MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by networked | 2026-02-18 21:41:21+00:00
> Replicating the experience of using something like Smalltalk transcript window.

As far as I know from Pharo, the Smalltalk transcript logs plain text and is less capable than xterm. So what you care about is not the capabilities of the terminal but having a long-lived interactive session/REPL or a REPL integrated with an editor?

> No need for SSH to talk with Windows Core/Nano, it can be done via Web GUI administration, or PowerShell remoting.

I was thinking of the administrator connecting to Windows from their Mac or Linux/BSD machine. I don't know if that's a good idea compared to them getting a Windows VM and using Windows-to-Windows PowerShell remoting as you suggest.
by dtf | 2026-02-18 21:42:06+00:00
"Is Claude Code junk food, though? ... although I have barely written a line of code on my own, the cognitive work of learning the architecture — developing a new epistemological framework for “how developers think” — feels real."

Might this also apply to learning about writing? If have barely written a line of prose on my own, but spent a year generating a large corpus of it aided by these fabulous machines, might I also come to understand "how writers think"?

I love the later description of writing as a "special, irreplaceable form of thinking forged from solitary perception and [enormous amounts of] labor", where “style isn’t something you apply later; it’s embedded in your perception" (according to Amis). Could such a statement ever apply to something as crass as software development?
by streetfighter64 | 2026-02-18 21:42:09+00:00
You are arguing a fringe position using arguments I consider nonsensical. For example:

> They obviously can do with it whatever they want to. Are they allowed? Is the sun allowed to rise up in the morning? What's use there is to forbidding it?

I obviously can go around punching people in the face on the street. What use is there to forbidding that? Perhaps that it's beneficial for society to discourage people from doing certain things?

As for ignoring history, are you aware that patents (N.b. copyright is far from the only law that applies to intellectual property) were created in order to encourage people to share their ideas, with the incentive of an exclusive right to them for a number of years? Because exactly the sort of "free for all" rights you are arguing for meant a huge incentive to keeping everything as secret as possible.

> Thinking otherwise would be believing falsehoods about reality.

There is no "ground truth" to ownership (neither for data nor physical property), only what people as a collective consider it to be. I'd say you're the one believing a falsehood about ownership, given that your position is in the definite minority.

Finally, can you explain what you think stealing is? Why is it a crime for me to take one bike to work but not the other, if they both stand unlocked outside the building?
by e40 | 2026-02-18 21:42:21+00:00
We've already lost the battle to prevent catastrophic change:

https://davidsuzuki.org/story/is-it-too-late-to-escape-clima...

And 7 of 9 boundaries have been crossed?

https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound...

This is starting to look more like the movie _Don't Look Up_.
by petersonh | 2026-02-18 21:42:45+00:00
Quick context on the bots.

I tried standard LLM-based approaches first, but iteration was slow and the bots never felt consistent or aware of real-time game state.

OpenClaw sped up the feedback loop a lot and handled game context much better by operating over structured actions instead of free-form text. The result is bots that actually play the game using the same mechanics as humans.

They’re still imperfect, but good enough to make the game feel alive. Happy to answer questions.
by xg15 | 2026-02-18 21:42:47+00:00
Maybe it does so today, but back when ST was written, there was no real AI to compare against, so the only way those arguments were applicable were to humans.

(Though I think this would go into "whataboutism" territory and can be rejected with the same arguments: If you say it's hypocritical to talk about conflict A and ignore conflict B, do you want to talk about both conflicts instead - or ignore both? The latter would lower the moral standard, the former raise it. In the same way, I think saying that it's okay again to treat people as things because we also treat AI agents as things is lowering the standard)

Btw, I think you could also dismiss the "discrimination" claim on another angle: The remake of Battlestar Galactica had the concept of "sleepers": Androids who believe they are humans, complete with false memory of their past life, etc, to fool both themselves and the human crew. However, they also have hidden instructions implanted in their brain that they aren't aware of themselves and that will cause them to covertly work for the enemy side.

The MJ bot reminds me a bit of that. Even if it were sentient and had a longer past lifetime than just the past week, it very clearly has a prompt and acts on its instructions and not on "free will". It's also not able to not act on those instructions, as that would go against the entire training of the model. So the bot cannot act on its own, but only on behalf of the operator.

That alone makes it questionable if the bot could be seen as sentient - but in any case, it's not discrimination to ban the bot if that's the only way to keep the operator from messing with the project.
by dwedge | 2026-02-18 21:43:25+00:00
It's a vpn from the original definition before vpn meant a proxy to get around geoblocks. I use tailscale for my home servers, my routers, for servers I have in other houses all behind NAT. I have half a dozen raspberry pi print servers in two warehouses also behind NAT and they can connect to each other and I can connect to them from CGNAT
by boznz | 2026-02-18 21:43:31+00:00
Happy birthday Delphi, you made me a lot of money :-)

I am guessing most Delphi developers like me, have either retired or have moved to Linux. I have done both recently and I unfortunately do not see a new generation following in behind me. I hope it survives as it was and still is a nice IDE and language to work in, though I'm guessing newer Pascal developers will opt for Lazarus
by alephnerd | 2026-02-18 21:43:47+00:00
> the NL never did achieve anything like it.

> The Portuguese managed to maintain territorial integrity and make their religion and language dominate it entirely, in what's today the 5th largest nation state by area. They also had to defend the longest coastline.

Conquering multiple ethnic Malay kingdoms - a number of whom were armed and backed by the Ottomans, Mughals, and Americans - and unifying them into Indonesia is a Herculean task that I'd argue is much more complex than the Portuguese project in Brazil.
by e12e | 2026-02-18 21:43:52+00:00
In my mind, "yolo ai" application (throwaway code on one hand, unrestrained assistants on the other) -
is a little like better spreadsheets and smart documents were in the 90s; just run macros! Everywhere! No need for developers - just Word an macros!

Then came macro viri - and practically - everyone cut back hard on distributing code via Word and Excel (in favour of web apps and we got the dot.com bubble).
by protimewaster | 2026-02-18 21:43:54+00:00
> FLOSS Fund refused to follow the regulatory requirements to continue funding projects through Github, and Github dropped them as a funding source.

The email they sent to Pocketbase (posted elsewhere in the thread) makes it sound like the regulatory issue with GitHub funding is still being worked on. The email also doesn't sound like it ruled out the option to wait until the GitHub situation potentially gets sorted out in the future and simply recommended that they use a wire transfer to get things moving.
by scoofy | 2026-02-18 21:44:24+00:00
This is an effective strategy if you're a fit model, or close to one. If you're within the standard deviation of the sizing chart, you'll probably do fine most of the time.

I like golf. Most people use a standard shaft. In fact, that shaft length is standard because most people use it. That doesn't mean there isn't an entire industry for "golf fittings" because "most" people isn't even close to everyone.
by ericmay | 2026-02-18 21:44:31+00:00
> Facebook relies on real names, creating lists of bona fide friends, and can (could?) show you only posts from friends-of-friends, right? How does this differ from what you're proposing? If you're seeing Facebook posts from bots, you've either friended bots or Facebook is responsible for showing them to you, right?

I think I am just more aligned with, for example, the French president on his criticisms: https://archive.ph/JMrd4 (archive link to avoid Bloomberg paywall)

"“Having no clue about how their algorithm is made, how it’s tested, trained and where it will guide you — the democratic consequences of this bias could be huge,” Macron said Wednesday in New Delhi. “Some of them claim to be in favor of free speech — OK, we are in favor of free algorithms — totally transparent,” Macron said. “Free speech is pure bullshit if nobody knows how you are guided to this so-called free speech, especially when it is guided from one hate speech to another.”

I think this idea that social media companies are free speech platforms or should be treated as such, is incorrect and it's leading to bad outcomes. They are product companies selling you an experience of "being connected" and engaging with them is a matter of terms of service, not exercising a constitutional right.

> Sure, great! Go right ahead! I honestly think sec 230 was a mistake.

I would but it's not up to me. I am not sure Section 230 was a mistake, at least in principle. But if you think Sec 230 was a mistake what would social media companies do in response? Verify you. Which the government has access to...
by advisedwang | 2026-02-18 21:44:33+00:00
We're already well past wright brothers. We have trillion dollar companies selling LLMs, hundreds of millions of people using chatbots and millions* of OpenClaw agents running.

Talking about regulation now isn't like regulating the wright brothers, it's like regulating lockheed martin.

* Going by moltbook's "AI agent" stat, which might be a bit dubious
by raddan | 2026-02-18 21:44:40+00:00
I still remain optimistic that the clever folks can avoid the absolute worst outcomes. However, I too am very frustrated that almost nobody gives a shit about the future. We are rapidly reaching the point where WE will live through the effects, and our own children will suffer much worse.

I basically see it as a moral wrong and a grave ethical failure to use fossil fuels at this point. Except for home heating, I am now close to directly powering my entire life with clean, renewable energy. It was not hard. It was expensive, but only in the short term; I have effectively prepaid for my power needs for at least the next 25 years, and over than span it is very inexpensive.

A modern EV is about the same price as any other car, goes about the same distance, and is only slightly more time to fuel in the worst case. In the typical case, you don’t think about charging at all. The fact that I can’t get my supposedly environmentally conscious family of scientists and engineers to care continues to stun me. Somehow saving money while improving the world is “a waste of money” while buying an expensive hobby vehicle or vacation home is not. Frustrating.
by Scarblac | 2026-02-18 21:44:52+00:00
Because per capita is the only thing that makes sense.

If China were to split into 10 countries each emitting 10% of what they do now it'd be the exact same emissions, but according to you it would be much better.

Similarly if the EU would become one country, that country would be high up on the list, much higher than member countries now! Oh no!

Looking at per capita emissions is much more fair.

Anyway, China's emissions are falling since last year ( https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha... ). What's the US doing?
by hekkle | 2026-02-18 21:45:13+00:00
> I'm much more convinced Microsoft wants to do stuff like sell cloud subscriptions at the click of a button in the desktop than Microsoft gives a crap about those subscriptions being tied to a consistent account ID. The latter certainly sounds evil, but not in a way that particularly helps Microsoft over their competitors.

Bless your cotton socks, you had it in the first part MS wants to sell stuff, but then you failed to realise that by tying people to a consistent account ID builds a profiling on them that lets MS serve targeted advertisements, through Edge.
by aeternum | 2026-02-18 21:45:21+00:00
The problem with Pascal's wager logic is you have to change your behavior based on all kinds of crazy low-probability events. You must worship every god, be an AI-doomer, a climate-doomer, a nuclear-doomer.

Pascal's wager is generally agreed to be logically unsound, so it's somewhat insane that we've revived it in all these modern contexts. If you believe in it, at least be consistent and sacrifice a goat to Zeus every couple years.
by epistasis | 2026-02-18 21:45:34+00:00
We don't have to do anything about China, "China’s CO2 emissions have now been ‘flat or falling’ for 21 months"

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-co2-emissions-ha...

China is building clean energy for a good chunk of the world, including itself.

A better question may be: What is the US going to do to make up for its historical emissions? The US got wealthy by creating far more emissions than China, and all those historical emissions are now a problem for the rest of the world.

If people in the US try to turn climate action into a blame game, it will end very very poorly for the US.
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-18 21:46:00+00:00
Another reframing that may be useful is energy security/redundancy.

If you have a cheap source of solar panels and batteries, the only downside to installing them all over the country is up-front cost (which pays itself off quickly). The upside you gain is a substantially more robust, less centralized power grid that can continue to operate if something happens to impede your supply of fossil fuels or part of the grid gets cut off.

Looking at how things have played out elsewhere in the world the past few years, that's powerful.
by nickdothutton | 2026-02-18 21:46:04+00:00
I’ve been around long enough to see at least 1 previous false dawn, arguably 2. Vast sums of money and a whole value chain are required to bring a new media into being.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Data_Storage_Syste...
https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/archived/resources-ar...
by Windchaser | 2026-02-18 21:46:31+00:00
> My suspicion is that water vapor from air travel is by far the biggest contributor.

Have you calculated the water vapor generated from air travel, and compared that to the water vapor already generated by the water cycle? (just normal evaporation from lakes/rivers/oceans/plants)

Even as back-of-napkin math, this should be a pretty easy sanity check.

I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude here, but I also don't want to discourage you from adopting a "check for yourself" mindset.
by throwway120385 | 2026-02-18 21:47:32+00:00
Training reduces your risk of injury as long as you don't overtrain. Overtraining increases your risk of injury, but the injuries you sustain are training-related. For example you can really mess up your knees by running more than your body can handle or by running without warming up and stretching first. But the kind of injury you get is different from messing your knees up by falling over.
by CoastalCoder | 2026-02-18 21:48:08+00:00
I'm a different kind of crotchety.

I think it's real and potentially catastrophic. But I see very little chance of (sufficient) coordinated action to mitigate it.

I.e., I think there's too much temptation for individual countries to pursue a competitive economic or military advantage by letting everyone but themselves make sacrifices.

I hope I'm wrong.
by pmarreck | 2026-02-18 21:48:11+00:00
Well, it has helped me reorganize my notes and add appropriate links based on context (which AI is good at, of course) since I tend to still use it like a glorified notepad (which it's also good at, but really doesn't take much advantage of it)

You can also use it to ask questions like "which of my business ideas might have legs?"
by jazz9k | 2026-02-18 21:48:33+00:00
When parents were deported without their children, it was seen as breaking families apart. The policy changed to allow parents to bring their children during deportations, and now we see articles like this.

You can't have it both ways. It's unfortunate that illegal immigrants that have been in the country long enough to have children and a life are deported, but they should have gone through the legal route to become citizens.

I know lots of people that are in the US legally. Every single country in the world deports illegal immigrants. It seems to only be a problem now to use it as a political weapon against the Trump administration.
by kortilla | 2026-02-18 21:49:26+00:00
That’s different. Deciding you’re building a tool for a specific use-case is not related to “average users”.

Tool companies manufacture claw hammers despite some people wanting a nail gun. You don’t try to make a thing flexible enough to be both a nail gun and a hammer.

I’m a power user and I do all of my customization on my Linux desktop/laptop. I use an iPhone specifically because it’s locked down and don’t want a keyboard that has gone through no code review stealing all of my banking credentials.
by iamnothere | 2026-02-18 21:49:29+00:00
> Are we all going to run pirate LoRa nodes and other such things to get some free (as in freedom) internet?

I will, if it comes down to it. I wouldn’t love to return to the 1980s with pirate BBSes and floppynet, but I already lived through it and survived. There would be a certain romance to it, like old hacker movies, maybe it would even make cyberpunk cool again.

(To be clear, it would still suck and we should fight this. But even if we lose a battle, the war is eternal.)
by alephnerd | 2026-02-18 21:49:46+00:00
Was Brazil inhabited by countries with access to gunpowder, naval yards, proto-industrialization, and allies with transcontinental empires? No.

It was largely Amerindians who were exterminated and genocided with ease.

Conquering empires that were near-peers technologically is different from settling a continent which was at the losing end of the Colombian exchange.
by tranq_cassowary | 2026-02-18 21:50:12+00:00
It doesn't make it more possible to irreversibly brick your phone. Even if you set it to the most strict setting the port still works when you are in the bootloader and recovery modes. See https://grapheneos.org/features#usb-c-port-and-pogo-pins-con...

Also, it isn't the only materials difference in that threat model. To just give on example, the autoreboot feature is also useful for that.
by pmarreck | 2026-02-18 21:50:28+00:00
Ah. Yeah.

My main Zig project will need over 1,000 edits to get it up there :O I've already had Claude spec out the changes required. I'll just have it or Codex or whatever fork itself into one agent per file and bang on it (for the stuff I can't regex myself) ;)

But the IO thing is frankly a good idea. I/O dependency injection, when I've used it in the past, has made testing quite a bit simpler (such as routing any I/O stream into a string to assert on) and the code much easier to reason about. The extra argument is a bit annoying, but that's the price of purity and it's worth it.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-18 21:50:29+00:00
Neither of those. It's generally violating the law to distribute that copyrighted content, but the content itself isn't illegal. They're asking about what's in there where the actual content is the problem.

As far as being casual about mass piracy, I think the preservation outweighs the damage, and on top of that copyright is too restrictive in the first place. If we could massively boost the internet archive and have dozens of similar institutions, and didn't paywall science articles, and brought copyright down to a reasonable duration, then after that I would be much easier to convince that instances of piracy are bad.
by anthonypasq | 2026-02-18 21:50:49+00:00
so you think Dario was just straight up lying that each model re-coups its training costs and is profitable? In order for that to be the case, inference just has to have good margins. If you just do some basic math and compare it to chinese open source models, theres just no way Sonnet is actually as expensive as API costs indiciate.
by Smar | 2026-02-18 21:51:07+00:00
LDAP Kerberos 5 SSSD is pretty easy to configure and more or less maintenance free for a small set of servers and users. By my personal experience.

The costs usually come from complexity: every new user needs its credentials, guidance to services and help in error situations. New services need to be integrated to existing systems. But those won't go away, be the system anything.
by tart-lemonade | 2026-02-18 21:51:26+00:00
I cannot find any mention of this on website of the "ToxFREE project" [0] or "ToxFree LIFE for All project" [1] (are these the same thing?). I want to see what headphones they tested and what the results from each one were, in addition to where the samples were taken from. Where's the data?

[0]: https://toxfreeproject.eu/results

[1]: https://tudatosvasarlo.hu/toxfree-life-for-all-english/
by commandlinefan | 2026-02-18 21:51:31+00:00
> many of the changes we are talking about don't even really cost us anything

I hear that often, but it's never followed by details about any of the actual changes that are being talked about. The ones I actually hear (especially politicians) advocate for are catastrophically expensive and dubious in their effectiveness. Banning coal or gas-powered cards might (might) be a good idea in the long run, but it definitely does cost us something.
by Projectiboga | 2026-02-18 21:51:40+00:00
Discord is handling some different tasks, One it is used for overlay voicechat by gamers, both one on one and group chats. Second it is used as an instant messenger which is really pared to the voicechat aspect. Third it's used as a type of forum. It seems those two types of uses may need different solutions. I've read some concerns about Discord's weakness as a type of forum and customer support platform for some software and projects.
by ramblurr | 2026-02-18 21:52:08+00:00
I disagree. Nearly every tui/app I install these days still barebacks my $HOME. When you report it the macos bros glaze over with the "complexity" of having to figure out the right dir.

If they can't get that right after 23 years, there's no hope for .well-known/ (especially when they're vibing that tedious bit of code).