MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by snohobro | 2026-02-12 00:06:33+00:00
Adding an additional thought to this. Is it conservation if you’re just trying to recreate what once was? I think your thoughts parallel what the author was saying. You can’t just recreate a community (or any ecosystem) as it once was, it will be different. I would argue conservation should be trying to prevent the unnatural end to a community/ecosystem.

Despite humans being a natural part of our planet, and thus an end to an ecosystem could be considered natural in some way, we are unique in our ability to challenge and question our natural ways. Maybe we should be exempting ourselves from the natural order of things and working to allow the natural course of an ecosystem to die out on its own. Then we have the ability to inhabit and change without having destroyed in the process.

Idk, additional things to muse on.
by barbacoa | 2026-02-12 00:06:44+00:00
Apple wants to vertically integrate. Their AI strategy until recently was to develop their own LLM models that were small enough to run on device. But massive scaling is what makes LLMs so powerful, so all their internal models were terrible and unusable.

Basically they bet that compute efficient LLMs were the future. That bet was wrong and the opposite came true.
by chr1 | 2026-02-12 00:07:03+00:00
I hope you will agree that the overall goal is maximizing freedom and autonomy, that is allowing every person or group to pursue happiness the way they want make mistakes or good choices and bear the consequences.

The representative democracy has a problem with delegates not faithfully representing the people they are supposed to represent. It allows politician to be elected by campaigning for issue X which is popular with majority, then do Y and Z that almost no one wants, and then campaign again on other party undoing X, leaving people no way to communicate that they want X and not Y Z.

Social media have greatly increased the impact of this instability, the only way to improve situation is adding some elements of direct voting that would improve efficiency of communication between people and the government.

No one in this thread have suggested to completely replace everything with direct voting, and yet many people vehemently argue against that. Meanwhile there is a much more interesting discussion: how to make cooperation between people more efficient using the new technologies that we have.
by nvader | 2026-02-12 00:07:09+00:00
I've noticed this bimodal distribution of perception too, and my hypothesis is that's it's hugely driven by the difference of "who is in the driver's seat".

Your tech-savvy AI early adopters are discerning between tools, the deployments and environments, and are willing and able to change things to extract the highest output from current capabilities. For instance, re-architecting a codebase to make it easier for agents to contribute to it.

The rest are having AI hypeware shoved upon them, often as a cost cutting measure, and lack the agency to influence outcomes. When agents misbehave, they only have the option to "Press 0 to speak with a Human" and hope that works.

I suspect this is a big factor in the divide we're seeing, and might result in your median adult being ambushed by recent gains in capabilities.
by juris | 2026-02-12 00:07:16+00:00
to add to that, it kills the concept of whether the host is human (and not just another soulless megacorp harvesting your data in their walled garden)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46969751 remark that they're taking down their self-hosted projects citing costs associated with AI scraping.

at best we have walled garden content; and when those are scraped (either by the host or by more sophisticated bots) those walled gardens will hopefully rot under an inability to drive advertisement revenue.

I agree, I think we're at the edge of a paradigmatic shift away from humans navigating TCP-IP itself. What that looks like, I don't know, but given trends (like dynamic pricing, human-futures marketing, surveillance, and consolidation of computing under mega-companies) I can imagine: local beacons screaming AI advertisement components across a geospatial sneakernet. Auditorium-based ticketed podcasting and AR/VR/meatspace events. Thoughtful hackers reminiscing of better times simulating them in web-assembly driven first-person POV "sites" and a rolling set of encryption keys for read-access (just send them BTC)

without an ecosystem for humans to contribute meaningfully to a feedback loop that allows for free group assembly around like interests, monetary growth for hosts and other participants, and some degree of presence / searchability / permanence, the current text-only web page paradigm is doomed.
by mhitza | 2026-02-12 00:07:23+00:00
> vaccine-induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis (VITT)

> According to the European Medicines Agency, about 900 VITT cases have been reported after immunization with the AstraZeneca or J&J vaccines in Europe, including 200 deaths. Few data are available about the rest of the world, even though more than 3 billion doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine were administered globally.

> It’s not clear whether the syndrome was rarer outside Europe or whether cases were missed. In most parts of the world, between 40% and 60% of the population has the genetic background that makes people more prone to VITT, but in East Asia the prevalence is only 20%. Other factors, too, might contribute to the rare cases when they happen.

This is such a crazy fact. I didn't know the AstraZeneca was administered at that scale. I remember the quick switch to the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine previsely as precautionary because of the AstraZeneca shot. Our (Romanian) army personal was mostly the one subjected to this vaccine.
by upboundspiral | 2026-02-12 00:07:27+00:00
Edit: it seems one of the cannonballs comes from the siege of Rome during the unifaction of Italy.

Echoing another comment, before unification, Italy (1860s) had its "warring states period".

The North were independent small monarchies, including the Savoia, from which came the unification push with the help of Garibaldi.

In center Italy the Church ruled with an iron fist. In fact, when Rome was besieged and the Church lost, all of Italy was excommunicated by the Pope. (They then bactracked on the policy once they saw people just kept going about with their lives).

In the South was a repressed agricultural state that was so terrible to live under people invented something even worse: the mafia. (This is also why so many Italian Americans come from the South - they were escaping in search of a better life).

A song (in Italian) somewhat about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poaPh00AmDQ
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-02-12 00:07:44+00:00
That's perfectly reasonable, but I genuinely don't understand how "read 2 files" is ever useful at all. What am I supposed to do with this information? How can it help me redirect the model?

Like, I'm open to the idea that I'm the one using your software the wrong way, since obviously you know more about it than I do. What would you recommend I do with the knowledge of how many files Claude has read? Is there a situation where this number can tell me whether the model is on the right track?
by gowld | 2026-02-12 00:07:50+00:00
A mistake isn't "judgment".

These were technical rulings on matters of jurisdiction, not subjective judgments on fairness.

"The consistency in legal compliance from GPT, irrespective of the selected forum, differs significantly from judges, who were more likely to follow the law under the rule than the standard (though not at a statistically significant level). The judges’ behavior in this experiment is consistent with the conventional wisdom that judges are generally more restrained by rules than they are by standards. Even when judges benefit from rules, however, they make errors while GPT does not.
by GaryBluto | 2026-02-12 00:08:22+00:00
> and every platform migration sheds and shreds members.

What's the problem? You're filtering out people who don't really care about participation in whatever group or society is there. People who want to participate will move to an acceptable service and those who feel that is too much effort probably weren't participating much (if at all) anyway - in that case the only difference is the visible list of people with accounts going down, not the actual "users".
Ask HN: Does OpenClaw need a re-architecture to be usable?
by xinbenlv | 2026-02-12 00:08:43+00:00
I’ve been using OpenClaw intensively for about two weeks.

The first few days were exciting. It felt like we’re finally getting closer to autonomous agents that can actually operate a computer end-to-end. But after the initial excitement faded, I started noticing some consistent issues:

- It frequently stops responding mid-task

- Execution fails without clear recovery

- Task success rate feels inconsistent and unpredictable

- Long-running tasks degrade over time

It made me wonder whether the current architecture is fundamentally limiting reliability.

Right now, it feels closer to a “single program trying to do everything” model. But if we look at the history of computing, systems only became truly robust when we moved toward operating system–like abstractions:

- event-driven execution

- proper failure recovery

- watchdog / heartbeat monitoring

- task supervision trees

- state persistence and resumability

In other words, less like a script, more like an OS.

My current hypothesis is that tools like OpenClaw might need a deeper re-architecture — not just better prompting or incremental patches — but a system-level rethink focused on reliability and scalability from day one.

Curious what others think:

Is this mainly an engineering maturity issue that will be fixed incrementally?

Or is there a more fundamental architectural gap in current agent frameworks?

Has anyone tried building agents with more OS-like supervision models?

Would love to hear perspectives from people building in this space.
by bikezen | 2026-02-12 00:09:01+00:00
*Citation needed

> Nearly 21 million voting-age U.S. citizens do not have a current (non-expired) driver’s
license. Just under 9%, or 20.76 million people, who are U.S. citizens aged 18 or older
do not have a non-expired driver’s license. Another 12% (28.6 million) have a non-
expired license, but it does not have both their current address and current name. For
these individuals, a mismatched address is the largest issue. Ninety-six percent of
those with some discrepancy have a license that does not have their current address,
1.5% have their current address but not their current name, and just over 2% do not have
their current address or current name on their license. Additionally, just over 1% of adult
U.S. citizens do not have any form of government-issued photo identification, which
amounts to nearly 2.6 million people.

From https://cdce.umd.edu/sites/cdce.umd.edu/files/pubs/Voter%20I...
by mulmen | 2026-02-12 00:09:01+00:00
> I think it is the point: there is a balance between freedom and safety.

Sometimes. But that doesn’t imply freedom and security are fundamentally opposed.

It’s possible to trade freedom for security but it’s also possible that freedom creates security. Both can be true at the same time. Surveillance, not security, is what opposes freedom. Surveillance simply trades one form of insecurity for another at the cost of freedom.

> For example, it is illegal to carry a loaded handgun onto a plane. Most people would agree that is an acceptable trade of freedom for safety.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

2A seems to make the case that the freedom to bear arms creates security. Given how history played out it’s hard to argue against. I’m not arguing we should be able to take guns on planes but 2A is an example of freedom creating security.
by zahlman | 2026-02-12 00:09:16+00:00
> the mild effort to find an alternative solution?

Calling it a "mild effort" assumes skills that older generations took for granted but many young people seem to have been actively trained out of. We're past the era where I take for granted that aspiring programmers need to have the basics of a terminal or shell explained to them, into one where they might need an explanation for the basics of a file system and paths. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that hardly any of them could touch-type, either. (I wonder what the speed record is for cell phone text input...)

Yes, they can query a search engine (kind of) or, I guess nowadays, ask ChatGPT. But there's going to be more to setting up an alternative than that. And they need to have the idea that an alternative might exist. (After all, they're asking ChatGPT, not some alternative offering from a company that provides alternatives to Google services....)
Show HN: Turn Your Support Tickets into Product Insights (Zendesk → Slack)
by junetic | 2026-02-12 00:09:30+00:00
Support teams handle hundreds of tickets but rarely analyze them systematically. Patterns like workarounds, feature confusion, or rising escalations often surface too late.

This tool:

Analyzes Zendesk tickets daily (last 7 days vs 30-day baseline)

Detects workaround language, expectation gaps, and escalation trends

Sends Slack alerts when thresholds spike

Includes real customer quotes for context

Built with TypeScript, Vercel, Supabase, Slack SDK, and Claude for extraction and categorization.

Free for now. Would love feedback from support leaders or B2B builders.
by noah_buddy | 2026-02-12 00:09:50+00:00
Think about this like a market. Suppose yes, there is demand for your power at $1000/kwh.

What is the market pressure here? Suddenly a ton of new capacity in solar, gas, etc, will come online and drive that price down because there will be much more capacity before you reach the point of $1000/kwh purchases.

The alternative is that people get paid at cost of production, which if you think about it is less fair. Why should a gas turbine get paid $67/kwh and a solar cell or battery get paid less? It also means that the market incentivizes more cheaper energy as a rule, because they take profit.

Would you go to the gas station charging $2 above market price just because their costs are higher to produce the gas?
by skmurphy | 2026-02-12 00:10:05+00:00
Key Takeaways

+ Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, launched Garry's List, a California nonprofit organization.

+ The 501(c)(4) will distribute voter guides, research explainers, and digital content on economic policy.

+ Tan argues that California's innovation environment faces pressure from upcoming ballot measures.

Closing quote: “California should prioritize retaining and attracting entrepreneurs and investors—the people who create jobs, strengthen the tax base, and fund essential services,” Tan said. “Policies that drive them out of the state harm innovation and make it more difficult to support core public needs, from infrastructure to public safety to education."

Related article https://missionlocal.org/2026/02/sf-garry-tan-california-pol... with related HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46980591
by leptons | 2026-02-12 00:10:14+00:00
I gave up driving in the 1990s because I knew back then the situation was untenable for the climate. I chose to try to live a life that contributes less to the destruction of life as we know it. Life without a car has brought sacrifice, but I'm glad I did it. No, my single sacrifice won't save the planet, because far too many people are addicted to cheap energy, and free movement. Blaming the oil industry is like blaming the cows because you ate too much cheese. Now there are electric cars, but unless you are charging it up every day from solar/battery (along with your house), then you're still only helping a little.

Suppose the fossil fuel lobby disappeared tomorrow, along with government subsidies and any hegemony you think exists - people are still going to be addicted to cheap energy. Only when the forms of energy they currently rely on really starts costing what it would cost to save the planet from climate change will you and others realize that every decision has a consequence. You want to drive 2+ hours in traffic every day? That has a real cost for the environment to do it with fossil fuel.

Maybe try changing your life so that you don't spend 2+ hours every day driving around in traffic. That's what I did, I got a job locally, got rid of my car, and started riding my bike everywhere. If it was far, I planned ahead take the bus/train. I do this in Los Angeles, since the 1990s - not exactly a bike-centric place to live, but it is entirely possible to do. Of course it's more difficult to do this in rural areas, but maybe that should be the exception.
by acdha | 2026-02-12 00:10:16+00:00
This is quite untrue as a blanket statement. The problem is that there was massive cultural variation: if you installed a Perl module from CPAN you probably ran hundreds of tests. If you ran a C program, it ranged from nothing to “run this one input and don’t crash” to exhaustive suites. PHP tended towards nothing with a handful of surprises.

As a data point, my first tech job was QA for a COBOL compiler vendor. They supported roughly 600 permutations of architecture, operating system, and OS version with a byte-coded runtime and compiler written in C. I maintained a test runner and suite with many thousands of tests, ranging from unit tests to things like Expect UI tests. This was considered routine in the compiler vendor field, and in the scientific computing space I moved into. I worked with someone who independently reproduced the famous Pentium FDIV bug figuring out why their tests failed, which surprised no one because that was just expected engineering.

Then you had the other end of the industry where there was, say, 50k lines of Visual Basic desktop app where they didn’t even use version control software. At a later job, I briefly encountered a legacy system which had 30 years of that where they had the same routine copied in half a dozen places, modified slightly because when the author had fixed a bug they weren’t sure if it would break something else so they just created a copy and updated just the module they were working on.
by scottLobster | 2026-02-12 00:10:20+00:00
Cool spooky concept, but seems like this could be easily foiled by shoving some aluminum foil into one's pockets or wearing thermal clothing in the winter. Or moving furniture around.

My cheapo Amazon desk is steel framed, and the monitors have all sorts of metal and signals running through them. I know it impacts wifi because my wifi-connected printer gets crappy signal on one side and decent signal on the other. Good luck getting a positive ID via wifi when I'm sitting at it.

Likewise I don't see how this survives in the real world for a mass surveillance application. Any "signature" will be in constant flux as environments change, in terms of everything from crowds to weather. I'll need to see a demo outside of a controlled environment before I start trying to obfuscate my signature or remodel my house to run Ethernet everywhere.
by chao- | 2026-02-12 00:10:47+00:00
I remember learning about this in high school, but grew up in a part of a large city that only really developed after the 1940's, I didn't think much of it. However, the name was catchy so I had it stashed in my memory somewhere.

As I've gone on to live in a few older cities, I have been surprised the number of times that I have (for example) come across a bridge or tunnel or whatnot and seen a big serif "WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION 1936" plaque on one side of it. It always feels like stepping into an alternate reality where history is more present and real.

It feels like a silly way to phrase it, but growing up where only a handful of buildings were older than 40 years, encountering history in a more banal form, like a simple bridge with some engravings, always feels more impactful than seeing some 500-year-old castle, monument or other touristy site.
by Ancapistani | 2026-02-12 00:11:15+00:00
> the EPA’s 2009 decision says that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane are heating the Earth and that warming threatens public health and welfare

I’ll wait until the actual action is taken before deciding where I stand on this.

The above is actually two statements: that greenhouse gasses cause warming, and that warming is harmful overall. I could see reversing the latter as consistent with this administration’s positions - the former is, as far as I know, not really up for debate.
by nonameiguess | 2026-02-12 00:11:25+00:00
The Taliban was repeatedly crushed. All of the leadership was killed many times over. The problem is the Taliban is an idea that transcends individual human members and it can always be reconstituted. It also benefited from being able to harbor supporters in Pakistan, which is a nuclear power the US was not willing to also invade.

There isn't a real analogy there because cartel leaders have no official state support anywhere, let alone in a bordering nuclear power, but even if they did, it hardly seems reassuring from their perspective to know the drug trade will outlive them after they all get killed. It's different when you're deeply religious and believe what you're doing is worth dying for and the larger arc of history is more important than your own life and wellbeing. I don't think drug lords think that way.
by AlienRobot | 2026-02-12 00:12:01+00:00
Would you rather visit a website full of ads that doesn't answer your question and is written for SEO or get the answer instantly without any ads?

Eventually, after killing several websites by depriving them of revenue, ChatGPT will enshittify like everything else and starting adding ads.

There isn't even a question about that. Just think of Google for example.

Why Google's SERP has ads but Gemini does not? There isn't even a "they are making money with the data" argument here, because Google already has all the query data it could ever want. They just haven't added ads yet.

Eventually, Gemini will look like a SERP with 5 ad results, if it doesn't go to the Google graveyard like everything else.
by alex43578 | 2026-02-12 00:12:40+00:00
1st amendment auditors = confrontational streamers who deliberately take public filming to an extreme.

Any cameras are fine for recording any public property. That’s the whole idea of being in public: others can see you, you can see them, and you aren’t (shouldn’t) be doing something you wouldn’t mind being recorded. You have no expectation of privacy standing on a sidewalk.
by edm0nd | 2026-02-12 00:13:03+00:00
wat. the majority of Americans have a DL, ID, or Passport. What a silly thing to say.

For DL alone:

>Data indicates that approximately 84% to 91% of all Americans hold a driver's license, with roughly 237.7 million licensed drivers in the U.S. as of 2023.

Add in an ID and Passport and we are likely closer to 99%
Show HN: Ngn – a new back end programming language
by j4w8n | 2026-02-12 00:13:05+00:00
Maybe the dumbest move of all time, but it's been a blast to build over the last few months - er, prompt AI to build.

Even with AI doing the coding, I've put in a lot of time thinking about how it should work, the syntax, features, etc. Building a language is a new domain for me, so I had to ask a lot of questions about a lot of things.