MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dzink | 2026-02-18 00:56:17+00:00
Freedom is not “doing anything you want”. It’s “not having to do the things you don’t want to do”.

AI may automate a white colar subset of those, but modern day society has for the longest time used wives, young people, immigrants from countries with bad currency devaluation, etc, to fill the gap above. The article talks about status and attention as the ultimate goal, but that may be a male-only perspective. Or even a him-like-perspective. The reality is humans chase many ladders since brains have may proclivities. For more than half of the population (wives and the poor) the goal may be freedom or time to do more.
by stahtops | 2026-02-18 00:56:30+00:00
Fascinating to cherry pick while trying to color an article as biased. Couldn’t even include an entire sentence?

“The incidents included a collision with a fixed object at 17 miles per hour, a crash with a bus while the Tesla vehicle was stopped, a crash with a truck at four miles per hour, and two cases where Tesla vehicles backed into fixed objects at low speeds.”
by fatherwavelet | 2026-02-18 00:57:08+00:00
I had not used Claude much until an hour ago since probably before GPT5.
I had only been using Gemini the last 3 months.

Sonnet 4.6 extended on the free plan is just incredible. I am just complete floored by it. The conversation I just had with it was nuts. It was from Dario mentioning something like a 20% chance Claude is conscious or something crazy like that. I have always tried that conversation with previous models but it got boring so fast.

There is something with the way it can organize context without getting lost that completely blows Gemini away.

Maybe even more so that it was the first time it felt like a model pushed back a little and the answers were not just me ultimately steering it into certain answers. For the free plan that is nuts.

In terms of being conscious, it is the first time I would say I am not 100% certain it is just a very useful, very smart , stochastic parrot. I wouldn't want to say more than that but 15-20% doesn't sound so insane to me as it did 2 hours ago.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-18 00:57:08+00:00
> And remember, this kind of effect is supposed to be so robust and generalizable that we can deploy it in court.

This goes for a lot of things that are utter bullshit. Lie detectors, handwriting, many others and the big bad bogeyman of the court: statistics.

Eyewitnesses being unreliable is one thing, but expert witnesses believing their own bs should be a liability if they are found to be wrong after the fact.
by echelon | 2026-02-18 00:57:14+00:00
I think you're right about Discord.

Reddit never faced the same pressure. The API thing pissed off mobile users, but all of the Reddit alternatives, such as Voat, were hyper polarized politically and were not good destinations for most people. They collected the "worst parts of Reddit" rather than providing a place for the majority of users.

The same thing happened to Twitter. Bluesky is very polarized and constantly gets poked fun at because of it, even by left-leaning folks. Threads was a much more neutral and inviting space that doesn't force you to wear a particular set of politics on your sleeves.

Discord has a few (small) alternatives that aren't alienating or off-putting.
by devhouse | 2026-02-18 00:57:49+00:00
The specifics are crazier than most people realize. During the rename chaos, Steinberger called Altman to check if "Open"Claw was safe to use. That one phone call became the relationship that became the deal.

Before the forced rename, Claude was the default model, and Anthropic's own Constitutional AI research had inspired soul.md. The trademark enforcement accidentally created the introduction.

The part not getting enough attention is the governance gap, like the MIT license, foundation format, no IP transfer, etc. Good on paper. But the foundation hasn't formed yet, no board members, no governance documents, no clarity on trademark ownership or on the contractual rights OpenAI holds.

I mapped out every confirmed term and every undisclosed detail here: https://www.everydev.ai/p/blog-openclaw-joins-openai-who-own...
by deathanatos | 2026-02-18 00:57:53+00:00
I think if you're in a language that's doing constant-propagation optimizations, you work around that in one of two ways:

1. you drop down to assembly.

2. you use functions that are purpose built to be sequence points the optimizer won't optimize through. E.g., in Rust, for the case you mention, `read_volatile`.

In either case, this gives the human the same benefit the code is giving the optimizer: an explicit indication that this code that might appear to be doing nothing isn't.
by decimalenough | 2026-02-18 00:57:56+00:00
That phrasing gave me a chuckle as well. Nevertheless, the accidents per miles driven stats don't assign blame: Tesla is now "experiencing" a crash every 57,000 mi, vs the US statistical human driver average of 229,000 miles and Waymo's claimed ~500,000 mi per "incident".

https://waymo.com/safety/impact/
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-02-18 00:58:06+00:00
And you must have a long position if you're going to cherry pick so egregiously. The other incidents from that same paragraph that you conveniently left out:

* a collision with a fixed object at 17 miles per hour

* a crash with a truck at four miles per hour

* two cases where Tesla vehicles backed into fixed objects at low speeds.

So in the 5 cases listed in that paragraph, 3 of them were when a Tesla hit a stationary object. Hitting a stationary object should be like the last thing I would think an autonomous vehicle would have trouble with, but if you got rid of lidar and radar because Elon had a fever dream, maybe it's not so unexpected.
by dekhn | 2026-02-18 00:58:11+00:00
"If I asked you to calculate the inverse square root of 26 without a calculator, you’d probably be stuck for a while—and honestly, so would I."

Um, 5*2 is 25 and 6*2 is 36 so we know the square root of 26 is between thos two and likely a lot closer to 5.1.

And 1/5 = 0.2. The correct answer is .196 plus a few irrelevant digits.
Show HN: Masharif
by alielmorsy19 | 2026-02-18 00:58:26+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on a GUI library and ran into a familiar problem: I needed a layout engine that was lightweight, predictable, and easy to integrate. I couldn’t quite find what I wanted, so I ended up building my own. That project became Masharif.

Masharif is a complete Flexbox layout engine. It supports margins, padding, gaps, and the full set of flex properties, with behavior aligned closely to how Flexbox works on the web.

Some technical notes:
- Full Flexbox implementation
- Supports margin, padding, gaps, and nested layouts
- Designed to be simple to embed and reason about

Performance (tested with 10,101 nodes):
- Initial layout: ~0.87 ms
- Single property edit (width): ~0.07 ms
- 100 property edits (flex-grow toggles): ~0.07 ms
- Structural change (removing a child): ~0.75 ms

Why another layout engine?
Yoga is the obvious industry standard, but I wanted something that feels more idiomatic C++ rather than C-style APIs. Mostly, though, I wanted to take on the challenge and really understand the problem space by building one myself.

I’d love feedback, criticism, or questions.
by DrewADesign | 2026-02-18 00:58:33+00:00
This “It’s not about profits, man, it’s about how much you’re worth. The rules have changed. Don’t get left behind,” nonsense is exactly what a bunch of super wrong people said about investing during the .com bust. Even if we got some useful tech out of it in the end, that was a lot of people’s money that got flushed down the toilet.
by hackerbrother | 2026-02-18 00:58:49+00:00
The "LLMs shouldn't be writing code" take is starting to feel like the new "we should all just use No-Code."

We’ve been trying to "build a better layer" for thirty years. From Dreamweaver to Scratch to Bubble, the goal was always the same: hide the syntax so the "logic" can shine. But it turns out, the syntax wasn't the enemy—the abstraction ceiling was.
by protocolture | 2026-02-18 00:59:17+00:00
>People who got "enabled" by AI to produce stuff, just need to learn to keep their "target audience of one"-projects to themselves.

This is what I do. I have tons of cool (to me) shit I have built with LLM assistance. I only wheel my dumb stuff out if its specifically relevant to someone.

But I am also not doing it as a resume hobby, just as a hobby. A lot of people are trying to jump from hobby to career. The recognition is the point for some.
by vardalab | 2026-02-18 01:00:37+00:00
We said the same thing when 3D printing came out. Any sort of cool tech, we think everybody’s going to do it. Most people are not capable of doing it. in college everybody was going to be an engineer and then they drop out after the first intro to physics or calculus class.
A bunch of my non tech friends were vibe coding some tools with replit and lovable and I looked at their stuff and yeah it was neat but it wasn't gonna go anywhere and if it did go somewhere, they would need to find somebody who actually knows what they're doing. To actually execute on these things takes a different kind of thinking. Unless we get to the stage where it's just like magic genie, lol. Maybe then everybody’s going to vibe their own software.
by g947o | 2026-02-18 01:02:18+00:00
jscodeshift supports ts as a parser, so it should work.

If you want to also remove argument from call sites, you'll likely need to create your own tool that integrates TS Language Service data and jscodeshift.

LLMs definitely help with these codemods quite a bit -- you don't need to manually figure out the details in manipulating AST. But make sure to write tests -- a lot of them -- and come up with a way to quickly fix bugs, revert your change and then iterate. If you have set up the workflow, you may be able to just let LLM automate this for you in a loop until all issues are fixed.
by watsi | 2026-02-18 01:02:52+00:00
We'd love to have GiveWell evaluate Watsi. They often recommend global health interventions because every dollar goes incredibly far in saving lives. In the meantime, here's what a few (independent) experts have said about investing in access to surgery:

• A review across 23 LMICs found that low-complexity surgeries (e.g., appendectomy, hernia repair) cost as little as $17 per Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY) averted (Mengistie et al., 2025). Overall, 89% of surgical procedures studied were cost-effective, and 76% were “very cost-effective” based on GDP thresholds (Ifeanyichi et al., 2024).
• Essential surgery often achieves costs per DALY well below standard willingness-to-pay thresholds and can be more valuable than essential drugs or vaccines on a per-DALY basis (Mengistie et al., 2025). Low-complexity surgical interventions compare favorably to—and are sometimes more cost-effective than—interventions such as HIV antiretroviral therapy, family planning, and TB vaccinations (Ifeanyichi et al., 2024).
by gzread | 2026-02-18 01:03:34+00:00
You grunt with all your might and heave the car wash onto your shoulders. For a moment or two it looks as if you're not going to be able to lift it, but heroically you finally lift it high in the air! Seconds later, however, you topple underneath the weight, and the wash crushes you fatally. Geez! Didn't I tell you not to pick up the car wash?! Isn't the name of this very game "Pick Up The Car Wash and Die"?! Man, you're dense. No big loss to humanity, I tell ya.

*** You have died ***

In that game you scored 0 out of a possible 100, in 1 turn, giving you the rank of total and utter loser, squished to death by a damn car wash.

Would you like to RESTART, RESTORE a saved game, give the FULL score for that game or QUIT?
by avazhi | 2026-02-18 01:03:51+00:00
It isn't siloed though, not truly - not in the way Teamspeak or Mumble used to be, at least. Discord's global friends list is what will keep people from abandoning it in droves, unfortunately, and until Teamspeak et al sort that out it isn't changing.

EDIT: Maybe I completely forgot how Teamspeak works. It seems like there is a global friends list, but I can't remember that it was a thing back in the day (10+ years ago).
by bschwindHN | 2026-02-18 01:03:55+00:00
> I'd rather just improve my own skills with all that time and energy

That's what I would recommend, it's time better spent. I use AI occasionally to bounce some questions around or have some math jargon explained in simpler terms (all of which I can verify with external sources) using the free version of chatgpt or gemini or whatever I'm feeling that day, without caring about whatever version the model is. I don't need an AI to write code for me because writing the code is not really the hard part of solving a problem, in my opinion.
by marak830 | 2026-02-18 01:04:32+00:00
Oh I'm looking forward to playing with this one. But as a solo-dev-on-the-side I really wish Anthropic would create another plan, I'll happily pay for a pro-double to give me twice the usage. The $100 package is a bit brutal when converted to Yen, when I'm using it for side projects :s
by joecool1029 | 2026-02-18 01:04:43+00:00
I already see the ‘save us China’ meme comments, but I want to go a step further and ask: Did they ever develop domestic HDD production (like of the tooling needed to make HDD’s)?

As I understand it, the technology holders for this specific line of technology are Korea (Samsung), Japan (Toshiba), and US (WD/Seagate).

I don’t think China ever developed the tooling internally? Am I wrong?

This feels like the ballpoint pen situation. Where China could build everything but the ballpoint since it took specialized machinery. But HDD gets to be a hard sell with how far NAND has come, and China could just lean on economies of scale here and skip the hard work of what at some point could become overcomplicated abandonware technology. Similar to approach between internal combustion cars and EV’s…

EDIT: And I am very aware production happens in places like Thailand, I don’t forget the flood pricing, I also don’t forget clamcoin shortages. Specifically mean where the core expertise is held.
by rchaud | 2026-02-18 01:05:08+00:00
> We are witnessing a civilizational "race to the middle," where the complexity of human thought is sacrificed on the altar of algorithmic smoothness.

This has long been the case in the area of "business English", which has become highly simplified to fulfill several concurrent, yet conflicting requirements:

- Generally understandable to a wide audience due its lingua franca status

- "Media-trained" to not let internal details slip or admit fault to the public

- "Executive Summary"-fied to provide the coveted "30k ft view" to detail-allergic senior leadership

Considering how heavily weighted language training models are towards corporate press releases, general-audience news media and SEO-optimized blogspam, AI English is quickly going to become an even more blurry photocopy of business English.
by bryanrasmussen | 2026-02-18 01:06:41+00:00
thankfully nobody has ever had multiple books they've been writing at the same time, or books that they have actually written in the past but not taken the time to format and publish, or anything else that would explain anything like a month gap between publishing two books.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was written in two days.
Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde was evidently written in a week.

There are examples too numerous to mention of quite famous books that were written in 3 weeks.
by phil21 | 2026-02-18 01:07:05+00:00
I've seen plenty of stuff from google and meta datacenters on the market.

Had some weirdo AMD GPUs that were GCP-only that were offered to folks if you bought in bulk quantity. A whole ton of whitebox Ethernet switches from Facebook were on the market a number of years ago.

Lots of weird stuff like OCP 25G NICs that only were bought in quantity by hyperscalers as well come out in waves. You don't see a lot of these things hit eBay and traditional "used marketplaces" but they are out there if you know where to look and have connections with liquidators. You're unlikely to get deals on a few here and there though unless the market becomes absolutely saturated - usually hundreds are MoQ for a lot of these things.

Storage will be unlikely to see as the risk:reward for a giant company usually is too great. If data was ever written to them, typically they will be shredded vs. secure wiped. Very few large corporations want to take the risk of some liquidator either not running a proper wipe process or something slipping through the cracks. Even with encrypted drives I haven't seen much in quantity hit unless they were quite literally never utilized and straight pulls from large JBOD orders or the like. However, ServerDirect and other places seem to have cracked this nut a little bit considering the number of refurb drives they run through - not sure what their sources are though. Certainly not hyperscaler levels in any case.
by cucumber3732842 | 2026-02-18 01:07:05+00:00
Maybe, I really can't say.

My coworkers aren't telling me every time they back into a light post nor are they narcing on themselves to their insurer (who tells the NHTSA) that they wound up in a ditch and the tow truck driver had to pop their bumper cover back on.

We have no good data for how often humans make "not work reporting to anybody" crashes because the system is set up to be adversarial and therefore those do't get reported and there are a lot of those in this data.
by Betelbuddy | 2026-02-18 01:07:23+00:00
This is a quote from Tesla latest earnings call, at 04 min..

"Because we're really moving into a future that is based on autonomy and so if you're interested in buying a Model S and X, now would be the time to order it, because we expect to wind down S and X production in next quarter and basically stop production of Model S and X next quarter. We'll obviously continue to support the Model S and X programs for as long as people have the vehicles, but we're gonna take the Model S and X production space in our Fremont factory and convert that into an Optimus factory, which will... with the long-term goal of having 1 million units a year of Optimus robots in the current S/X space in Fremont."
by fatbird | 2026-02-18 01:07:34+00:00
Every day that passes, Ukraine gets stronger: more domestic defense production of what's currently the cutting edge of warfare; deeper financial integration and relationships with Europe; more aid lined up; European powers taking more responsibility for supporting Ukraine and seeing it win, not just survive. They have the largest and most competent army in Europe that's fought Russia to a standstill.

Every day that passes, Russia gets weaker: more oil sold in crude form only, since they don't have refining capacity to export gasoline; foreign currency reserves shrinking, since China is their main customer; another 35k casualties every month, with mounting costs for enlistment bonuses and death benefits; outer provinces stripped of men of fighting age, North Korea unwilling to send more soldiers, African recruits drying up; inflation raging, industries shutting down, and all economic indicators heading south.

It's terrible that Ukraine is trapped in this slugfest, but at this point, time favours Ukraine.
by pixl97 | 2026-02-18 01:07:52+00:00
>bluecollar stuff isn't going anywhere.

The 1700s called, regular mechinization already came for that.

And non-LLM AI has been moving into more blue collar stuff for years already, now with LLM logic they are becoming far more capable too.

You must be thinking of the more blue collar service industry, which may not go anywhere, but the time it takes to train, and the number of people that will go into it will ensure earning a living is difficult.
by protimewaster | 2026-02-18 01:08:14+00:00
> Because a phone running an unknown OS is significantly more dangerous than a phone that hasn't received security updates for years.

I'm not convinced this is generally true, at least as can be detected by an app. Back when I had my phone rooted, it was configured so that it would pass all the Google checks and look like the stock OS. That configuration was probably dangerous, but apps were happy with it. Now that I run an OS that doesn't lie about what it is, I'm flagged as untrustworthy. What's the point in being honest?

Overall, I don't think they really have any idea what's a threat based on the checks they're doing, so I don't think they can say at all what's more or less trustworthy. But I think that a phone that reports being years out of date should reasonably not be expected to be secure, but yet they mark it as secure anyway. Many of those devices can be rooted in a way that can still pass their checks. I would think, if nothing else, that would be reason to block them, since they're interested in blocking rooted devices.
by DrewADesign | 2026-02-18 01:09:41+00:00
The point is there’s no close positive correlation at that scale between labor and profits — hence the layoffs while these companies are doing better than ever. There’s zero reason to think increased productivity would lead to vastly more output from the company with the same amount of workers rather than far fewer workers and about the same amount of output, which is probably driven more by the market than a supply bottleneck.
by anonymars | 2026-02-18 01:09:57+00:00
Not to be hyperbolic, but the leap between this and Westworld (and other similar fiction) is a lot shorter than I would like...all it takes is some prompting in soul.md and the agent's ability to update it and it can go bananas?

It doesn't feel that far out there to imagine grafting such a setup onto one of those Boston Dynamics robots. And then what?
by xracy | 2026-02-18 01:11:04+00:00
Weird, cause I remember there being a very lengthy and involved debate about COVID. I remember hearing a ton of dissent and disagreement with the government positions... almost like... they weren't being censored. There are hundreds of thousands of discussions about the lab leak hypothesis, and there were hundreds of those discussions at the time. There was also plenty of conflicting advice given, including "injecting bleach" which was advice given by the then president, and ivermectin, which was advice given by 100s of online podcasters.

Even today, you can find like, hundreds of articles of dissenting opinions that were posted at the time of covid. In fact, no one quite yelled "I'm being silenced" as loudly as covid deniers who were demanding to share untested hypotheses.

What I can't find, is any articles that were pulled-from-the-air for going against the then-administration's opinions. But if you have them, please share. Importantly, they need to not be pulled for "false, harmful, or misleading takes."
by pandaman | 2026-02-18 01:12:00+00:00
Finland had an offer from the USSR to swap some land for double the size elsewhere. After the "serious military victory over ussr" it lost that land plus some more for the total of 11% of its area, including its second largest city.

>and fought with ussr in 1941-1945

That is a very hilarious way to say that Finland allied with Nazis and got crushed again.
by bediger4000 | 2026-02-18 01:12:34+00:00
How does this analysis change if an LLM decides how much to charge a buyer? I think that LLMs will end up doing the median thing, and charging people based on credit rating and other financial info they've got, missing out on the "fat tail" people who have passion for, or obsession with the thing service or experience offered for sale. Some folks will claim that LLM pricing gives them great deals, others will call rip off.