MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-10 15:03:26+00:00
Tip that will work forever, even when the ones you replace your old idols with get replaced: Don't have any idols.

Listen to the words, don't follow "personalities", don't listen to specific individuals just because of their status. Not a single time have I been disappointed by an idol, because I've made the conscious choice of not having following any. Bunch of smart people say smart stuff all the time, until they don't. I read everything as if I don't know the author, I think more people should do this and less celebrity worship would make the entire ecosystem better. We need less of it, not more.
by ssivark | 2026-02-10 15:03:42+00:00
> my entire team hates them and anyone trying to post important stuff in topics gets ignored lol we can't help it our brains just don't want them in our lives.

I have a theory for why some people love Slack and others love Zulip (Completers -vs- cultivators) which I shared in a sibling thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46960569

Curious to hear what you think.
by elevatortrim | 2026-02-10 15:03:45+00:00
You could describe drugs the same way, no? building products to connect people to substances they enjoy? There would be no fraud and deception too.

This is not about Alice liking or disliking it. This is about allowing Mark to engineer a system where statistically too many Bob's and Charlie's can't refuse (for the same reasons gambling is more common in poor communities), making the society worse off at a result.
by jjice | 2026-02-10 15:03:57+00:00
True, but I haven't found any good decentralized options for almost anything that don't have enough friction to scare the average user away. I'm talking about decentralized options that are actually decentralized, not "potentially decentralized in theory but no one uses them in a decentralized way".

I do see a future where we crack the code to a smooth flow that does allow for decentralized networks, but it does suck for most people currently.
by DrScientist | 2026-02-10 15:03:57+00:00
> Because the most important thing in the world is the state ensuring people not make bad choices

So you think it's fine to cheat or con somebody? Just a bad choice by the person conned?

The key thing you are missing here is that companies like Google and facebook aren't some passive actor just 'placing choices' before people.

The allegation is they are were actively working to knowingly harm for their own interests.

You pretend to be advocating for a world full of individual responsibility - yet somehow that doesn't extend to the actions of large companies or the people who run them.....
by Spooky23 | 2026-02-10 15:04:05+00:00
You’re the problem because of the way you are thinking. You don’t own the asphalt in front of you. You’re angry because in your mind you do, and you feel righteous about it. That’s why you are casting a moral judgement about them.

The most efficient throughput of the road system is not for people to “politely” queue up for 5 miles. People should be utilizing the rod and merging in an orderly manner. By adopting some arbitrary self imposed practice that is leading to 20 drivers cutting in front of you, are the one creating an unsafe situation.
by angiolillo | 2026-02-10 15:04:17+00:00
> Slowing down on a busy highway does not reduce turbulence at all, it add chaos and unpredictability to the system. Once car suddenly slowing down...

I agree that slowing down "suddenly" causes turbulence. However, slowing down *gradually* allows you to build up a safety buffer which in turn allows you to avoid slowing down suddenly.
by sidewndr46 | 2026-02-10 15:04:27+00:00
I don't really think looking at road traffic is a good example here. I grew up in the US, so my first thoughts are "well the signage is inadequate, it appears lanes aren't respected & if there are traffic control devices they aren't being followed".

I've also driven in a bunch of different places, including the left-hand drive portion of the United States. So I've seen the wide spectrum of driving. I could just as easily remark that in some parts of Asia, road traffic has a general degree of lawlessness to it. Laws aren't enforced or are absent in the first place. Yet somehow it appears that in any populated area hundreds of thousands of people are able to participate in road traffic each day and somehow be productive members of society and economy. All of this happens in the absence of legal coercion. I'm not going to leap to "it's a libertarian utopia" but if people can co-exist in a society in a productive way without legal coercion and have it not just immediately become violent I think that is admirable.
by ssivark | 2026-02-10 15:05:17+00:00
> Coming from Slack for a number of years, there is an initial shock of missing out of the 'slack way of things' [...] takes some getting used it.

I have a theory for why some people love Slack and others love Zulip (Completers -vs- cultivators) which I shared in a sibling thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46960569

Curious to hear what you think.
by water-data-dude | 2026-02-10 15:05:30+00:00
My immediately thought when I read the description of the book was that I have some internet friends who are into ABDL (adult baby diaper lover) stuff, and it sounds like the book's somewhat like that. I haven't GRILLED them about their motivations or why they're into it, but they like pretending to be a baby sometimes (not always in a sexual way) - maybe it's freeing to let go of responsibilities and pressure, etc. Anyway, it doesn't hurt anyone, and they get something out of it that makes them happy.

This ruling is sad IMO, because I have the feeling that Australia is increasingly hostile to The Weird Stuff, and I'm worried about what it might mean for people over there who are into abdl and the like.
by bluGill | 2026-02-10 15:05:41+00:00
There is no way to answer that - we have limited money/people/time. Whatever we fund - we will get whatever the returns are - but there is no way to know what we don't have because we didn't fund some other thing. Even if in a few years we fund that other thing - what we get out of those funds is influenced by the other things we already know and so whatever we get out of it also shows the results of the other research that we already have.

The only exception is if some research reveals nothing. Though this isn't a useful claim: "it doesn't work" still revealed something.
by toss1 | 2026-02-10 15:05:54+00:00
Your proposal is to do nothing and then make sure the entire thing causes orders of magnitude greater costs and damage which can be irreparable for centuries.

That has ALREADY been tried, and it was an absolute disaster, killing people, wrecking lives, and wrecking vast areas of ecosystems including driving species to extinction. You clearly were not around when rivers literally caught fire or when pollution required entire areas of cities and towns to be evacuated and dug up (look up Superfund Sites), costing taxpayers hundreds of $Billions.

A billion dollar mining operation is not a quick trip to a bar, and it is not putting personal liberties at risk to require planning.

It is far better to PLAN ahead and AGREE on the requirements up front so the company and investors can make sound profit projections and the ecosystem is protected. It is far worse for everyone to let them cause irreparable damage then hit the company/investors with crushing legal actions after the fact.

Yes, I agree that such reviews need to be expedited, the delay does no one any good. But doing the reviews is crucial.

Please read some history and lookup Chesterton's Fence before whinging about topics of which you are clearly ignorant
by Anamon | 2026-02-10 15:06:18+00:00
I went back to typing myself after a short time, even for the stuff I do rely on LLMs on. I noticed that crucial steps of thinking happen as I type out the code. Letting an agent code, or copying from a chat, versus typing it off manually makes a huge qualitative difference for me. Typing manually is an extreme time saver because of all the issue it lets me catch early on.

At least for me and a lot of others, the mental process is very different between the two. I guess there's a similar dynamic with, e.g., writing a letter to someone vs. dictating it. You prepare differently, think differently. A different text comes out.

Like the author (I forgot which one) who said they once copied an entire classic novel with their typewriter, in order to "see what it feels like to write a great novel." When I first heard it, I thought it was meant as a joke, but there's a lot more truth and sense in that than it might sound like at first.
by Yizahi | 2026-02-10 15:06:19+00:00
Of course, over the past few centuries. Magna Carta, Bill of Rights, Polish-Lithuanian Constitution and many other central documents limiting powers of the highest ruler.

As an example more familiar to me - Kievan Rus and its region (modern day Ukraine, Russia). Duchies in the region had been closely following western Europe countries, right up until Golden Horde invasion and continued occupation. After that few centuries of despotia, then Russian Empire, then USSR effectively destroyed almost all collaborative culture. But on the other hand western Ukraine managed to avoid most of that and preserved its culture over the centuries. And so in the 21st century that preserved core managed to jump-start democratic revolution in the country, while protests in Russia mostly fizzled out, with some exceptions of course.
by jk1484 | 2026-02-10 15:06:28+00:00
I wrote a report proving that autonomous AI agents force a regression from Agile to Waterfall - structurally, not by opinion.

The core argument: if no one who understands the code is in the loop during creation, the code is either unreviewed (vibe code) or reviewed after the fact (Waterfall - which is slower than sync pair-programming with AI).

Async workflow = sync workflow + formalization cost + context reload + feedback latency + tooling downgrade. Every term is strictly positive. No configuration makes it zero. No amount of AI improvement changes this.

Pair-programming was always the best methodology. AI just made it affordable. The industry should be doubling down on it - not abandoning it for the methodology we spent twenty years escaping.

Full analysis: https://github.com/Jk1484/agentic-waterfall
by showerst | 2026-02-10 15:06:52+00:00
Each new episode of this I've said to myself "wow, that problem is much harder than I expected". Then he solves it in an elegant way, and I realize the problem is even harder than that!

I'm into a number of the hobbies he's good at, and it's incredible how much skill he has at design AND fine working AND manual machining AND cad/cam AND on and on... I'm really glad he started a youtube channel.
by codyb | 2026-02-10 15:07:32+00:00
A lot of folk justify it to themselves.

I've heard "well, you have to change things from the inside" before.

And a lot of people have been there for a while, it wasn't always... quite as bad even if a lot of the warning signs were absolutely there.

I was actually just thinking to myself this morning that I literally have no idea what these feeds look like at this point, but more and more people seem to be looking at me with envy when I say I don't have any lol. I'm kind of curious and might ask my friends if I can see what they're looking at day to day if they'll show me.
by Luker88 | 2026-02-10 15:08:06+00:00
Deuteronomy 22:28‑29, "young woman...of tender age".
For Jewish tradition this means 12 year old, age at which the Jews once considered girls capable of marriage.

Lot daughters are also believed to be less than 15.

Famously also the prophet Mohammed consumed a marriage with a 9 year old, and that was seen as normal and approved by all previous text and tradition.

No age is ever explicitly defined for any case, because "csam" and "underage sex" just were not concepts people gave thought to.

Recognizing that some cases are probably fine by today's standard is fine, but refusing to recognize that at least some of them must have been way too young is ignoring a lot of evidence.
by conartist6 | 2026-02-10 15:08:53+00:00
They're not afraid of the idea of programming people.

When I worked there every week there would be a different flyer on the inside of the bathroom stall door to try to get the word out about things that really mattered to the company.

One week the flyer was about how a feed video needed to hook the user in the first 0.2 seconds. The flyer promised that if this was done, the result would in essence have a scientifically measurable addictive effect, a brain-hack. The flyer was to try to make sure this message reached as many advertisers as possible.

It seemed to me quite clear at that moment that the users were prey. The company didn't even care what was being sold to their users with this brain-reprogramming-style tactic. Our goal was to sell the advertisers on the fact that we were scientifically sure that we had the tools to reprogram our users brains.
by 4b11b4 | 2026-02-10 15:09:17+00:00
I'm a fan human pruning (which you refer to as "write gates").

At this point, I'd argue any "automated memory" is a failure over time. I don't know if I'll be convinced otherwise.

If one were to go full automation, then I'd want generations of what to prune ("I haven't used this memory in a while... "). Actually, that might be useful in your tool as well. "Remove-gates"?
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-10 15:09:22+00:00
> At that point, what're you going to do, quit?

Yes? Why not? If I'd join a company and figured out what I did actually harmed more than helped, I'd leave that place, absolutely. I'm a software engineer, even with the lowest possible position in a random company I'd earn better than most people in the country and live a better life, even just the bottom 30% of earners in software in the country (not counting outsourcing obviously). Especially at that time it was very easy to find new jobs.
by rayiner | 2026-02-10 15:09:24+00:00
Nope. India had guns and cannons, and more of them than the British East India company!

Robert Clive overthrew the Nawab of Bengal with 800 europeans and a dozen artillery pieces: https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/battle-plassey. He also had 2,000 Indian soldiers (Britain conquered India with Indians doing the work). The Nawab had an army of 50,000 along with 50 artillery pieces.
Elon Musk Censors Dissident Fleeing the United States
by jPendleton | 2026-02-10 15:09:55+00:00
A U.S. citizen who has been chased out of the country by a corrupt federal judiciary in an attempt to cover for the crimes of Palantir Technologies, joined X last year in an attempt communicate with government officials in a public forum and found that he was unable to interact with any other users on the platform. He had apparently been preemptively "shadow banned."

Jochen Edmund Pendleton, formerly known as Jonathan Eric Pendleton, who is currently seeking asylum in Canada, has filed suit against Elon Musk and X Corp in Bastrop County, Texas, under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act and the First Amendment, petition available here: https://drive.proton.me/urls/RGBJPXCMCM#NCUEmjiNFLxc

Judging from the complaints X Corp. has received on the Better Business Bureau website, https://www.bbb.org/us/tx/bastrop/profile/social-media-marketing/x-corp-0825-1000230350/customer-reviews, many of which occurred while Musk was an employee of the federal government, X Corp. has done the same to many other consumers, making this a potential mass tort action for violations of the First Amendment.

Pendleton has no prior relationship with Musk or X Corp. who appear to be participating in an ongoing cover up of a very high-profile matter in DC's federal court, Pendleton v. United States, et al, No. 01218 (2025), involving a tangential connection to Musk's friends at Palantir Technologies and their serial violations of the Fourth Amendment.

Musk has tried to dodge service of the petition in Bastrop County and has sent grossly incompetent attorneys to argue on behalf of X Corp. that "Musk’s alleged personal statements on freedom of speech or X being the platform for free speech around the world do not constitute any promises or representations as to how content posted on X will be treated, monitored, or promoted and amount to nothing more than puffery." Musk apparently does not take his citizenship oath very seriously.

Because Palantir has turned the world into a North Korea style digital prison brought to you by the Intel Management Engine and its progeny, giving the CIA total access and control of all networked devices, if you would like to share this story, print these instructions and post them in a public space:

1. Go to a foreign search engine, like swisscows or yandex.

2. Search for a foreign URL shortener, the more foreign the better.

3. Without visiting the link, obtain a redirect URL for https://jpendleton.substack.com/

4. Post the link to social media using non-descript language, avoiding keywords that would alert skynet to your activities.

5. Repeat these instructions for all subsequent shares.

If enough people share the story in this way, it is at least possible that they will not face retaliation and suffer the same fate as Pendleton. Good luck with your country!
by colesantiago | 2026-02-10 15:10:01+00:00
I'm confused and saddened on why Oxide has to keep raising money (in substitute for growth) and keep entrenching their business with VCs and letting them control business and ownership.

> "So if we didn’t need to raise, why seek the capital? Well, we weren’t seeking it, really. But our investors, seeing the business take off, were eager to support it."

From this of course the VCs will back and support Oxide (they are mentally thinking that Oxide will move into supplying hardware for AI datacenters) eventually want their money back at many many multiples and the pressure is there to achieve this.

Can you even invest in Oxide?

I just wish Oxide wouldn't have to keep getting owned by VCs which would inevitably lead to enshittification to pay back the VCs.

If Oxide followed the model of Valve (100% founder and employee ownership, profitable, vast unlikelihood of enshittification or pressure to get acquired or IPO) then it would be a different situation.
by notepad0x90 | 2026-02-10 15:10:10+00:00
"it's complicated" is not the same as "it's insecure". Google feels like removing this complexity improves security for web-pki. Improving security is not the same as saying something is insecure. Raising security for web-pki is not the same as caliming non-web-pki usage is insecure or is degrading security expectations of web-pki users. It's just google railroading things because they can. You can improve security by also letting Google decide and control everything, they have the capability and manpower. But we don't want that either.
by kayo_20211030 | 2026-02-10 15:10:21+00:00
> Converting instructions to code is essential complexity

I don't agree with that. If I want to add two numbers I'd like to write `a = b + c`. I do not want to write the machine code that effects the same result on whatever computer architecture I'm targeting. Precisely _how_ one adds two numbers is accidental complexity. Whether they need to be added, and what numbers should be added, is essential complexity.

Fortran removed that accidental complexity and left the essential stuff in place. There were no fuzzy lines.
by InMice | 2026-02-10 15:10:30+00:00
Is it really landmark tho? First it was nicotine and big tobacco, then the same addiction engineers designed ultra processed foods. Kraft, nabisco, etc all spun off by tobacco companies... Normalizing food addiction in children. And now it's screens and social media. It's the same fundamental physiology but it seems like society can't learn a lesson either.

I thought it was kind of pathetic how quickly they shoved ipads into schools with no real long term data, no research whatsoever. Just insane really. And now here we are yet again.
by embedding-shape | 2026-02-10 15:10:32+00:00
> not everyone can avoid immoral but legal work whilst trying to exist in this economy

We're talking about software engineers here, not "cleaner taking up any job you can". Literally one of the most well paid jobs considering the amount of effort you put into it. People slave away on fields picking berries for less, with more impact on their life expectancy, if there is any career you can almost jump between jobs in just a few weeks, software engineering is one of them.
by bluGill | 2026-02-10 15:10:35+00:00
> Every step towards understanding subatomic physics is a step towards cold fusion.

Is it?

You are assuming cold fusion is possible. We don't know that. It might be one more step before we finally prove it is never possible.

You are also assuming that cold fusion is something this path of research will lead us to. However this might be a misstep that isn't helpful at all because it doesn't prove anything useful about the as yet unknown physical process that cold fusion needs.

We just don't know, and cannot know at this point.
by flohofwoe | 2026-02-10 15:10:37+00:00
Having quite recently written a (still experimental) Vulkan backend for sokol_gfx.h, my impression is that starting with `VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer` (soon-ish to be replaced with `VK_EXT_descriptor_heap`), the "core API" is in pretty good shape now (with the remaining problem that all the outdated and depreciated sediment layers are still part of the core API, this should really be kicked out - e.g. when I explicitly request a specific API version like 1.4 I don't care about any features that have been deprecated in versions up to 1.4 and I don't care about any extensions that have been incorporated into the core API up until 1.4, so I'd really like to have them at least not show up in the Vulkan header so that code completion cannot sneak in outdated code (or EXT/KHR postfixes for things that have been moved into core).

The current OpenGL-like sediment-layer-model (e.g. never remove old stuff) is extremely confusing when not following Vulkan development very closely since 2016, since there's often 5 ways to do the same thing, 3 of which are deprecated - but finding out whether a feature is deprecated is its own sidequest.

What I actually wrestled with most was getting the outer frame-loop right without validation layer errors. I feel like this should be the next thing which the "Eye of Khronos" should focus on.

All official tutorial/example code I've tried doesn't run without swapchain-sync-related validation errors on one or another configuration. Even this 'best practices' example code which demonstrates how to do the frame-loop scaffolding correctly produces valiation layer errors, so it's also quite useless:

https://docs.vulkan.org/guide/latest/swapchain_semaphore_reu...

What's worse: different hardware/driver combos produce different validation layer errors (even in the swapchain-code which really shouldn't have different implementations across GPU vendors - e.g. shouldn't Khronos provide common reference code for those GPU-independent parts of drivers?). I wonder if there is actually any Vulkan code out there which is completely validation-layer-clean across all possible configs (I seriously doubt it).

Also the VK_[EXT/KHR]_swapchain_maintenance1 extension which is supposed to fix all those little warts has such a low coverage that it's not worth supporting (but it should really be part of the core API by now).

Anyway... baby steps into the right direction, only a shame that it took a decade ;)
by dylan604 | 2026-02-10 15:11:03+00:00
This is a comment that my reaction is different based on your age. If you're older, I'd be more disappointed. If you're young, I'd be more sympathetic. However, the careers mentioned by GP all require schooling where those ethics courses can be taught. In "Software Engineering", so many people are self taught or taken boot camps without formal schooling. The SE title is just a joke to me knowing that it is so overused and given to people that clearly are not trained as an engineer.

Maybe we should have Gavin Belson's Tethics be more widely taught???