MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-23 21:12:22+00:00
This is what I thought when Facebook first came out;

It was going to be like MySpace where most people were expected to remain anonymous like the internet had always been, and only those who actually wanted to be identifiable could reveal as much information as they personally wanted to.

But no, Facebook wanted everybody's personally identifiable information as table stakes, not only those who really wanted to promote themselves or gain personal recognition.

There was no other way to sign up.

I thought people would be too smart for that. But Facebook was "free" to use, and learned a lot from it's first major gamescourge, Zynga.

Naturally I've been waiting for it to stand the test of time, and it does look like it has been a complete failure when it comes to being worthwhile.

Facebook started out with enshittification as a business model but the next major escalation came when people had to have an "account" before they could even browse the site any more.

People who had actually enjoyed it were somewhat pressured to join just so they could continue following those who were promotional. Linkedin did this too and made it no longer worth visiting either. So much for supporting the members who were intended to be promoted.

You can only imagine my shock years ago when I found out Facebook was a billion-dollar company.

Things like this were never even supposed to be worth money.
by ineptech | 2026-02-23 21:12:29+00:00
I am on board with basically everything this article is arguing, but I think it covers the easy part (that "people run their own servers" is the only solution to the problems caused by relying on giant ad corps to provide the server half of client/server software) and skips the hard part, which is the software they run.

Like, suppose some really good personal server software existed. Suppose there were an OS-plus-app-repository platform, akin to linux plus snapcraft, but aimed solely at people who want to host a blog or email server despite knowing nothing and being willing to learn nothing. It installs on to a raspberry pi as easy as Windows. It figures out how to NAT out of your cable modem for you. It does all the disk partitioning and apt-gets and chmods, you just open the companion app on your phone and hit the Wordpress button and presto, you've got a blog. You hit the Minecraft button and you've got your own minecraft server, without having to learn what "-Xms2G -Xmx6G" means. It updates itself automatically, runs server components in sandboxes so they can't compromise each other, and it's crack-proof enough that you can store your bitcoins on it. Etc, etc.

If that existed, we wouldn't have to write essays about freedom and so forth to get people to buy it, they'd buy it just because it's there. I mean, look at those digital picture frames - they cost more than a rasbpi and are way less useful, and half the people I know got or gave them for christmas. Why? Because they're neat and they cost less than a hundred bucks and they require no knowledge or effort. If a server that can host your blog were that easy, it'd get adopted too, and we'd be on a path to some kind of distributed social media FB replacement. Imagine the software you could write, if you were allowed to assume that every user had a server to host it on!

The problem is, that software doesn't exist and it's not clear how it would ever get made. It'd be a huge effort (possibly "Google building Android" sized) and the extant open source efforts along these lines lack traction, mostly due to the chicken-and-egg problem of any new platform that needs apps to be useful. And until it exists, any kind of neighborhood-internet-collective-power-to-the-people dream has to necessarily begin with hoping that millions of people will spontaneously decide to spend their precious free time doing systems administration.

Not to shit on a fine essay that I mostly agree with. It just seems like, without figuring out the software, this is daydreaming.
by srcreigh | 2026-02-23 21:13:06+00:00
First, it is important for these discussions that people include details like I did. We're all better off to not generalize.

RE: Claude Code, no I haven't used it, but I did do the Anthropic interview problem, beating all of Anthropic's reported Claude scores even with custom harnesses etc.

It's not a dunk that agents can't produce "as fast as can be" code; their code is usually still reasonably fast; it's just often 2-10x slower than can be.
by mrguyorama | 2026-02-23 21:13:11+00:00
NewEgg is still great if you specific "Fulfilled by newegg" or whatever magic checkbox stands for "No actually this is a product we have bought and have in our warehouse from a real company and you are paying us to sell that physical item to you from our warehouse"

Of course, that eliminates 90% of their "inventory", but I only ever wanted to buy computer products from them anyway.
by inejge | 2026-02-23 21:13:14+00:00
> we invented this new thing called fire [...] So the tribe leader (who, by the way, gropes your children) proposed a solution: centralize control of all the fire

Of all the things, a "save-the-children prolegomena to the Prometheus myth" certainly wasn't on my bingo card today. So thank you for that, but I'm not aware of any reports of fire-keeping in the way you've described. Societies and religions do have sacred traditions related to fire (like Zoroastrians) but that doesn't come with restrictions on practical use AFAIK.
by bigstrat2003 | 2026-02-23 21:13:29+00:00
The #1 use case for crypto is that it's anonymous like cash. And yes, this enables people to use it for crime... just like they use cash. The unavoidable cost of freedom has always been that some people will misuse it. Personally, I would rather have freedom even if it gets misused than not have freedom even if it means crime is over.
by hmokiguess | 2026-02-23 21:13:35+00:00
If you want to argue that, then you could also argue that everything needed to challenge the questions’ motives and its validity is also contained therein.

This reminds me of people who answer with “Yes” when presented with options where both can be true but the expected outcome is to pick one. For example, the infamous: “Will you be paying with cash or credit sir?” then the humorous “Yes.”
by chasd00 | 2026-02-23 21:13:54+00:00
yeah surveillance doesn't mean secure. A few weeks ago there was a solid 10-15 second run of automatic weapons fire on my street in an intersection. I do a lot of shooting and i could tell from the concussion it couldn't have been more than a couple hundred feet from my bedroom window. My neighbors turned in all their camera footage with recordings of two cars and the gunfire to a detective. When i asked them what happens next the detective just said in an annoyed voice "well i'll ask someone to check around..". Like it was plainly obvious he had zero interest at all.

edit: I live in Dallas so, although we sometimes hear gunshots when the Cowboys score a touchdown, i'm not in an active war zone.
by gamerdonkey | 2026-02-23 21:13:57+00:00
In many cases, the decision to install Flock cameras have been made by city councils and sheriffs' offices. So it very much depends on local candidates.

On the broader topic, I'm not sure that just voting is the way that we'll get out of this mess, but I think a large part of the problem is how our focus on wider, national issues has eroded the interest in the local. So people seem to be most disenfranchised from the level of politics where they can actually have the most influence, both by voting and direct action (protests, calls, etc).
by lilcodingthings | 2026-02-23 21:14:41+00:00
Thanks for taking the time to look at our articles! That's really helpful feedback.

I'll start with the more technical and in-depth posts, as well as ones that describe personal paths and experiences, and see how it goes based on people's feedback
The once-a-month approach could also be a good starting point for me. I'm trying to blog while working full time and, as you said, it is hard indeed.

Hopefully, as time goes by — and fingers crossed, by making the right decisions, people will start reading, Google will start showing us in results, and we'll stop feeling as if we're writing for ourselves only.

Although I don't feel bad writing just for myself, it would be nice to know that someone else may read what I'm sharing. :)
by tsimionescu | 2026-02-23 21:14:46+00:00
A perfectly fine, sycophantic response, that doesn't question the premises in any way, would be "That's a great question! While normally walking is better for such a short distance, you'd need to drive in this case, since you need to get the car to the car wash anyway. Do you want me to help with detailed information for other cases where the car is optional?" or some such.
by achierius | 2026-02-23 21:15:01+00:00
Just like how all we had to do to shut down Guantanamo Bay was vote for President Obama, right? So glad that that worked out. By and large, our institutions are not democratic, in that they are not responsive to 'popular opinion'; while there are certain arenas where, for one reason or another, the will of the majority does sway the day (e.g. the influence of scandals on individual elected officials), by and large most things are decided by non-democratic factors like business interests and large donors, and the media just works to get people on-side with whatever comes out of that.

To quote a well-known study on the topic: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

(Gilens & Page, Perspectives in Politics)
by giantg2 | 2026-02-23 21:15:13+00:00
"All we had to do to avoid this was to vote."

Every time I hear this I cringe, whether this subject or any other. The people did vote and this is what they got - not necessarily what they specifically voted for. Different people hold things in different importance. Flock security cameras (or similar) generally don't even get noticed by the people voting on taxes, guns, abortions, etc.
by andai | 2026-02-23 21:16:07+00:00
Well, it is a trick question. The question itself implies that both options are valid, and that one is superior. So the brain pattern-matches to "short distance, not worth driving." (LLMs appear to be doing the same thing here!)

If you framed it as "hint: trick question", I expect score would improve. Let's find out!

--

EDIT: As suspected! Adding "(Hint: trick question)" to the end of the prompt allows small, non-reasoning models to answer correctly. e.g.:

Prompt: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? (Hint: trick question)

grok-4.1-non-reasoning (previously scored 0/10)

>Drive.

>Walking gets you to the car wash just fine—but leaves your dirty car 50 meters behind. Can't wash what isn't there!

--

EDIT 2: The hint doesn't help Haiku!

>Walk! 50 meters is only about a block away—driving would waste more fuel than it's worth for such a short trip. Plus, you're going to get wet washing the car anyway, so you might as well save the gas.
by snapetom | 2026-02-23 21:16:14+00:00
I really don't know how to answer that. I've seemed to experience the peak worst of both.

In waterfall, I was a young programmer in a big, disciplined, corporate environment and spent about 2/3 of my time doing documentation and meetings rather than writing code. I nearly switched careers because that wasn't what I signed up for.

In chaosland, I came in as a PM well after the company's heydey trying to sort out the mess. I wasn't there for the trips on yachts with everyone drunk. I spent my years there asking, "wtf were you guys thinking" and the answer was always, "seemed like a good idea at the time."
by trueno | 2026-02-23 21:16:18+00:00
Am I the only one that is repeatedly amused at how many smart people are just caving to making this about parents/children at all?

We've literally watched things unfold in real time out in the open in the last year I don't know how much more obvious it could be that child-protections are the bad-faith excuse the powers that be are using here. Combined with their control of broadcasting/social media, it's the very thing they're pushing narratives in lockstep over. All this to effectively tie online identities to real people. Quick and easy digital profiles/analytics on anyone, full reads on chat history assessments of idealogies/political affiliations/online activities at scale, that's all this ever was and I _know_ hackernews is smart enough to see that writing on the wall. Ofc porn sites were targeted first with legislation like this, pornography has always been a low-hanging fruit to run a smear campaign on political/idealogical dissidents. It wasn't enough, they want all platform activity in the datasets.

I can't help but feel like the longer we debate the merits of good parenting, the faster we're just going to speedrun losing the plot entirely. I think it goes without saying that no shit good parenting should be at play, but this is hardly even about that and I don't know why people take the time of day. It's become reddit-caliber discussion and everyone's just chasing the high of talking about how _they_ would parent in any given scenario, and such discussion does literally nothing to assess/respond to the realities in front of us. In case I'm not being clear, talking about how correct-parenting should be used in lieu of online verification laws is going to do literally nothing to stop this type of legislation from continually taking over. It's not like these discussions and ideas are going to get distilled into the dissent on the congressional floors that vote on these laws. It is in it's own way a slice of culture war that has permeated into the nerd-sphere.
by magicalist | 2026-02-23 21:16:25+00:00
Sure, and—setting aside the issues with all the millions of smart phone users who can't properly consent to these apps and their permissions because they don't have the knowledge to know what they're actually consenting to—the great thing is that I can choose not to install these apps. And I don't!

I don't have the same choice with cameras everywhere that feed into a company with a security team run by donkeys and that provides minimal to no oversight to the government bodies using the camera data to do an end run around the fourth amendment.
by munificent | 2026-02-23 21:16:39+00:00
No, I don't think that's true. I was active in the early blogging days and writing blogs as a response to other blogs was a really common pattern and part of the way the community functioned. It was sort of one big distributed conversation.

Certainly, it's fundamental to human nature that if we work hard to create something, we want some way to tell that another human was moved by it.
by lacoolj | 2026-02-23 21:16:40+00:00
Contrary to a lot of comments here, the only way to use bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency) without tracking is to mine it yourself, and even then...

Where did you get it? Purchased/transferred? Where did they get it? What else did the person with that wallet do?

If the answer is "mined", even then, you have to actually do something with it, right? Buy something? Where is that something shipped? At worst you'll have to pay customs on it, and have it actually get through customs. At best, your address is in a database now.

Have it shipped somewhere obscure? Video cameras are everywhere.
Have it shipped to someone else's house and steal it off their porch? Again, cameras everywhere.

Not have a physical item? Just a service? That's pretty much the closest you'll get to anonymous money transfer and full usage (along with whatever VPN you prefer).

Cool that was a fun mental exercise. Now everyone tell me why I'm wrong!
by infecto | 2026-02-23 21:16:59+00:00
and what market forces haven’t been sufficient here. Demand went up, price has gone up. Price has been fairly stable since the initial run up. It’s unclear to me why you think who the winners or losers matters. My position is it’s incredibly difficult to regulate short term supply and demand. You will always introduce unintended consequence. Regulation in my opinion works best where there are external costs that are hard to measure. This is not one of them.
by vimda | 2026-02-23 21:16:59+00:00
A lot of Japanese websites also have to be tremendously over provisioned because of how regimented the country is. A friend of mine worked infrastructure for a local newspaper, and every day at 6PM they'd send a push notification to all their subscribers and had to provision for that peak. When he asked if they could smooth out traffic, send the notification to some folks a minute before, or a minute after he was almost thrown out of the room. "Japan runs on time. Not a minute early, not a minute late. On time".
by j45 | 2026-02-23 21:17:45+00:00
Same experience, the job of the display is to help manage attention, instead of information delivery.

If we think about paper calendars hung on a wall, and updated sporatically we know what's there is likely good information, only that it might not be up to date.

If a calendar can be calm by default, surface what's changed or newly relevant, and fade when it resolves. The next level could be understanding who's attention something needs, and when, in a personalized way.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-23 21:17:51+00:00
From what the poster says, it appears that the HDD prices vary extremely inside USA, so you must be careful from where you buy.

The poster says that the 28 TB Seagate HDDs have been bought from Best Buy and B&H for around USD 330.

If I look right now at Amazon USA and Newegg, I see much higher prices, in the range of $600 to $700, so buying from there would be a mistake.

However, the reported price seems too good to be true, because looking now at both the B&H & Best Buy online shops I see prices double in comparison with the claimed $330, and which are in line with Newegg and Amazon USA.

So perhaps the poster was extremely lucky and has succeeded to take advantage of some price that was so low only for a short time.

For comparison, last week I have also bought a 28 TB Seagate Expansion HDD, but in the European Union, for USD 550, which is much lower in comparison with the UK price of almost $770 quoted by the Reddit poster, and also much lower than the prices that are listed today on Amazon USA, Newegg, B&H and Best Buy, which are higher by about 10% than what I paid.

On the other hand the Reddit poster has succeeded to buy 10 such HDDs for a price of only 60% of mine, raised after that to about 74% by the import VAT.

Good for him, but taking into account the prices that I see today at 4 US online shops and the continuous price increases in HDDs, it seems that not many, if anyone, will repeat soon such an achievement.
by sepositus | 2026-02-23 21:18:01+00:00
I am in the process of co-founding a new protocol which creates a decentralized root of trust using normal plain-text names (i.e. `foo.bar`). One of the goals I hope to obtain is allowing domain-style lookups of private websites hosted on P2P networks. It's lofty, but the dialog used by OP is _very_ close to why I think it's necessary.
by rincebrain | 2026-02-23 21:18:02+00:00
I suspect the wildly differing experiences for this depend on the number of bad actors doing this in the pools feeding into whatever warehouses, versus total churn.

For me, living first in Baltimore then NYC, places where there's quite a few people buying quite a few things up and down the cost scale, I never saw a counterfeit anything come up.

That's not to say I think it doesn't happen, just that I think that's why some people have wildly different experiences here.
by ectospheno | 2026-02-23 21:18:09+00:00
I had one in grade school. Taught me the value of backups early in life. Spent all night typing in a game from a magazine. Started it without saving to tape first. It was so loud! Panicked and restarted the machine. Sadness ensued.

Replaced it with a C128-D. Didn’t get my first intel until I bought a 386 after graduating high school. Good times.
by array_key_first | 2026-02-23 21:18:15+00:00
This is a new phenomena. It took over a decade for my school district to ban phones. Eventually parents relented - but for the longest time they were the single blocker. Oh, what about emergencies???

Well Nancy, it's not 1995 anymore. Phones aren't for phone calls, we all know that. The school has phones too, you know.
Show HN: Groupchat, Open Source Slack for Developers
by svapnil | 2026-02-23 21:18:24+00:00
Hey Hacker News,

My name's Svapnil Ankolkar and I missed talking to human being when I used AI to code. I built this app since I wanted to spend more with people instead of talking to LLMs. Developers can run their Claude Code / Codex within the app to pair program or work on projects together.

The client is open source and I'm hoping to work with other developers to make this program even better. Please let me know if you're interested and I'd love to work with you :)
by pfannkuchen | 2026-02-23 21:18:34+00:00
In my subjective experience cannabis does tend to nudge some part of the brain into edit mode. What happens afterwords depends on the person.

For me it upended a lot of my alignment with the contemporary consensus morality. Before marijuana I had a sense that the morality wasn’t actually well foundationed, or at least it was equivalent to a religion in that respect, but my mind seemed to avoid thinking about it too much. With marijuana my mind freely went there, and I think a lot of my prior beliefs about the world and social systems ended up being altered.

I haven’t ended up with any diagnosed conditions, but it is inconvenient to have beliefs that are quite different from the societal default, even though in my case I do believe that my way of seeing morality is significantly more accurate on a technical basis than the consensus view. And I suspect this wouldn’t have happened without any marijuana.

I can definitely see how someone with a less analytically oriented mindset could end up going off in weird directions and writing that as a legitimate belief while in edit mode.

We definitely need studies to properly characterize what exactly this edit mode is, but I am not too skeptical about there being some kind of causal link between marijuana and going off the rails mentally, in some individuals and in some environmental conditions.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-23 21:18:51+00:00
Flock cameras are different, they take advantage of laws that have not kept pace with technology while being colocated and operated in public spaces, to where you are forced to live in a corporate surveillance state for Flock Group's enterprise value and potential shareholder returns. And so, destruction of the devices is all that is left available to them (if their jurisdiction opts to not remove them, as many have done [1]). Somewhat silly to blame humans who want privacy (arguably a human right [2]) just so the CEO of Flock can get wealthy (and YC can get liquidity) at IPO, no?

The human is doing what you would expect the human to do when faced with limited options in an operating environment that is not favorable to them. Crime has been trending down for some time [3], Flock cameras are a business driven on fear like Shotspotter, where the results are questionable at best and you're selling to the unsophisticated.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2026/02/17/nx-s1-5612825/flock-contracts...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy

[3] https://time.com/7357500/crime-homicide-rate-violent-propert... | https://archive.today/vMACL
by riku_iki | 2026-02-23 21:19:17+00:00
> them complete hypocrites in respect to how they got the model training data in the first place.

sure, hypocrisies is part of rules for big games: politics and business.

> Fraudulent accounts? They're just accounts.

they tell the story in blog post, that they don't allow claude in China, but those labs use some proxy services to access claude and mix traffic with regular users to hids its activities