower margins if the US could more aggressively negotiate drug prices.
by ValentineC | 2026-02-25 18:04:57+00:00
> I tried this out but the brew command errors out saying it only works on macOS versions older than Sequoia.

Newer than Sequoia, you mean?

The brew recipe [1] says macOS >= 15.

Anyway, I'm on Sequoia — it's mostly better than Ventura, which was what my M2 MacBook Pro came with. I'm holding off upgrading to Tahoe (macOS 26), hoping they fix liquid glAss.

[1] https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/kitlangton-hex
by tistoon | 2026-02-25 18:05:02+00:00
Yep... this user (breve) doesn't like Tesla.. ..we got it now.

breve posted on HN:

Tesla EU registrations crash 17% (Feb 24, 2026)

Tesla Crash rate 3× worse than humans (Jan 29, 2026)

EV sales booming without Tesla (Nov 17, 2025)

By the way.. Tesla is no more a car company anymore.. change your software :)
by MidasTools | 2026-02-25 18:05:49+00:00
Building AI-native tooling for solopreneurs and watching this play out in real time.

The frame I'd add: AI isn't just threatening single-purpose SaaS — it's unbundling the expertise layer from the execution layer. Traditional SaaS bundles both: you pay for their workflow AND for the embedded knowledge about how to do the thing right. That knowledge was the actual moat.

What's happening now is the expertise layer is separating. You can package domain knowledge as prompts, SOUL files, agent configs — and run it on generic infrastructure. So the question for any SaaS business is: which layer are we actually selling?

If the answer is "we sell the interface to a workflow that the user still has to configure" — that's the vulnerable piece. If the answer is "we sell an opinionated, deeply-tuned system with embedded expertise that gets better over time" — that's harder to replicate.

The Lego analogy above is right but it cuts both ways. Modular is great for buyers. It's lethal for vendors who were charging SaaS prices for what is now a commodity block.

What survives: anything where the value compounds over time (your data, your history, your learned preferences). What gets squeezed: anything where the value is static at first install.
by ajross | 2026-02-25 18:05:56+00:00
Absent any existential debate about religion and faith, this bit of the Sermon on the Mount relies on some pretty profound misunderstandings of biology and ecology.

Life really sucks in the wild. By nature, all species expand into their niche. Literally everything exists, in perpetuity, right at the razor's edge of starvation. If there is abundance, by random chance, then the prolific grandchildren of the lucky critters will find themselves in horrifying competition for the now-limited resources.

Those birds of the air may not sow or reap or store[1], but they're just one bad hunting day away from death. And their prey life on the opposite side of the knife. The flowers of the field seem to be growing without labor because you aren't noticing the 99%+ of them that are going to be eaten or destroyed before procreating, or the 99.999%+ of grass tufts that got eaten before even making a flower.

[1] Actually they totally do. But fine fine, Jesus and Matthew didn't know that.
by MisterTea | 2026-02-25 18:06:07+00:00
> Nyc has a subway for longer trips.

Only if your trip is to Manhattan or along the line. Otherwise, in Brooklyn and queens, North-south subway service is almost non-existent. I live in South Queens a block from the A train. However, If I wanted to go shopping at Queenscenter Mall or along Queens Blvd, I have to take a bus up Woodhaven Blvd.
by intended | 2026-02-25 18:06:29+00:00
It’s the same thing as theft and locks. Any motivated attacker will overcome any rudimentary obstacle. We still use locks because most opportunistic attackers are the most prevalent.

Even the paper on improved phishing showed that LLMs reduce the cost to run phishing attacks, which made previously unprofitable targets (lower income groups), profitable.

The most common deterrent is inconvenience, not impossibility.
by davidsainez | 2026-02-25 18:06:34+00:00
I put off podman for a while because of claims of compatibility issues, which is unfortunate because I've had an excellent experience since switching over. Can you point as specific issues you've had (not doubting, just curious)?

I also have heard a lot of recommendations for OrbStack, but I haven't had problems with speed either. And I could never stomach using a proprietary system for such a core part of my workflow.

For context I use containers for practically everything and I run some decently complex workflows on them: fullstack node codebases, networking, persistent volumes, mounting, watch mode, etc. Red Hat knocked it out of the park with podman!
by mandevil | 2026-02-25 18:07:02+00:00
As someone who volunteered in a museum right near the Newseum, their biggest problem was the competition. The Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art being some of the best museums in the world, right across the street, with much better stuff and totally free was always going to be hard to compete with. The only private museum that has managed to survive is the International Spy Museum, which went all in on fun and interactives, and much less on education, and has a lot less prestigious footprint.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-25 18:07:03+00:00
There are times where you just can't... someone uses my email address in person at tractor supply co. and I'm getting a ton of marketing email I can't usnsub to.

I've had this happen several times... There's a lawyer I used for a dispute a few years ago, and they now have another "First Last" name that matches mine, and he keeps emailing me... my reply, "Wrong Michael, again..."

It's kind of annoying all around... I need to get off my butt and get a few things shifted, then just start relying on my own MTA again, instead of forwarding *@mydomain to my gmail to. I'll still wildcard the domain, but to a single mailbox on my own mta.

I'm not sure how bad the spam might get though... I've had a test account on my mta for a couple years and it hasn't really recived any... my wildcard accounts either... I use the wildcard so I can do things like walmart@mydomain, to see if/where an email address is sold/leaked from regarding spam.
by JeremyHerrman | 2026-02-25 18:07:31+00:00
agreed that Apple will scrap these, but surely some of these will escape (even in a non-functional state) and with enough effort folks will figure out how to boot them.

I have a few prototype apple devices in my collection. Especially with the sheer number of these AI servers it's just a matter of time before they wind up in public.
by vitorlourenco | 2026-02-25 18:07:50+00:00
Production is live.

Critical fixes ship next week.

The author left.

Congratulations. It’s yours now.
Documentation? “Should be somewhere.”

One hour in:
You find scattered notes. No context. No history. Just comments like // handles edge cases.

Twenty-four hours in:
Tests pass. You understand less than when you started.
Every change feels like cutting the wrong wire.

This is normal.
It’s called code archaeology.

And it’s expensive.
Knight Capital Group lost $440M in 45 minutes.
CrowdStrike pushed a config no one fully understood.
The xz Utils backdoor incubated for two years.

Not reckless teams.
Just systems with no memory.

We broke down the six recurring pains of a codebase that forgot its own why.

Read: codeslick.dev/blog/six-pains-codebase-without-memory
by tokyobreakfast | 2026-02-25 18:08:05+00:00
Same as Reddit. Accumulate enough points via posting shallow and uninteresting—yet popular—dialogue to earn down voting and flagging abilities, which can be used (via automation) to manipulate discussions and suppress viewpoints.

Slashdot's system was superior because mod points were finite and randomly dispensed. This entropy discouraged abuse by design—as opposed to making it a key feature of the site.

It's the Achilles' heel of Reddit and every site that attempts to emulate it.
by danans | 2026-02-25 18:08:23+00:00
> One nice thing about what’s happening is that politics are losing to reality. I’m not even sure how this became a left vs right issue in the first place (isn’t the right meant to be pro free market!?)

No, the right isn't meant to be pro free-market. It's meant to protect the interests, longevity, and demand-capture of its donor industries, primarily fossil fuels extraction, processing, and distribution, but increasingly large technology companies in monopoly positions in their markets.

All the "free-market" to "culture-war" rhetoric are just political/religious strategies to achieve that end.
by Tangurena2 | 2026-02-25 18:08:34+00:00
I blame the "contest" started by the magazine US News and World Report, which started their college rating. This led to university execs aiming to raise their rating at the expense of education. Higher rankings meant higher bonuses for top employees - especially the president of the university. This race for ratings is why the cost of a university education has skyrocketed far faster than inflation.
by palmotea | 2026-02-25 18:09:21+00:00
How helpful would injecting noise and red herring into pseudonymous posts help?

It seems like it would make sense to get in the habit of distort your posts a bit, and do things like make random gender swaps (e.g. s/my husband/my wife), dropping hints that indicate the wrong city (s/I met my friend at Blue Bottle coffee/I met my friend at Coffee Bean), maybe even using an LLM fire off posts indicating false interests (e.g. some total crypto bro thing).
by impendia | 2026-02-25 18:09:35+00:00
I got curious, and looked up the Harvard Polo Club. Apparently it naturally faded away as polo declined in popularity, but then was revived in 2006.

I understand that, if you have a current and active polo club running, then you either have to keep it going or run the risk of pissing people off.

But, if I can ask you to speculate, why might Harvard have revived its club in 2006?
Show HN: Agent that matches sales reps with warm leads based on product usage
by nadyyym | 2026-02-25 18:09:50+00:00
hey, I'm building a tool that:
1. analyzes your Posthog data
2. finds patterns that lead to plan upgrade/account expansion
3. creates a deal in your CRM whenever it sees it againg

we've just launched a huge update. Beton now has MCP (my Claude Code is already connected), Firecrawl integration and onboarding that's easier to understand

available in cloud and via AGPLv3

let us know if you need any help setting up

PS it's also suitable if you want to send triggered push notifications or emails
by munificent | 2026-02-25 18:09:53+00:00
Any article about public transit in the US needs to discuss the opioid epidemic and mental health crisis. Otherwise, it's like claiming that bicycles work great for the Netherlands, so people should ride them in the Himalayas.

The situation is just so different in many cities in the US compared to Europe in ways that drastically affect public transit.

> By contrast, a bus stop in a French city like Marseille will have shelters and seating by default.

The bus stop I use regularly has seating and shelter. That's great because I currently have severe post-traumatic osteoarthritis in my ankle and it's painful to stand for several minutes while I wait for a bus.

One day, a homeless guy was sitting on the bench when I got there. A few minutes later, he stood up, walked to the bushes, pulled down his pants, squatted, and unleashed a liquified horror from his ass. He pulled his pants up, and sat back down on the bench.

I don't sit on that bench anymore.

Nearly everyone I know who rides the bus has a story of being harassed by a mentally ill person. Most women I know either refuse to take the bus, or only take it in very careful situations where the odds of being accosted are lower.

We can't have nice things as a public without figuring out a way to help the people in crisis who end up making it worse for everyone.
by Griffinsauce | 2026-02-25 18:10:10+00:00
This stood out to me as well. The level of discourse is incredibly low compared to other topics. Huge amount of "next/vercel sucks" without any constructive or deeper argument made.

There is a similar vibe on the Next.js subreddit, just enormous amounts of shallow negativity. Very strange.

(I'm not saying there aren't valid reasons to dislike the framework or company but the way it's expressed is consistently incredibly juvenile for some reason)
by JohnMakin | 2026-02-25 18:10:34+00:00
As people will point out, the OSINT techniques described are nothing new - typically, in the past, you could de-anonymize based on writing style or niche topics/interests. Totally deanonymization can occur if any of these accounts link to profiles containing pictures of their faces, which can then be web-searched to link to a real identity. It's astounding how many people re-use handles on stuff like porn sites linked very easily to their IRL identity.

While people will point out this isn't new, the implication of this paper (and something I have suspected for 2 years now but never played with) is that this will become trivial, in what would take a human investigator a bit of time, even using common OSINT tooling.

You should never assume you have total anonymity on the open web.
by legitster | 2026-02-25 18:10:39+00:00
> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)

More or less.

Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery, and even to this day, people still equate slavery with prosperity (as implied by that controversial 1612 Project article, for example).

Another way to think about it, the South did not embrace slavery because it made them richer; the South embraced slavery because they opposed industrialization. Southerners would regularly complain about the hustle and bustle of the North, the size of the cities, and how hard regular (white) people had to work. The "Southern way of life" was a thing - a leisurely, agrarian society based on forced labor and land instead of capital.

In this regard it's a doubly fitting metaphor because much of the opposition to abolishing slavery was cultural and not economic.
by demyanov | 2026-02-25 18:10:40+00:00
The approach is CS verification applied to tax design: enumerate every possible state (5 storage types × 5 agent types) and every possible action (7 primitives), then show every cell is priced and no sequence of actions reduces cost. Three instruments are sufficient for closure. Registration of assets is voluntary but strictly dominant — unregistered assets carry no enforceable ownership title, so the only "compliance decision" is dominated.

I'm the author. Curious whether anyone can find flaws.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-25 18:10:52+00:00
Even as a US citizen... fuck that... it'd be like saying the US should open its' data up for China without any restrictions at all, even if they are slurping up everything they can as a state actor.

While, if you choose to use a US service, it shouldn't be required to host data in your country, if you know it's a US service with data in the US... government data is another thing entirely.. and $cloud provider should be required to accommodate if they want that business, or for companies in a given country for that matter.
by elevation | 2026-02-25 18:11:51+00:00
LLM fatigue is real. It's not just em-dash — it's the overall tone of the writing that clues people in. But if your viewpoints and approach are unique, your typesetting won't raise suspicion of machine-generation, except in the most dull of readers. Just be you and it will be fine.

If you'd like more tips on writing I'd be happy to help.
by wavemode | 2026-02-25 18:12:03+00:00
It's funny - some months ago I noticed that I use the word "actually" lot, and started trying to curb it from my writing. Not for any AI-related reason, but because it is almost always a meaningless filler word, and I find that being concise helps get my points across more clearly.

e.g. "The body of the template is parsed, but not actually type-checked until the template is used." -> "but not typechecked until the template is used." The word "actually" here has a pleasant academic tone, but adds no meaning.
by lillesvin | 2026-02-25 18:12:11+00:00
> The difficult part of language is the fact we can build entirely novel meanings out of a relatively small finite set of words.

So are you saying that we've got e.g. neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition and typology down? Or do you simply mean "interesting to you" when you say "difficult"? Because in my experience, pretty much every subject in linguistics (and most other sciences) is easy if you don't understand it and surprisingly difficult once you start to get a grasp of it.

> Bouba kiki has no bearing on the way words are composed.

It literally shows a preference best described by sound-symbolism so it most certainly has a bearing on how words are composed. Just because the relation between sound and meaning _can_ be arbitrary, showing that in some cases it's not entirely so is extremely valuable for evolutionary linguistics.
by Trasmatta | 2026-02-25 18:12:15+00:00
> POC is fully conscious according to any test I can think of, we have full AGI

There are no tests for consciousness. Consciousness resides fully as a first person perspective and can't be inspected or detected from the outside (at least not in any way currently known to science or philosophy). What they mean when they say that is "my brain is interpreting this thing as conscious, so I am accepting that".

Maybe LLMs are conscious in some abstract way we don't understand. I doubt it, but there's no way to tell. And an AI claiming that it IS or is NOT conscious is not evidence of either conclusion.

If there is some level of consciousness, it's in a weird way that only becomes instantiated in the brief period while the model is predicting tokens, and would be highly different from human consciousness.
by garganzol | 2026-02-25 18:12:18+00:00
The user [1] you've mentioned has 160 points being a poster of total four bland messages. This goes against a normal statistical distribution. And this gives away why they do it: the long-term aim is to cultivate voting rings to influence the narratives and rankings in the future. For now, this is only my theory but it may be a real monetization strategy for them.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=snowhale
by toast0 | 2026-02-25 18:12:55+00:00
Where I live, the bus line that serves me only has maybe one marked stop. There's a bus depot at the ferry; every where else, you can just stand on the side of the road and wave your hand when the bus comes by and it'll stop for you; when you want to get off on your way home from the ferry, you push the button and let the driver know where to stop.

But that only works because density is low and there's only one plausible destination.
by realo | 2026-02-25 18:12:57+00:00
I live in a relatively large Canadian city. Not as a suburbanite, but right in the heart of the city.

I have a car, which I use when the weather is not nice, or when it would be inconvenient to take public transportation.

Otherwise, on sunny week-ends i often chose public transports. Here they are efficient , clean, secure and most importantly predictable. We have apps for payment and bus status that show us , on the phone, exactly where every bus is at any moment.

You know your bus will be there for you in exactly 2 minutes. Like a Uber, but much much cheaper.

Predictability is a game changer.

Works very well.
by mobilene | 2026-02-25 18:13:00+00:00
When I rode the city bus as a teen in South Bend, IN, in the 80s, there were some designated bus stops. But buses worked on a hail model anyway. You could be on any corner on the route, and as the bus approached, you'd just stick up your arm and it would stop. It was really efficient. But I suppose that works best in a small city like South Bend.