MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mindslight | 2026-02-14 17:08:35+00:00
Prohibiting (or at least restraining) the de jure government but allowing a parallel corporate de facto government to keep growing (in scope, coercion, and influence) is exactly what has happened here. The fundamentalist (ie myopic) view is that the de jure government can always continue to "just say no" to the parallel power structure, keeping it subservient to the de jure government. But rather, eventually the corporate government gets powerful enough to overrun the traditional mechanics that keep it in check (no matter how strong those mechanisms may be!). Then the corporate government goes to work subverting, devouring, and replacing the traditional government.

If we had wanted to avoid where we are now at, the surveillance industry ("tech") needed to be nipped in the bud 15+ years ago - with a GDPR-equivalent, and strong anti-trust enforcement that prohibited anti-competitive bundling [proprietary] software with [Metcalfe's law] network services. The surveillance industry's power needed to be constrained to remain in line with our assumptions of natural rights and Constitutionally-limited government.

But a lot of people were being paid a lot of money to not think too hard about the implications of what they were building. And thus every time the topic came up in our communities, those on the take would shout it down with a litany of rationalizations about why such constraints were not necessary.
by yoyohello13 | 2026-02-14 17:10:13+00:00
They know what they are doing. To survive as a large entity during this administration you have to kiss the ring. If you don't, you'll get targeted for being 'woke' or whatever. In fact, kissing Trump's ass is more important for success than actually making a good product at this point.

I definitely don't think what these CEOs are doing is moral, but it's certainly rational.
by swat535 | 2026-02-14 17:10:17+00:00
I don't know if you've lived in an Islamic country but I have. In fact I was born there and spent more than half my life under Islamic law. More to it, I am the same brown minority that you seek to defend by posting this.

Westerners are so naive, Islam's objective is to grow and convert as many people as possible. To this end, they have been building mosques all over the world, increasing their population and weaponizing immigration. There is a reason Muslim countries don't allow Christians, Jews and other faiths to flourish in their homes.

Now, is this applicable to all Muslims? Of course not. But don't be naive and think that no one has an agenda. Case in point, my family has Muslims (Shia) and there are some of them I wouldn't want in the West.

No one is advocating for an immigration ban here, or is attempting to bar Muslims. Suggesting caps and enforcing sane limits is a good thing. Nations need to vet their applicants thoroughly before letting them in.

As a final note, I think that immigration is a band-aid for the population collapse in the West. The real issue is the underlying culture change. Perhaps a better avenue is to focus inward and promoting family values instead of outwards to resolve the issue?
by srcreigh | 2026-02-14 17:10:28+00:00
Your math point is proven wrong, with math. The argument goes like this:

1. AI is a computer program.

2. Some math is not solvable with any computer program.

3. Therefore, there are limits to what AI can do with math.

I recommend you to read this lovely paper about Busy Beaver numbers by Scott Aaronson. [1]

[1]: https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/bb.pdf
by laurentenhoor | 2026-02-14 17:10:38+00:00
I built DevClaw, an OpenClaw plugin that turns each Telegram group into an isolated, autonomous dev team. Orchestrator, DEV, and QA all running on their own. I use it for all my development now. Here’s what it does:

∙ Autonomous dev/QA loops: DEV writes code, QA reviews it, failures loop back to DEV automatically, no human in the loop

∙ Multi-project isolation: each Telegram group is a separate project with its own queue, workers, sessions, and state

∙ Smart model selection: picks the cheapest model per task (Haiku for typos, Sonnet for features, Opus for architecture)

∙ Session reuse: workers keep their sessions across tasks instead of re-reading the entire codebase every time (~50K tokens saved per pickup)

∙ Token-free scheduling, the heartbeat that scans queues and dispatches work runs on pure CLI calls, zero LLM tokens

∙ Atomic operations, label transition, state update, session dispatch, and audit log in one call with rollback on failure

∙ Issues as source of truth, everything runs on GitLab/GitHub issues, no internal database
These compound to roughly 70% token savings versus running one big model with fresh context each time.

Keen to hear from anyone running autonomous coding agents, especially what you’ve found works for model selection and session management.

Code’s all here:
https://github.com/laurentenhoor/devclaw
by wat10000 | 2026-02-14 17:10:53+00:00
Star Trek looked much better. They couldn’t do the numbers that B5 could do, at least not until the later parts of DS9. But what they were able to show actually looked realistic. B5’s effects were very, very clearly done on consumer-level computers. They were quite good considering, but didn’t look real. Star Trek was doing things with large physical models and it showed. Ships and stations looked like real objects (since they were!) rather than the smooth curves of everything in B5.

As a young SF devourer at the time, the cheap effects were a major turnoff and one reason I never got into B5.
by stcredzero | 2026-02-14 17:10:56+00:00
Please get in touch with us! We're in need of this very thing! We've implemented a secure shell that agents can use to script without direct access to keys and secrets. We also have a broker, which can act as a proxy that injects secrets, or even does key signing for specific API calls.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47005607

https://seksbot.com/
by leptons | 2026-02-14 17:11:03+00:00
>Come on. OSX was a paradigm shift in desktop usability and intuitive design.

OSX was born by moving from a real crap OS that couldn't even multitask property, to slapping the same UX paradigms on a Unix base.

The first release of OSX wasn't meaningfully different from OS9 in UX. They had the same goofy window gadgets for minimizing and maximizing a window, and still couldn't resize a window from any corner/side.

Finder is still just as much garbage as it ever was, nothing has really changed there. "About this software" is still the first thing on the first menu, because of course that's the most important thing a user could do with MacOS software is to look at what version they are using.

There's a reason MacOS has never gone above 15% market share - part of that is the extortionate cost of Apple hardware, as well as their shitty UX.

I will gladly take Windows XP over any version of MacOS.
by ankit21j | 2026-02-14 17:11:03+00:00
I use an external monitor at my desk and didn’t want my Bluetooth speaker always connected — only when docked. So I built an open source tool that runs as a LaunchAgent and manages it automatically.

It uses system_profiler for display detection and blueutil for Bluetooth control. Currently polling-based with debounce logic.

Would appreciate feedback from other macOS users.
by doyougnu | 2026-02-14 17:11:44+00:00
I'm honestly shocked by this having been an Ars reader for over ten years. I miss the days when they would publish super in-depth articles on computing. Since the Conde Nast acquisition I basically only go to ars for Beth Mole's coverage which is still top notch. Other than that I've found that the Verge fulfills the need that I used to get from Ars. I also support the Verge as a paid subscriber and cannot recommend them enough.
by dahart | 2026-02-14 17:12:06+00:00
Why are you assuming that the hosting locale is even relevant? I’m not going to ban anything, but if @phire’s idea was law, it would probably ban anything advertiser from choosing which ads to show you based on your personal data. It’s irrelevant where the ads or site is hosted, I assume. If ads from foreign countries don’t target individuals, their ads would be legal. If ads from foreign countries, or from the US, use your posts to choose which ads they think you’ll engage with, that wouldn’t be allowed under @phire’s proposal. Is @phire’s suggestion confusing?
by 9x39 | 2026-02-14 17:12:19+00:00
This view reduces countries to nothing more than oversized hotels or economic zones, as if they don’t have communities that go back many generations and who would fight or die to defend the borders.

Think this through: If the world likes your real estate, they can just come in and take it over overnight? Borders suddenly don’t matter?

Pop caps can easily be understood as visa or naturalization buffers. Hysteria doesn’t help.
by AnotherGoodName | 2026-02-14 17:14:17+00:00
It's so weird how many good shows are not on any of the platforms. So much of what the platforms create is utter crap. Yet there's amazing shows only available on DVD.

Recently bought and watched the Hornblower series. Amazing. Star Trek like atmosphere, exploration of new worlds etc (the show has less violence and a lot more good intentions than reality which i prefer in my times of relaxation), on a ship during the Napoleonic wars. Amazing. All the episodes of the miniseries are ~8 on imdb, deservedly so.

Yet you wouldn't know this excellent series existed based on what the platforms show.

Sharpe's another good one. I'm guessing there's bias against non-US made content but as someone not from the UK or the US wow what a blindspot!
by Kye | 2026-02-14 17:14:39+00:00
>> Another problem is that I like to add a variety of sites so that people following what’s recently added don’t get swamped by loads of blogs on one topic. And last time the site got on HN the suggestions (not “submissions”) were swamped with mostly men with rarely-updated blogs about computers.

Essentially my trouble with every "share your blog" type thing that appears on HN. Some of the blogs do show some interest outside computers, but those posts are quickly swamped by more computer touching.

I appreciate the curation in favor of diversity of interest here.

edit: You can see it in a lot of the suggested alternatives elsewhere. I think it's hard for someone to really get it if computer touching is their life. Curation like this is vital to avoid regression to the mean.
Show HN: ScreenKite: Free alternative to Screen Studio with 4x export speed
by imWildCat | 2026-02-14 17:14:44+00:00
Hello folks, I've been lately recording a huge amount of demos for my apps or some tutorials (for YouTube like for OpenClaw or random stuff).
The exporting speed of Screen Studio is a blocker for my flow.
So I created a free alternative to Screen Studio, a native macOS app, ScreenKite.

My goal is to have like 4x exporting speed with similar functionalities.

Welcome to try!
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-14 17:14:45+00:00
I know some Spanish. But if I were an advertiser, I wouldn’t want to waste my money on ad impressions on people who couldn’t understand a word I was saying. I also as a business person who targets Spanish speaking people - like you know immigration assistance or when mask thugs think I’m here illegally when I was born in Puerto Rico (hypothetically).

So what if I have a website based out of the counter and accept advertisements? Are you going to tell ISPs to block those foreign websites?

Let me tell you a little story. The state I live in just passed a law requiring all porn sites to verify age. Guess how many porn sites not based in the US ignored the law entirely? Guess how many who did folks the law can be viewed over a VPN? If you guessed “lesser than 100% between both, you would be wrong.
by AshamedCaptain | 2026-02-14 17:14:54+00:00
I still use optical discs for my personal backups and have done since 95. My biggest concern is whether I will still be able to buy new drives and blank media in 10, 20 years. Or physical media at all...

Please do not say LTO tapes. The drives are huge, noisy, expensive, and they have a very quick deprecation policy (new drives cant use old tapes).
by cubefox | 2026-02-14 17:14:59+00:00
> his writing is terrible and extremely AI-enthusiastic

I disagree, his writings are generally quite good. For example, in a recent article [1] on a hostile Gemini distillation attempt, he gives a significant amount of background, including the relevant historical precedent of Alpaca, which almost any other journalist wouldn't even know about.

1: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/attackers-prompted-gemini...
by ozgrakkurt | 2026-02-14 17:15:08+00:00
Really interesting.

I was trying to implement a compression algorithm selection heuristic in some file format code I am developing. I found this to be too hard for me to reason about so basically gave up on it.

Feels like this blog post is getting there but there could be a more detailed sets of equations that actually calculate this based on some other parameters.

Having the code completely flexible and doing a full load production test with desired parameters to find the best tuning is an option but is also very difficult.

Also read this previously which I find similar.

https://rocksdb.org/blog/2021/12/29/ribbon-filter.html
by readitalready | 2026-02-14 17:15:42+00:00
Companies hosting libel should be sued, because the same companies also have editorial control over their content.

If you don't want companies to be sued for libel, then they should also be forced to remove their editorial controls. No more algorithms, no more content moderation, no more banning, etc.

You can't have it both ways.

The only thing Section 230 did was protect large corporations by removing their liability for hosted content, thereby enforcing generic corporatist speech. It did NOT protect speech on the internet.
by jaredklewis | 2026-02-14 17:15:44+00:00
Except the first one, every job I’ve ever had, I’ve found while holding another job. No one has ever commented about it. And from the other side of the table, it also seems fine to me if a candidate has a job.

I think if you regularly change jobs more than every two years or if 15 years into your career you have never held a job longer than 4 years, that might be a flag go some recruiters/companies.

But the hiring manager in your post sounds highly abnormal. Switching jobs while you have a job is absolutely the norm.
by somenameforme | 2026-02-14 17:15:47+00:00
These articles are actively mixing two very different topics: claims of people simply criticizing ICE, and people who are reporting on officer locations or otherwise providing information that could viably result in danger to the officers, difficulty enforcing the law, and so on. I think you'll very few conservatives would be supportive of the censorship of criticism, but many and probably the overwhelming majority would be supportive of censoring information of the latter type.

If there are genuine aims to censor or target Americans who are genuinely simply criticizing ICE, I don't understand why the media isn't naming names with their permission. For instance when Jay Bhattacharya was revealed as one of the people censored for having contrarian views on COVID related decisions, I think it was a major turning point because it made it clear that the censorship extended to the point of censoring highly qualified people simply for having different opinions.
by wredcoll | 2026-02-14 17:18:26+00:00
I'm not sure it's the worst attribute you can have, but I definitely agree with the sentiment.

As I've gotten older, I've become less fond of slippery slope style arguments. People love making them for censorship-related rules and laws.

"Oh if <biden> is allowed to ask/tell social media to stop publishing so many lies about covid then that means trump will be able to <whatever>"

First of all, trump and his ilk are probably going to do <whatever> regardless of what people did in the past and the technical legality of the actions seems to be of only minor concern.

Secondly, I hate this idea that laws and rules can't have nuances. We can, with our collective brain power, probably come up with a law that helps reduce covid lies and doesn't also apply to government criticism or whatever.

I get the appeal of a simple "all speech is free! No laws about speech allowed!" But fairly obviously you're going to have laws about fraud/threats/slander/"porn" at which point we're back to nuances and deciding which bits we allow and where.

As for modern republicans, I'm not old enough to have ever believed their states rights/small gov/freedom lies, but I thought I could at least count on them to be anti-russia invading other countries.
by tgv | 2026-02-14 17:18:48+00:00
From bots to Nazis is really quite the jump. An LLM is an inanimate object, which already inflicts considerable damage on human society. They can literally not be dehumanized. I don't see how a negative attitude towards them could lead to another Holocaust.

Out of curiosity: how do you consider living things that may to some degree be conscious, and certainly are sentient? Apes? Pigs? Dogs? Mice and rats, perhaps?
by readitalready | 2026-02-14 17:18:53+00:00
You did not link to any actual, informative sources. You linked to typical debunked garbage.

Section 230 is old. You aren't providing any new information I haven't seen over the last 30 years. And, like we predicted, it has destroyed independent media in favor of large corporations, enforcing their corporatist speech.

None of your predictions are true. All of our predictions have come true.

The only thing Section 230 does is enforce corporatist speech by removing liability for large corporations hosting content. It did not stop those same corporations from maintaining editorial controls over speech, thus allowing them to control your speech. Is Facebook/YouTube an internet service like a public utility? Or is it speech content itself with their own editorial controls?

You can't have it both ways.

YouTube just banned Guy Christensen from their platform. Now what?
by sokka_h2otribe | 2026-02-14 17:18:56+00:00
I honestly think you're wildly missing the point.

Writing is not about writing. Admittedly, that is a trick sentence [what does it mean??] and it exists because I'm trying to get you to re-evaluate my next words. And, I am doing this because I think you are missing the point.

Writing is about organizing your thoughts. You cannot have someone else organize your thoughts. Once you approach writing as a thought excercise, and not an output excercise, then there is a world of nuance and writing is more than just organizing your thoughts.

Further, you have allegedly spent 3 years on this. I know you're busy. That said, you can certainly spend 3 days on writing if you spent 3 years working on this.

Please don't double down on acting like everyone is just a hater. There is more depth to the criticism than I think is being acknowledged.

P.s, if you feel "blocked" writing and think of it as just about output, try this:
(0) Ask yourself what you want to convey, why; to whom.
(1) Write without inhibition
(2) Edit, cut, delete. Refer to (0); look at what seems higher word count in proportion to its value.

There are other tips to editing and writing. This is one rough off the cuff formula that I think tracks & may benefit you, especially since you seem to see yourself as a worse writer than you may actually be.
by pphysch | 2026-02-14 17:19:26+00:00
And it only costs $30K per year for a single terabyte of usable (NVMe?) storage. The value!

$1 GiB/month x 3 minimum replicas x 1024 GiB x 12 months

And according to the status page they only have CDNs in us-east and eu-central.
by tonetegeatinst | 2026-02-14 17:19:36+00:00
statutes are written in precise language that both courts and citizens can interpret, but the two interpret the law very differently. Also see lower courts passing laws that violate the constitution or a supreme court ruling that will take decades to get removed off the book.

No "average citizen" can read and understand the law. You have laws at all different levels that conflict, conflict of definition, and then budget bills and executive orders that can also change the laws and regulations.

This is why law firms exist. Our legal text has become so complex that you need a specialist to decode the meaning, and it is not cheap.
by jmyeet | 2026-02-14 17:19:50+00:00
What I find most interesting about this is that US tech companies are doing what people accuse China of doing.

In fact, theoretical Chinese informed was the entire (performative) justification for the Tiktok ban. The reality of course was that TikTok wouldn’t censor what the US government wanted to censor.

The irony is that these companies are sowing the seeds for their own destruction and the US government is undermining US tech dominance, which is a potent foreign policy tool.

I think Steve Jobs would be rolling over in his grave at Tim Cook’s capitalization. I once trusted Apple to be more user-forest than any other platform. Now? I think I’d trust Huawei more.
by IshKebab | 2026-02-14 17:20:24+00:00
The trouble is it's impossible to magically know in advance if something is worth reading. You have to use secondary information to guess. Until recently "it appears that the author put effort into writing it" was a vaguely useful signal, but LLMs have ruined that.

Actually that's not even the only issue. Another reason people hate this is because it's inconsiderate - it's like people who leave voicemails or say "hi" in chat. They are not respecting my time.
by tokyobreakfast | 2026-02-14 17:21:32+00:00
It's not free but it's not expensive either. Most well known Windows open source projects have them; e.g. PuTTY, Wireguard, VLC, Rufus, etc.

Maybe it's high time for a free-as-in-beer CA for non-profit open source developers funded by donations?

Edit: I was wrong.

Prices on code signing certificates have skyrocketed to in excess of $500/year, due in part to continuing meddling by the CAB forum which increased the requirements of standard certs to be the same as EV certs, and requiring the key to be stored in a hardware token.
by Kye | 2026-02-14 17:22:06+00:00
>> "I also don't see why there can't be an open directory of websites where the community makes decisions about what to add instead of leaving it to a single individual."

Because no one who wants one has made it. Why not be the change if it's something you want?

If your response is anything other than enthusiasm to get started, you understand why it hasn't happened.
by blincoln | 2026-02-14 17:22:09+00:00
If I ever have a house built to my own specs, I want to get the best of both worlds by using drywall, but with most/all of the interior walls being maintenance corridors accessible via concealed doorways. A modern version of the way the dormitory in Real Genius was constructed.

Just make the house itself ~10% larger than it would be otherwise, so the usable floorspace is the same.

Adding/repairing wiring and plumbing would be easy. Every wall could have two layers of thermal/sound insulation. And who doesn't love secret passages?
by lkey | 2026-02-14 17:22:14+00:00
The term robot came from Czech language in 1923.

The word was coined by Czech author Karel Capek, first used in his play (English translated name) "R.U.R."[7][8][9]

The term is from Czech word for robotnik ('forced worker'), from robota 'forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery,' from robotiti 'to work, drudge', from an Old Czech source akin to Old Church Slavonic rabota (работа) 'servitude,' from rabu 'slave'. From Old Slavic orbu-, from PIE orbh- 'pass from one status to another'.

change in status -> change status from person to 'slave' -> forced labor -> forced worker.

The word has always been about unpersoning someone and then extracting labour for 'free'.

The dream of a world where you can have an 'robot' serve you without moral quandaries, pay, or backtalk is right there. It's always been there.

"I treat this enslaved person like an object, but what if they were actually an object, so that voice screaming in the back of my mind shuts up."

It is that deep, notice when you do this and endeavor to stop.