MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rockskon | 2026-02-12 23:51:08+00:00
What I read explicitly stated use of AI would be involved in their guesswork of determining if a user is or is not an adult.

Also - the outcry here isn't from people who think they will no longer be able to use Discord in any way, shape, or form without going through an age verification process. That's a bizarre strawman that doesn't represent the main grievances being aired.
by renewiltord | 2026-02-12 23:51:51+00:00
Indeed, I've been saying this for decades now. Hacker News needs usernames to post. How long before they require real names? And then how long before they require IDs for those real names? And then how long before they need you to show up in person with your IDs for those real names? And then how long before they need you to bring notarized documents in person with your IDs for those real names?

All so that we can post online about how Google is invading our privacy?
by ChadNauseam | 2026-02-12 23:52:11+00:00
I find AI extremely useful for that. "What did I brush over?" "What did I assume the reader might know when they might not" "can you fact-check every claim for me and provide references." It is incredibly high ROI and I think it makes the final piece better.

What I dislike about reading AI writing is that it's dumb but sounds smart. If it were smart I wouldn't mind reading it. Here's an example. It's always full of metaphors that make no sense, like a closet so full of junk that it topples out as soon as you open the door. (see what I mean? the metaphor has a superficial resemblance to the topic at hand but doesn't clarify the subject at all and therefore muddles the waters as you try to understand what I might have been intending to communicate with it.)
by batteryphil | 2026-02-12 23:52:13+00:00
I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to solve the "Shadow Weight Tax." Standard Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) is often a memory lie—it claims to be 4-bit, but it keeps a hidden FP32 master copy to accumulate gradients. This kills the dream of training anything substantial on consumer-grade Pascal/Turing cards.Project PRIMAL is an attempt to delete shadow weights entirely and train a 0.1B parameter model directly on a discrete integer grid.1. The Core Hack: The Prime-Harmonic GridInstead of linear INT4, I’ve implemented a 13-value grid derived from prime reciprocals ($\pm 1, \pm 1/2, \pm 1/3 \dots$). This concentrates precision around zero, creating a "natural" bell curve that mimics weight distribution without the overhead of floating-point math.2. The "Poltergeist" OptimizerTo solve "Stochastic Thrashing" (oscillating between weights due to lack of micro-steps), I used Decoupled Flipping:Vote Buffering: Gradients cast a "Vote" into an int8 buffer.Consensus: We only flip a bit if the buffer shows a strong net signal (e.g., +4 net votes over 4 micro-batches).Adaptive Probability: Weight magnitude determines flip-resistance.3. Stats on a GTX 1080 Ti (11GB):Throughput: ~5,800 - 6,000 Tokens/Sec.VRAM Health: 10.37 GB (94% saturation) with zero leakage over 18+ hours.Convergence: Started at 11.0, currently hitting stable 5.1 - 5.3 at Step 11.6k.4. Process & Tooling DisclosureI am a solo researcher using AI as a force multiplier to accelerate this project. I collaborated with Gemini 3 Flash to:Kernel Refinement: Optimizing the custom C++ and CUDA kernels for the Prime-Harmonic LUT.Documentation & Telemetry: Formatting the training logs and structuring this technical report.Logic Stress-Testing: Brainstorming the "Z-Score Threshold" logic to handle gradient accumulation without master weights.The architecture and the "Poltergeist" logic are my own, but the speed of iteration was made possible by treating the AI as a pair-programmer for the low-level boilerplate and data synthesis.GitHub: https://github.com/batteryphil/Primal-Discrete-LLM-Training....
by hypeatei | 2026-02-12 23:52:22+00:00
> but where are you getting the idea that discord is going to estimate the user's age using "some AI garbage tool"

"Additionally, Discord will implement its age inference model, a new system that runs in the background to help determine whether an account belongs to an adult, without always requiring users to verify their age"[0]

0: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...
by leftyspook | 2026-02-12 23:53:21+00:00
Do you think the attention and engagement is because people think this is some sort of an "ai misalignment" thing? No.
AI misalignment is total hogwash either way. The thing we worry about is that people who are misaligned with the civilised society have unfettered access to decent text and image generators to automate their harassment campaigns, social media farming, political discourse astroturfing, etc.
by bigbadfeline | 2026-02-12 23:54:37+00:00
> Sometimes you are wrong, and everyone else is wrong,

Happens all the time.

> and only an empirical test can separate the wheat from the chaff.

Not for the vast majority of political issues and indeed for most of the Social Sciences. In these cases, empirical evidence is just an accessory, it's still evidence but it's never conclusive, you need reasoning to sort out the complexity.
by leptons | 2026-02-12 23:54:44+00:00
>Tariffs affect the cost of business same-day.

How? The day the tariff goes into effect is after vast amounts of on-shore stock has already landed, purchased for a far lower price. The purchases done on the day the tariffs took effect and after are costing more, but have not landed yet. So no, it's practically never a "same-day" effect.

>claims that tariffs are destroying the American consumer feel like gas lighting

If you live in the US, and don't notice the price of everything has been steadily increasing last year, and continues to increase this year, then I don't know what to tell you but that you're arguing in bad faith.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-12 23:54:59+00:00
> Retailers take on all the risk

> landlord which has done literally nothing

This isn't really accurate. It actually takes a decent amount of work and capital input to get a set of retail buildings into usable shape and keep them that way. The internet caricature of landlords is that the buildings just popped into existence one day and the landlords rent them out, but there's obviously more to it. I know several attempts at retail real estate development that flopped and lost investors a lot of money.

There's also a risk involved in renting out the properties. Not all tenants will pay the rent, and when they stop paying for long enough you have to evict. It takes a long time to get someone's business out and turn the property over so a new business can move in. The rents have to be adjusted to compensate for some of that loss, but in a downturn (e.g. COVID) the losses can all sync up at once and torpedo the financial model used by the landlord.

Retail spaces also need to be kept up. It's common in my area for groups to buy out blocks of spaces and overhaul the old parking lots, landscaping, lighting, traffic patterns, and security so that they go from being sketchy run-down locations to something safe and inviting.

I'll probably get downvoted for trying to add some balance to the conversation because this is an internet comment section and my comment wasn't "landlords bad", but retail property investment isn't really a magical safe investment like everyone assumes. Keep that in mind if anyone hits you up for an investment opportunity related to one.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-12 23:55:16+00:00
> https://wiki.st.com/stm32mpu/wiki/How_to_display_on_HDMI

That board has a DDR3 chip on it. Is there one with HDMI that doesn't?

> But mostly it’s the fundamental problem space from an A/V perspective. You don’t need iPhone-grade image processing - you just need to convert the raw signal from the CMOS chip to some flavor of YUV or RGB, and get that over to the screen via whatever interface it exposes.

> NTSC HD was designed to be compatible with pretty stateless one-way broadcast over the air. And that was a follow-on to analog encodings that were laid down based on timing of the scanning CRT gun from dividing the power line frequency in an era where 1GB of RAM would be sci-fi. We use 29.97 / 59.94 fps from shimming color signal into 30 fps B&W back when color TV was invented in the early-mid 1900s, that’s how tight this domain is.

If you're getting a real-time signal that's already TV-like then you don't need a processor at all. But I didn't want to assume you're getting that, running a multi-Gbps signal over a wire in a very hostile environment.

The more generic solution needs the ability to hold a couple frames in memory. Which probably means a ram chip. Please don't focus so hard on the way I rounded the number. The point was that it's a negligible number of dollars. And you can use a much smaller chip than a gigabyte, but that doesn't save a proportional amount of money and the conclusion is the same, negligible amount of dollars.
by kccqzy | 2026-02-12 23:57:32+00:00
I think you are conflating between walkable and having good transit. A walkable city means almost everything you need is within walking distance. That doesn’t mean there are buses or trains to take you out of this area. I live in a walkable part of the city. Within a 15-minute walk, there are three supermarkets, perhaps twenty restaurants with different cuisines, four pharmacies, one each of USPS/UPS/FedEx for shipping, four different banks, three dry cleaners… you get the idea. The only transportation tool I need is my two legs.
by abraxas | 2026-02-12 23:57:36+00:00
But it makes it worse. Once Waymo cars start clogging streets, cruising around waiting for passengers it will amplify the issue. It will be cheap enough to just have them mill around to be quickly available when requested.

In time, human driving will be phased out and that will precipitate removal of speed limits and traffic lights as autonomous cars will be able to use vehicle to vehicle messaging to negotiate intersections. Of course pesky pedestrians and cyclists could still be in the way. That's where lobbying comes in to restrict the pedestrian areas to pockets where cars and people never share the same space. But since cars require much more space than peeople the result will be more sprawl and less walkable places as it will be people who will get pushed aside.
by ra0x3 | 2026-02-12 23:58:08+00:00
Absolutely https://github.com/ra0x3/systemg/tree/main/examples/orchestr...

Things are time bound by instruction creation - at some point you still need a human to dictate the instructions that the orchestrated agents use. From there I've found that -- (1) derive a goal from the instructions (2) break that goal into tasks (3) order those tasks into a DAG (5) spawn the agents to work via the DAG -- seems to be doing everything I want it to do.
by vindarel | 2026-02-12 23:58:38+00:00
JetBrains IDE plugin for Common Lisp: https://github.com/Enerccio/SLT (I'm sure you saw it before and I don't know how polish it is, and I'm pretty sure it has less features than Emacs&SLIME, yet, but I must link it for reference. Because yes, before 2023 we could complain there were no JetBrains IDE plugin for Common Lisp, since 2023, we have one.)
by dinobones | 2026-02-12 23:58:53+00:00
> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.

There is no unsupervised robotaxi service in Austin and there won't be, for years, if ever. Just like the way "FSD" is not fully self driving and likely never will be.
by INTPenis | 2026-02-12 23:59:12+00:00
eID is the obvious answer here in Europe. Right now it's kinda scattered with different providers, but I believe EU is working on a more universal protocol. Unfortnately there are rumors it will require official Google/Apple play stores, unrooted devices, and all that it does today already.

But it should be treated as a relatively safe ID, it's even used for voting. If you feel uncomfortable, just have one device for eID, and one for everything else.

I think it's a great tool if we want to implement some sort of liquid democracy feature.
by moregrist | 2026-02-12 23:59:32+00:00
I use a notebook extensively for certain kinds of work and problems. I’ll point out specific ways that I use it to answer your questions.

> The post here mentions hypotheses, but I don't do experiments for the most part.

Debugging any hard bug is essentially making a series of hypotheses and testing them. I use a notebook to keep track and make notes when I’m knee-deep in some hairy bug.

> It mentions writing down in the notebook before writing code, but I can't test my notes, I can't really send my notes for code review.

I use a notebook primarily for design work, especially algorithmic design work.

It’s really handy for numerical stuff where I often want to transform some expression or equation and prove to myself that it’s equivalent or has certain properties.

It’s also handy for working through any algorithm where you’re manipulating a tree or a graph.

> I guess you could use it for design, but you'd lose all the advantages of word processing such as editing, links, context, etc.

I find it much faster to sketch the things I mentioned (especially diagrams!) with pen and paper when working through them. If I need to present the work or share it, I might scan the notes or I can polish them in a word processor or slide deck or whatever.

For what it’s worth, my background is in a computational science (not CS) and I do quite a lot of work on numerical and algorithmic problems that come up in actual hardware and sensors. I also like to work on compiler-y things in my spare time.

Ultimately you end up using tools that are useful for you. So none of this may have any value for your work. But hopefully it answers what someone might write in a notebook.
by alex43578 | 2026-02-12 23:59:42+00:00
Genuinely asking how is that realistically dangerous to the populace?

Set aside a slippery slope argument, because we’re just talking about security cameras in public areas: do you really think you have a right to privacy on a sidewalk?

If someone recognizes a criminal on a sidewalk from a wanted poster, or a missing child from a milk carton, is that surveillance state? Are they an asshole for calling the tip line, instead of keeping quiet?
by nohat | 2026-02-12 23:59:49+00:00
Fair points. "Alexandrian who found area from mere sides" is a bad hint because it is fairly obscure, and really just a history trivia check. And the image is a bit random. You can view the explanation for the hint by clicking the ? button in the upper right corner after a word is completed if you are curious about the models reasoning.

As a bit of an explanation I generated these before Nano banana pro came out, and at the time I made a large comparison grid for various image and text models. For this style qwen image performed very well. LLM wise I started with 5.1 and updated to 5.2. Of course with the rate of model release my choices are pretty much already obsolete... Expense is also a factor for a hobby project, and NB pro is 7.5x more expensive than Qwen image.
by arjie | 2026-02-13 00:00:30+00:00
The section of people who care about anonymity has always been fairly small, even on niche communities like Hacker News. As an example, the most popular comment on the Australian social network ban for teens is in favour: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208348

Watching as things play out, I understand why people try to target discord et al. with their complaints about the loss of anonymity. Being a tiny minority they have no hope to influence their governments because the opposite position is widely popular.

Therefore, they try to convince commercial entities to disregard these laws as much as possible. This is particularly useful for that niche since fighting legislation cannot in itself be done anonymously. Therefore, they attempt to transform a very nonymous (haha) entity to do the fighting on their behalf.

I think it's a doomed endeavour. To get users on discord, it has to be portrayed to parents as a safe and legal service. The days of underground BBSes are gone. Now, if your brand gets associated with anything negative you're toast.

Overall, a fight with a bygone conclusion. If you want anonymity you have to use other tools and be aware that simply using those tools marks you out as someone who desires anonymity.
by heisenzombie | 2026-02-13 00:00:32+00:00
Another irony is that I clicked on one of their suggested questions ("My aging parent lives alone...") and the first part of the answer was:

"""
1. Explore Government and Community Meal Programs (Often Low-Cost or Free)
Many programs provide balanced, home-delivered meals designed for seniors, emphasizing nutrition over processed frozen dinners. These are ideal for someone on a fixed income who doesn't cook.
"""

Specifically, it recommended Meals on Wheels, the Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP), Local senior food pantries or boxes through Feeding America food banks, and Medicare Advantage or Medicaid benefits.

To my obvious follow-up question, Grok replied "Yes, several of these programs have faced proposed cuts, eliminations, or other pressures during the current Trump administration"
by D-Machine | 2026-02-13 00:01:39+00:00
> Because the gains from spending time improving the model overall outweigh the gains from spending time individually training on benchmarks.

This may not be the case if you just e.g. roll the benchmarks into the general training data, or make running on the benchmarks just another part of the testing pipeline. I.e. improving the model generally and benchmaxing could very conceivably just both be done at the same time.
by fhub | 2026-02-13 00:02:09+00:00
I think the biggest change for robotics in this space will be a new vision (Lidar + Camera) unit from the team that made Microsoft Kinect (and were acquired by apple). https://lyte.ai/. Sensor fusion handled, no robot lidar robot interference. Seems very plug-n-play.

No affiliation. Just looks like cool tech by a proven team.
by dimitri-vs | 2026-02-13 00:02:31+00:00
Maybe I'm just not working on complex or big enough projects but I haven't encountered a case of a feature that couldn't be implemented in one or two context windows. Or using vanilla Claude Code a multi-phase plan doc with a couple of sub agents and a final verification pass with Codex.

I guess maybe I'm doing the orchestration manually, but I always find there's tons of decisions that need to be made in the middle of large plan implementations.

Your refactor example terrifies me because the best part of a refactor is cleaning out all the bandaid workarounds and obsolete business logic you didn't even know existed. Can't see how an agent swarm would be able to figure that out unless you provide a giga-spec file containing all current business knowledge. And if you don't spec it the agents will just eagerly bake these inefficiencies and problems into your migrated app.
by tamimio | 2026-02-13 00:02:32+00:00
I had the same issue but in instagram, not for personal use, but few years ago I made few startups, and every time I register the company I create few social accounts, all works well except instagram for some reason, always get flagged and asked to take a selfie with a book or something.. and even after providing that selfie I still get perma banned! I tried to call support, like how you would expect from any company let alone a multi billion one, only to find out that there’s actually no support in anywhere in fecebook wise! And the only way you can get something fixed is through a secret syndicate-like community where you should know someone who knows someone to talk to some person there to fix your issue. Long story short, never bothered with that shitty company again, good riddance.
by tim-tday | 2026-02-13 00:02:38+00:00
The problem is the system. Enshitification will happen because we push our institutions to make a profit at all costs. Rental car companies perform the fourfold scam, add absurd fees, run with inadequate staff. They know they’re doing evil and every single one of them does it.
Contrast this with your local library. They staff adequately, never ask for unreasonable fees, perform services thanklessly.

The two institutions are simply binary examples of a system that will turn against us on the one hand or a system that will work for us on the other.

AI companies exist in the former system and they will all sacrifice their morals and betray us.

The danger is not AI, the danger is the system we’ve created that sucks us all dry and spits out the empty husk.
by BhuvanChalla | 2026-02-13 00:02:40+00:00
I built OPP (Open Provenance Protocol), an open standard for verifying whether an image was AI-generated even after screenshots, compression, cropping, and re-uploads.

The problem: C2PA/Content Credentials embed metadata in the file. Screenshot the image and the provenance is gone. AI detectors are probabilistic and unreliable.

OPP takes a different approach, an external fingerprint registry. When a generator creates an image, a 3-layer signature (SHA-256 + PDQ perceptual hash + CLIP ViT-L/14 embedding) is registered in a central index. Anyone can verify an image by querying the index. The signature survives any transformation because it's not embedded in the file. Think Shazam for images, but for provenance.

Matching pipeline: exact hash lookup → CLIP cosine similarity via Qdrant HNSW (sub-10ms at billions) → PDQ hamming distance enrichment.

Only verified AI generators can mint. Verification is open.

Early MVP. Looking for feedback on the protocol design and poking holes in the approach.
by danny_codes | 2026-02-13 00:02:43+00:00
it’s illegal to build more of them in almost all places in the US. San Jose, a city of over 1M people, was zoned 96% SFH until like 5 years ago.

So prices do existing ones are high. Labor is taxed heavily compared to rental income so it’s a slog to break into the capitalist class. This wasn’t the case 50 years ago though, because we let people built apartment buildings then. So plenty of people could buy in at that time.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-13 00:03:09+00:00
> Yet people are en-mass switching from discord.

Some people are, but I would bet money on it being a very small number of people who switch platforms. The HN bubble is not representative of the average user.

This is similar to when HN thought Reddit's userbase was going to shrink after the API changes (it didn't) or when the internet thought Netflix was going to lose subscribers when they cracked down on account sharing (they grew, not shrank).

A few blog posts about people switching to IRC or setting up their own Matrix servers in protest isn't representative of a mass movement.
by abraxas | 2026-02-13 00:03:58+00:00
Yeah, sort of.

Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities by cruisnig around looking to pick up rides or deliver shit and mill around endlessly or occupy every piece of parking in prime real estate to make sure they are quickly available wherever demand is high (i.e. where people want to or have to be). In time they will phase out human driven cars which will lead to higher speed limits and more infrastrcuture that supports autonomous driving. Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks. Everything optimized for autonomous cars to endlessly mill around. People will be blocked from being near autonomous cars as those will be going too fast for human reflexes to cope with so areas where cars drive will not have sidewalkss nor bike lanes. This will lead to urban areas that are even more car dependent with only pockets of urbanism that support human scale. To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity. Since cars need a lot more land area than humans the urban infrastructure will mostly cater to them and not to people because the expectation and argument will be that you can always get your ass shuttled to wherever you need to be.