MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simon666 | 2026-02-17 17:42:33+00:00
> Leave that advice for corporate drone training.

Not clear how you linked what I said with "corporate drone training" since the thrust of my comment was about what would make good rhetoric for fighting the authoritarianism in the U.S.

> Not all sort of countercurrent has to follow the same academic advice to create harmless, defensive and ultimately forgettable prose.

I'll point out two things: One, there's an inconsistency in your characterization of my comment. First you said it was the language of corporate drone training, now you're saying it's academic speak.

Two, I didn't advocate "defensive" prose. I suggested abandoning language that implicitly frames the the movement again authoritarianism in the U.S. as in a defensive movement and thereby in a weaker position than it actually is. I argued "resist" is an example of this defensive language that should be abandoned. If you're against defensive prose, I'd think you too would be against defensive terms as well.

> We are drowning in sterile PR speech already, sometimes an earnest “fuck the system” resonates better with the intended audience.

Yes, indeed. My whole comment was about having language that is not defensively frame, but that is playing offense. In fact "fuck the system" could be such language. Although to note "the system" is vague and so has risk rhetorically because it easily allows an audience to think what you mean by "the system" is what they, the audience likes by "the system", which leads to the audience you're trying to find common cause with to reject your movement.
by sigmoid10 | 2026-02-17 17:42:33+00:00
Did you have problems with tiredness and concentrating? Especially after only getting very little sleep for an extended time? Or did you already consume a lot of meat? There are many factors here that could potentially make it not worth your while. As with all supplements, a good diet and lots of rest can make them little more than expensive pee. But not everyone can have a perfect diet and lots of sleep all the time. Creatine is a supplement for a very particular lifestyle.
by robviren | 2026-02-17 17:42:43+00:00
I have run into that a lot which is annoying. Even though all the code compiles because go is backwards compatible it all looks so much different. Same issue for python but in that case the API changes lead to actual breakage. For this reason I find go to be fairly great for codegen as the stability of the language is hard to compete with and the standard lib a powerful enough tool to support many many use cases.
by short_sells_poo | 2026-02-17 17:43:23+00:00
I actually came to this realization recently. I'm part of a modding community for a game, and we are seeing an influx of vibe coded mods. The one distinguishing feature of these is that they are entirely parasitic. They only take, they do not contribute.

In the past, new modders would often contribute to existing mods to get their feet wet and quite often they'd turn into maintainers when the original authors burnt out.

But vibe coders never do this. They basically unilaterally just take existing mods' source code, feed this into their LLM of choice and generate a derivative work. They don't contribute back anything, because they don't even try to understand what they are doing.

Their ideas might be novel, but they don't contribute in any way to the common good in terms of capabilities or infrastructure. It's becoming nigh impossible to police this, and I fear the endgame is a sea of AI generated slop which will inevitably implode once the truly innovative stuff dies and and people who actually do the work stop doing so.
by 72deluxe | 2026-02-17 17:43:25+00:00
Very clever and quite frightening. Well done.

Personally I like using LLMs for getting information (not chat) or solving problems, and I like the fact it's text and I can read it quicker than a normal conversation, and don't need to look for facial cues when ingesting the information provided (am I autistic?), but I might be a minority...

Some people might really find this useful.
by powerinthelines | 2026-02-17 17:43:39+00:00
Just published: Our paper on "Bell–CHSH Under Setting-Dependent Selection" offers critical insights into quantum loopholes and introduces a robust audit protocol. The sharp total-variation bounds we derived could lead to more reliable quantum experiments. Would love to hear thoughts on the implications for quantum computing and cryptography! #QuantumComputing #HackerNewsDiscussion #QuantumComputing #HackerNewsDiscussion
by lutusp | 2026-02-17 17:43:47+00:00
Readers should be aware the New Scientist regularly publishes articles that ... aren't remotely scientific. In this case, one clue is the presence of the word "mind," which, notwithstanding its colorful history, isn't accepted as a scientific topic.

The reason? The mind is not part of nature, and scientific theories must refer to some aspect of the natural world. If we were to accept the mind as science, then in fairness we would have to accept religion, philosophy and similar non-corporeal entities as science. So far we've resisted efforts to do that.

Some may object that psychology studies the mind, and experimental psychology is widely accepted as science. That's true -- there's plenty of science in psychology, some of it very good. But the many scientists in psychology study something that cannot itself be regarded as a basis for scientific theory.

This means psychology can do science, but it cannot be science. It's the same with astrology, a favorite undergraduate science topic by students learning statistical methods. But only the seriously confused will mistake an astrology study, however well-designed, for proof that astrology is a scientific theory.

People have the right to use the word "science" any way they please. So the only reality check is an educated observer. The fact that New Scientist has the title it does, and publishes the articles it does, stands as proof that there aren't nearly enough educated observers.
by dang | 2026-02-17 17:43:51+00:00
Yes, we need to do something about this and tomhow and I are talking about it - it's not clear yet what.

Raising the quality bar would likely cut down on quantity as a side effect, and that would be a nice solution. One idea that a user proposed is a review queue where experienced HN users would help new Show HN submitters craft their posts to be more interesting and fit HN's conventions more.
by angmarsbane | 2026-02-17 17:43:58+00:00
What if a degree could be seized? For example, what if bankruptcy courts could require a debtor to stop "representing themselves" as having a degree as a condition for discharging debt. If a court revoked a degree, it would effectively reset the graduate to the status of a dropout removing a significant amount of the degree's value (I know knowledge has its own value, but credentialism is a big part of a degree's value too).Universities already have the infrastructure to flag students. For example, many institutions withhold official transcripts or diplomas for academic fraud, moral infringements etc. Could this create enough of an incentive to pay back loans and not declare bankruptcy?
by fuse711 | 2026-02-17 17:44:03+00:00
> I feel like I got into programming when it was seen as low-status profession in the late 80s.

No, you didn't! If you are 45, then you were 5-10 years old in the late 80s. You might have started playing around with programming at that time, but you didn't "get into" it in any professional sense. I am willing to bet anything that you had no knowledge, let alone concept, of the professional status of programming at that time.
by hackingonempty | 2026-02-17 17:44:12+00:00
Humans are all subject to cognitive biases. Musicians are no different. That is why controlled testing is the only way to determine if these extraordinary instruments actually produce extradordinary sound.

Wouldn't you like to know if you could sound just as good on an ordinary instrument? I imagine a lot of money could be saved and and a lot of stress could be avoided.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-02-17 17:44:18+00:00
>Simply wrong and dishonest, yet so easy to google.

I am neither of those things. And Google will only bring up half-assed activist blogs. Go find a Westlaw or LexisNexis terminal, search there instead. No one's being sentenced to labor in US civilian courts (can't say for courts martial, maybe some jackasses committing crimes while in the army are sentenced to labor).

>I suppose you could consider 15 cents an hour “paid wages”,

If it is money, and the amount is above zero, then it is not my consideration that it's "paid wages", it is empirical fact. Words have objective meanings, except for leftists.
Show HN: WodBlock – the AI-powered workout timer
by nicotejera | 2026-02-17 17:44:42+00:00
Hi, I'm Nico. I do CF/functional workouts on a regular basis and use timers to measure my progress. These workouts usually involve a few different blocks, with different types of timers and rest in between. I couldn't find an app that would allow me to set it and forget it so I went ahead and built it myself. I soon realized entering the blocks by hand is a bit tedious, so I added coach Woddie, which allows the users to talk to set up the time and also to get recommendations for workouts of a specific duration, style, etc.
by mystraline | 2026-02-17 17:44:49+00:00
How boomerish of you to bring in the red scare and boogeyman of communism.

I'm looking at China pretty seriously, and for the evil "Chinese Communist Party", I'm over here seeing us languishing in basically every area.

Public transit is non-existent.

Power grid is fracturing at the seams.

Power generation is basically "gimmee coal and oil".

Robotics is what I watch China excel at, and the laughable Muskbots to do great pratfalls.

Great priced EV's are available everywhere, but in the USA.

So yeah, bring on Chinese style communism. I would love to be able to switch to electric, have great power and water grids, and high speed rail everywhere.
by zahlman | 2026-02-17 17:45:27+00:00
Going off search results, it seems to be a new coinage. I found mostly references to TFA, along with an (ironically obviously AI-written) guide with suggestions for getting LLMs to avoid the issue (just generic "traditional" advice for tuning their output, really). The guide was apparently published today, and I imagine that it's a deliberate response to TFA. But FWIW the term "semantic ablation" does seem to me like something that newer models could invent

At any rate, it seems to me like a reasonable label for what's described:

> Semantic ablation is the algorithmic erosion of high-entropy information. Technically, it is not a "bug" but a structural byproduct of greedy decoding and RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback).

> ...

> When an author uses AI for "polishing" a draft, they are not seeing improvement; they are witnessing semantic ablation.

The metaphor is very apt. Literal polishing is removal of outer layers. Compared to the near-synonym "erosion", "ablation" connotes a deliberate act (ordinarily I would say "conscious", but we are talking about LLMs here). Often, that which is removed is the nuance of near-synonyms (there is no pause to consider whether the author intended that nuance). I don't know if the "character" imparted by broader grammatical or structural choices can be called "semantic", but that also seems like a big part of what goes missing in the "LLM house style".

Bluntly: getting AI to "improve" writing, as a fully generic instruction, is naturally going to pull that writing towards how the AI writes by default. Because of course the AI's model of "writing quality" considers that style to be "the best"; that's why it uses it. (Even "consider" feels like anthropomorphizing too much; I feel like I'm hitting the limits of English expressiveness here.)
by jodytornado | 2026-02-17 17:45:34+00:00
Over the past ~24 months I’ve been building PROTOS_OS, a symbolic reasoning kernel that runs directly on bare metal — no host OS, no hypervisor, no cloud dependency.

It’s written in ~175K lines of no_std Rust. I built the whole thing solo.

The system includes its own boot path, page tables, interrupt handlers, and NVMe driver. It runs in long mode at ring-0. There’s no syscall boundary between the reasoning engine and hardware, and no scheduler preemption separating decision logic from execution.

The goal is bounded, auditable autonomy for safety-critical environments.

The reasoning engine is symbolic and refusal-first. Every conclusion must resolve to an explicitly grounded knowledge-base state. If it can’t, execution halts. Unsupported assertions don’t propagate into automated action.

There’s no probabilistic inference path in the decision layer. All reasoning is local and deterministic. Identical inputs produce byte-identical reasoning chains across reboots, and those chains are integrity-verified.

I model epistemic state explicitly. There are six discrete knowledge states mapped to corroboration level. Automation only executes at full corroboration; contested or degraded states block autonomous action.

So far I’ve run 358 validation tests across 25 phases. The validation footage is uncut, and I documented what each phase is intended to verify:

https://www.jou-labs.com/proof

Some limitations up front:

Capability is bounded by knowledge-base completeness.

The system isn’t formally verified.

Hardware trust is currently rooted in firmware.

The design intentionally excludes probabilistic inference in the decision layer.

I’m particularly interested in feedback around:

Formal verification pathways for systems like this

Deterministic autonomy models

How to make autonomous systems legally defensible
by cratermoon | 2026-02-17 17:45:35+00:00
What little money they get they immediately give back.
Inmates are charged anywhere from $0.06 to $0.25 per minute for phone calls.
Prisons spend less than $2/day per inmate on meals,
barely enough for sustenance,
so many inmates supplement by purchasing from the prison commissary.
If that's not bad enough,
prisons in 40 states are so-called pay-to-stay,
charging prisoners for their accommodations.
by BobaFloutist | 2026-02-17 17:45:58+00:00
It's entirely possible, but as I've approached and now passed 30 my improved patience, self-discipline, and self-knowledge has allowed me to pick up skills and wrap my head around things I bounced off of several times as a high-schooler, and the technical foundation I've built up in that time has helped me build more connections and understand things in more depth/from more angles.

I'm sure I'll slow down eventually, but I've always found that thinking fast is vastly overrated. I've always had an easy time understanding things quickly, but it still takes me time to understand them well.
by theorchid | 2026-02-17 17:46:02+00:00
I tried to write my first blog posts using AI. I created dozens of restrictions and rules so that it would produce human-like text, which I then edited. The text contained only my thoughts, but the AI formatted them. However, no matter how much I tried to prohibit constructions such as "It's not X, it's Y!", it still added them. I had to revise 10 drafts before I had the final version. When I stopped using AI for my texts, my productivity increased, and I can now complete an essay in 1-2 drafts, which is 5 times faster than when using AI.

This is strikingly different from development. In development, AI increases my productivity fivefold, but in texts, it slows me down.

I thought, maybe the problem is simply that I don't know how to write texts, but I do know how to develop?
But the thing is, AI development uses standard code, with recognized patterns, techniques, and architecture. It does what (almost) the best programmer in their field would do. And its code can be checked with linters and tests. It's verifiable work.

But AI is not yet capable of writing text the way a living person does. Because text cannot be verified.
by dang | 2026-02-17 17:46:26+00:00
p.s. I thought the OP's Show HN looked pretty good so I put it in the SCP (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308)

Show HN: Clawntown – An Evolving Crustacean Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023255
by croes | 2026-02-17 17:46:42+00:00
> If you give in and comply without a fight, are you actually a victim or are you actually a collaborator?

That is victim blaming. Heard the same from judges about rape victims.

> CBS is controlled by Ellison, which makes this look a lot like collaboration.

That changes this completely.
That isn’t being a coward, that’s just good old quid pro quo from billionaire buddies.
by throw7 | 2026-02-17 17:46:45+00:00
"fear"... come one now... the headline is hyperbolic.

The change here is that late night interviews are not "bona fied news" so equal time rule kicks in. CBS can have the on-the-air interview, but that equal time must be given to the opposition. I believe just an offer must be made (else i would think the opposition can "censor" the other side indirectly... i could be wrong here).

This is a change from the past where the fcc declared leno's interview with schwarzeneggerer a bona fide news interview (thus exempted from equal time).
by palata | 2026-02-17 17:47:39+00:00
> Though the situation is not that clear because there are other Android based phones that do not contain the Google layer but are still Android.

Which ones? I'm pretty sure that being "Android" means that you are certified by Google. You cannot sell an Android device if it's not certified by Google.

> It's become sort of a GNU/Linux kind of distinction where the "certified" Android is AOSP + Google

It depends on the context. If someone asks you "are you using Windows or Linux?", answering "I'm using GNU/Linux" is a way to show that you are that kind of people. But if someone asks you what userland you are using, then suddenly it makes sense to make a distinction between GNU and, say, busybox.

When someone asks me if I have and iPhone or Android, I say Android (even though I am running GrapheneOS). But when we're talking specifically about an alternative to Android that builds upon AOSP, then I think it makes sense to make a distinction. There is a whole (niche) market of AOSP-based alternatives to Android, that users choose specifically because they are not Android. When we talk about that, it makes sense to use the right words.
by epistasis | 2026-02-17 17:47:42+00:00
A big part of that is also the transfers between private insurance and Medicare, with health care providers accepting far lower rates for Medicare and then subsidizing operations with the rates charged to private insurers. Hospital administration is pretty hellish. As is administering payments!

Any functioning health care system is going to have a "band-aid" exactly ACA subsidies: make sure that those with the lowest incomes can still afford health care. Something in between Medicaid and the full cost. But as we rein in the costs and get healthcare to be a smaller fraction of GDP, the size of the band-aid can shrink.
What Improves YouTube CTR – Thumbnail Design or Distribution?
by Picknar | 2026-02-17 17:48:16+00:00
I’ve been analyzing YouTube thumbnails and CTR patterns while building a thumbnail extraction tool.

A few things I’ve observed:

High contrast and facial expressions correlate strongly with higher CTR.

Simplicity often outperforms detailed design.

Many high-performing thumbnails follow repeatable structural patterns.

But I’m curious:

From your experience, what moves the needle more?
Better thumbnail design? Or better distribution and targeting?

Would love to hear insights from creators and growth engineers.
by hangonhn | 2026-02-17 17:48:37+00:00
This is exactly how effective censorship works. For example, what most people don't understand about Chinese censorship is that the foundation of their system is that everything is attributable to someone eventually. So they start by targeting anonymity. Then when something they don't like is published and gains traction, the originating party and the major distributors are punished -- sometimes very publicly. The chilling effect is that people will learn to self censor. Oh and they keep the rules really vague so you always err on the side of caution.

CBS self censoring is basically the same thing.

The Chinese government can then say "What censorship?" or "It's rare" and now the FCC can do the same.

Playing whack-a-mole is not a good strategy for censorship. The chilling effect of self censorship is the winning strategy.
by wraptile | 2026-02-17 17:48:37+00:00
I think we have different undersrand of what greatness is. Being the best paperclip making machine is hardly meaningful. True greatness is in balance and virtue. A truly great person is well rounded and plays to true human strength- adaptability.

I'd be willing to bet everything I have that our society on average would be better at every single specialized thing if everyone was well rounded generalist with minor specialization instead of niche expert and it's incredibly easy to see why given the era of technology were living through right now. After all, all best in anything are finally defeated by a few years of collective technological progress.

Now what's the meaning of life if we have no treadmill to run on indefinitely? Well that's for each to figure out but what a sad meaning it would be if it was just to be slightly better at one niche activity for a very short while?
by nonamenoslogan | 2026-02-17 17:48:38+00:00
Kroger here has done that with their app. The loyalty card/phone number still works for many of the specials, but the "digital deals" thing by using the app and scanning a QR code on the price sticker gives BIGGER discounts. Its not the most convenient way to shop, but I am willing to save 15-20% more usually.
by AreShoesFeet000 | 2026-02-17 17:48:47+00:00
Because even though at work it looks like you’re tasked with creating use values, you’re only there as long as the use values you create can be exchanged in the market for a profit. So every humane drive to genuinely improve your work will clash with the external conditions of your existence within that setting. You’re not there to serve people, create beautiful things, solve problems, nu-uh. You’re there to keep capital flowing. It’s soulless.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-17 17:49:09+00:00
"Possible" and "easy" are two different things. 87% is of the people who applied for it, but they would be the ones most likely to have it granted because there is little reason to pay lawyers to file a form which is likely to be rejected. But the more you relax the requirements, the more people do it, which is of course the problem.
by Herring | 2026-02-17 17:49:10+00:00
Reminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance.

Support for such measures (eg welfare, healthcare, unionization, high taxes etc) is usually low among Americans.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/welfare-cuts...
by the_harpia_io | 2026-02-17 17:49:23+00:00
yeah I think we actually agree on the volume part, I'm not disputing that. my point is more about which group causes the bugs that make it to production. the garbage PRs from the illiterate crowd - those get caught. someone submits a PR where the error handling is clearly copy pasted from a chatbot and the variable names are arg1 arg2, that's an easy reject. but when your senior engineer submits something that looks clean because they prompted well and skimmed the output, that sails through review. I've literally seen a race condition introduced this way that sat in prod for weeks because the PR looked like something that person would write. so yeah the volume problem is real but I think it's a distraction from the harder problem