MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kccqzy | 2026-02-12 23:40:42+00:00
Disagree. A city is walkable because it is dense: daily destinations like your grocery store is close enough to walk to. But density implies congestion for cars because if everyone is in a car the roads will be too congested. This happens regardless of whether we have a human driver driving the car alone, or a human sitting inside a Waymo as a passenger. Congestion happens either way. Waymo does not solve the congestion problem, and therefore will not have any affect on the walkability of cities.
by gnat | 2026-02-12 23:40:42+00:00
We're in the brief window of time when AI's writing style is the weirdness. It's an artifact of the production process, like JPG blur, MP3 distortion, autotune's rigidity. And it didn't take long for those things to become normalized, in fact for them to become artifacts that people proudly adopted and embraced. DJs release tracks built from MP3s samples instead of waves. Autotune is famously a 'sound' that was once something to be subtly added and never confessed to, but which now genres and artists lean into rather than away from.

Long story short: I think emoji in headings and lists, em dashes, and the vile TED Talk paragraph structure of "long sentence with lots of words asking a question or introducing a possibility. followed by. short sentences. rebutting. or affirming." are here to stay. My money is that it gets normalized and embraced as "well of course that's how you best communicate because I see it everywhere."
by renato_shira | 2026-02-12 23:40:48+00:00
the spam/bot problem is real but i think the more subtle challenge is keeping quality high even with all real humans. most online discussions degrade not because of bots but because the incentive structure rewards reactive emotional responses over thoughtful ones.

what's interesting about polis's approach is that it surfaces agreement clusters instead of amplifying disagreement. most comment systems optimize for engagement, which in practice means conflict. if you optimize for "where do people actually agree despite appearing to disagree" you get a completely different dynamic.

the invite-tree idea someone mentioned below is interesting for the same reason: it's not just that it keeps bots out, it's that it creates social accountability. you're more thoughtful when your reputation is linked to the people you invited. same principle as why small communities tend to self-moderate better than large ones.
by bhickey | 2026-02-12 23:40:55+00:00
> Two thirds of new American homes are in some sort of community association, typically homeowners’ associations, but also co-ops, and condominium associations, and 30 percent of American homes overall. Buyers opt into these associations, pay annual fees in the thousands of dollars, and suffer their annoying restrictions and demands because they create amenities: quiet, cleanliness/tidiness, safety, or things like public pools and parks.

Uh... People "opt-in" to homeowners' associations because two-thirds of new builds impose them. Municipalities don't want to accept new roads, so developers can get things built through privatization.
by kevin_nisbet | 2026-02-12 23:41:40+00:00
Thanks for sharing, this was a great read. And it brought up some old memories, of fighting with telecom vendors about how their calculated their memory usage. At that time you only really got what the vendors gave you.

I think the most fun I had with the page cache was when one of the vendors "fixed" a bug where the memory calculation has previously excluded the page cache. These boxes were all network services, they didn't rely on the disk for anything more than holding the binaries, configuration, and logs. Where the fun comes in is the first time you grep through the logs, which fills the page cache, and sets off the alarms that the cellular network is about to die. ;)

Anyways, important concept to know and understand when it comes to how software performs when interacting with a host.
by XCSme | 2026-02-12 23:41:40+00:00
I currently do not automatically detect the agents themselves, and most of the bot traffic is ignored, but for the traffic that is not ignored it usually shows as a 0s session (so you can filter for all sessions that have a 0s replay, which are usually bots).

I am still torn whether I should actually track bots/AI traffic or simply drop it, maybe I will add a toggle in the setting, maybe it's at least interesting to see how much spam the website gets and coming from where.
Ask HN: How much PTO do you get?
by SunshineTheCat | 2026-02-12 23:41:42+00:00
I've worked for a number of different companies throughout the years and they all had fairly differing policies.

One was 20 days PTO plus a couple of weeks off for the holidays. Another was "unlimited" as long as you had your main projects on track/done/someone covered for you. Another is 3-4 days per year.

I know there's no "right" answer, I'm just trying to get a feel for what's "normal" these days.
by tux1968 | 2026-02-12 23:42:01+00:00
No, you're failing to acknowledge that your own assertion that intelligence can't be based on a non-dynamic, non-learning technology is just wrong. And not only wrong, proof to the contrary, is demonstrated by your very own existence. If you accept that you are at the very base of your tech stack, just atoms, then you simply must acknowledge that intelligence can be built on top of a non-learning, non-dynamic base technology.

All the rest is just hand waiving that it's "different". You're either atoms, or you're somehow atoms + extra magic. I'm assuming you're not going to claim that you're extra magic, in which case, your assertions are just demonstrably false, and predicated on unjustified claims about the nature of biology.
by pixl97 | 2026-02-12 23:42:11+00:00
>Why is it so easy for me to open the car door

Because this part of your brain has been optimized for hundreds of millions of years. It's been around a long ass time and takes an amazingly low amount of energy to do these things.

On the other hand the 'thinking' part of your brain, that is your higher intelligence is very new to evolution. It's expensive to run. It's problematic when giving birth. It's really slow with things like numbers, heck a tiny calculator and whip your butt in adding.

There's a term for this, but I can't think of it at the moment.
by legitster | 2026-02-12 23:42:27+00:00
https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...

> For the majority of adult users, we will be able to confirm your age group using information we already have. We use age prediction to determine, with high confidence, when a user is an adult. This allows many adults to access age-appropriate features without completing an explicit age check.

> Facial scans never leave your device. Discord and our vendor partners never receive it. IDs are used to get your age only and then deleted. Discord only receives your age — that’s it. Your identity is never associated with your account.

> We leverage an advanced machine learning model developed at Discord to predict whether a user falls into a particular age group based on patterns of user behavior and several other signals associated with their account on Discord. We only use these signals to assign users to an age group when our confidence level is high; when it isn't, users go through our standard age assurance flow to confirm their age. We do not use your message content in the age estimation model.

I work with corporate privacy all of the time, and there is actually something really interesting going on here. We're basically never allowed to claim legal compliance using heuristics or predictive models. Like, never ever. They demand a paper trail on everything, and telling our legal team that we are going to leave it to an algorithm on a user device would make them foam at the mouth.

They are basically trusting a piece of software to look at your face or ID in the same way that, like, a server at a restaurant would check before serving you alcohol.

I am curious to see if this kind of software compliance in the long run is even allowable by regulators.
by munksbeer | 2026-02-12 23:42:53+00:00
I would suggest it is a phenomenon that is well studied, and has many forms. I guess mostly identify preservation. If you dislike AI from the start, it is generally a very strongly emotional view. I don't mean there is no good reason behind it, I mean, it is deeply rooted in your psyche, very emotional.

People are incredibly unlikely to change those sort of views, regardless of evidence. So you find this interesting outcome where they both viscerally hate AI, but also deny that it is in any way as good as people claim.

That won't change with evidence until it is literally impossible not to change.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-12 23:43:00+00:00
> It's called the right to redress.

You don't have the right to complain to random websites without punishment. And nobody punished you. And "ability to redress" is something you still have. And there are no damages.

> It's a if you know you, you know.

You brought it up. Though it's pretty obvious you're a liar.
by dathinab | 2026-02-12 23:43:18+00:00
It is de-facto required and has been for many years.

Should in most RFCs also mean "do it as long as you don't have a very good technical reason not to do it". Like it's most times a "weak must". And in that case the only reason it isn't must is for backward compatibility with older mail system not used for sending automated mails.

And it is documented if you read any larger mail providers docs about "what to do that my automated mails don't get misclassified as spam". And spam rejection is a whole additional non-standardized layer on top of RFCs anyone working with mail should be aware of. In any decades old non centralized communication system without ever green standards having other "industry standard/de-factor" but not "standardized" requirements is pretty normal btw.
by lacker | 2026-02-12 23:43:43+00:00
It's funny to use "the market value of all taxi companies combined" as a proxy for how valuable the self-driving market will be, because that's exactly the reasoning that led people to underestimate Uber. The market value of all taxi companies combined was pretty small when Uber started.

That said, you could be right! Maybe self-driving will never be worth more than that. It's really hard to tell what business models will be like in the future. But this is the cultural mismatch, it seemed like GM leadership did not want to be in a risky business where they were betting billions of dollars on the success of self-driving. Clearly, to some people, that seemed like a really good bet to make. Time will tell.
by hadlock | 2026-02-12 23:44:03+00:00
If self driving cars replace humans, I can safely bike on the road again, not having to worry about some exhausted soccer-parent scrolling tiktok on their phone in their minivan as they use me as a speed bump. Also as a parent/part time family taxi driver, I wouldlove to get back the ~10 hours a week I spend staring at the road. Kids will be driven by waymo to Karate, Soccer, Violin lessons etc. I am ready for this future.
by RC_ITR | 2026-02-12 23:44:13+00:00
Here's the score for new AIME's, where we know the answers aren't in training.

https://matharena.ai/?view=problem&comp=aime--aime_2026

As for MMLU, is your assertion that these AI labs are not correcting for errors in these exams and then self-reporting scores less than 100%?

As implied by the video, wouldn't it then take 1 intern a week max to fix those errors and allow any AI lab to become the first to consistently 100% the MMLU? I can guarantee Moonshot, DeepSeek, or Alibaba would be all over the opportunity to do just that if it were a real problem.
by qwerpy | 2026-02-12 23:44:39+00:00
I hope this prods Tesla to up their game. I love my Teslas but if Waymo’s approach is shown to be truly better then I’d happily switch to a car that used their tech. For now I have no choice but to stick with the self-driving that’s available for personal cars. Hopefully Waymo works on licensing their tech for other manufacturers and expanding their geographical coverage.
by mark_l_watson | 2026-02-12 23:45:10+00:00
Off topic comment (sorry): when people bash "models that are not their favorite model" I often wonder if they have done the engineering work to properly use the other models. Different models and architectures often require very different engineering to properly use them. Also, I think it is fine and proper that different developers prefer different models. We are in early days and variety is great.
by bigyabai | 2026-02-12 23:45:14+00:00
> Meta’s Quest dominates the VR headset market with roughly 80% of unit sales. Vision Pro, at $3,499, was never going to compete on volume. But Google’s selective support felt less like a business decision and more like picking sides.

How is it "picking sides" if both YouTube Premium and advertising are entirely dependent on volume? Apple should be paying Google to support the Vision platform.
by siofra | 2026-02-12 23:45:30+00:00
This is exactly the problem I've been working on. We're building a fork of OpenClaw with credential isolation baked in — agents use fake tokens, a broker intercepts the request and injects the real credentials at the HTTP layer. The agent never sees the actual API key or secret.

The analogy that clicked for us was SQL prepared statements: you separate the query structure from the data. Same idea here — separate the command structure from the secrets.

It's called SEKS (Secure Execution Keyless System). Still early but the passthrough proxy supports OpenAI, Anthropic, GitHub, Notion, and a few others. Site is at seksbot.com and the code is at github.com/SEKSBot.
by troad | 2026-02-12 23:45:39+00:00
> In contrast, FP tends to be very, very dense, or even worse, have a density that's super inconsistent.

Depends on the FP. Pipes make things fairly legible. Example from Elixir:

def some_function(thing, doodad, doohickey) do
thing
|> foo(doodad)
|> bar()
|> baz(doohickey)
|> quux()
end

Also easy to debug -- break on any of those lines, or insert `|> IO.inspect()` at any point for good old fashioned print debugging.

Conversely, the non-FP non-pipe version of this would:

(a) be monstrous and difficult to segment: `quux(baz(bar(foo(thing, doodad)), doohickey))`,

(b) needlessly require OOP: `thing.swizzle(doodad).razzle().blorple(doohickey).dazzle()`, where the functions are methods defined on the preceding construct (or some parent construct, to god-knows-what generation), or

(c) require a lot of throw away variables (you get the picture).

I wish more languages had a pipe construct. It's very handy.

Interestingly, D is one of the few languages to have uniform function call syntax,[0] which makes the dot syntax effectively act as a pipe operator, requiring no OOP coupling for its use. Very neat!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_function_call_syntax
by dangus | 2026-02-12 23:45:53+00:00
The administrative state worked extremely well before Trump dismantled it.

Do you really want Congress to use legislation to make decisions about day to day technical rules and regulations that they quite obviously have no chance of understanding?

The whole point of the administrative state is to put non-political experts in charge of hashing out the specifics of rules and regulations while Congress legislates the broad process of making those rules.

An analogy to “making Congress do it” would be like if you had to raise every pull request you wrote to the board of directors of your company and check if they were okay with it. That is insanely inefficient and your board of directors would make the wrong decision most of the time. Instead, your company’s board of directors hires competent people and sets the general goals of the company and directs everyone to work toward them, trusting them with the implementation details and putting in places systems that ensure good performance is rewarded.

In the past we just trusted presidents to operate at some bare minimum level of basic good faith that they were non-traitor citizens who actually wanted this country to succeed, rather than being completely apathetic to the future and viewing American society purely as an asset to exploit.

The idea of a president who would make the country worse on purpose, going as far as making it worse for the wealthy in addition to common people, was unheard of.

But then we elected the New York Russian mafia’s real estate guy. And now we have found out that it’s very likely that his best friend’s sex trafficking operation was used to compile kompromat. The probability that the Russian intelligence apparatus is directly instructing Trump to sabotage the geopolitical position of the USA is astronomical. Part of that sabotage is almost certainly the dismantling of the administrative state.

Call it a conspiracy theory if you want, but we’ve crossed this conspiracy theory bridge many times with Donald Trump and he has never really given any of us a good reason to not trust the idea that “oh, it’s actually worse than we thought…”
by PonyoSunshine | 2026-02-12 23:46:10+00:00
I managed to make it through most of the UK, but I ran into an issue in Portsmouth. On the map, it appeared there were a whole bunch of shipping lane options, but when I tried both, one only had two cryptic options, and the other had none. Possibly, it would also be nice to have some sort of toggable pda that had an itinerary of all the tickets you have purchased, but haven't used yet.
by alex43578 | 2026-02-12 23:46:12+00:00
The original point that I was making was never purely a technical one. Performance, economics, convenience, and business trends all play a part in what I think will happen.

Even if LLM improvement slows, it’ll probably result in the same treadmill effect we see in other software.

Consider MS Office, Adobe Creative (Cloud), or just about any pro level software. The older versions aren’t really used, for various reasons, including performance, features, compatibility, etc. Why would LLMs, which seem to be on an even faster trajectory than conventional software, be any different? Users will want to continue upgrading, and in the case of AI, that’ll mean continuing to access the latest cloud model.

No doubt that someone can run gpt-oss-120b five years from now on device, but outside of privacy, why would they when you can get a faster, smarter answer (for free, likely) from a service?
by bigfatkitten | 2026-02-12 23:46:53+00:00
I’m all for AI integrated into applications where it makes sense; “remove background” buttons in image editors, for example, where the application uses AI to perform a useful function, without the user needing to care what happened under the hood.

Microsoft’s product managers however have no imagination, and so they insist on just mindlessly shoving obnoxious Copilot buttons everywhere.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-12 23:46:56+00:00
Lots to parse there. (1) the interesting politics that Lunarians would be possessive of volatiles on the moon and not want to spend them on refueling rockets or other exports but rather keep them in a circular economy (2) a believable mass driver doesn’t like like Acela the way you’d picture from Heinlein or O’Neill but looks more like the Paris Gun and goes up in one Starship load ex. the power supply and cooling system and (3) O’Neill never came up with a plausible catcher but I can picture a rotating cone that is in a sort of halo orbit slightly displaced from the L1 or L2 point where cargo is coming in close to the separatrix and not moving that fast.
by biosubterranean | 2026-02-12 23:47:17+00:00
Discord has always felt more personal than just voice comms over a game. The way you can see more and more about what your friends are doing - like what song on spotify or how long you're playing fortnite, and how many days in a row you're playing these games.

I feel like it has always been on this path to capture more and more of your data and personally link it to who you are.
by mullingitover | 2026-02-12 23:47:21+00:00
> It may be technically illegal to destroy a person's property but no judge is going to convict someone who breaks down a person's front door because they heard someone crying for help inside.

> we let judges judge.

The role of a judge is to interpret and apply the law, including applying existing legal standards and precedents. They are referees in the adversarial judicial system and it is unethical legal malpractice for them to apply their discretion in places where the law does not allow for it. Your hypothetical situation doesn't help your argument: if the judge in question is not applying the law as it is written and as the precedents dictate, they are violating their oath.
by gsf_emergency_6 | 2026-02-12 23:47:23+00:00
That sounds more like irony than sarcasm

But maybe that's my English-media tainted view of sarcasm as something quite unfunny (and also socially .. deficient?)

Different take from mine here tho :)

https://www.thescop.com/archive/2011/09/irony-vs-sarcasm

>Sarcasm happens when the observed irony does not extend to the speaker.
by echelon | 2026-02-12 23:47:56+00:00
You poor summer child.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEXINT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexpionage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vassall

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/27/asia/south-korea-telegram...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/nsa-tracking-online-po...

https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/echoing-dirty-pa...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/27/nsa-files-live...

It's such a successful strategy, even Bitcoin scammers use it:

https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/extortion-spam/25070/
Show HN: Light Lynx – polished light app and automation based on Zigbee2MQTT
by vanviegen | 2026-02-12 23:48:49+00:00
I had my house built without any wired light switches. Instead: a lot of Zigbee switches, sensors and bulbs.

To manage all that, I've been using Zigbee2MQTT, and I've slowly been growing initially just some simple automation scripts, and then later a smartphone PWA for day-to-day light control tasks.

I decided to share it with the world, so I invested a bit (well, that turned out to be a rather large understatement) of time to make it ready for public usage. It's grown in scope and polish a lot! I'm pretty happy with its current state.

So, without further ado, here's Light Lynx: https://lightlynx.eu/

Currently it's a free hosted service for a product I made Open Source. I may consider selling some additional feature in the future - AI integration seems to be trendy these days :-) Who knows.. But for now I'm just glad to have it out there!
by taurath | 2026-02-12 23:49:06+00:00
Yet people are en-mass switching from discord. Anonymity on the internet is important for a lot of reasons and is part of why it’s good. If hacker news required an ID to access who’s hiring and ask HN threads, people would move off.

Communities aren’t about the “platform features” they’re about the environment. As for profit CEO after CEO fail to recognize time after time
by themadturk | 2026-02-12 23:49:45+00:00
My father in law grew up in the Denver area. His father made his living as a handyman, and one of his regular customers was Molly Brown (the Titanic survivor known as "The Unsinkable Molly Brown"). Every week he would go to her house to exchange her radio battery, then bring the old battery back to his workshop for charging.
by RupertSalt | 2026-02-12 23:51:00+00:00
The latter.

They appear to be distinguished externally by the vehicle model and new sensor design. Currently, the production fleet in Phoenix and elsewhere consists of the Jaguar I-PACE.

The sixth generation would have been in testing phases -- closed tracks, simulations, and supervised driving. Now they're deploying on the Waymo Ojai (Zeekr) and Hyundai's IONIQ 5.

This is way more fun than I ever had in my Corolla.

From the company who got the world "go-goo"ing like infants, I, for one, can't wait to say "O HAI" to my new ride, or "Isn't it IONIQ, don't you think?"