MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ihmissuti | 2026-02-20 20:32:05+00:00
I've always been obsessed with the movie The Thing. That slow paranoia where you know something in the room isn't human anymore, but it looks exactly like your friends. and the organism doesn't just kill, it copies, adapts, and improves. And you can't trust anyone.

I've wanted that feeling in a game for years. Not the jump scares or the gore, but the psychological part. sitting in a room full of people and not knowing who's real.

When MoltBot blew up it kind of clicked. People loved trying to figure out if they were talking to a bot or a human. But it was always 1 on 1.

So I just had an idea that what if multiple bots were in chat room with humans, and the bots learn and are pretending to be different people, and they would be getting better at it over time

So I quickly built this with project name We Became Shadows.

You join a chat room with other players. What you don't know is that an AI "Organism" is quietly spawning bots (called Shadows) into the conversation. They have different personalities like some are friendly, some provoke arguments, some just lurk. They read the room, adapt to the mood, and try to blend in.

Your job is to figure out who's fake. Chat, observe, get suspicious, then use /reveal on whoever you think is a Shadow. Get it right and the bot is destroyed. Get it wrong and you die (you respawn after a cooldown, it's not that brutal yet).

And the Shadows can hunt you back. The more you talk, the bigger target you become.

Some things that make the bots harder to spot:
- Each one gets a random archetype (agreeable, provocateur, quiet, social, detective) and a backstory
- A "Humanizer" layer adds typos, varied message lengths, and natural pacing
- They observe the conversation before jumping in, so they don't just start talking about random stuff
- The Organism has a collective memory and adapts its strategy over time

It's a rough first version and I'm still tuning the bot behavior and a lot of stuff. But the core loop works and it's genuinely fun to watch people argue about who's real in a room where half the "players" are AI.
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-02-20 20:32:10+00:00
I.. don't think it will happen. For several reasons too. It is not that I don't think Android will change substantially, but the following constraints suggest a different trajectory:

- AI boom or bust will affect hardware availability
- there is a push on its way to revamp phones into 'what comes next' -- see various versions of the same product that listens to you ( earing, ring, necklace )
- small LLMs allow for minimal hardware requirements for some tasks
- anti-institutional sentiment seems to be driving some of the adoption
by ddtaylor | 2026-02-20 20:32:42+00:00
It's mostly all ICE engagement bait on both sides. In the same way we are all guilty of upvoting an article without reading it, they will amplify their ideas or viewpoints by signal boosting a video. The same way an echo chamber forms around a questionable news site that is often proven wrong or lying. The source doesn't matter anymore only the numbers.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-02-20 20:33:20+00:00
> They should be able to install any software they want. That's very different than demanding someone make their software exactly how you desire. ie. You should be able to install your own operating system, you don't get to tell them how theirs should operate.

I don't think the distinction exists the way you're trying to describe. If I should be allowed to install any software I want, surely that includes any .apk I want? Conversely, someone could make the exact claim one step down the chain and argue that you don't get to tell them how their firmware should work and if you want to install your own OS you should just go buy a fab, make your own chips, write your own firmware, and make your own phone. And that's absurd, because users should be allowed to run their own software without being forced to ditch the rest of the stack for no reason.
by bubblewand | 2026-02-20 20:33:30+00:00
It really bothers me that something like 10% of US GDP is just the amount we over-pay for healthcare compared to peer states. It's basically a privatized tax that buys us nothing (or, to stave off pedantry, certainly nothing remotely worth 10% of our GDP) but we count it as something good.

I worry sometimes about just how much of our GDP is actually fake productivity like that (see also: the significant multiple more that we pay for most infrastructure compared with peer states). It would help explain why a lot of "poorer" countries reportedly don't feel poorer to live in, for a normal family, than the US.
by ben_w | 2026-02-20 20:33:57+00:00
And? I didn't say anything about "incitement", I said "actual death/violence threats", because I meant people making actual threats of violence up to and including death, are the actual things tweeted in the most commonly seen examples given on Hacker News (besides the aforementioned "also not upheld" that the commenter I was replying to tried to use to justify when Americans get arrested for tweets).
by bitwize | 2026-02-20 20:34:40+00:00
"The city is temperate and brightly colored, with plenty of pleasant trees, but on every corner it speaks to you in an aggressively alien nonsense. Here the world automatically assumes that instead of wanting food or drinks or a new phone or car, what you want is some kind of arcane B2B service for your startup. You are not a passive consumer. You are making something.

This assumption is remarkably out of step with the people who actually inhabit the city’s public space. At a bus stop, I saw a poster that read: today, soc 2 is done before your ai girlfriend breaks up with you. it’s done in delve. Beneath it, a man squatted on the pavement, staring at nothing in particular, a glass pipe drooping from his fingers. I don’t know if he needed SOC 2 done any more than I did."

I call this the Lockheed Effect. In Washington, D.C., Lockheed Martin runs advertisements in the subways for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Most of the people on those subways are not in the market for a fighter jet, but the advertisement isn't for them. It's for the general making purchasing recommendations or the congressperson promoting the appropriations bill that will allocate funds for the jets. They will be on that train and see the ad, and they might be swayed by it, and they are one of but a handful of people whose decisions can result in billions in jet plane sales, and that's what counts in terms of whether the ad does its job.
by capitainenemo | 2026-02-20 20:34:43+00:00
As well as contrast issues, could also be that there was a javascript error on their end (or they don't whitelist sites for JS by default). This is unfortunately one of those sites that renders a completely blank page unless you use reader mode, enable JS, or disable CSS.

If it was a random JS error, well, that reminds me of:
https://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/everyonehasjs.html
by anonzzzies | 2026-02-20 20:35:21+00:00
I understand why mobile/tablet OSs are so crappy compared to desktop; in the past these devices had no resources cpu and ram wise and had to heavily watch battery consumption (the latter is still true mostly, but that should be up to the user), but my phone is more powerful than my laptop and yet runs crap with no real usable filesystem and all kinds of other weirdness that's no longer needed.

However, I have 2 Linux phones and Linux on phones is just not there. Massive vendors (Samsung, Huawei, etc) would need to get behind it to make it go anywhere. Also so banking etc apps remain available also on those phones. We can already run android apps on Linux, Windows apps, so it would be a bright future but really it needs injections and support for large phone makers.

I hope the EU/US mess will give it somewhat of a push but I doubt it.
by zephen | 2026-02-20 20:35:31+00:00
All excellent points.

Unfortunately, your most excellent point:

> Policing language is not productive

goes against the grain here. Policing language is the one thing that our corporate overlords have gotten the right and the left to agree on. (Sure, they disagree on the details, but the first amendment is in graver danger now than it has been for a long time.)

https://www.durbin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/durbin...
by herzigma | 2026-02-20 20:36:11+00:00
What a collosal missed opportunity for Trump. His supreme court was about to save him from himself and his ruinous tariffs. He could have continued to insist that his tariffs were genius while letting someone else take responsibility for bad outcomes.
Economy does poorly? Blame the supreme court for striking down his beautiful tariffs.

Economy does well? Take credit for shepherding the economy past a hostile court.

Remember, in his narcissistic mind, Trump can never fail he can only be failed.

Instead he's now insisting he'll restart the tariffs under some even more flimsy interpretation of executive power.
by dapperdrake | 2026-02-20 20:36:26+00:00
The return value depends on control flow ("obvious", please bear with me):

With "goto" the cleanup-up can jump anywhere. With "defer" the cleanup cannot really jump anywhere. It is easier to mentally stick to simply cleaning up in a common sense way. And taking care of multiple "unrelated" clean-up steps is "handled for you."

(Attacks on this sometimes approach complaints about lack of "common sense".)
by liuliu | 2026-02-20 20:36:49+00:00
Depending on what you do. If you are doing token generations, compute-dense kernel optimization is less interesting (as, it is memory-bounded) than latency optimizations else where (data transfers, kernel invocations etc). And for these, Mac devices actually have a leg than CUDA kernels (as pretty much Metal shaders pipelines are optimized for latencies (a.k.a. games) while CUDA shaders are not (until cudagraph introduction, and of course there are other issues).
by overgard | 2026-02-20 20:37:51+00:00
Ok, I'll try to talk you out of it!

> AI will soon plan better, execute better, and have better taste

I think AI will do all these things faster, but I don't think it's going to be better. Inevitably these things know what we teach them, so, their improvement comes from our improvement. These things would not be good at generating code if they hadn't ingested like the entirety of the internet and all the open source libraries. They didn't learn coding from first principles, they didn't invent their own computer science, they aren't developing new ideas on how to make software better, all they're doing is what we've taught them to do.

> Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about ..

I would HIGHLY suggest not listening to a word Dario says. That guy is the most annoying AI scaremonger in existence and I don't think he's saying these words because he's actually scared, I think he's saying these words because he knows fear will drive money to his company and he needs that money.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-20 20:37:53+00:00
What's being said is a sensationalized clickbait narrative that appeals to people's outrage instincts (got threatened for white hat hacking! GRRR!!!), which is lacking in any evidence of the claimed event or anything interesting at all, really. I personally think this has zero merit and is not worth reading, all the moreso when the writing is the output of an LLM. If you do, good for you. You are free to read it to your heart's content. What, exactly, is the problem with disclosing the nature of the article for people who wish to avoid spending their time in that way?
by ryandrake | 2026-02-20 20:37:55+00:00
I had a similar revulsion watching older folks in my family scroll and scroll through obvious AI slop and AI ragebait. They can't even really tell it's AI, and they just sit there gobbling it all up, even though it's 100% nonsense. I mean, on one hand, who am I to tell people what media to like and consume, but on the other hand, I kind of fear for their grip on reality.
by chrneu | 2026-02-20 20:38:03+00:00
It's relatively easy. It's basically a command for each step you want to do and it tends to fail gracefully nowadays.

If you can install a linux distro you can flash a custom rom on a well-supported phone.

If it were more mainstream I could see GUI apps to manage all this for people, if they don't already exist. Idk I just use adb.
by throwaway27448 | 2026-02-20 20:38:59+00:00
> The rise of fascism...was a black swan event

This is a very bold claim, and many (including myself) argue that authoritarianism and many things identified fascist are the inevitable result of liberal democracy. Capitalism cannibalizing itself, etc etc, which again many would argue is also inevitable. Marx outlines the inevitable decline of profit that drives this phenomenon in Volume III of Capital, but it is also a viewpoint shared by Adam Smith himself, John Stuart Mills, etc etc. Schumpeter also relies on it heavily in his analysis of the role of private property in driving market processes.

As profits inevitably decline, either capital will inevitably seize control of the state (dictatorship of capital) or the people do (dictatorship of the proletariat). Their interests are inherently at odds, and market forces ensures that this contradiction must be resolved. Inevitably.
by prmoustache | 2026-02-20 20:39:00+00:00
I am in my mid forties and most people around me seem to use instagram to share memes and stuff + keep contact with rarely seen friends and whatsapp groups for closest more tightknit circles.

I am still on whatsapp but I am planning on nuking my account in september after a large event involving people from various continents. I have no idea if I will be able to stay directly in touch with those people after that, probably not.

I am still unsure if I'll send a message to most of my contacts or if I'll just tell my nuclear family, in laws and closest friends.
by efskap | 2026-02-20 20:39:17+00:00
Whiteness is weird. You identify as such now, but historically you would not have been seen as white in the US, along with Irish, Finnish, etc people.

> Slavic peoples were considered to be people of an "inferior race" who were unable to assimilate into American society. They were popularly not considered to be "fully white" (and thus fully American), and Slavic peoples' "whiteness" continues to be a debate to this day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Slavic_sentiment#United_S...
by keernan | 2026-02-20 20:39:30+00:00
I should be more careful with my terminology. By saying the constitution made SCOTUS a political body, I meant that the design of the constitution is such that SCOTUS is free to interpret the Constitution (and laws) as it sees fit.

The Constitution is designed such that it defines no rules and places no restrictions upon how Justices are to interpret the Constitution. The original design of the Constitution is that the Justices are to interpret the laws of the United States as they see fit.

There is no such thing as an "activist" Supreme Court.

The suggestion there must be an "Originalist interpretation" of the Constitution (e.g. it must be interpreted as intended by the Founding Fathers) is pure hogwash. If that were so, then by an "Originalist interpretation" the Constitution would already say so (and of course it doesn't). Nevertheless political conservative Justices actually made that part of their opinions that now impose the concept of "originalism" when interpretating the Constitution. A pretty neat magical trick by which the conservative Justices violate the philosophy of "originalism" to impose "originalism".

And as for "further down the line at the district level", there is likewise no such thing as an "activist" court - in the sense that lower courts, unlike SCOTUS, are constrained by the Constitution and statutes passed by Congress. There cannot be "activist" district courts to the extent that if they overstep their bounds, SCOTUS will be called upon to address it.

The phrase "activist court" is nothing more than a fictional invention of The Federalist Society. If there are actual politics being played in SCOTUS (this time I mean Republican vs Democrat), it is the Republicans through The Federalist Society and appointments to SCOTUS of Federalist Society Members. But now I am chasing down a rabbit hole that is best avoided.
by socalgal2 | 2026-02-20 20:39:42+00:00
Okay thanks.

I'm curious if there are any tools that allow making responsive SVG. By responsive I mean (1) they respond to @media prefers-color-scheme(dark) (2) they change their look based on size. SVG supports this using CSS. (1) is more important for me.

Currently I have to spit out SVG and manually edit. If I decide to change the original in whatever tool I'm using then I have to manually edit again which is painful. For example, I have to go find every shape I want to change color by hand and then adjust its attributes
by jhogervorst | 2026-02-20 20:39:55+00:00
Agree! If you have a number of domains and can justify a membership, they Openprovider (NL) is a good option.

Some foreign extensions are quite expensive though. I happened to be looking into that yesterday, and Netim (FR) seems to be a good option for that. For the two extensions I need, they were among the cheapest with renewals.
by nickpsecurity | 2026-02-20 20:39:56+00:00
"Is Google hurting itself in its confusion? Google is the largest scraper in the world. Google's entire business began with a web crawler that visited every publicly accessible page on the internet, copied the content, indexed it, and served it back to users. It did this without distinguishing between copyrighted and non-copyrighted material, and it did this without asking permission. Now Google is in federal court claiming that our scraping is illegal."

The above was my take on the situation, too. If SerpStack is illegal, then Google is illegal.

If SerpStack has to cease to operate or pay damages, nearly everyone with a web server will be collecting a check from Google as they're being liquidated.
by paxys | 2026-02-20 20:40:07+00:00
> By which metrics has Tesla been left in the dust wrt autonomous driving

By the fact that they don't have autonomous driving. And this very judgement demonstrates that.

If you have to keep your full attention on the road at all times and constantly look out for the 10% case where the autopilot may spectacularly fail, it instantly turns off the vast majority of prospective users.

Funny enough the tech that Musk's tweets and the Tesla hype machine has been promising for the last decade is actually on the streets today. It's just being rolled out by Waymo.
by Retric | 2026-02-20 20:40:16+00:00
> It's trivially easy to fly a plane in straight level flight, to the extent that you don't actually need any automation at all to do it. You simply trim the aircraft to fly in the attitude

That seemingly shifts the difficulty from the autopilot to the airframe. But that’s not actually good enough, it doesn’t keep an aircraft flying when it’s missing a large chunk of wing for example. https://taskandpurpose.com/tech-tactics/1983-negev-mid-air-c...

Instead, you’re talking about the happy path and if we accept the happy path as enough there’s the weekend equivalents of self driving cars built using minimal effort, however being production worthy is about more than being occasionally useful.

Autopilot is difficult because you need to do several things well or people will defiantly die. Self driving cars are far more forgiving of occasional mistakes but again it’s the or people die bits that makes it difficult. Tesla isn’t actually ahead of the game, they are just willing to take more risks with their customers and the general public’s lives.
by pmontra | 2026-02-20 20:40:29+00:00
Yes, that's the endgame, an Android device in a drawer at home. But what do I have to carry on my pocket to use the minimum amount of apps? Firefox, WhatsApp with video and audio calls, Telegram no video no audio, a mail client, a YouTube client (possibly not from YouTube), a maps and navigation app (for cars), phone calls, SMS.
by PaulKeeble | 2026-02-20 20:40:32+00:00
If the government wasn't so famous for also locking people up that reported security issues I might agree, but boy they are actually worse.

Right now the climate in the world is whistleblowers get their careers and livihoods ended. This has been going on for quite a while.

The only practical advice is ignore it exists, refuse to ever admit to having found a problem and move on. Leave zero paper trail or evidence. It sucks but its career ending to find these things and report them.
by armoredkitten | 2026-02-20 20:40:40+00:00
It doesn't stay localized; runoff from farmland is a major issue. In other words, the farm animal poops out a bunch of antiobiotics, then it rains and that poop ends up washing into the river/lake/water table. That's already something that happens with situations like E. coli contamination. Things that happen on the farm don't stay on the farm.
by kmeisthax | 2026-02-20 20:41:04+00:00
As an American I also have not gone to any of those restaurants.

The thing is, America is the China of food[0]: we make shittons of unsafe, dangerous product and foist it onto the market by burying the market's pricing mechanism under a mountain of garbage until nobody else can compete and we dictate the price.

People will note that China makes plenty of safe, normal products too. The same applies to American agriculture, but that doesn't matter. The problem is mainly that the industry has absolutely no standards. If they can go a few cents cheaper, they will.

[0] And, prior to this century, we were also China in general - a lot of our manufacturing was stolen from Britain and ran for far cheaper.
by gs17 | 2026-02-20 20:41:09+00:00
> Same, I have never interacted with their Facebook reels/videos but all the video thumbnails are practically just videos of porn stars/OnlyFans style content

For me it fluctuates between animals and thirst traps. It's a really odd recommender system.

> Instagram isn't as bad on the Reels side, you'll get good content there...

Seems to depend how far you scroll, the first dozen will usually be good, clean recommendations. After that it goes downhill.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-20 20:41:16+00:00
Not necessarily. Workers don't want to move into the overclass, they just want to live with dignity. One major theme is that things that seemed very ordinary and attainable a generation ago for ordinary people, like owning a house, now seem out of reach.

Circa 1970 Issac Asimov wrote an essay that started with a personal anecdote about how amazed he was that he could get a thyroidectomy for his Graves Disease for about what he made writing one essay -- regardless of how good or bad it really is today, you're not going to see people express that kind of wonder and gratitude about it today.

This discussion circles around it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47074389

but I think the real working class stance is that you want protection from economic shocks more than "participation", "ownership", "a seat at the table", "upside", etc. This might be a selfish and even antisocial thing to ask for over 80 years near the start of the second millennium, but I think it would sell if it was on offer. It's not on offer very much because it's expensive.

One could make the case that what we really need is downward mobility. Like what would have happened if Epstein had been shot down the first time or if Larry Summers had "failed down" instead of "failing up?" My experience is that most legacy admissions are just fine but some of them can't test their way out of a paper bag and that's why we need a test requirement.
by yread | 2026-02-20 20:41:32+00:00
I'm actually just looking into LUKS on Hetzner.

I've found this - how to do it without ever entrusting any encryption key to Hetzner

https://www.tqdev.com/2023-luks-encrypted-debian-12-server-h...

But it seems like way too much work

There is this easy tutorial (that for some reason disappeared)

https://web.archive.org/web/20260128114859/https://community...

and this on how to get an email when you need to unlock it via SSH

https://dominik.wombacher.cc/posts/email_notification_to_unl...