MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by webdevver | 2026-02-27 12:04:44+00:00
> It feels so much better to ask humans a question then the machine

I could not disagree more! With pesky humans, you have all sorts of things to worry about:

- is my question stupid? will they think badly of me if i ask it?

- what if they dont know the answer? did i just inadvertantly make them look stupid?

- the question i have is related to their current work... i hope they dont see me as a threat!

and on and on. asking questions in such a manner as to elicit the answer, without negative externalities, is quite the art form as i'm sure many stack overflow users will tell you. many word orderings trigger a 'latent space' which activates the "umm, why are you even doing this?" with the implication begin "you really are stupid!", totally useless to the question-asker and a much more frustrating time-waster than even the most moralizing LLM.

with LLMs, you don't have to play these 'token games'. you throw your query at it, and irrespective of the word order, word choice, or the nture of the question - it gives you a perfectly neutral response, or at worst politely refuses to answer.
by BSDobelix | 2026-02-27 12:05:21+00:00
>only the FAANG know how to keep websites up

Really FAANG can stop a solar-storm? A war on infrastructure?

Remember that your website not just needs running computers but energy too, and a net that brings that information to the peoples, and those peoples devices need power too.

Just look at the Berlin outage where people had to go to hotpots with generators to load the phone:

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/07/europe/berlin-power-outag...

And that was a small attack on infra but 100'000 where affected.

But sorry if i touched any of your sensitive areas...because it's Europe and not FAANG ;)
by aristofun | 2026-02-27 12:05:42+00:00
It’s wiser to invest in independence of any external circumstances. To get some valuable skill, for example. To be flexible enough to relocate.

Also you don’t go to another country for a “better living standards”.

You go there to get out of your comfort zone, to grind, to prove yourself, to learn etc. unless you’re already rich you’re going to struggle in one way or another for a while. Only your kids born there will be able truly and fully enjoy all the “standards”. That’s the brutal truth.
by yokuze | 2026-02-27 12:07:05+00:00
I found that having a rule like this helped some too:

> * ABSOLUTELY DO NOT use `@deprecated` on anything unless you are explicitly asked to. Always fully refactor and delete old code as-needed instead of deprecating it

https://github.com/yokuze/aix-config/blob/f5094b5c5169261fae...
by skydhash | 2026-02-27 12:07:21+00:00
I don’t think I’ve ever ask a question on Stack Overflow, but I’ve consulted it several time. Even when I’ve not found my exact use case, there’s always something similar or related that gave me the right direction for research (a book or an article reference, the name of a concept to use as keyword,…)

It’s kinda the same feeling when browsing the faq of a project. It gives you a more complete sense of the domain boundaries.

I still prefer to refer to book or SO instead of asking the AI. Coherency and purposefulness matter more to me then a direct answer that may be wrong.
by thedevilslawyer | 2026-02-27 12:07:39+00:00
These are crappy arguments. The author is seeking to re-litigate Piracy of IP is bad, and AI is bad.

If those are your axioms then you will find the old world is already in the rear-view mirror, and they want to pull back every other project to stay with them in that world.

AI is here. Free software succeeded - make as much as you want. This technology a force multiplier.

You can debate it's morality, but most people want to do their work.
by Schmerika | 2026-02-27 12:08:11+00:00
Including the US.

And 68% of American adults don't even know it [0]. Not to mention all the foreign slavery in the supply chain, or all the slavery we've directly enabled by 'toppling dictators' who wouldn't give us their shit.

0 - https://www.merkley.senate.gov/is-slavery-still-legal-in-the...
by 3form | 2026-02-27 12:08:53+00:00
In a great part, yes?

When I see an early realistic painting, I'm impressed by the skilled hand of the artist. When I see an impressionist one, I'm awed by their ability to go through the whole process and to know which strokes are the best ones to achieve such a result. When I see a modern oil painting, I marvel at that someone takes that medium and does such things with it, where maybe the ease of editing the digital content would make it so much more convenient.

Then when I see old paintings with very particular pigments, certain blues or reds for instance, I enjoy thinking about the whole chain of events that got them there; the need of creativity even in getting the colors you wanted.

We do love a pretty picture, but so do we love a display of skill and hard work.

Before GenAI this value was mostly self-evident, but by now it's becoming less and less so; and what's worse, it's rife with one thing we don't love for sure - which is lies.
by moozooh | 2026-02-27 12:09:51+00:00
Anthropic's policy is full of contradictions. They are against mass-surveillance of Americans but they happily deal with Palantir. They talk about humanity as a whole but only care about what American companies use their models to do to Americans; everybody else is fair game for AI-driven surveillance. They warn of the dangers of AI-driven warfare by demonstrating a mass-scale cyberattack perpetrated using their model, Claude, as the main operation engine and immediately release a new, more powerful version of Claude. You just need to use Claude to protect yourself from Claude, see.

When you really start digging into it, it appears schizophrenic at first, and then you remember market incentives are a thing and everything falls into place.
by techblueberry | 2026-02-27 12:10:55+00:00
This seems surprisingly backward looking. Most of the thought leaders around UBI aren't politicians. I agree UBI probably doesn't work without a paradigm shift, but everyone's talking like we're amidst a paradigm shift (whether we are is questionable) but like, communism doesn't work because of the way it impacts incentives (as described) but what happens if you fully automate egg production? Then "And even worse, many people quit work once they got the UBI. So now less eggs are made." become irrelevant.

If everything's fully automated, then "many people quit work" is irrelevant, because not many people are working, which is the point?
by Fischgericht | 2026-02-27 12:11:04+00:00
No, it's really simple: Programming, Math, AI, blabla - those are all abstractions of what we have seen in nature.

Once you have understood that, you can just apply the rules learned backward, and they will typically match pretty well. I can buy fractal veggies in a supermarket.

And also, it's just data. Just take some random samples. That even civilizations like the Mayas who have faaaar more time on the clock than say than the US had multiple full resets.

Another random sample I've just pulled out of thin google air: San Francisco Fire of 1851. Everybody knew that wood burns. And that wooden buildings burn. And that wooden cities burn. Did anyone decide to tear down their house and re-build with a different material? No. This happened after everything had burned down to the ground. That was the reset needed.

I think it is very clearly an iterative process. Have a look.
by bawana | 2026-02-27 12:12:03+00:00
A parallel but not too different situation is happening in the hospital space. Corps fire experienced nurses and hire newbies at half the price. Then they realize the newbies aren't performing so they downsize staff. Then a flu or other seasonal event drives up need for staff so they turn to temp agencies (per diem nurses or 'travelers'). These travelers get 150% to 200% of what staff nurses get. The remaining staff nurses start to leave and become per diem. hospital costs double, quality of care declines.
by qsera | 2026-02-27 12:12:31+00:00
> Ever used a GTK app under Windows?

I have created and used them. They didn't look terrible on windows.

>What a browser asks from an OS is a rectangle (a graphics buffer) and the fonts to draw a webpage. Nothing else. Entire drawing functionality and the behavior is redefined from scratch. This is the advantage of Web..

I think that is exactly what Gtk does (and may be even Qt also) too..

I think it is just there there is not much funding going to those projects. Web on the other hand, being an ad-delivery platform, the sellers really want your browsers to work and look good...
by apireno | 2026-02-27 12:12:35+00:00
DOMShell maps the browser's Accessibility Tree into a virtual filesystem that AI agents (or humans) navigate with `ls`, `cd`, `grep`, `click`, `find`.

The problem it solves: current browser automation feeds agents high-entropy representations (raw HTML, pixel screenshots, CSS selectors) that are fragile and token-expensive. The AX tree is the low-entropy, structured alternative — deterministic, semantic, compact.

*How it works:*

The Chrome extension's background service worker reads the AX tree via `chrome.debugger` (CDP 1.3), including cross-iframe trees via `Page.getFrameTree`. The VFS mapper aggressively flattens non-semantic wrapper nodes (role=generic, role=none, unnamed divs), promoting children up. What remains is a clean hierarchy where containers are directories and interactive elements are files.

A standalone MCP server on localhost:3001 bridges any MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf) to the extension over WebSocket. Security is tiered: read-only by default, write commands gated behind `--allow-write`, cookie access behind `--allow-sensitive`, domain allowlists, audit logging.

```
dom@shell:$ ls
[d] main/
[d] contentinfo/

dom@shell:$ find --type link --meta -n 3
[x] english_7141000_articles_link href=https://en.wikipedia.org/
[x] deutsch_3099000_artikel_link href=https://de.wikipedia.org/
[x] français_2740000_articles_link href=https://fr.wikipedia.org/

dom@shell:$ submit search_input "Artificial intelligence"
Submitted

dom@shell:$ find --type heading --text -n 5
[d] artificial_intelligence_heading "Artificial intelligence"
[d] goals_heading "Goals"
[d] reasoning_heading "Reasoning and problem-solving"
[d] knowledge_heading "Knowledge representation"
[d] learning_heading "Learning"
```

*Benchmark:* 8 trials, Claude Opus 4.6, same tasks with DOMShell vs Anthropic's built-in browser automation. DOMShell averaged 4.3 tool calls per task vs 8.6 — 50% fewer round-trips.

Stack: TypeScript, Manifest V3, Chrome DevTools Protocol, React + Xterm.js (side panel), Express + WebSocket (MCP server).

Open source (MIT): https://github.com/apireno/DOMShell
by LeonidasXIV | 2026-02-27 12:13:03+00:00
All of this is true.

Having lived in Germany it's quite different, but I'd argue the centralized handling of the CPR is actually quite convenient and doesn't meaningfully impact privacy. In Germany every authority has its own ID for you anyway (my password manager has a category "Government Primary Keys" for this), however that means that you have to provide all your information from scratch to every authority. This would theoretically lead to more privacy if we lived in 1926, but now computers are ubiquitous and a rogue government (like Germany is close to electing) can just correlate these keys together. Relational databases have existed for decades and JOINS are cheap. Thanks to surveillance capitalism by now we have very sophisticated ways to deanonymize people, the government can just hire someone to do it.

So the privacy in Germany is most often inconvenience for the citizen paired with hardly any privacy gain from a potentially hostile government. At this point I think the better solution is to avoid electing hostile governments. To Denmarks credit, they're currently doing that better than many other European countries.
by bell-cot | 2026-02-27 12:13:52+00:00
> Looking at the data, the turning point is clear. From the start of the 1990s through to the late 2000s, everything seemed to be going well for the UK economy. Gross domestic product (GDP) growth had trended upwards [...]

> As the financial crisis of 2008 unfolded, unemployment increased, wages fell, and millions were pushed into poverty. Meanwhile, those whose greed and recklessness lay behind the crisis were insulated from [...]

Not to speak well of "neoliberalist" economic policies, but Britain was pretty well broken by the events of 1912-1946, and its own poor responses to those. Start of that period, Britain was the obvious global superpower - her Royal Navy dominating the seas, London the world's financial capital, the sun never setting on her Empire, etc., etc. Vs. end of that period, Britain was a crumbling has-been - avoiding full national bankruptcy only because the US Treasury gave her a huge bail-out loan.

(If you look at British history 1946-1992 - it's obvious that the greed, recklessness, stupidity, and lack of consequences for the guilty, which the article notes in 2008, was long-established practice. If you read some older history...yeah. Those vices predate neoliberalism by thousands of years.)

And that Britain looked fairly good - by some macroeconomic metrics - during the 1992-2008 financial boom is not a sign of "going well". It's a sign that the economy was heavily financialized. A petrostate looks great when the price of oil is spiking...but that's no sign of actual economic health.
by throw0101c | 2026-02-27 12:14:46+00:00
> Paramount is a highly leveraged company. They are not going to come out of this very expensive acquisition unscathed.

Is this before or after Ellison et co gut the news side of the organization to create another Fox New / RT? We've already seen what happened with 60 Minutes and CBS News:

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/29/bari-weiss-c...

* https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/01/26/inside-bari-we...
by mapt | 2026-02-27 12:14:53+00:00
Both of these actions are extraordinarily illegal under US law and FAA regulation for a number of reasons. Among them - Permanently blinding a human pilot can be done at 1000 times the range that it takes to melt aluminum, and laser weapons are powerful enough that secondary scatter off shiny surfaces is a real hazard.

We have a civilian airspace, and we have laser weapons, and we have CBP/ICE MAGA militia dabbling in military work. No two of those are safe to have at the same time in the same place.
by TheusHen | 2026-02-27 12:15:36+00:00
Hi HN,

This is EEGFrontier V1, an open-source EEG acquisition board I designed as a learning and experimentation project.

The board is built around the ADS1299 (EEG analog front-end) and a Seeed XIAO RP2040. The goal was to design a compact, low-cost board that works with dry electrodes and exposes the full EEG signal chain, from analog front-end to firmware.

I started this project because most affordable EEG devices are either closed-source or abstract away too much of the hardware. I wanted to understand the real constraints involved in EEG design: noise, grounding (REF/BIAS), routing limitations, and what actually happens when theory meets a real PCB.

The repository includes the full KiCad design, firmware, BOM with cost references, and documentation images. This is a V1 board and still evolving. It’s functional, but there are things I already want to improve, especially around shielding and noise mitigation.

This project is primarily educational, but I tried to design it seriously, following datasheets and reference designs while learning where those fall short in practice.

I’m sharing it here to get feedback, criticism, and ideas from people more experienced in EEG, biosignal acquisition, or analog front-end design. Any comments are appreciated.

It's a little expensive too , but I'm applying it at HackClub Blueprint.

Thanks for reading.
by sneak | 2026-02-27 12:16:03+00:00
The only reason you ask for these capabilities is because you want to use these capabilities.

That is, the news here is that DoW (formerly DoD) is willing and able and interested in using SOTA AI to enable processing of domestic mass surveillance data and autonomous weapons. Anthropic’s protests aside, you can’t fight city hall, they have a heart attack gun and Anthropic does not. They’ll get what they want.

I am not particularly AI alarmist, but these are facts staring us right in the face.

We are so fucked.
by keybored | 2026-02-27 12:16:45+00:00
As a complete bystander I put so incredibly little weight to what friends and former employees think about the persons and figureheads behind tech companies that aim to change the world.

Why would I care. All people with at least some positive or negative notoriety have friend and associates that will, hand to their heart, promise that they mean well. They have the best intentions. And any deviations from their stated ideals are just careful pragmatic concerns.

Road to Hell and all that.
by ssl-3 | 2026-02-27 12:17:01+00:00
The transformers are fine as they are. We already have 240VAC in the typical US home: Two legs of 120v, with one being 180° out of phase. That part exists and it works fine -- the big industrious parts of the infrastructure are already supplying 240v.

US 240v is a bit different than the way the rest of the world usually does it, where they have 1 leg of 240v and 1 neutral, but AFAICT that detail is not a big deal for the stuff that actually uses electricity.

The wire itself, broadly-speaking, is fine.

Suppose we decided that tomorrow at noon to begin the move to 240v.

We just refactor our breaker panels and update to some new objectively-good whiz-bang outlet format (because we would certainly never borrow existing designs from anywhere else on the planet; we in the States have a big problem with Not Invented Here when it comes to policy), and finally get rid of twist-in Edison light bulb sockets, and that part is done.

But then all kinds of stuff doesn't work anymore.

Fridges, garage door openers, microwaves, light bulbs, clock radios, natural gas furnaces, and anything else that doesn't work with 240v: That stuff is dead in the water without converting back down to 120v using an autoformer or something.

Sure, we'll eventually get things updated; when we don't count survivorship bias examples, it's plain to see that stuff just doesn't last all that long anyway (and never actually did).

But for a time: There literal mountains of stuff that just won't work without help. And that's a tough pill to swallow.

---

What we could start doing is embrace our existing dual-voltage home wiring methods, and putting 240v sockets in some places where it's actually beneficial. Places like kitchens (for heating water and food), say. But broadly speaking: Nobody does this because nobody sells safety-approved residential appliances for the US domestic market, so it's a lot of money to spend to get it done for no benefit. It's a catch-22.
by littlestymaar | 2026-02-27 12:18:18+00:00
No. Again, this regulation is about regulating businesses because that's what the EU is about.

The general use or creation of deepfake for porn, harassment, or election manipulation, is outside of what the EU can regulate as an institution, it is the responsibility of member states. (The same way the EU can impose rules on platform with respect to copyright violations, but cannot enact rules against piracy in general, these are always made by member states).
by acomjean | 2026-02-27 12:18:33+00:00
I remember seeing my friends dad’s first cd player. Huge jazz fan and it did sound great. Especially the quiet parts (No tape hiss or record pops) and easy to use. He bought a couple of cds of rock and man they sounded good.

Every other media at the time required some maintenance to sound good. Records would scratch, those tape pinch rollers would need to be cleaned. Nothing was easy, cds were (skip forward with a button push). Cassettes still were the only way to record, better for portability and sounded pretty good (we did some a:b testing cd vs cassette as kids).

Late 80s, cds were everywhere. I stopped buying records. At my highschool radio station someone got a ton of great records from his neighbor who was replacing with cds.

My friends dad who liked jazz did lament that a lot of the jazz he had in record form would never be re-released as cds. Not digital so a lot of music lost to time and a format change.
by balboah | 2026-02-27 12:18:35+00:00
In Sweden there’s at least one more competitor to BankID called Freja. There’s also some kind of EU-level system.

Would be cool if multiple actors were allowed and shared the same kind of auth signing method so that there aren’t just one point of failure. Or something distributed like a blockchain type of signing method, at least I don’t think Bitcoin or Ethereum have downtime that often, and authorization should probably be read heavy only to check if some identity is still allowed
by latexr | 2026-02-27 12:18:52+00:00
> you'll be relieved that I stopped short of deploying "mentor"

Funnily enough, I think that might’ve been better. I don’t think a mentor has to necessarily be human; one can learn from nature or pets. Or even a machine: Stockfish can teach you to play better chess and give context as to why you fumbled and how to do better next time.

I just don’t think LLMs are people and that we should avoid anthropomorphising them (for a whole plethora of reasons which are another discussion). I’m not even saying I think there could never be a robot which is a person. Just not what we have now.
by cess11 | 2026-02-27 12:19:10+00:00
BankID is not a government thing, it's developed by a company founded by a bank consortium. Once upon a time the state aimed to build an public good in this space but bank representatives in the committee responsible managed to block it.

I was under the impression that it doesn't work under GrapheneOS, great news that it does. Other than that it shares some of the characteristics detailed above, refusing to run if it notices rooting and the like. Also no Linux support.

Edit: I agree that it has a convenience to it, but I strongly suspect it has a latent tyrannical potential and that future governments will exploit this to a further degree.
by A_Venom_Roll | 2026-02-27 12:19:24+00:00
Perfect timing - Sharopolis just released a video [0] using this exact disassembly to mod Super Mario-style physics into the game.

He used Claude Code to 'vibe code' the assembly changes, leveraging the fact that the disassembly identifies about 2KB of unused memory. It’s a fascinating look at how LLMs can now navigate and modify 40-year-old Z80 assembly when provided with a well-documented codebase like this one.

The video sparked a lot of discussion in the comments, with some people being very upset he used AI for this.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxxNgZgd88I"
by LiamPowell | 2026-02-27 12:19:32+00:00
True, but in that case the fuse only needs to be as easy to replace as whatever else you're replacing. If there's internal socketed components then the fuse only needs to be internal and socketed. If everything is soldered to a board then it's fine to have the fuse soldered too.

Many older appliances did expect the user to put some external bits in that would be across mains, or maybe across a transformer to mains, and in that case the fuse was just as replaceable as the user-provided part.
by dreamhomestore | 2026-02-27 12:21:57+00:00
Even when wardrobes include storage, a separate bedroom chest of drawers often makes the room function better. A wide unit balances the height of the taller furniture and prevents the room from feeling top-heavy. In many layouts, an 8 drawer chest of drawers becomes the workhorse of the home. It holds accessories and everyday items that shouldn’t be hidden away in a deep cupboard.

A black 6 drawer chest tends to ground the room visually. It acts as an anchor beneath mirrors or artwork. Lower horizontal furniture makes rooms feel wider and provides surfaces for lamps without adding clutter to the bedside.