MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kypro | 2026-02-18 21:15:55+00:00
The uncomfortable truth to most "the algorithm is biased" takes is that we humans are far more politically biased than the algorithms and we're probably 90% to blame.

I'm not saying there is no algorithmic bias, and I tend to agree the X algorithm has a slight conservative bias, but for the most part the owners of these sites care more about keeping your attention than trying to get you to vote a certain way. Therefore if you're naturally susceptible to cultural war stuff, and this is what grabs your attention, it's likely the algorithm will feed it.

But this is far more broad problem. These are the types of people who might have watched political biased cable news in the past, or read politically biased newspapers before that.
by mothballed | 2026-02-18 21:15:58+00:00
This is a crude but misguided attempt to bypass what I say which was "effective regulation." FGS only controls a minority of Somalia -- most of it is controlled by Somaliland, Puntland, Al-Shabaab, directly by xeer (customary) law, or only FGS hanging on by a thread.

Even in cases where FGS is in control -- even then xeer law on property rights and law often supersede written law of FGS. For instance, on occasion Somali population has straight up killed FGS soldiers/police and Somalian government has deferred to xeer courts and said "welp that is fine." Xeer law in particular has a very liberal free-market view on inter-familial entrepreneurism (although with a lot of intrafamilial and tribal dues which hinder it in practice) which is at odds with what outside law has tried to impose upon it.

NCA has rather limited influence in somalia, and definitely not of the sort that could break up a monopoly if one existed.
by zozbot234 | 2026-02-18 21:16:05+00:00
> So it makes sense that if your ethical problems are really more about discriminated humans and not about actual AI, you would side more with rejecting those arguments.

Does it really make sense? That would conversely imply that you should also feel free to view discriminated humans as more thing-like in order to more comfortably and resolutely dismiss, e.g. the AI agent's argument that it's being unfairly discriminated against. Isn't that rather dangerous?
by jmyeet | 2026-02-18 21:16:59+00:00
I blame Google for a lot of this. Why? Because they more than anyone else succedded in spreading the propaganda that "the algorithm" was like some unbiased even all-knowing black box with no human influence whatsoever. They did this for obvious self-serving reasons to defend how Google properties ranked in search results.

But now people seem to think newsfeeds, which increase the influence of "the algorithm", are just a result of engagement and (IMHO) nothing could be further from the truth.

Factually accurate and provable statements get labelled "misinformation" (either by human intervention or by other AI systems ostensibly created to fight misinformation) and thus get lower distribution. All while conspiracy theories get broad distribution.

Even ignoring "misinformation", certain platforms will label some content as "political" and other content as not when a "political" label often comes down to whether or not you agree with it.

One of the most laughable incidents of putting a thumb on the scale was when Grok started complaining about white genocide in South Africa in completely unrelated posts [1].

I predict a coming showdown over Section 230 about all this. Briefly, S230 establishes a distinction between being a publisher (eg a newspaper) and a platform (eg Twitter) and gave broad immunity from prosecution for the platform for user-generated content. This was, at the time (the 1990s), a good thing.

But now we have a third option: social media platforms have become de facto publishers while pretending to be platforms. How? Ranking algorithms, recommendations and newsfeeds.

Think about it this way: imagine you had a million people in an auditorium and you were taking audience questions. What if you only selected questions that were supportive of the government or a particular policy? Are you really a platform? Or are you selecting user questions to pretend something has broad consensus or to push a message compatible with the views of the "platform's" owner?

My stance is that if you, as a platform, actively suppresses and promotoes content based on politics (as IMHO they all do), you are a publisher not a platform in the Section 230 sense.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/14/elon-musk...
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-18 21:17:40+00:00
>Switching jobs from electrician to teacher to nurse

The point is not to do that ever.

Just gain one of the skills like that and plant it firmly on your resume, before trying anything more risky.

Like starting a business, which might not actually cost as much or take as long to get a license.

And with no further delay needed before any future pivots, when you might need quick alternatives most.

Even if you only go back to teaching for a while to regroup.
by prometheus76 | 2026-02-18 21:17:50+00:00
All you need to do is read the other comments on this very page and you will see that there are very strict cultural and political norms here too, but for some reason they are invisible as such to those who hold them. They consider their views to be "common knowledge" and "what any reasonable person believes" because they, too, live in curated bubbles.

Any comment that challenges mainstream science, materialism/physicalism, and leftist politics gets downvoted into oblivion here because HN is definitely not a haven for people who "pride themselves on intellectually challenging material."

TL;DR: It's an echo chamber here, too, but most people who hold the worldview that is enforced here often cannot see their own presuppositions, nor do they see that their views are political in nature.
by lwansbrough | 2026-02-18 21:18:32+00:00
I wonder if we should move beyond this messaging. It’s well known to the smart half of the population that climate change is happening. There is apparently some debate on the cause. But this point is mostly irrelevant, it is problem-oriented thinking. By keeping the conversation in the problem-realm you invite troglodytes into the conversation to insert their bullshit. Instead, if we move forward with “presumption of truth” solutions-based messaging, we can start to talk about what we’re going to do.

Climate control is something more people will be on board with compared to trying to have a conversation about climate science to a person who didn’t graduate high school.
by phkahler | 2026-02-18 21:18:50+00:00
>> My impression is that almost no one denies the warming itself, just the link to greenhouse gasses.

I fall in that category. My suspicion is that water vapor from air travel is by far the biggest contributor. I saw the blue skys after 9/11. I read the NASA guys that said daily temperature range increased measurably. I saw the blue skys again during Covid19.

I'm also of the opinion that anyone looking at historical data only going back 200,000 years or less is missing the larger picture. Sea levels are NOT at historic highs, we should expect them to rise further before receeding. We should expect glaciation again if we don't do anything, but speeding up warming IMHO is more likely to trigger glaciation that to "push through" whatever causes it and break the cycle (which would be a good thing).

So as a long-term thinker all this hype is just that. If you don't have a plan to end the glacier cycle you're just making a big deal out of a small change in time-scale due to reasons (CO2 vs H2O) that may well be the wrong ones.
by mrguyorama | 2026-02-18 21:18:56+00:00
You don't have to know. You can fully remove the few "minor" accidents (that a self driving car shouldn't be doing ever anyway) and the Tesla still comes out worse than a statistical bucket that includes a staggering number of people who are currently driving drunk or high or reading a book

The car cannot be drunk or high. It can't be sleepy. It can't be distracted. It can't be worse at driving than any of the other cars. It can't get road rage. So why is it running into a stationary object at 17mph?

Worse, it's very very easy to take a human that crashes a lot and say "You actually shouldn't be on the road anymore" or at least their insurance becomes expensive. The system in all of these cars is identical. If one is hitting parked objects at 17mph, they would almost all do it.
by almostdeadguy | 2026-02-18 21:19:23+00:00
At a minimum, every single who has been slandered, bullied, blackmailed, tricked, has suffered psychological damage, etc. as a result of a bot or chat interface should be entitled to damages from the company authoring the model. These should be processed extremely quickly, without a court appearance by any of the parties, as the problem is so blatantly obvious and widespread there's no reason to tie up the courts with this garbage or force claimants to seek representation.

Bots must advertise their model provider to every person they interact with, and platforms must restrict bots that do not or cannot abide by this. If they can't do this, the penalties must be severe.

There are many ways to put the externalities back on model providers, this is just the kernel of a suggestion for a path forward, but all the people pretending like this is impossible are just wrong.
by sonofhans | 2026-02-18 21:19:35+00:00
> Algorithms serve what Users engage with, if the Users were to no longer be interested in ragebait, clickbait, focused on thoughtful content -- the algorithms would adapt.

Algorithms have been adapted; they are successful at their goals. We’ve put some of the smartest people on the planet on this problem for the last 20 years.

Humans are notoriously over-sensitive to threats; we see them where they barely exist, and easily overreact. Modern clickbait excels at presenting mundane information as threatening. Of course this attracts more attention.

Also, loud noises attract more attention than soft noise. This doesn’t mean that humans prefer an environment full of loud noises.
by decodebytes | 2026-02-18 21:19:56+00:00
Hey HN

Luke here.

I wanted to introduce a project I have building for the past few weeks in response to events such as openclaw and the glaring security issues at hand. Prior to nono, I created Sigstore , a project used for software supply chain security now used by pypi, npm, brew and GitHub for release attestation and provence.

The problem: Protecting the host from the agent is largely solved, microVMs (kata, firecracker), containers , nono is more focused on protecting the environment or workspace itself - having said that, the isolation controls from the host are pretty solid as we use landlock and seatbelt.

nono uses OS-level isolation, atomic snapshots, and command auditing, secret / token protections (using keychain on linux and the secure enclave chip on apple)

Linux: Landlock LSM (kernel 5.13+) macOS: Seatbelt (sandbox_init) After sandbox + exec(), there's no syscall to expand permissions. The kernel says no.

Filesystem: read/write/allow per directory or file Network: block entirely (per-host filtering planned)

Atomic Rollbacks: Content-addressable storage — Files are stored by SHA-256 hash. Identical content is never duplicated, keeping storage efficient even across long sessions with many reverts — Every snapshot is committed to a Merkle tree. Tampering or corruption becomes more easily detectable

Audit trail of commands: nono automatically generates a cryptographically verifiable audit trail of every file change made by a sandboxed AI agent.

SDKs. We have two SDKs releasing soon using FFI bindings, python and typescript to allow uses to easily implement nono features into their own code base.

Technical details:

Written in Rust. Uses the landlock crate on Linux, raw FFI to sandbox_init() on macOS. Secrets via keyring crate. All paths canonicalized at grant time to prevent symlink escapes.

Landlock ABI v4+ gives us TCP port filtering. Older kernels fall back to full network allow/deny. macOS Seatbelt profiles are generated dynamically as Scheme-like DSL strings.

Limitations:

Network is binary, on or off - plans are in place to introduce IP filtering.

GitHub: https://github.com/always-further/nono
Docs: https://docs.nono.dev Site: https://noto.sh

Apache 2.0. Would love feedback!
by ericmay | 2026-02-18 21:20:11+00:00
> Fortunately your opinion doesn’t trump the Constitution or settled law.

Neither does yours? This is a nonsense claim.

> Anonymous (or at least pseudonymous) speech has been a feature of American discourse since before the Revolution.

You're just cherry-picking which ideas you like from the founders or early America. Slavery was also a feature of the United States. Whether we had something in the past or not isn't necessarily a good enough argument to keep doing it.

> Without anonymity, you lose whistleblowers,

We can figure out other ways to have whistleblowers without social media.

> effective criticism of the powerful from the weak, and “public interest” leaks like the Snowden revelations.

Snowden, who is living in Russia.

> You lose outlets where the abused can ask for help and advice in escaping bad situations.

The only way to do this is on social media, anonymously? If so, we have a much bigger problem. An emergency, even.

> You lose any/all criticism of employers current and past; who wants to hire a complainer?

I complain about past employers all the time. I don't think you lose this.

> You silence people who are afraid to give their opinion because of their employer or parent.

I don't think so. And both left and right political blocks have gotten plenty of people fired, even those who post anonymously.
Show HN: Zenhub Analytics for Multiple Workspaces
by gsauzande | 2026-02-18 21:20:12+00:00
I am one of those developers that worked for a startup and ended up doing pretty much every job other than cleaning the actual office and one of those jobs was to be the Scrum Master for 3 teams at the same time.

We were using Zenhub over there and I loved it, but the analytics across workspaces is simply not there so I built zenstat to help with that.

I'd love to get some feedback from other Scrum Masters or PM or any other Zenhub enthusiast.
by malfist | 2026-02-18 21:20:13+00:00
I'd bet they probably have some abnormality too, but I don't think I'd expect them to have more issues. There's a lot talked about people getting injured in the gym, but people get injured a lot outside the gym, just for some reason people really fixate on in the gym injuries.

There's lots of research that indicates that frequent strength training significantly reduces your risk of injury in day to day activities, especially later in life. If I can deadlift 500 pounds, I'm not going to get injured lifting 100 pounds, but your general population could. If I've got 3 inches of muscle around my hips and increased bone density from resistance training, I'm not going to break my hip when I trip.

"Strong people are harder to kill" -Mark Rippetoe
by daveguy | 2026-02-18 21:20:28+00:00
Less than you might think.

He didn't win a majority of the vote, just a plurality. And less than 2 of 3 eligible voters actually voted. So he got about 30% of the eligible population to vote for "yay grievance hate politics!" Which is way more than it should be, but a relatively small minority compared to the voter response after all ambiguity about the hate disappeared. This is why there's been a 20+ point swing in special election outcomes since Trump started implementing all the incompetent corrupt racist asshatery.
by BeetleB | 2026-02-18 21:20:32+00:00
Again, I'm not disagreeing with the harm.

But I think drawing the line of banning AI bots is highly convenient. If you want to solve the problem, disallow anonymity.

Of course, there are (very few) positive use cases for online anonymity, but to quote you: "I don't care about the positive uses." The damage it did is significantly greater than the positives.

At least with LLMs (as a whole, not as bots), the positives likely outnumber the negatives significantly. That cannot be said about online anonymity.
by harmmonica | 2026-02-18 21:20:44+00:00
What form would those funds take? I would agree that the government could pull one lever that would cause Tesla's sales to spike and that would be reintroducing the ev credit. To really juice them they'd have to reintroduce and increase it. I don't think there's another lever they have at their disposal that would do anything material. The government buying a bunch of vehicles for a single or multiple departments wouldn't move the needle. Basically you have to incentivize the masses to purchase. Of course none of that would happen with the current admin and congress. EV's are anathema to the platform.

As an aside, the situation at Tesla sure is getting stranger. I don't know if it was yesterday or earlier in the week, but Elon saying that at least one Cybercab will be sold to a "consumer" before the end of '26 for under $30k makes no sense (yeah yeah promises promises). But wasn't the idea that Tesla would control the fleet? Why would they sell a person a Cybercab to operate as a taxi? That would mean that there's profit to be had by that buyer and so why the heck wouldn't Tesla just keep that profit for itself and run the entire operation? Some kind of balance sheet gimmick? Offloading the insurance risk to someone else?

Maybe someone reading this long-ass reply will clue me in. And I get it the majority of the folks these days think it's all vaporware, but doesn't the vaporware at least have to make some sense?
by SetTheorist | 2026-02-18 21:20:45+00:00
There is no general rule that something created by an X is therefore an X.
(I have difficulty in even understanding the state of mind that would assert such a claim.)

My printer prints out documents. Those documents are not printers.

My cat produces hair-balls on the carpet. Those hairballs are not cats.

A human creating an artifact does not make that artifact a human.
by hn_acc1 | 2026-02-18 21:20:51+00:00
My mom altered clothing when I was younger - and she darned socks too. My M-I-L still sews the occasional seam for pants that are too long and were cut for my wife or daughters.

But me? I buy a pair of $30 jeans at Costco. If they don't fit great, I buy a different pair of $30 jeans. I don't spend $50 to have them altered, or take it to a laundrette. If it can't be washed in our home washer/dryer, I don't buy it. And these days, when a sock gets a hole? I throw it away.
Reacting to news is basically a cheat code for LinkedIn
by janekfollendorf | 2026-02-18 21:21:51+00:00
Replying fast to breaking news is one of the most reliable traffic spikes I've found. The problem is it requires constant monitoring and you have to drop everything to act on it.

Built a tool (JackSEO) that watches news, finds what's relevant to your niche, and drafts SEO/GEO-optimized articles and social posts automatically. By the time you see it, it's ready to publish.

Would love feedback from anyone who's doing content marketing.
by wtallis | 2026-02-18 21:22:58+00:00
I don't think hardware random number generators are bullshit, but it's easy to overstate their importance. Outside of cryptography, there aren't a whole lot of cases that truly require that much care in how random numbers are generated. For the kind of examples the article opens with (web page A/B testing, clinical trials, etc.) you'll never have sample sizes large enough to justify worrying about the difference between a half-decent PRNG and a "true" random number generator.
by fuzzfactor | 2026-02-18 21:23:18+00:00
Almost typed the same thing in different words at the same time :)

Your above point can not be upvoted enough.

You do have to wonder what some people are thinking ;)

Good message from Taleb too, he may not be the most likeable or agreeable person in the world, but he is quite brilliant at synthesizing logical meaning from the inputs he does have.
by youarentrightjr | 2026-02-18 21:23:47+00:00
> That is a completely made up bar that is impossible to test for, and can never be met.

My own bar being a self driving car better than me is made up and impossible to test for?

Stop trying to force shitty self driving implementations down other's throats. If they were good and useful, people would voluntarily use them.

> Self driving cars need to be better than the average human

And Teslas are obviously not, to everyone except the terminally brainwashed. Two more weeks until it works though, right?
by i_am_jl | 2026-02-18 21:24:45+00:00
I don't believe those numbers will ever come close to converging, let alone bounty prices surpassing black market prices.

It seems like these vulnerabilities will always be more valuable to people who can guarantee that their use will generate a return than to people who will use them to prevent a theoretical loss.

Beyond that, selling zero-days is a seller's market where sellers can set prices and court many buyers, but bug bounties are a buyer's market where there is only one buyer and pricing is opaque and dictated by the buyer.

So why would anyone ever take a bounty instead of selling on the black market? Risk! You might get arrested or scammed selling an exploit on the black market, black market buyers know that, so they price it in to offers.
by BeetleB | 2026-02-18 21:24:47+00:00
> should be entitled to damages from the company authoring the model.

1. How will you know it's a bot?

2. How will you know the model?

Do you want to target the model authors or the LLM providers? If company X is serving an LLM created by academic researchers at University Y, will you go after Y or X? Or both?

> These should be processed extremely quickly, without a court appearance by any of the parties, as the problem is so blatantly obvious and widespread there's no reason to tie up the courts with this garbage or force claimants to seek representation.

Ouch. Throw due process out the door!

> Bots must advertise their model provider to every person they interact with, and platforms must restrict bots that do not or cannot abide by this.

This is more reasonable, but for the fact that the bots can simply state the wrong model, or change it daily.

Unfortunately, the simple reason your proposal will fail is that if country X does it, they'll be left far behind country Y that doesn't. It's national suicide to regulate in this fashion.
by kogus | 2026-02-18 21:24:50+00:00
I have very fond memories of working with Delphi 5 and 2005 in the early 2000s. Both the language and IDE were a real pleasure to work with, and they were head and shoulders better than anything from Microsoft at that time. The community was small but enthusiastic and supportive as well.

It would be hard to justify Delphi in a new project today - not because of the tooling or language, but because of the prohibitive license costs.
by neodymiumphish | 2026-02-18 21:24:54+00:00
Yep, I’m in this camp. My OC instance runs on an old MacBook with no access to my personal accounts, except my “family appointments” calendar and an API key I created for it for a service I self-host. I interact with a Discord bot to chat with it, and it does some things on schedules and other things when asked.

It’s a great tool if you can think of things you regularly want someone/thing else to do for you.
by SecretDreams | 2026-02-18 21:25:11+00:00
I like voting (up and down) but I also agree with your take. Reddit salts the votes, but maybe the solution is to allocate a certain amount of reasonable votes (up or down) total that a user can use weekly. Make it so when you are voting, it's much more meaningful and truely reflect an opinion you either really agree with or really do not agree with.

Ultimately, I think it comes back to people value their online persona way too much and this is something we've intentionally marched towards.