MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmyeet | 2026-02-28 19:58:54+00:00
The dirty little secret here is that the Democratic establishment and thus many Democratic politicians like what's happening. They just don't like how it's being done.

What's they're doing is both bad policy (IMHO) and bad politics. Why is it bad politics? Because this military action is deeply unpopular and you cannot outflank the Republican Party on the right about American imperialism. Remember when Kamala Harris promised the "most lethal" military? What does that mean? And why?

But hte other reason this is bad politics is for the reason you state: it cedes the political ground of being the "peace president" to Trump. Memories are short because he did exactly the same thing in 2015 eg [1][2] and again in 2020 eg [3]. The last one is particularly funny because Biden did exactly what Trump promised to do but the Trump still beat Biden over the head for it.

There's no consistency in any of this. Trump was never a peace president. We knew it was a lie at the time. We know it's a lie now. Nobody cares.

But when the supposed opposition party mirrors his policy positions and offers no resistance to anything that's happening, who are voters going to listen to? The guy who talks about peace, even though he's lying, or the guy who says nothing about peace and just thinks Trump should've consulted with Congress but nothing otherwise should change? Or, worse, sometimes Trump isn't being tough enough?

Then Senator Joe Biden in 1986 called Israel "the best $3 billion we make" and if Israel didn't exist we'd invent on to protect our interests [4] while Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State called Israel an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the region.

The JCPOA was a rare W for Obama (who was otherwise the Deporter-in-Chief and the Drone King). Trump of course dismantled it at the behest of the Adelsons. Did Biden reinstate it? Of course not.

The best case for an establishment Democratic administration now is to do nothing while promising nothing and reversing nothing that ultimately brings in the next Trump, just as Biden/Harris did in 2024.

That's the long version of why I say there's no difference. In the short term there might be. Even that's debatable of course. But long term the ratchet effect only gets worse.

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/12/donald-...

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/13/donald-trump...

[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/08/donald-trump...

[4]: https://www.c-span.org/clip/senate-highlight/user-clip-joe-b...
by jbdamask | 2026-02-28 19:59:08+00:00
Hmmm, didn’t realize I was deflecting - just stating facts. But if I came across that way then criticism noted.

If I turned this into a paid app then more attention would be given to quality. There’s only so much an app that leverages LLMs can do, though. With enough trace data and user feedback I could imagine building out Evals from failure modes.

I can think of a few ways to provide a better UX. One is already built-in - there’s a “Recreate” button the original uploader can click if they don’t like the result.

Things could get pretty sophisticated after that, such as letting the user tweak the prompt, allowing for section-by-section re-dos, changing models, or even supporting manual edits.

From a commercial product perspective, it’s interesting to think about the cost/benefit of building around the current limits of LLMs vs building for an experience and betting the models will get better. The question is where to draw the line and where to devote cycles. Something worthy of its own thread.
by loganc2342 | 2026-02-28 19:59:24+00:00
It's a scary thought, albeit not a realistic one at the moment, thankfully. The Supreme Court has shown ample willingness to strike down blatant (and subtle, for that matter) executive overreach. Exhibit A is Trump's tariffs, which were justified by the administration to be legal through the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows the president to “regulate…importation” during a declared state of emergency. The Supreme Court found that the wording in the act allowing the president to “regulate…importation” was not sufficient to grant the president the power to impose tariffs. The wording in the IEEPA is vague enough that you could go either way, but the conservative majority tends to follow the Major Questions Doctrine, which essentially says that in vague matters like this, assume that the power belongs to Congress and not the president.

Meanwhile, delaying or canceling elections through executive order would be blatantly illegal, particularly when no conflict is taking place on U.S. soil. The case likely wouldn't even make it to the Supreme Court, but if it did, I have no doubt elections would be promptly reinstated.

I'm not saying the Supreme Court has a perfect record, of course. Not even two years ago, they essentially ruled that the president is above the law. But at least in matters regarding the balance of powers between branches, the Supreme Court is wary of the power of the executive branch, and that should certainly include the president's ability (or lack thereof) to interfere in elections.
by jjk166 | 2026-02-28 19:59:58+00:00
Orion was never aiming for anywhere. It was always meant to be a flexible module that could be used for whatever some future plan would come up with. The constellation program which Orion was originally part of ostensibly had ambitions beyond just going to the moon, including missions to both Mars and Near Earth Asteroids, but those follow on targets were never really fleshed out. The SLS was created after constellation was cancelled with no clear mission defined; its intent to keep shuttle supplier contracts going was clearly stated at the time. Artemis was a program created to give the SLS destinations to go to, none of which are Mars.
by tzs | 2026-02-28 20:00:19+00:00
The military uses a lot of open source software.

It would be interesting if the maintainers of several projects the Pentagon depends on were to start using Claude on those projects.

How would Hegseth explain that it is both such a big risk that he wants to ban from government work any company that uses Anthropic even if they are not using it for their government work, yet they keep using those open source projects whose maintainers are using it for the work the government is using?

Note: even projects that do not allow AI contributions could almost certainly find something helpful to use it for.
by GuB-42 | 2026-02-28 20:00:22+00:00
The thing is that programming is not an end goal, it is a means to a end. No one is paying you to "write code", they are paying you to make a website shat serves as a storefront, to make a video game, something for accounting,...

It turns out that in many of these cases, code is an effective way of doing it, but there may be other options. For a storefront, there are website builders that let you do it very effectively if your needs match one of their templates, there are game engines that require no code, and a lot of accounting can be done in Excel.

What I wanted to say is that maybe you could have done without code, but thanks to LLMs making code a viable option even for beginners, that's what you went for. In fact, vibe coding is barely even coding in the strictest sense of writing something in a programming language, since you are using natural language and code is just an intermediate step that you can see.

The reason programmers use programming languages is not gatekeeping, unlike what many people who want to "eliminate programmers" think. It is that programming languages are very good at what they do, they are precise, unambiguous, concise and expressive. Alternatives like natural languages or graphical tools lack some of these attributes and therefore may not work as well. Like with many advanced tools, there is a learning curve, but once you reach a certain point, like when you intend to make it your job, it is worth it.
by jonator | 2026-02-28 20:00:39+00:00
I’ve found a good counter to this is having agents visualize and explain the architecture of the system. Then I gain just enough context to figure out what I’m trying to accomplish.

Also, as always, a highly modular codebase is very important. If I only have to reason about a single module then I don’t have to have full context on system.

It seems we’re now in a world where engineers are responsible for creating a good environment where an agent is able to gain context on the architecture and validate its work via tests (e2e, unit, smoke, etc). Then it can get into its own feedback loop and find the correct solution on its own much faster.
by lxgr | 2026-02-28 20:00:46+00:00
But attestation for passkeys is dead. Neither Apple's, nor Google's implementation (with negligible exceptions) support it anymore, so any site demanding attestation will immediately disqualify > 99% of all potential users.

Some still might, e.g. for corporate or high security contexts, but I don't think it'll become a mass-adopted thing if things don't somehow drastically change course.
by dennysora | 2026-02-28 20:01:06+00:00
Security is important, security is important, security is important — I keep emphasizing this point.
But for me, that statement only really applies to people who genuinely understand security.
I personally bought two YubiKeys, understand the associated risks, and store my credentials on those YubiKeys.
However, many people today do not realize the risks involved. They casually store these things in places like a keyring and then never manage them properly.
That does not necessarily mean they are secure. On the contrary, it can become another kind of danger, because once you start using passkeys, the level of access and authority tied to them is significant. If they are lost or leaked, the consequences can be disastrous.
I am glad to see that the industry is paying more attention to security, but at the same time, I believe these more specialized aspects should be aimed at people who actually have the relevant expertise.
Passkeys do have a learning curve. For ordinary users, they often just click through a few prompts and end up binding themselves to a system without really understanding what happened.
On top of that, with modern systems relying on encryption and TPM, once a computer runs into serious problems, many people simply have no way to recover their data.
For the average user, 2FA is already sufficient.
by pixelsort | 2026-02-28 20:01:48+00:00
The level of compliance and enthusiasm varies. Some believe they are making the world a better place. Some feel they're adding value but suspect they are trapped within a cycle they refuse to examine. Some are more connected to the truth, and comply willingly but resentfully.

Where you fall depends on where you work and what you work on.

You make a great points about the chain of accountability. But, in my opinion, working professionals are the only agents in the system with the potential to realize their own culpability and divert their actions.

Perhaps, it isn't fair to point to them and call them traitors. Still, they are the only ones with enough agency to potentially organize and collectively push for the kind of ethics that could save us all.
by nkrisc | 2026-02-28 20:02:00+00:00
Safety for whomever controls the nukes, whether autocratic (Iran) or democratic (Ukraine).

Russia would not have attacked Ukraine if they still had their nuclear weapons and Iran wouldn’t be under attack now if they had them too.

I’m not saying whether it’s goods or bad that any or specific countries have nuclear weapons, that’s beside the point. The point is that this attack sends the signal that the only way to guarantee your safety is to have them.
by andoando | 2026-02-28 20:02:26+00:00
Ok imagine you went back 30 years and you had a swarm of experts around you who you could ask anything you wanted and they would even do the work for you if you wanted.

Does this mean youd be incapable of learning anything? Or could you possibly learn way more anyone else because you had the innate desire to learn and understand along with the best tool possible to do it?

Its the same thing here. How you use LLMs is all up to your mindset. Throughly review and ask questions on what it did, or why, ask if we could have done it some other way instead. Hell ask it just the questions you need and do it yourself, or dont use it at all. I was working on C++ for example with a heavy use of mutexs, shared and weak pointers which I havent done before. LLM fixed a race condition, and I got to ask it precisely what the issue was, to draw a diagram showing what was happening in this exact scenario before and after.

I feel like Im learning more because I am doing way more high level things now, and spending way less time on the stuff I already know or dont care to know (non fundementals, like syntax and even libraries/frameworks). For example, I don't really give a fuck about being an expert in Spring Security. I care about how authentication works as a principal, what methods would be best for what, etc but do I want to spend 3 hours trying to debug the nuances of how the security library is configured for a small project I dont care about?
by deadbabe | 2026-02-28 20:02:28+00:00
Modern social media has only been around for maybe 10-15 years. The honeymoon phase of the 2000s and early 2010s was probably the peak of value for the individual user, but I would say in the mid 2010s the value began to tilt and now the corps extract far more value than what they deliver to individual user’s lives.

Social media today has little value beyond an engine to deliver dopamine hits, increasingly more of this content is just AI slop. I don’t think this will ever be palatable for most users.

I think 10 years from now, it is plausible that major social media platforms will have been completely abandoned by “real” users, in favor of private decentralized chat groups and small anti-viral platforms, where most members have only 1 or 2 degrees of separation to each other, and where the content posted is of interest, but not addicting, and not infinitely scrollable.

This would do a lot of damage to the techno-fascist state, as it takes away one of the pillars upon which their control stands.
by smegger001 | 2026-02-28 20:03:08+00:00
Smallpox, which the only remaining samples exists in a couple of secure facilities controled by superpowers for use making vaccinations in case they are wrong about their only being a few samples controled by superpowers. Everyone with an ounce of sense knows bioweapons infect both sides and nuetral parties who are no longer neutral once you infect them. It like mustard gas but worse no one other than suicidal terror groups want them and they dont have the facilities equipment samples or knowhow.
by TuxSH | 2026-02-28 20:03:16+00:00
Yes, I agree.

It's just that I value the right to reveal my identity on my own terms a lot higher than $1200 (using my username and project name is fine). For the offer to become enticing they would need it to be 5~10y instead of 6mo, or to simply remove the $realname part of the "publicity" section
by briandw | 2026-02-28 20:05:06+00:00
Time to retire the use of the word Fascism. It's lost all meaning at this point. It's become a shortcut for "bad people that I'd don't like".

The result is sloppy thinking and sloppy arguments.
The people that you need to convince will see the word "Fascist" and tune it out as more left wing noise.

The threats are real, however this framing is doing more harm than good.
by ericmay | 2026-02-28 20:05:22+00:00
Right... shells age. They blow up in the barrel, things like that. Maybe they even intentionally blow up in the barrel. Not that I would suggest sabotage. There's no way South Korean intelligence could possibly infiltrate North Korea ;)

But even so, if there was a serious threat of war, which is unlikely because China would stop North Korea, the US would place assets in the region and as we got close to a confrontation the US and South Korea (and as things are looking, probably Japan) would begin an aerial and missile bombardment to destroy in place North Korean offensive capabilities. Some would get through of course, perhaps thousands or tens of thousands of South Korean casualties, but in the context of a conventional war North Korea's capabilities would be quickly overwhelmed, at least in my opinion.

But honestly, the current status quo works pretty well for everyone except the people of North Korea, but there's not much we can do. It's a tragedy and the blame for that falls squarely on the Soviet Union and Chinese Communist Party.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-28 20:05:50+00:00
Yes I agree, I don't know the current VC market so I am not gonna comment about that but my point was that the OpenAI employees would still be considerably well off even if they switch jobs.

My point was I don't think that Money (whether from VC or taking Jobs from other massive AI employers) should be as important issue to them atleast imo.
by paviva | 2026-02-28 20:06:22+00:00
His French is so simple and yet, incredibly beautiful and elegant, in a way that I am not even able to express in words. Only Voltaire compares.

"tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre." -- "All the woe of man comes from one single thing only: not knowing how to remain at rest, in a room"

In the same text, he follows with:

"Le roi est environné de gens qui ne pensent qu’à divertir le roi, et à l’empêcher de penser à lui. Car il est malheureux, tout roi qu’il est, s’il y pense."

"The king is surrounded by people who think only of amusing the king and preventing him from thinking about himself. For he is unhappy, though he be king, if he thinks about it."
by Cyphase | 2026-02-28 20:06:29+00:00
Quite tangential, but this reminded me of a line from Human Target:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6tqvzt?start=872&mute=fal...

"I'm sorry, you... You think I'm a prostitute?"

looks at offered cash

"A $40 prostitute?"
by cc-d | 2026-02-28 20:06:59+00:00
Yep. Sounds like us.

It's better than previous "fascist" states in some ways, worse in others. Please remember everybody, many past "authoritarian" states have been character assassinated relentelessly, and the world you inhabit may not be nearly as free as the illusion our very based media boys have presented to you.

The very terminology provided to you to describe these power structures is a form of warfare in and of themselves.
Show HN: PyTorch/FEniCSx pipeline for elastocaloric metamaterial optimization
by Rao_Atreya | 2026-02-28 20:06:59+00:00
Hi HN,

I built an open-source Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) environment to explore topology optimization for elastocaloric cooling (solid-state HVAC).

The physical problem:
The HVAC industry is trying to replace toxic HFC refrigerants with elastocaloric Shape Memory Alloys like Nitinol. You cool a room by cyclically compressing a porous metal lattice. The paradox is that you need high porosity for air to flow through the metal, but holes create stress concentrators. If the metal is too thin, it snaps after a few thousand cycles from mechanical fatigue. Standard density-based topology optimization (like SIMP) usually outputs jagged, unprintable "grayscale" meshes.

What I built:
I wanted to bypass SIMP and enforce manufacturing reality. I wrote an OpenAI Gymnasium wrapper that bridges a PyTorch RL agent with a native CAD-to-Physics pipeline:
1. The PyTorch agent outputs continuous geometric parameters for BCC/Gyroid lattices.
2. The environment checks the resulting wall thickness. If it drops below 0.2mm (the minimum feature size for standard LPBF metal 3D printers), the agent gets a terminal penalty and the episode ends.
3. If printable, OpenCASCADE and Gmsh generate a watertight tetrahedral mesh.
4. FEniCSx crushes it in a virtual hydraulic press (via MPI) to find peak stress.
5. The agent learns to maximize porosity while fortifying high-stress zones.

The whole stack runs locally on Apple Silicon using Metal Performance Shaders (MPS).

Current Limitations (The Next Phase):
Right now, the FEniCSx solver is using a linear elastic approximation to save compute time during the DRL training loop. Real Nitinol undergoes a highly non-linear austenitic-martensitic phase transformation. The next major step is integrating a hyperelastic/phase-field model into the FEniCSx step without making the compute cost per episode astronomical.

I’m dropping this here because I know there are people on HN working at the intersection of AI, computational mechanics, and thermal management.

I would love any brutal feedback on the architecture, the FEniCSx integration, or ideas on speeding up non-linear physics solvers for RL loops.

Repo:https://github.com/rao-atreya-01/elastocaloric-ai-optimizati...
by jjfoooo4 | 2026-02-28 20:07:04+00:00
This scenario always imagines that the people getting bombs rained down on them will somehow determine that their actual friends in the world are those dropping the bombs.

Even accepting this, how exactly are these peaceful, western friendly civilians going to withstand a war better than their country's army?

It's very depressing to see this playbook credulously trotted out yet again. When has this worked?
by stephenhuey | 2026-02-28 20:07:14+00:00
I had never heard of the Zone Rouge, so thanks for sharing! I grew up in the USA in the 80s, and as a child, the first time I remember hearing of the problem of lingering landmines was in reference to countries such as Cambodia. Later I lived in Africa and eventually visited other continents. Of course I remember hearing of the war in Yugoslavia when growing up, but a dozen years ago when I visited Sarajevo, I certainly felt sad when the Bosnians told me about the ongoing problem because it felt like something I would have expected to be cleaned up by now in a developed country. Definitely a strong lesson on the long-term costs of war.
by johnpdoe1234 | 2026-02-28 20:07:17+00:00
Not sure I agree.

One cannot (in most of the planet) go to the supermarket and buy an M16 and a box of hand grenades, or get a hold of a couple of kg of plutonium cause they want some free energy at home.
We also have rules in place of what one individual/company can and cannot do from the point of view of the greater good. I cannot go and kill my neighbour for my benefit (or purposefully destroy his life) without consequences. A myriad of things are not allowed, and I don't see people complaining about any incursion into personal freedoms.

The reason people have accepted these is that we have already proven that having access to those things could be catastrophic. We haven't proven hat yet with AI.
But I don't see much difference between those established and well accepted rules, and a rule that says: A company cannot release or use for its benefit a technology that will impact the need of humans at scale, because of the impact (again at scale) that it would have in society.

In other words, if you are a company and have the potential to release a product, or buy a product from a provider that would cause mass unemployment, should you be legally allowed to do so? I do not think so.
Show HN: Panther - Bloomberg Terminal for prediction markets now in early access
by mkelias | 2026-02-28 20:07:21+00:00
Hey HN! We've been building Panther, a professional-grade terminal for prediction markets (Kalshi, Polymarket, and more).

We aggregated data across platforms so you can compare odds, track market movements, and trade from one place. Think of it as a Bloomberg-style interface but for prediction markets. It's available as a web terminal you can use right in your browser, and as a desktop app with full multi-monitor support and fully customizable layouts. You can check it out at https://getpanther.app.

Early access is completely free. Would love feedback from this community, especially on what data/features you'd want to see. We're also hanging out in our Discord (https://discord.gg/MakgPGmBHn) if you want to chat or share ideas. Thanks!