MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mapontosevenths | 2026-02-20 23:30:16+00:00
Ahhh. Another of Elon's absolutists? Fine all words are ok now. So we make all these things legal:

Obscenity in any context - Won't someone not think of the children?

Child sexual abuse material - Fine in the new regime as long as you didn't record it yourself, right?

Incitement to imminent lawless action - You only told them who to murder, right?

True threats and harassment - All those people can just die. Speech is the ONLY freedom that matters. Serious expressions of intent to commit unlawful violence be damned.

Fighting words - Sure - Bait them till they hit you then the cops can come arrest THEM. Aren't you clever! And totally free from consequences for your actions! Ideal!

Defamation - Why CAN'T we just make stuff up about our enemies, friends, and loved ones? Those suckers rights are far less important than ours after all!

Fraud and false commercial speech - All legal now! Finally the freedom to rip off old ladies and the mentally unwell! Thank god for liberty!

IP violations - Again, free speech is absolute now so nobody can own anything that can be conveyed via language. Yay!

Or... we could just be reasonable about it and say that the limit's of free speech are where they start to impinge on other peoples liberties. Your call.
by nandomrumber | 2026-02-20 23:30:38+00:00
> light hygiene

Awesome, hadn’t come across this term before.

You might appreciate the concept of chronotypes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype

The DOAC podcast recently hosted Dr. Michael Breus on same.

Apple Podcast link, or conjure your own:

https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-diary-of-a-ceo-wit...
by theturtletalks | 2026-02-20 23:30:40+00:00
Posts like this really irk me. There were shitty side projects before AI (trust me, I made a couple), but those people knew how to code so somehow you were able to separate the noise and signal easily. Now, coding is no longer some crazy skill and anyone can make side projects.

Just because you can't separate the noise from signal with that easy check doesn't mean these people can't get the joy of side projects. It's especially lazy when that project is open-source and you can literally ask CC, hey dig into this code, did they build anything interesting or different? Peter's side projects like Vibetunnel and Openclaw have so many hidden gems in the code (a rest API for controlling local terminals and Heartbeat, respectively) that you can integrate into your own project. Neglecting these projects as "AI slop" is stopping you from learning what amazing things people are building, especially when those people have different expertise. Lest we forget, the transformer model came from Alphafold and sometimes the best discoveries come from completely unrelated fields.
by alexgarden | 2026-02-20 23:30:54+00:00
Yah... how does this evolve... this is the big question. Honest answer? We'll see.

My opinion? Human-in-the-loop will get thinner over time. As that happens, the accountability chain has to thicken. If we want any notion of reliable trust, these scales have to balance. Note: I don't think this scales without it.

Broadly speaking (I've talked a lot about life in the post-rules universe), we (humans) stop signing actions and start signing policies - policies in this case are declarative envelopes of defined agent automation boundaries.

Couple this with a proof system that can (cryptographically) prove that the agent stayed between the lines.

Build on that... trust between agents becomes computable. If A trusts B, you have a derivable trust score (with ~ decay) and naturally Quorum models fall out of that.

Then you get to proof composition - essentially "instead of verifying /checkpoint you verify a proof for an entire session - the math guarantees nothing was skipped. Human only needs to see the summary.

All of this presumes the policy was correct to begin with. This approach isn't a substitute for "don't write sloppy policy or be an asshole."
by oezi | 2026-02-20 23:31:00+00:00
A little less hyperbole would maybe help your arguments, but trying to argue that one of the most liberal democracies in the world is comparable to one of the most repressive regimes is hurting your argument (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/liberal-democracy-index).

Nobody is perfect, but Germans have learned a lot in the last century and a half. One of the things is that Freedom of Speech doesn't deserve the pedestal that primarily US Americans put it on. It has boundaries and one of those is calling for the displacement of an entire nation.

You make it sound like that Germany is just a puppet without its own mind, but in reality it is just some 80m people all with their own mind, history and education. The reality is that Germans are more aware of their history and the impact seemingly small decisions can have on the life of millions. That's why I talk about the German-ness, because many other countries can't or don't want to understand the weight of responsibility which arises from being the perpetrator of two world wars and the holocaust.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2026-02-20 23:31:03+00:00
I found the basic premise of this blog post to be incredibly flawed. The author seems very sure of himself that blue light filters don't work, but making arguments related to cell types and emissions spectra and circadian rhythms is not the way to make a conclusive argument in a topic like this. Science is littered with recommendations about things that "plausibly" made sense, but that turned out to be flawed or just absolutely wrong when actually put to a real, scientific test. One example most people are familiar with: the recommendation against eating eggs in the 90s was based on the fact that eggs have a lot of cholesterol, and we knew high LDL levels in blood were associated with a greater risk of vascular and heart problems. So, "logically", it seemed that limiting dietary cholesterol would reduce heart disease. Except when scientists actually tested those recommendations, they turned out to be largely wrong - when you eat a lot of cholesterol, for most people their body's natural production of cholesterol goes down, so unless you're in the small subset of people who are particularly sensitive to dietary cholesterol, eating eggs is fine.

Making recommendations based solely on a theoretical mechanism of action is bad science. The only way to actually test this is with a study that looks at different types of light restriction and its effect on sleep. Obviously it's kind of impossible to do a blinded study for blue light filters, but you could get close by testing various permutations of light changes (e.g. total luminescence, eliminating only very specific wavelengths, etc.)

As another commenter said, it may be a placebo effect, but if it is, who cares? All I care about is that I get a better night sleep, and as someone (unusual among programmers I know) who really doesn't like dark mode, a screen reddener greatly helps me at bedtime.
by Mongoose | 2026-02-20 23:31:09+00:00
I think this is less about the projects themselves and more about distribution channels like HN and ProductHunt being dead. When the zone is flooded by vibecoded apps of all kinds, the "build it and they will come" era of getting your thing on a popular website's homepage is over.

But other distribution strategies exist. You just have to be smarter about finding and getting in front of your core audience.
by r1chardnl | 2026-02-20 23:31:10+00:00
I love AI side projects, it allows for quick iteration and finishing on ideas that weren't feasible due to time constraints before. I just made one yesterday/today.
I used Magit before and during the making of this I found out GitUI exists too but I think it's pretty powerful if the tool doesn't do exactly what you want and are opionated you can tailor your tools the way you want to.

https://github.com/riicchhaarrd/tuide
by beej71 | 2026-02-20 23:31:26+00:00
No, not like that. There's a difference between a site that:

1) provides a snapshot of another site for archival purposes.
2) provides original content.

You're arguing that since encyclopedias change their content, the Library of Congress should be allowed to change the content of the materials in its stacks.

By modifying its archives, archive.today just flushed its credibility as an archival site. So what is it now?
by analognoise | 2026-02-20 23:31:35+00:00
There's no way to make a thing more unpopular with a massive swathe of Americans than to force us to participate.

I think they should use up all their social capital and definitely force government to do this, and it will go brilliantly for them in the midterms. Definitely do this. Maybe even send police around to rough up everyone and say it randomly, Americans love that.
by Animats | 2026-02-20 23:31:38+00:00
A regular importer who routinely pays customs duties is now owed money by Customs and Border Protection. Can they now set off future duties against the balance owed them? Normally, reciprocal debt cancellation is legal.

The U.S. Treasury has a whole system for this, but in the other direction. If the government owes you money, and you owe the government money, the Treasury will deduct what you owe from whatever they are paying out.[1] But they're not set up for that in the other direction.

[1] https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/TOP/
by joninous | 2026-02-20 23:31:50+00:00
> a group about a specific car model I own

This is basically the only reason why I occasionally log in to Facebook these days. Facebook groups seems to be the place where car owners gather to share information regarding their vehicles, at least here in Finland. I have found discussions in these groups very valuable e.g. when I'm diagnosing a problem or evaluating whether some defect will be covered by warranty or not.
by onurui | 2026-02-20 23:31:59+00:00
Puppeteer and Playwright work fine for browser testing. For AI agents, not so much. Slow, bloated, and they shove the entire DOM at your LLM.

Built something smaller. Aslan Browser is a native macOS app (WKWebView, the Safari engine) with a Python CLI/SDK over a Unix socket. Instead of raw HTML, it gives your agent an accessibility tree, tagged with refs. @e0 textbox "Username", @e1 button "Sign in". 10-100x fewer tokens.

~0.5ms JS eval, ~15ms screenshots, zero Python dependencies. About 2,600 lines of code.

It comes with a skill for coding agents that teaches the agent to drive the browser and builds up site-specific knowledge between sessions. It loads context progressively so your agent isn't stuffing its entire memory with browser docs on every call. My agent used to fumble LinkedIn's contenteditable fields every time. Now it doesn't. I didn't fix anything — the skill learned.

macOS 14+ only. MIT. Would love feedback.

https://github.com/onorbumbum/aslan-browser
https://onorbumbum.github.io/aslan-browser/
by spopejoy | 2026-02-20 23:32:03+00:00
> in my experience there’s a large contingent of people, especially the youth, that are more reactionary about AI than they are interested in creativity.

First off -- are you an artist? As in, are you making your argument with skin in the game for something you _need_ to do, not just a pastime that makes dayjobs livable?

Not gatekeeping! Trying to see if you are formulating your position as a creator or a consumer.

If the latter, hate to say it, but your opinion is kind of irrelevant. Ultimately, only artists really understand what's involved in creating real art. Not what's good or bad, but what's at stake and how to tell if somebody's for real.

If you're a creator I'm a little puzzled. Are you really worried that AI is so freaking great that the horrible luddites at bandcamp et al are going to "gatekeep" us away from incredible AI art? This is NOT something that keeps me up at night.
by tolerance | 2026-02-20 23:32:19+00:00
Do you believe that such a campaign would not exist under a President who is a Democrat?

I’m sure it’s easy to assume that these questions aren’t in good faith. Of course I have a point of my own that I could make, but then we’d be arguing over that instead and I’m less interested in trying to speculate better than you than I’m curious about what you think on your own.

So there isn’t any way that an administration led by a Democrat would implement such a campaign? You can’t imagine that? If not under an identical premise (viz. the US semiquincentennial) but under some other initiative to instill non-partisan nationalist pride at a time where it is virtually absent?
by rvz | 2026-02-20 23:32:41+00:00
> therefore they are deterministic when the batch size is 1

This is like saying: "C++ is 'safe' when you turn off all the default features and if you know what you are doing", but up to the point where it becomes absolutely useless, and it's still not safe.

The language is still fundamentally memory unsafe, just like how LLMs are fundamentally deep neural networks which that comes with downsides such as being unpredictable blackboxes which carry lots of non-determinism of outputs with that.

> Your second source lists a large number of ways how to make LLMs determnistic. The title of your third source is "Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference" which also means that they can be made deterministic.

That is the point: "When", "Can be made", "how to make LLMs determnistic".

It just tells you something about why both papers recognise the problem of non-determinism in LLMs which makes my whole point even more valid which is why I linked those papers.

Those papers have highlighted the fundamental nature of these LLMs right at the start of the paper.

> Every single one of your sources proves you wrong, so no more sources need to be cited.

Nope, it is quite the opposite.
by josephg | 2026-02-20 23:33:13+00:00
I did some work ~15 years ago for a consulting company. The company pushes their own custom opensource cms into most projects - built on top of mongodb and written by the ceo. He’s a lovely guy, and good coder. But he’s totally self taught at programming and he has blind spots a mile wide. And he hates having his blind spots pointed out. He came back from a react conference once thinking the react team invented functional programming.

A friend at the company started poking around in the CMS. Turns out the login system worked by giving the user a cookie with the mongodb document id for the user they’re logged in as. Not signed or anything. Just the document id in plain text. Document IDs are (or at least were) mostly sequential, so you could just enumerate document IDs in your cookie to log in as anyone.

The ceo told us it wasn’t actually a security vulnerability. Then insisted we didn’t need to assign a CVE or tell any of our customers and users. He didn’t want to fix the code. Then when pushed he wanted to slip a fix into the next version under the cover of night and not tell anyone. Preferably hidden in a big commit with lots of other stuff.

It’s become a joke between us too. He gives self taught programmers a bad rep. These days whenever I hear a product was architected by someone who’s self taught, I always check how the login system works. It’s often enlightening.
by sanction8 | 2026-02-20 23:33:24+00:00
a16z talking again?

This is your regular reminder that

1) a16z is one the largest backers of LLMs

2) They named one of the two authors of the Fascist Manifesto their patron saint

3) AI systems are built to function in ways that degrade and are likely to destroy our crucial civic institutions. (Quoted from
Professor Woodrow Hartzog "How AI Destroys Institutions"). Or to put it another way, being plausible but slightly wrong and un-auditable—at scale—is the killer feature of LLMs and this combination of properties makes it an essentially fascist technology meaning it is well suited to centralizing authority, eliminating checks on that authority and advancing an anti-science agenda (quoted from the A plausible, scalable and slightly wrong black box: why large language models are a fascist technology that cannot be redeemed post).
by MaintenanceMode | 2026-02-20 23:33:39+00:00
If you're part of a particular subculture, like sailboat cruising, nearly all of international sailboat cruising takes place on Facebook. There are pages for every town, anchorage, marina, etc that you will encounter. Often that is paired with a WhatsApp group where people have conversations and coordinate activities. When you sail from city X to city Y, you join that Facebook group and you learn where to do laundry, where to get groceries, etc. You stay on these groups and the whole community interacts there for many years. There are other places this happens but Facebook is the main source of this type of information sharing.
by duzer65657 | 2026-02-20 23:34:43+00:00
>> Anish Acharya says it is not worth it to use AI-assisted coding for all business functions. AI should focus on core business development, not rebuilding enterprise software.

I don't even know what this means, but my take: we should stop listening to VCs (especially those like A16Z) who have an obvious vested interest that doesn't match the rest of society. Granting these people an audience is totally unwarranted; nobody but other tech bros said "we will vibe code everything" in the first place. Best case scenario: they all go to the same exclusive conference, get the branded conference technical vest and that's were the asteroid hits.
by blueg3 | 2026-02-20 23:35:13+00:00
There's a lot of misinformation here.

> I guess it means the Play store will be the only way to install an app

No, non-Play stores will still work, but developers will need to register a developer account with Google that is tied to some real identity. They already need to do this to distribute through the Play store, but now it'll apply regardless.

This is to make it harder for scam apps to churn app signatures. Kind of like requiring code-signing, but with only one CA.

> That users won't be able to install what they want

No, sideloading will still work, but it won't work if the APK isn't signed by someone in the Google developer registry.

> and that they would need a google account to install apps

Nope.

> That app developers have to go through google to distribute their apps, with identity verification etc.

They don't need to distribute through Google, but they will need to be involved with Google and do identity verification.

> However, I'm also reading here and there that it is a threat to alternative ROMs. To me it sounds at the contrary as an amazing opportunity, as they can strip this verification and be the only truly open Android, or am I missing something?

You're being misinformed. They won't even need to strip the verification. The verification is only for certified Android -- OEMs that partner with Google. Custom ROMs and the OEMs that aren't certified (Amazon, some Chinese manufacturers) won't have verification.

The target audience for verification and who would ever use a custom ROM has basically zero overlap.
by socketcluster | 2026-02-20 23:35:23+00:00
AI exacerbates the slop it but it's an old trend.
It boils down to "form over substance" which has been an issue in this industry since as far as I can remember; it just got worse and worse; especially over the past decade.

Solid solutions are being overshadowed by AI slop alternatives which were assembled in a few months with no long term vision; the results look great superficially, but under the bonnet, it's inefficient, expensive, closed, lacks flexibility, experience degrades over time. All the essential stuff that people don't think about initially is what's missing.

It feels like the logical conclusion of peak attention economy; the media fully saturated with junk where junk beats quality due to the volume advantage.
by oezi | 2026-02-20 23:35:52+00:00
It is often easy to assume this position if you are majority, white, employed, etc.

Your argument is similar to saying that we shouldn't have rules when driving cars. "Why life cannot be dignified if I have to observe stop signs."

In every are of life there are balances to be struck. I am sure your country has rules for slandering individuals (because most have). What's the difference to also having rules against slandering entire people?
by password4321 | 2026-02-20 23:36:17+00:00
In case you weren't aware: https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher

macOS Big Sur and newer on machines as old as 2007

macOS Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma and Sequoia

Personally I'm hapy with my old macOS in no small part thanks to https://www.macports.org
by nullocator | 2026-02-20 23:36:17+00:00
There is no mechanism for citizens of the united states to recall a president or member of congress. They must wait 2, 4, and 6 years depending on who they'd like to replace. This contributes to the the current woes as as many members of congress and some presidents (like this one) would certainly undergo recall battles or be immediately recalled. Since we can't though, and elections in this country are a 12-16 month barrage of lies, propaganda and ads by the time voting does come around people just check which ever box matches their team, zero thought given and are thankful the whole mess is over with so they can mostly ignore politics until its time to start complaining again about how poorly they're represented. Repeat.
by rsynnott | 2026-02-20 23:37:03+00:00
> The EU promised to buy lots of LNG and make investments in the USA to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. This was a bald-faced lie on the part of the EU negotiators. Even if the EU wanted to actually do this, they have no power or mechanism to make member states and companies within those member states buy more LNG or make more investments in the USA. This was just an empty promise.

The amounts named were also, ah, suspiciously similar to the amount of LNG Europe would generally buy, and the amount that would be invested in the US as a matter of course. It was kind of "well, the thing that would ordinarily happen will happen".
by alphazard | 2026-02-20 23:37:15+00:00
This is exposing a problem that already existed, AI is just throwing gas on the fire. Most engineers, including the readership of this site, have terrible taste in software.

What I mean by that is: after reading through a brief description of a project, or a conceptual overview, they are no better than noise at predicting whether it will be worthwhile to try out, or rewarding to learn about, or have a discussion about, or start using day-to-day.

Things on the front page used to be high quality software, research papers, etc. And now it is entirely driven by marketing operations, and social circles.
There is no differential amplification of quality.

I don't know what the solution is, but I imagine it involves some kind of weighted voting. That would be a step towards a complicated engagement algorithm, instead of the elegant and predictable exponential decay that HN is known for.
by latchkey | 2026-02-20 23:37:58+00:00
"The worst thing about AI is that EVERYONE can build now."

Come on. This site keeps promoting negative content.

It wasn't like I couldn't build before, it just makes it easier and a hell of a lot more fun now. I just did an AI side project and it was a blast. https://oj-hn.com

AI isn't going to take your job. People who know AI are.
by henryfjordan | 2026-02-20 23:38:13+00:00
It's kinda wild that you don't need to be a professional engineer to store PII. The GDPR and other frameworks for PII usually do have a minimum size (in # of users) before they apply, which would help hobbyists. The same could apply for the licensure requirement.

But also maybe hobbyists don't have any business storing PII at scale just like they have no business building public bridges or commercial aircraft.