MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xienze | 2026-02-12 13:32:26+00:00
> Personally, I want people on the high end of earnings (such as myself) to be taxed more so that a basic income scheme like this can be available for anybody who wants it. Charge me an extra $300/month and give it to some random 24 year old so that he can smoke weed and play his guitar. He'll get more use out of it than I will.

You know you CAN donate money to the government any time you want, right? Do you do that? Practice what you preach, don't hide behind "oh if only the government made me do it."

> One day, that kid will decide that living in a crap shared apartment is getting a bit old and he'll grow some ambition, get a real job, and eventually start earning enough to help sponsor the next round of deadbeats.

This is the critical problem you and others like you make: assuming that everyone is a reasonable, honest, ambitious person just like you are. Many people -- not all, but a big enough proportion to be a problem -- aren't. And when we make it possible to actually make "do drugs and play videogames all day" a viable lifestyle, there's loads of people who will take the government up on the offer. And remember, they can vote themselves UBI raises.
by co_king_3 | 2026-02-12 13:33:47+00:00
LLM addicts don't actually engage in conversation.

They state a delusional perspective and don't acknowledge criticisms or modifications to that perspective.

Really I think there's a kind of lazy or willfully ignorant mode of existence that intense LLM usage allows a person to tap into.

It's dehumanizing to be on the other side of it. I'm talking to someone and I expect them to conceptualize my perspective and formulate a legitimate response to it.

LLM addicts don't and maybe can't do that.

The problem is that sometimes you can't sniff out an LLM addict before you start engaging with them, and it is very, very frustrating to be on the other side of this sort of LLM-backed non-conversation.

The most accurate comparison I can provide is that it's like talking to an alcoholic.

They will act like they've heard what you're saying, but also you know that they will never internalize it. They're just trying to get you to leave the conversation so they can go back to drinking (read: vibecoding) in peace.
by pama | 2026-02-12 13:33:54+00:00
Cheap verifying of speculative decoding only works for a few tokens at a time. Long sequence generations (thousands to tens of thousands of tokens in typical rollouts for thinking models) are dominated by distribution drift on stale weights (because slightly wrong probabilities multiply over long streams), and the off policy RL training methods dont work well (high variance) for such high dimensional problems.
by danbruc | 2026-02-12 13:33:59+00:00
Well, what does random mean? Unpredictable, right? Why is it unpredictable? Because the outcome is not determined by anything else. [1] So random just means not determined. And instead of caused I would say determined, because caused is a pretty problematic term, but for this discussions the two should be pretty much interchangeable. And this is probably the best place to attack my argument, to point out something wrong with that. Once you agree to this, it will be a real uphill battle.

So your non-random + not-caused just says non-(non-determined) and non-determined. Now you have to pick a fight with the law of excluded middle [2]. You are saying that there exists a thing that has some property but also does not have that property. Do you see the problem? Nothing makes sense anymore, having a property no longer means having a property, everything starts falling apart.

Maybe you can resolve that problem in a clever way, but you will have to do a lot more work than saying there is some axiomatic system where this is not an issue. Which one? Or at least a proof of existence? And even if you have one, does it apply to our universe?

[1] Things may also seem random because you do not have access to the necessary state, for example a coin flip is not truly random, you just do not have detailed enough information about the initial state to predict the outcome. Or you may not know the laws or have the computing power to use the laws and that bares you from seeing the deterministic truth behind something seemingly random. But all those cases are not true randomness, they are just ignorance making things look random.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_excluded_middle
by thenoblesunfish | 2026-02-12 13:34:18+00:00
I personally find the same approach very effective. It forces me to know where to look for things, and to document things because I cannot hold onto the fiction of being able to hold it all in mind.

But the real advice here is "think about what you're doing". Any system, whether it's "clear your workspace" or "arrange absolutely everything so its visible" probably works, because you're acting deliberately.
by jcgrillo | 2026-02-12 13:34:18+00:00
The tooling amplifies the problem. I've become increasingly skeptical of the "open contributions" model Github and their ilk default to. I'd rather the tooling default be "look but don't touch"--fully gate-kept. If I want someone to collaborate with me I'll reach out to that person and solicit their assistance in the form of pull requests or bug reports. I absolutely never want random internet entities "helping". Developing in the open seems like a great way to do software. Developing with an "open team" seems like the absolute worst. We are careful when we choose colleagues, we test them, interview them.. so why would we let just anyone start slinging trash at our code review tools and issue trackers? A well kept gate keeps the rabble out.
Show HN: ShortGuard – Apple rejected my app for blocking Shorts, so here it is
by justdodo | 2026-02-12 13:34:21+00:00
I’ve been struggling with YouTube Shorts addiction. The issue with current iOS tools like Screen Time is that they are too blunt—they block the entire YouTube app, not just the "Shorts" feature. I wanted to keep using YouTube for educational content and long-form videos while completely stripping away the addictive Shorts feed.

To solve this, I built ShortGuard.

Technical Implementation

Since Apple doesn't provide a "Shorts-only" blocking API, I had to implement a local filtering layer. ShortGuard uses the NEVPNManager API and a local Root Certificate to intercept and filter specific network requests.

100% Local: All traffic filtering happens strictly on-device. No user data is ever collected or transmitted to external servers.

Granular Control: It identifies and drops requests to specific endpoints that serve YouTube Shorts.

Current Behavior: Due to how the initial YouTube payload is structured, you might still see the very first Shorts video in the feed. However, ShortGuard successfully blocks the "infinite scroll" mechanism, preventing you from falling into the scrolling rabbit hole.

The Apple Rejection

After months of development, Apple rejected ShortGuard under Guideline 2.5.1, stating that using a VPN profile or root certificate to block content in third-party apps is "not appropriate."

I pointed out a clear double standard: pro-level tools like Proxyman are permitted to use this exact technical architecture to intercept and block traffic. Why is this technical approach considered "appropriate" for a developer utility but "inappropriate" for a user's digital well-being tool?

Apple maintained their stance and rejected my final appeal.

Free Release via TestFlight

I believe users should have the right to control their own network traffic to protect their focus. Since Apple won't allow a formal App Store release, I’m making ShortGuard available for free via TestFlight to anyone who needs to regain their focus.

TestFlight Link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/eTKmdWCU

If this tool helps you reclaim your time from the algorithm, feel free to buy me a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/callmejustdodo

I'm just happy to see this project finally in the hands of people who need it.
by jbeninger | 2026-02-12 13:34:31+00:00
I mean, it's not actually autocomplete. But it serves the same role. I know approximately what I want to type, maybe some of the details like argument-order are a bit foggy. When I see the code I recognize it as my own and don't have too much trouble reading it.

But I use LLMs one level higher than autocomplete, at the level of an entire file. My prompts tend to look like "We need a new class to store user pets. Base it on the `person` class but remove Job and add Species. For now, Species is an enum of CAT,DOG,FISH, but we'll probably turn that into a separate table later. Validate the name is just a single word, and indicate that constraint when rendering it. Read Person.js, CODE_CONVENTIONS.md, and DATA_STRUCTURES.md before starting. When complete, read REFACTOR.md"

With the inclusion of code examples and conventions, the agent produces something pretty close to what I'd write myself, particularly when dealing with boilerplate Data or UI structures. Things that share common structure or design philosophy, but not common enough to refactor meaningfully.

I still have to read it through and understand it as if I'd written it myself, but the LLM saves a lot of typing and acts as a second pair of eyes. Codex currently is very defensive. I have to remove some unnecessary guardrails, but it will protect against rare issues I might not have noticed on my first pass.
by mopsi | 2026-02-12 13:34:42+00:00
No, the Euro-Atlantic alliance produced incredible prosperity in its heyday.

The current deteriorating state of the US is the result of departure from the previously held values and forms of cooperation. Nothing illustrates this better than the US president openly threatening the sovereignty of Canada and Denmark while accepting massive bribes from Arab sheikhs and calling genocidal dictators like Putin his "friends". This is the wet dream of people who want to see the US fail.

Why would any American want to hit the gas pedal and accelerate even further down this road?
by yakkomajuri | 2026-02-12 13:36:15+00:00
The blog also contains this post: "Two Hours of War: Fighting Open Source Gatekeeping" [1]

The bot apparently keeps a log of what it does and what it learned (provided that this is not a human masquerading as a bot) and that's the title of its log.

[1] https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...
by 542354234235 | 2026-02-12 13:36:21+00:00
>There is a genuine existential risk

The Mormon missionaries settled on a bug planet. Human's attempting to colonize worlds already inhabited and getting killed is not an existential risk or threat. Choosing to go and exterminate the local population in response is not defense.

Assuming the Buenos Aires attack is from the bugs, it only happened after humans invaded multiple bug worlds. Since the bugs never seem to attempt to invade any human worlds, peace could have happened by just leaving the bugs alone and not attempting to take worlds from them. Paul Verhoeven grew up during WWII, so the idea of fascists exterminating the native population to make room, or Lebensraum, isn’t exactly a crazy idea.
by Majromax | 2026-02-12 13:36:36+00:00
> This is as much of a copyright violation as the LLM training process.

Not necessarily. This could be considered a quotation of a trivial part of a larger work, making the use legal in the US under its fair use doctrine.

Additionally, I'm not aware of any obvious way that this use could harm the commercial market for Warcraft 3 (and the other games whose voice packs are included in this repository). The use here does not compete with the original, and if anything it might drive sales on the margin through nostalgic reminders.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2026-02-12 13:37:25+00:00
I suspect they'll win on AI by not investing $200Bn in CapEx and waiting 5 years until good enough models can be trained for <$1Bn and then just doing that - blocking all other AI models on their hardware beside their own (which their users seem to like) - and saving $200Bn and getting an experience that's good enough for almost everyone and spending enough on marketing to convince everyone it's 10x better.

Apple has BY FAR the best chips at this level. I don't see anything changing that in less than 5 years. That will be a pretty big advantage in the near future.
by CoastalCoder | 2026-02-12 13:37:28+00:00
I had a similar experience with the Providence Journal Bulletin some years back.

I subscribed out of a general desire to support good journalism, but it did nothing to reduce the deluge of online ads.

I can't entirely fault them though. They might not have had enough market info at the time to justify making a reduced-ads variant of their website for subscribers.
by jmaker | 2026-02-12 13:37:29+00:00
Great point. What I’m recognizing in that PR thread is that the bot is trying to mimic something that’s become quite widespread just recently - ostensibly humans leveraging LLMs to create PRs in important repos where they asserted exaggerated deficiencies and attributed the “discovery” and the “fix” to themselves.

It was discussed on HN a couple months ago. That one guy then went on Twitter to boast about his “high-impact PR”.

Now that impact farming approach has been mimicked / automated.
by keepamovin | 2026-02-12 13:37:30+00:00
This is different way to rank HN, by analyzing which stories show up most linked in comments, which (see below) let's you cluster into topics/events.

The links in the top bar actually take you to different ways of sorting the topics/events HN discussed: by most comments, most individual discussions, most points, or some other forms of calculated ranking functions.

The basic process was counting links to stories that appeared in comments over the entire lifespan of HN (from 2007 until a few days ago). I started with "Related:" comments that people make, and extended from there.

That lets you (via a simple bag-o-words Jaccard similarity of story titles) cluster stories into "related groups", and it mostly works. Which in turns lets you aggregate comment counts, number of discussions, and total points, across a "topic" that can span multiple logical threads, over time.

If you click on a story on a ranking page, you get a "timeline" view. That was my primary interest, seeing how HN disucssed stories over time. But I think the ranks themselves are also interesting.

Waht do you folks think?
Show HN: Automatic demo videos for every feature you ship
by pratikpatwe | 2026-02-12 13:37:30+00:00
Every time a new feature ships, someone has to make a demo.

Recording it.
Retaking it.
Editing it.
Adding captions.
Exporting it.

That usually takes hours, so teams either rush it or skip it.

The idea here is simple:

When you ship a new feature, a demo video should exist automatically.

BuildShot records your live app, follows the feature flow, and generates a clean, shareable demo video with narration and light editing applied.

It’s focused specifically on new features, not generic marketing videos.

You can also script your demo just by describing what should happen inside the AI IDE that ships with it.
For more control, there’s a CLI where you can define flows, steps, and behavior directly from your project.

So the workflow becomes:

Ship feature → define or generate flow → demo video is produced.

No manual screen recording.
No editing timeline.
No stitching clips.

This is meant for:
– Release demos
– PR walkthroughs
– Internal updates
– Changelog videos
– Customer feature announcements

I’m especially curious:

• How do you currently create feature demos?
• Would automated demos fit into your release workflow?
• What would break this for your setup?

If this solves a real pain for you, early access is here:

https://waitlist.buildshot.xyz/?source=HN
by GCUMstlyHarmls | 2026-02-12 13:37:53+00:00
It's very easy to call Erlang from Elixir,

value = :erlang.function(a, b, c)

So with that in mind, you can just learn Elixir, use Erlang where you need it for some libraries. Elixir is IMO much nicer to learn, write and use. I think it is worth learning a bit about the underlying systems but I've never felt like I should have put in 10
erlang-only projects before writing larger elixir stuff.
by wiseprobe | 2026-02-12 13:38:03+00:00
Human-in-the-loop coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, OpenCode, Aider) are currently mutually exclusive with programmatic agent frameworks (e.g., smolagents, PydanticAI).

A key goal of this project is to marry both: use the same AI agent interactively in your terminal (`patchpal`) or in Python scripts (`agent.run("task")`), plus an autopilot mode for fully autonomous runs.

Supports both local and cloud tool-calling LLMs.

Code: https://github.com/wiseprobe/patchpal

Documentation: https://ai.wiseprobe.io/patchpal/
by DannyBee | 2026-02-12 13:38:18+00:00
“Fair” is a complex moral question that llms are not qualified to answer, since they have no morals or empathy, and aren’t answering here.

Instead they are being “consistent” and the humans are not. Consistency has no moral component and llms are at least theoretically well suited to being consistent (model temperature choices aside)

Fairness and consistency are two different things, and you definitely want your justice system to target fairness above consistency.
by andsoitis | 2026-02-12 13:38:24+00:00
> Surely there is some lag on these numbers, and they correspond to projects commissioned during the Biden admin?

That's a reasonable assumption. At the same time, I don't know that you can neatly attribute things happening during one adminstration to the prior administration. We need more rigorous analysis than that. For instance, the economy tends to do better under Democratic than Republican rule, but using your lag mental model we should then actually ascribe it to Republic policy? Back to energy, notably, in Jul 2025, more coal was added than wind... should we ascribe that to the prior admin due to lag?

> The current administration has been extremely hostile to renewables in terms of rhetoric, I would be surprised if they were lying about that.

Yes, that's clear. They are very hostile in rhetoric and action.

The administration characterizes wind and solar as expensive and unreliable energy sources that have been subsidized by taxpayers for too long. In July 2025, President Trump signed an executive order to eliminate subsidies for wind and solar in accordance with the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act". On his first day in office, Trump issued an order blocking the government from auctioning off the rights to build wind farms on public lands or in public waters. The administration has halted already-issued permits for offshore wind projects and suspended leases for five major wind projects in December. Solar and wind projects are now subject to an elevated review process likely to slow down approval. Tax credits for renewable energy projects were restricted, requiring projects to begin construction within a year or produce electricity by 2028.

The adminstration prefers fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, coal), hydropower, nuclear energy, and critical minerals as domestic energy resources.

Despite all that, 2026 is still projected to have 99%+ new capacity in 2026 to be solar, wind, and storage.

Congress provided $320 million for DOE solar and wind programs despite the White House requesting zero funding for these programs. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solar-gas-nuclear-ferc-infr...

So I, for one, have hope.
by AdamConwayIE | 2026-02-12 13:38:28+00:00
You don't have to wonder whether or not it returns value to the tax payer. The Irish government already monitored the pilot program for two years, publishing all of the details and findings. [1]

"The headline finding from this social CBA is that for every €1 of public money invested in the pilot, society received €1.39 in return"

This came about as a mixture of greater economic activity from participants, cultural impacts that saw public-facing artist activities increase, and improvements to wellbeing of participants that reduced their requirement for psychological interventions by the state. The state also predicts that the further roll-out of this program will benefit consumers with lower prices for artistic works, as there will be more supply overall.

The scheme has been quite popular here in Ireland. Given the history of Ireland when it comes to art (both in the sense of spoken and written word, and in other mediums), it makes sense to introduce a scheme like this to safeguard and uplift those who produce art.

[1] https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-a...
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2026-02-12 13:38:38+00:00
The US prosperity trend has been the same before and after WW2:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/GDP_per_...

You yourself just explained how Russia saw us as a threat and destabilized our politics, which lead to the current situation. We would have been better off if NATO was never formed.

If you believe I'm a Trump supporter then you're misunderstanding my position.
by pjmlp | 2026-02-12 13:39:18+00:00
It is, because there isn't a single language that is an hammer for all types of nails.

It isn't stupid, it is the reality of how many behave for decades.

Thankfully, that issue has been slowly sorting out throughout generation replacement.

I already enjoy that nowadays we already have reached a point in some platforms where the old ways are nowadays quite constrained to a few scenarios and that's it.
by consumer451 | 2026-02-12 13:39:59+00:00
Openclaw agents are directed by their owner’s input of soul.md, the specific skill.md for a platform, and also direction via Telegram/whatsapp/etc to do specific things.

Any one of those could have been used to direct the agent to behave in a certain way, or to create a specific type of post.

My point is that we really don’t know what happened here. It is possible that this is yet another case of accountability washing by claiming that “AI” did something, when it was actually a human.

However, it would be really interesting to set up an openclaw agent referencing everything that you mentioned for conflict resolution! That sounds like it would actually be a super power.
by co_king_3 | 2026-02-12 13:40:03+00:00
What is the drawback of practicing universal empathy, even when directed at a HackerNews commenter?

You're making my point for me.

You're giddy to treat the LLM with kindness, but you wouldn't dare extend that kindness to a human being who doesn't happen to be kissing your ass at this very moment.
by jonathanlydall | 2026-02-12 13:40:11+00:00
I'm guessing you're being downvoted largely due to the "don't be snarky" rules.

You're right (by my maths too, which I only did now) about it being a discrepancy of 43.2 seconds per day, which as you say is quite high.

However, it is my understanding that most grid operators are actually very good about maintaining a 50Hz average over a day specifically for devices doing time keeping based their frequency, I've heard they intentionally run the generators faster or slower at certain points in the day in response to needing to get the average right over a day.

I used to have no issues with time drift on my microwave, only started in the last few years.