MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by perfmode | 2026-02-18 15:40:36+00:00
You say the dog “also consciously understands the connection between bell and food,” which is actually not something Pavlov’s framework establishes at all. Whether the dog has conscious understanding of the association is exactly the kind of claim Pavlov’s behaviorist approach was designed to avoid. We can observe the salivation; we can’t observe the dog’s understanding.

The PTSD analogy is intuitively appealing but also somewhat off. You say “even with the stimulus gone, the physiological reaction remains,” but PTSD is better characterized by impaired extinction and stimulus generalization (too many things become triggers), not by the response persisting in the total absence of any triggering stimulus. The difficulty of treating PTSD has as much to do with how the fear memory is consolidated and how extinction learning fails to transfer across contexts as it does with the simple involuntary nature of the response.
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-02-18 15:41:35+00:00
> Freedom is not “doing anything you want”. It’s “not having to do the things you don’t want to do”.

Both of those are anemic views of "freedom".

The most robust understanding of freedom is and must be rooted in morality and thus human nature:

Freedom is the ability to do what is *good*, or what one *ought*.

Because we're talking about human agency, "good" and "ought" here are normative and thus moral in nature. But morality itself is determined and underpinned by human nature. What makes a human act "good" depends on what it means to be human. There is no other basis for morality. Everything else is arbitrary, circular, or ultimately a tacit appeal to human nature.

And human nature has a direction. Good acts further human beings along that general axis (neutral acts at least do not retreat or deviate). Eating lead is unhealthy, but doing so intentionally, knowing fully well that lead is harmful, is evil, because a choice was made in light of knowledge to do what one should not.
by xg15 | 2026-02-18 15:41:46+00:00
I like how everyone on this thread is up in arms about Zuckerberg - until the moment where regulation is mentioned. Then it's suddenly "oh well, they could just, like, not use it, couldn't they?"

There is also peer pressure/FOMO. "Choosing not to use it" is not exactly easy if everyone else in your social group uses it - especially for teens.
by MontyCarloHall | 2026-02-18 15:41:47+00:00
I disagree with the central premise of the article:

>Why [haven't ready-made meals displaced home cooking]? Because humans love food. Humans love cooking. And humans love to learn from other humans about food and cooking. AI is doing to various kinds of work what ready-made meals have done to cooking: provide lots of cheap alternatives which, ultimately, make the real deal even more popular. Now, millions of people can dabble in creating special effect videos with a few simple prompts. But will more folks than now put in the hard work to become true special effect experts? Probably not.

The difference between home cooking and VFX is the ratio of producer to consumer. A home-cooked meal prepared by a single person usually feeds 1-10 people. That's a ratio of 1 chef to 1-10 consumers, so the enjoyment of the cooking process itself occupies quite a large proportional role in the overall enjoyment of the food. Feature-film VFX prepared by 100 artists is potentially seen by hundreds of millions of people. That's a ratio of 1 VFX artist to millions of consumers. The enjoyment of the artistic process occupies a much smaller proportional role in the overall enjoyment of the art. Humans love to cook at roughly the same degree as they love to consume food, so ready-made meals have not displaced cooking. But humans love to consume media far more than they love to create it, so it's not a given that ready-made media won't displace human artistry.

(As a fitting aside, AI is really really good at generating recipes. Makes sense: recipes are inherently linear processes where each step depends primarily on the immediately preceding context, which is exactly where autoregressive language models shine.)
by zo1 | 2026-02-18 15:42:07+00:00
The additional problem to this is that they guided the industry and their own platforms to actively generate that much content. No effort was made to naturally or organically slow the creation or even perform any sort of de-duplication. So whatever argument they use for "we're too big, their is just too much content" is directly on them.

Social media is a slot-machine essentially, and in order to do that they had to mobilize and incentivize entire industries to revolve around generating millenias-worth of content.
by pinkmuffinere | 2026-02-18 15:42:09+00:00
Ya, strongly agree. For those that don’t read the article, here are some of the more concerning ones imo

- Mark said “We don't allow sexually explicit content on the service for people of any age.” But they had a 17-strike policy, and 79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms. :(

- Mark said “Mental health is a complex issue and the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes.” But internal study found users who stopped using Facebook and Instagram for a week showed lower rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Meta halted the study and did not publicly disclose the results – citing harmful media coverage as the reason for canning the study. I suppose he might debate whether this is a “causal” link, but it’s fairly damning.

- Instagram head Adam Mosseri told reporters that research he had seen suggests the app’s effects on teen well-being is likely “quite small.” An internal 2019 study titled “Teen Mental Health: Creatures of Habit” found (1) “Teens can’t switch off Instagram even if they want to.” (2) “Teens talk of Instagram in terms of an ‘addicts narrative’ spending too much time indulging in compulsive behavior that they know is negative but feel powerless to resist.” (3) “The pressure ‘to be present and perfect’ is a defining characteristic of the anxiety teens face around Instagram. This restricts both their ability to be emotionally honest and also to create space for themselves to switch off.”
by HarakiriGod | 2026-02-18 15:42:13+00:00
Hi, great question! Honestly, because I haven't thought of it.

The whole project has begun as a side project once I had the opportunity to be a hiring manager. I saw so many resumes/CVs that were rejected 'just because', and even those that were accepted, were either hard to read/grasp, or had too much information that would make an HR person stop reading, and therefore rejecting, especially with students (as the role we opened was for an internship).

My idea was to build something for any kind of person, either tech literate or not, and to just have a one-stop shop for everything career related (which is why I won't stop with these 10 tools). At the same time, it also helped me understand how to build a project from scratch, deploy it, try and market/advertise it (which is obviously really hard), and see a good idea (in my opinion) can go to.

I have no problem sharing them, though, and fortunately the costs for me are insignificant at this point.
by guywithahat | 2026-02-18 15:42:25+00:00
This is (one of) my point(s), Tesla does publish accident reports to all the major government agencies, and then those agencies make them public. Electrek wants a press packet, which Tesla isn't doing for them. In response, they try to make it sound like Tesla is shady and hiding things, or otherwise acting in some nefarious manor nobody else could think to act in. It feels disingenuous and will only serve to hurt autonomous driving optics for all companies
by jacobsimon | 2026-02-18 15:42:37+00:00
Yeah that’s a good counterpoint. I guess it hinges on whether you can define a clear boundary around what is harmful or unharmful social media.

Like to me “online shopping addiction” is probably a more realistic and analogous problem to gambling, so maybe online advertising to teens could be regulated, but the jump to child abuse is so far outside Meta’s actual business model that it feels over-reaching to go there.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-18 15:42:53+00:00
Posting nothing but links to your own blog is a classic rookie mistake. If you do that your posts are automatically [dead].

Post some links to somebody else's blog, write some comments, get your karma up to 100 or so. Very simply, be part of the community and not just here to extract attention.

Turn on the "showdead" flag on your profile and you will get more insight into all the people who go straight to [dead].
by streetfighter64 | 2026-02-18 15:43:11+00:00
Lysenko as in the Soviet scientist? I don't really see what, if anything, a mistaken belief about evolution has to do with legal or moral definitions about ownership of data.

My point is this: If your insurance provider, for example, obtains access to your medical records, and store them on their servers, does that make it "their data" to use as they please? This would imply that:

> But if the data is on a storage media that you own, I would consider it your data
by adrian_b | 2026-02-18 15:43:56+00:00
The first examples in the parent article do not require decryption. They only require unpredictable random numbers that are unique.

If uniqueness is needed for a 32-bit number or a 64-bit number, then in AES-128 the byte permutation can be modified, to reduce the block size accordingly.

For the other examples with record identifiers, I am not sure whether the author meant for them to ever be decrypted. If decryption was intended, I disagree that this is the right solution. If an opaque record identifier is desired, it should be an unpredictable random number, which can be generated at maximum speed with AES. There is no need to ever decrypt such an identifier.

If other private information is needed, like a record counter, it should be put in separate fields, that are not provided to external entities, instead of encrypting it inside the identifier. Encrypting such private information would prevent its use in indexing anyway.
by slashdev | 2026-02-18 15:44:15+00:00
It's not as easy to build a business as just copying someone (otherwise we'd have all been doing that long before LLMs).

I expect the software market will change from lots of big kitchen sink included systems and services to many smaller more specialized solutions with small agile teams behind them.

Some engineers that lose their jobs are going to create new businesses and new jobs.

The question in my mind: is there enough feature and software demand out there to keep all of the engineers employed at 3x the productivity? Maybe. Software has been limited on the supply side by how expensive it was to produce. Now it may bump into limits on the demand side instead.

Meanwhile LLMs are better than junior devs, so nobody wants to hire a junior dev. No idea how we get senior devs then. How many people will be scared away from entering this career path?

The job has changed. How many software engineers will leave the career now that the job is more of a technically minded product person and code reviewer?

I can't predict how it all plays out, but I'm along for the ride. Grieving the loss of programming and trying to get used to this new world.
by deaux | 2026-02-18 15:44:33+00:00
Oh sweetie, Meta's revenue pipeline has included knowingly playing a crucial supporting and fomenting role in a genocide in Myanmar, and continues to rely on a huge number of actual scam ads from China that are intentionally ignored to protect revenue. Besides of course the "developing algorithms that detect when teen girls are at their most vulnerable to manipulate them".

But you're right. Ellison and Thiel get all the attention, while Zuckerberg has caused magnitudes more societal destruction than both combined. Not because the former two are better people, far from it, just hard real-world impact from the companies they've founded.

In tech, nothing comes close to the damage of Meta. Not even the most despicable of companies like ClearView, as while their products might be worse on paper their actual impact pales in comparison.
by xg15 | 2026-02-18 15:45:15+00:00
From the article, which quotes an internal study of Facebook itself on this:

> An internal 2019 study titled “Teen Mental Health: Creatures of Habit” found the following:

- “Teens can’t switch off Instagram even if they want to.”

- “Teens talk of Instagram in terms of an ‘addicts narrative’ spending too much time indulging in compulsive behavior that they know is negative but feel powerless to resist.”

- “The pressure ‘to be present and perfect’ is a defining characteristic of the anxiety teens face around Instagram. This restricts both their ability to be emotionally honest and also to create space for themselves to switch off.”
by jmclnx | 2026-02-18 15:45:26+00:00
Well if true, the good news is there will be no need to file a FOIA (https://www.foia.gov/how-to.html). We just wait for the next Microsoft breach :)

For example, "Microsoft says bug causes Copilot to summarize confidential emails":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47060202
by nickdothutton | 2026-02-18 15:45:30+00:00
>79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms.

This sounded very high, and I was interested to know how they understood what the total (100%) figure was, given the presumed underground nature of the activity. Clicked on the link for the source. The statement is false. By all means hold these companies to account but sensationalism isn't going to help. Full disclosure: I have never had a Facebook account and couldn't care less whether Meta exists or not.
by dd8601fn | 2026-02-18 15:45:33+00:00
His argument is that this isn’t a failure of AI to perform as advertised, but a series of deployment failures a businesses. He theorizes that they’re buying a million licenses for chatgpt or copilot, dumping that in the laps of employees, and assuming the results will just… “show up”.

So I guess he’s making the case that the tools are good… the employees are just holding it wrong.
by shimman | 2026-02-18 15:45:50+00:00
Not trying to sound like a dick, but do you actually go outside and talk to your neighbors? Do you attend your town boards or education boards or housing boards? Are you part of your local political party's chapter?

I am, and what I see is that there are people trying to fight this good fight and they need help.

Advocacy is by far the worst form of politics (talking about things), organizing is where real work happens and the act of politics takes place.

I recommend you actually go out in the real world and embrace your community.
by lucideer | 2026-02-18 15:45:55+00:00
> This is very useful for colorscheme developers

I would posit then that this article simply doesn't apply to you at all. The feature being described is targetted at users who are effectively developing their own schemes (albeit in a rather simplified automated manner). If I'm taking something off the shelf, I'm using the appropriate recommended base16. I have no expectation that a wild base16 is going to align with any 3rd-party's curated scheme.

I do understand that this logic isn't always going to click with people given the differing contexts of a terminal-wide -vs- app-specific (i.e. vim) approach, but again: that disparity seems either a legacy issue (caused by things like this 16-256 mis-alignment) OR simply a philosophical difference (whereby people who customise at the term level shouldn't at the app level & vice-versa).
by perfmode | 2026-02-18 15:46:05+00:00
The claim that the conditioned salivary response “can’t be suppressed” keeps getting repeated, and it’s still wrong. Pavlov’s own experiments demonstrated extinction. The conditioned response does weaken and disappear when you stop pairing the bell with food. It’s resistant to conscious override in real time, sure, but it’s not permanent or unsuppressable in the way you keep implying.

The framing that Pavlov’s key insight was about “responses which are not part of the conscious mind” is historically a bit anachronistic. Pavlov was a physiologist, not a psychologist. He wasn’t primarily making claims about consciousness vs. unconsciousness. He was mapping the mechanics of reflexes and their modification. The conscious/unconscious framing is more of a later psychological interpretation layered on top. Pavlov himself was pretty hostile to mentalistic language and would probably have objected to framing his work in terms of what the “conscious mind” does or doesn’t control.

The claim about surgery is also a bit misleading as a reason for using dogs. Pavlov used dogs because he was a digestive physiologist studying gastric secretion. The surgical fistula was created so he could measure salivation precisely, not because the experiment required it conceptually. You could (and people later did) study conditioned physiological responses in humans through things like galvanic skin response, heart rate changes, and eye-blink conditioning, none of which require surgery.

So you have a legitimate complaint about a shallow reading of Pavlov, but you’re building their correction on some inaccuracies of your own, and you keep asserting the “can’t be suppressed” point which is the weakest part of your argument.
by swiftcoder | 2026-02-18 15:46:33+00:00
> nothing beats the 2008-2013 Thinkpad keyboards

Maybe so, but 15-20 year old laptops are definitely starting to show their age.

An M2 MacBook Pro, on the other hand, is only 4 years old, has a fairly OK keyboard, and is still in striking distance of current high-end ultrabooks when it comes to performance.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-18 15:46:43+00:00
> You would have to really strain even to call Zuckerberg's statement a statement of fact, and the factual elements are just "we invest [an amount]" and "we do [efforts]".

You think such a weak claim is still a strain? That's the weakest possible factual interpretation.

But I don't think we should ignore "so much [...] to make sure" or "industry leading". If there was nobody prioritizing teen safety, or if that team had no power while teams targeting teens had power, then his statement was a lie. It's not just an opinion over whether the end result was shoddy.
by moduspol | 2026-02-18 15:47:16+00:00
> I'm sure they have an absolute tsunami of reports to go through and I do not envy the humans tasked with this work.

I'm not sure this is an excuse any more, particularly for companies with huge AI investments.

Maybe you don't have AI making final decisions, but for egregious cases like what you describe, it should be well within Meta's capabilities to prioritize human enforcement for them using AI.
by dabedee | 2026-02-18 15:47:27+00:00
I'm usually the first one to bash Facebook and its main liar in chief, but the first couple of paragraphs mix damning evidence with weak stretches (as mentioned by others here). The bad stuff is genuinely bad enough.

Meta's own research found Instagram worsened body image for 1 in 3 teen girls [1]. They killed a deactivation study when results looked bad, with one employee comparing it to tobacco companies burying research [2]. They had a 17-strike policy for accounts involved in sexual solicitation [3]. And they ran growth strategies explicitly targeting kids under 13, segmenting youth into "Kid (6-10), Tween (10-13), and Teen 13+" [4].

[1] 2019 Instagram slide presentation, "Teen Mental Health Deep Dive"

[2] Meta internal deactivation study (unnamed employee quote from unsealed docs)

[3] Testimony of Vaishnavi Jayakumar, former Instagram Head of Safety and Well-being

[4] Meta Internal Evidence Exhibit 45
by cxr | 2026-02-18 15:47:53+00:00
Right. GitHub started as and still is that "social coding platform" from 2008 inspired by the then-novel growth hacking of that era understood and demonstrated by Facebook—where it wasn't enough to host, say, your user's LiveJournal blog, and their friends might sign up if they wanted, and that was that. No, rather, you host your users' content but put it inside a closed system where you've erected artificial barriers that make it impossible to do certain things unless their friends are actively using the platform.

GitHub could have been project hosting and patch submission. It's the natural model for the style of contributions that you see most on GitHub today and is what Git was actually made for and how it's used by Linux. Pull requests are meant for a small circle of trusted collaborators that you're regularly pulling from and have already paid the one-time cost to set up in your remotes. Allowing simple patch submission poses a problem, though, in that even if Alice chooses to host projects on GitHub, then Bob might decide Gitorious is better and host stuff there even while remaining friendly and uploading patches to Alice's on GitHub when the time calls for it. By forcing a proprietary pull request system and a clunky forking workflow on Alice and Bob, on the other hand, you can enforce where the source of the changes are coming from (i.e. another repo hosted on GitHub). And that's what they did.
by hsuduebc2 | 2026-02-18 15:49:29+00:00
I would say they have these algorithms. They just know they can do it because literally nobody is forcing them not to. They buy politicians in US and it seems like EU fines are too small for them and even sparks and outrage of US policitcans when applied.

I surely hope so they end up like Standart oil. Broken down into small companies, because this monopol is absolutely net negative value for society.
by razdom59 | 2026-02-18 15:50:03+00:00
RazDom Libre asks the same question to Grok, Gemini, GPT-oSS, Qwen3 and Llama-3.3 in parallel, then fuses the answers.

Key goals:
- Low content filter
- Live verification
- Weighted synthesis instead of picking the "best" reply

Live: https://razdom.com

Tech: Next.js, Vercel, Upstash Redis, Serper
Thanks.
by SKILNER | 2026-02-18 15:50:15+00:00
If you've ever undertaken the task of documenting entire workflows, then you know that you quickly put up the white flag at the word "entire".

When you actually talk to people about what they do there are often many, many nuances, micro-events, micro-decisions and micro-actions in their work. This is why it can take days/weeks/months to completely train a new person for a job.

This level of detail is barely documented - anywhere. There is a huge amount of information buried in workflows that AI has barely had access to for training. A lot of this is more in the realm of world models, rather than LLMs.

So imagine trying to use AI to improve these workflows it knows so little about. Then imagine AI trying to reinvent them across an organization.

We find these use cases where AI provides great value - totally true - but these barely scratch the surface of what goes on.
by xmhatx | 2026-02-18 15:50:17+00:00
Great question! It makes it more interesting! New attack angles are presented when dealing with the speech-to-speech models. Prosody, which are the intonation patterns that convey meaning, emotion, and emphasis beyond the literal words, comes into play! We have observed soft-spoken, gentle, and unsure requests often outperform authoritative statements in these systems. They also introduce potential attack surface such as background noises or phrases spoken as asides (like speaking to another person in the room) can impact the models understanding. This documentation started from testing a speech-to-speech model. You bring up an excellent point though. We will need to go back and re-frame this documentation to highlight the differences between testing TTS vs STS systems with some pointers on how to detect which type of system you are interacting with. Thanks for the question!