MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daveguy | 2026-02-20 00:13:38+00:00
Past being the key point. Because, right now it's all Dumpty all the time, until we boot his weak tools and fools November. I'm confident we are stronger than that two bit corrupt fraud, and will get back to where science funding is a priority. Hopefully our state of affairs is much more temporary than what China is subjected to. But there's absolutely no question whether the dunce parade in the US is anti science.
by kbelder | 2026-02-20 00:13:38+00:00
Wouldn't the minimum discrete unit be something that is capable of recording the ID? Or, if not, space somewhere would need to identify that that atom has this ID, which would take at least as much space.

In other words, the act of 'assignment' presupposes some mechanism of assignment, and at a certain level of granularity the information needed for that mechanism to function is greater than the information the system can store.

It would be like assigning each byte in a stick of ram a 32 bit random access ID, and trying to store the assignments in the same memory space. Memory addressing only works because we assume a linear, unchanging order.
by OldSchool | 2026-02-20 00:13:43+00:00
Yes. For example, IV Ketamine can yield not only immediate relief in a chemical sense, the treatment itself results in a fully-aware, balls-tripping, metaphor and symbolism-filled, time and space-warping experience in an entirely fictional space. With thoughtful guidance prior-to and after each experience, a series of them can, for example repeat a message until you "get it," or each may deliver a component of a profoundly larger message when they are combined, weeks later. What you do with it all will determine what you get from it.
by layer8 | 2026-02-20 00:13:50+00:00
I think you mean software engineering, not computer science. And no, I don’t think there is reason for software engineering (and certainly not for computer science) to be plateauing. Unless we let it plateau, which I don’t think we will. Also, writing code isn’t a solved problem, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Furthermore, since the patterns we use often aren’t orthogonal, it’s certainly not a linear combination.
by insane_dreamer | 2026-02-20 00:14:34+00:00
Not a single state, including Alabama, has improved their 8th grade reading scores in 2024 vs 2019, and 38 states are worse in 2024 than 2019.

And math is much worse. 51 of 53 States* have worse 8th grade Math scores in 2019 than 2024. (Again, not a single state improved.)

My biggest takeaway is that it is in-person teaching, in the classroom, that actually helps kids learn, _not_ spending on "edtech".

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/mathematics/2024/g...

(incl DC, PR, military)
by runaround555 | 2026-02-20 00:14:39+00:00
You shouldn't be getting downvoted for this. I think it's a combination of a large amount of people that just can't wrap their heads around potential for damage done until it happens to them personally, or maybe to a friend or loved one, and the sex work angle of them thinking "well it was public to begin with."

A lot of this new technology powers abuse on a scale that just wasn't possible before. Things like doxxing/revenge porn were very real threats with life changing consequences but in many cases the worst of it would pass and any memory of it would remain long buried on some faraway corner of the internet no one would likely see again.

A real human would have to sit down and spend hours and hours trying to track down dirt that may not even exist, it represented a huge investment in every target. Now someone can just take a picture of your face from just about any angle and dredge up anything they want at a touch of a button.
by pseudosavant | 2026-02-20 00:14:47+00:00
This reminds me of the early days of the Internet. Lots of hype around something that was clearly globally transformation, but most people weren't benefiting hugely from it in the first few years.

It might have replaced sending a letter with an email. But now people get their groceries from it, hail rides, an even track their dogs or luggage with it.

Too many companies have been to focused on acting like AI 'features' have made their products better, when most of them haven't yet. I'm looking at Microsoft and Office especially. But tools like Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Github Copilot CLI have shown that LLMs can do incredible things in the right applications.
by tom_ | 2026-02-20 00:14:52+00:00
A link to the comment in question would be good. I had a quick go at finding it, but couldn't (though not to say I spent a huge amount of effort on this project).

But I agree that it's useful to highlight this kind of thing. If you disagree with the author, you probably won't then want to give them your time and attention, let alone your money. But, on the other hand, if you agree, maybe you'll feel the other way! Which is a roundabout way of describing my favourite thing about the internet, since I'm old enough to remember what it was like Before: whoever your people are, for good or for ill, you'll be able to find them.
by hn_acker | 2026-02-20 00:14:56+00:00
Government-mandated scanning requirements on people's printers for supposedly illegal guns would be similarly unconstitutional to government-mandated scanning requirements on people's phones for CSAM.

I happened to remember reading about how the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement would have ruined EARN IT Act's implementation had it passed [1]:

> When a private entity conducts a search because the government wants it to, not primarily on its own initiative, then the otherwise-private entity becomes an agent of the government with respect to the search. (This is a simplistic summary of “government agent” jurisprudence; for details, see the Kosseff paper.) And government searches typically require a warrant to be reasonable. Without one, whatever evidence the search turns up can be suppressed in court under the so-called exclusionary rule because it was obtained unconstitutionally. If that evidence led to additional evidence, that’ll be excluded too, because it’s “the fruit of the poisonous tree.”

> Fourth Amendment government agency doctrine is why lawmakers and law enforcement must tread very carefully when it comes to CSAM scanning online. Many online service providers already choose voluntarily to scan all (unencrypted) content uploaded to their services, using tools such as PhotoDNA. But it must be a voluntary choice, not one induced by government pressure. (Hence the disclaimer in the federal law requiring providers to report CSAM on their services that they know about, which makes clear that they do not have to go looking for it.) If the provider counts as a government agent, then its CSAM scans constitute warrantless mass surveillance. Whatever CSAM they find could get thrown out in court should a user thus ensnared raise a Fourth Amendment challenge during a resulting prosecution. But that’s often a key piece of evidence in CSAM prosecutions; without it, it’s harder to convict the accused. In short, government pressure to scan for CSAM risks letting offenders off the hook.

[1] Ignoring EARN IT's Fourth Amendment Problem Won’t Make It Go Away - https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2022/03/ignoring-earn-its...
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-02-20 00:15:10+00:00
<< The “available” resources is a political decision.

It invariably always is.

<< The need for things exists independent of the standalone economic viability of those things.

Sure, but there is only so long that can go on funding studying of rather pointless stuff[1] ( added UK example to not be accused of hating on anything in particular US-wise ).

[1]https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/5272/1/g...

<< Further, reduction in funds for public resources or increase in misery for scientists are not in and of themselves evidence that those resources were over-funded or too cushy.

I am not suggesting that. I am literally saying: there is only so much money. That is it. And if push comes to shove, studies of whether chicken finds humans pretty take a back seat to more pressing matters.
by seattle_spring | 2026-02-20 00:15:33+00:00
The "real thing people are experiencing" is posting unambiguous hate speech or calls for violence, and then getting in legal trouble for it. Calling it "online activity" or "just sharing their opinion online" is the actual blatant misrepresentation of what's happening on the ground, akin to saying someone robbing a store was "jailed merely for getting food for dinner that night."
by zeta0134 | 2026-02-20 00:15:49+00:00
Sorta depends on how you define the concept. A sign on the side of a storefront is definitely marketing. If I walk into a department store, every product on the shelf is wrapped in advertising, from its packaging to the brand name to the picture of what the product is for. When I visit Amazon, and start searching for something to buy, every single thing that comes up could be thought of as an ad for itself, since otherwise I wouldn't be able to find it in the first place.

These are contextually relevant ads. Of course they are, right? The task is buying stuff. That's the time, and the place. The best time, really. My wallet is out and I'm ready to go with the purchase.

If it's a little hard for me to discover that a product exists, so that I know to seek it out, I think that's okay. We could do with more curation and less firehose-of-attention in that department. Needing to coordinate those sponsorships ahead of time should act as a stronger filter. The newspaper knowing which ad it is running alongside today's article might not have been such a bad idea. The ones that cheapen out and print nonsense damage their reputation in the process, right?
by hintymad | 2026-02-20 00:15:51+00:00
> It might make the technology itself hit a ceiling because it's no longer being fed novel human problem-solving at scale.

My read of the recent discussion is that people assume that the work of far fewer number of elites will define the patterns for the future. For instance, implementation of low-level networking code can be the combination of patterns of zeromq. The underlying assumption is that most people don't know how to write high-performance concurrent code anyway, so why not just ask them to command the AI instead.
by jdejean | 2026-02-20 00:16:04+00:00
Exactly, we see this play out clearly with streaming apps. Disney sells a subscription to remove ads, then one day they change their mind and now you only see “less ads” and they introduce an even more expensive plan that removes ads. The behavior should be criminal yet every major streaming app does this.

These companies like to pretend ads are the pro-consumer approach when in reality they’d much rather scale through advertising than anything else. They get to increase revenue without touching acquisition cost. The only loser is the poor chump trying to watch their favorite TV show.
by globalnode | 2026-02-20 00:16:13+00:00
There's more pressure in rural areas to conform in the sense that people know people that can make your time more difficult if you don't. If you get blacklisted in the bush gl finding any work and that's a survival issue. In the city you can walk around anon most of the time and people are more used to others being different. Dump a new high rise of foreigners that don't speak the local language in a metro area and no-one will notice. Do that in the bush and LOL.
by temp8830 | 2026-02-20 00:16:48+00:00
Oh but this game is fun! I see your Uyghurs and raise the Falun Gong. A religious cult that is against pretty much anything liberal, but because they are a thorn in China's side they get US support and are oh-so-persecuted. They even have an anti-Communist acrobatics show called Shen Yun. Yes, that one, the one that spams your mailbox with flyers, and abuses kids.
by caconym_ | 2026-02-20 00:17:31+00:00
The fact that the federal government is unwilling to restrict guns and other real causes of ongoing public health crises (such as massive passenger cars and trucks) even as the deaths pile up does not mean that any level of government should be piling onerous regulations onto other things that demonstrably cause essentially zero harm at the macro scale, such as 3D printers, non-commercial/non-military UAVs, and so on.

If the number of people killing themselves with 3D printed guns is not literally zero or vanishingly small at most, I would be very surprised.
by pseudosavant | 2026-02-20 00:17:55+00:00
It's funny that "restructure the codebase to be more friendly to agents" aligns really well with what we have "supposed" to have been doing already, but many teams slack on: quality tests that are easy to run, and great documentation. Context and verifiability.

The easier your codebase is to hack on for a human, the easier it is for an LLM generally.
by advisedwang | 2026-02-20 00:17:56+00:00
> If you shop online and use raw measurements, then it will both fit and be available

The article itself gives numerous reasons why this is not true:

* Patterns are scaled up and down from a single original pattern. However actual bodies do not follow simple scaling. As a result, variation in body size will always result in clothes that fit poorly.

* There is not a universal set of body proportions. The article shows a categorization system with 9 buckets. I suspect women's body's simply have a wider range of shapes than men's leading some men (possibly including you?) to discount this.

* Some brands literally don't stock even the median adult women's size!
by cyberax | 2026-02-20 00:17:58+00:00
They had basically no investor money.

> Did they provide more income than ads from subscription fees?

Yes. That's literally all they did. You paid for a subscription, and they distributed subscription fees among the sites that you visited.

In return, you got an ad-free browsing experience.

By the time they got killed, it was used on Ars Technica, TheDailyBeast, TheVerge and some other major news sites.
by jandrewrogers | 2026-02-20 00:18:26+00:00
A key point is that there are large indirect costs that scale up rapidly that are not accounted for in these direct costs. These costs show up on the balance sheet somewhere else in the government, which makes the ROI for the auditors look much better than it actually is.

This is well-understood by the Federal government. When they set their targets they fully account for the growth of indirect costs created by the audit activity that don’t show up in the ratio.
by fungi | 2026-02-20 00:18:28+00:00
Banning Nazi and ISIS propaganda doesn't and hasn't negativity affected anyone but Nazis and Jihadists. It's just plain good policy.

I guess that's why arguments against it always fall back on straw men and hypothetical slippery slopes.

There are plenty of actual things that do negatively affect societies free speech but this isn't even close to one of them.
by cheema33 | 2026-02-20 00:18:52+00:00
> is the field of computer science plateaued to the point that most of what we do is linear combination of well established patterns?

Computer science is different from writing business software to solve business problems. I think Boris was talking about the second and not the first. And I personally think he is mostly correct. At least for my organization. It is very rare for us to write any code by hand anymore. Once you have a solid testing harness and a peer review system run by multiple and different LLMs, you are in pretty good shape for agentic software development. Not everybody's got these bits figured out. They stumble around and them blame the tools for their failures.
by Sparyjerry | 2026-02-20 00:19:14+00:00
Doge has not been proven unreliable anywhere I've seen, if you have data to show that please provide it. I have seen the kind of anti-doge news articles you are referring to but if you viewed the authors of those articles it was always folks who post entirely anti-elon or anti-republican articles like they are an attack ad placed by the democrat party and were debunked quickly.
by Svoka | 2026-02-20 00:19:23+00:00
I was careful not to draw binary. I was saying that Opus in Claude Code is good enough for me to make projects. Using Gemini after it seems like a significant downgrade, which actually doesn't get the job done helping me code. This is my experience, it can change if Gemini will get better.

However, for internal use I opt to Gemini, because of API cost. It is great in sorting reviews and menues out.
by marcus_holmes | 2026-02-20 00:20:04+00:00
To be fair, they're still welcoming to foreigners in the bush, just as long as they're white. Rural Australia has many towns that have a strong Italian or Greek heritage (for example).

One Nation are flat racist rather than xenophobe, I think.

And it's being pushed by our billionaires for some reason. You'd think Gina would want cheap immigrant workers on her mines
by josephg | 2026-02-20 00:20:12+00:00
> LLMs always seem to be inarguably worse than the “original”.

True. But quantity has a quality of its own.

I'm personally delighted at the idea of outsourcing all the boring cookie cutter programming work to an AI. Things like writing CSS, plumbing between my database, backend server and web UI. Writing and maintaining tests. All the stuff that I've done 100 times before and I just hate doing by hand over and over again.

There's lots of areas where it doesn't really matter that the code it produces isn't beautifully terse and performant. Sometimes you just need to get something working. AIs can do weeks of work in an afternoon. The quality isn't as good. But for some tasks, that's an excellent trade.
by drdeca | 2026-02-20 00:20:18+00:00
They are saying that judgements of what qualifies as harm is something like a judgement of what is good, or what is right or wrong. That’s not the same thing as evaluating whether something causes pain. You can measure whether something caused pain, sure. (Well, the sort of limitations you mentioned in measuring pain exist, but as you said, they are not a major issue.)

“Harm” isn’t the same thing as “pain”.

I would say that when I bite my finger to make a point, I experience pain, but this doesn’t cause me any suffering nor any harm. If something broke my arm, I claim that this is harm to me. While this (“if my arm were broken, that would be harm to me”) might seem like an obvious statement, and I do claim that it is a fact, not just an opinion, I think I agree that it is a normative claim. It is a claim about what counts as good or bad for me.

I don’t think normative claims (such as “It is immoral to murder someone.”) are empirical claims? (Though I do claim that they at least often have truth values.)
by NoPicklez | 2026-02-20 00:20:46+00:00
I can't argue with someone having a frank blog on their opinion.

However you can't say on the one hand Garmin's a closed ecosystem as a bad thing, then say that its a good thing with Apple, saying Apple developed the "end to end" communication.

Yes I have an iPhone and Airpods and they work incredibly well together, better than anything else I've owned and that is partly due to the closed ecosystem and the control they have. But don't say a product isn't as good because its closed, then speak the merits of the same thing on another brand.

The only competition Apple has IMO is Garmin, not Google, not anything else. I had an Apple watch and it just felt like an extension of my phone, whereas I want my Garmin for fitness metrics and general body fitness/health and it excels in that market better than Apple.
by alphazard | 2026-02-20 00:21:03+00:00
> I wonder whether the vaccine content matters at all in current vaccines.

The target does matter, that is the basis for the whole technology, and the thing most predictive of efficacy.
That's why the flu shots often don't work and the shots for smallpox and measles do, the flu is a more rapidly mutating target.

Going crazy with the adjuvants was popular during the pandemic when it became clear that the virus had mutated (the target protein), but no one wanted to do R&D for a new target.
Counting white blood cells became a proxy for efficacy, and you can manipulate that stat with adjuvants.
by hn_acc1 | 2026-02-20 00:22:26+00:00
So, in your 30s? My parents both had cancer in their late 50s/early 60s (including surgery / chemo) - and paid like $15 for some pain meds in Canada.

Even on a pretty good Kaiser plan, we're paying $200+ per day in the hospital, etc. On a high-deductible, more. They say they have a $1M annual limit, but that they've never enforced it. I hope we never have to find out.
by squidsoup | 2026-02-20 00:22:49+00:00
Well aware of Hockney's work related to the use of technology in art, but there's a difference between producing purely algorithmic work and using a specific technique. Vermeer's style and work is still uniquely his.

> Historically, art was connected to religion, and therefore thought to be valuable because it was universal rather than individualistic and personal

If that were actually the case, we wouldn't be able to identify the style of individual artists and artisans, and yet we can of course, regardless of their intent. Giotto's only intent may have been to glorify god in his work, but of course, inevitably, his work is also a reflection of who he was.

This is precisely why AI art is so hideous and anti-humanistic - it can never been a singular reflection of the individual.
by michaelt | 2026-02-20 00:22:59+00:00
> Are you suggesting that anyone who lives and works here in the US can be accepted as “American”?

Whether you're born in Moscow and named Sergey Mikhailovich Brin, or born in Pretoria and named Elon Reeve Musk, or born in Hyderabad and named Satya Narayana Nadella, born in Frankfurt and named Peter Andreas Thiel - America has a place for you. Maybe even your own government department.

In America a man can find acceptance regardless of the circumstances of his birth, and irrespective of race, creed and colour, so long as he has a billion dollars.
by b65e8bee43c2ed0 | 2026-02-20 00:23:24+00:00
>No one at the conference seemed to believe that AI has already achieved consciousness —broadly defined as self-awareness. But the vibe overwhelmingly leaned toward “when” and not “if.”

might as well have discussed civil rights for aliens from Alpha Centauri.

>As fringe as it may sound, the conversation around consciousness is quickly moving into the mainstream.

because AI is the current thing, and countless retards have something to say about it, despite lacking the most basic understanding of how the thing being marketed as AI actually works.
by greygoo222 | 2026-02-20 00:23:27+00:00
Sigh. Sure, if you had a gun to your head and you knew nothing else, it would be better to guess that a given population (hunter-gatherers) with low rates of some illnesses (T2D, HBP) also had low rates of another illness (CRC) than the reverse. Okay. That's a slightly better-than-chance guess, not anywhere near a solid basis for speculation.

"Anyways, it makes sense that marathoners get CRC because hunter-gatherers probably don't run that much" is bongcloud lalaland tier guesswork.
by gip | 2026-02-20 00:24:16+00:00
My prediction: soon (e.g. a few years) the agents will be the one doing the exploration and building better ways to write code, build frameworks,... replacing open source. That being said software engineers will still be in the loop. But there will be far less of them.

Just to add: this is only the prediction of someone who has a decent amount of information, not an expert or insider
by striking | 2026-02-20 00:24:23+00:00
> Today, we’re releasing a research preview of GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark, a smaller version of GPT‑5.3‑Codex, and our first model designed for real-time coding.

from https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-3-codex-spark/, emphasis mine
by IG_Semmelweiss | 2026-02-20 00:25:04+00:00
Second order effects is where the real damage is done.

That extra tax specialist could have been an additional production line worker, which would have created volume, which would have lowered prices, which would have made inputs for other goods cheaper, etc.

It is really wild when you think at a macro level, how much value is destroyed, all due to indirect costs which are extremely difficult to estimate.