MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eggy | 2026-02-06 14:03:38+00:00
I'm skeptical about banning design patterns just because people might overuse them. Growing up, I had to go to the theater to see movies, but that didn't make cliffhangers and sequels any less compelling. Now we binge entire Netflix series and that's fine, but short-form video needs government intervention?
The real question is: where do we draw the line between protecting people from manipulative design and respecting their ability to make their own choices? If we're worried about addictive patterns, those exist everywhere—streaming platforms, social feeds, gaming, even email notifications.
My concern isn't whether TikTok's format is uniquely dangerous. It's whether we trust adults to manage their own media consumption, or if we need regulatory guardrails for every compelling app. I'd rather see us focus on media literacy and transparency than constantly asking governments to protect us from ourselves.

You can't legislate intelligence...
by dweekly | 2026-02-06 14:04:26+00:00
I've begun an AI content disclosure working group at W3C if folks are interested in helping to craft a standard that allows websites to voluntarily disclose the degree to which AI was involved in creating all or part of the page. That would enable publishers to be compliant with this law as well as the EU AI Act's Article 50.

https://www.w3.org/community/ai-content-disclosure/

https://github.com/dweekly/ai-content-disclosure
by nickslaughter02 | 2026-02-06 14:04:50+00:00
> One of the most dangerous parts of the DSA is the massive power it hands to the commission, the EU’s international regulatory arm. While much of EU regulatory enforcement occurs at the national level, which is more accountable to voters, the DSA empowers the commission to investigate platforms and levy fines of up to 6% of their global annual revenue for each violation. In these investigations, the commission acts as both prosecutor and judge—accusing companies of noncompliance under a broad, ambiguous law, then deciding if companies’ answers are enough to disprove the allegations. An American court would strike down such a law as both unconstitutionally vague and a travesty of due process.
by thisislife2 | 2026-02-06 14:05:15+00:00
If true, the Americans have only themselves to blame - the START treaty between the US and Russia have expired because the Americans refused to renew it as Trump considers it a "badly negotiated deal". (Trump says new nuclear treaty needed to replace New START - https://www.dw.com/en/trump-says-new-nuclear-treaty-needed-t... ). Note that Putin has offered to extend the term of the treaty (probably because he really doesn't want to get into a new nuclear arms race with west, given the condition of Russian economy today). Trump meanwhile wants to include China too in the treaty, which, as the linked Newsweek article highlights, they are absolutely not interested in. (Possibly because they see it more as an intelligence gathering mission to find out the status of Chinese nuclear weapons, and they don't trust the west to adhere to its terms).
by troupo | 2026-02-06 14:05:50+00:00
> Otherwise it just seems like the EU waits for years and years until a company is a big enough player and then retroactively decides they’ve been breaking the law for years.

Lol. It's never like this.

These companies are given plenty of warnings and deadlines. After years and years of ignoring them these companies get slapped with a fine and start playing the victim.

BTW at this point DSA has been in effect for three years
by SlightlyLeftPad | 2026-02-06 14:06:18+00:00
You likely weren’t wired into it while your brain was developing.

There’s clear scientific evidence that these shorts trigger addiction-like behavior[1]. The detrimental effects on a kid’s brain development can be inferred[2]. A reasonable argument could made that it’s not so different from things like nicotine, alcohol or other drugs when it comes to child brain development. I believe these companies know this and willfully push it on kids anyway.

Edit: And I think it’s really telling that China has some of the strictest state-led anti-addiction and youth protection policies globally[3].

[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192...

[2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192...

[3] https://cjil.uchicago.edu/print-archive/kids-no-phones-dinne...
by bluGill | 2026-02-06 14:06:40+00:00
Working on a project for 18 months doesn't give you enough insight into it to know what is good or now about it. You need several more year before you can usefully figure out what changes will help get you to make milestones. (other than trivially obvious things, which might be the low handing fruit - but sometimes they are the better way to do things but the real problem makes that stand out instead).

Nothing will get you to hit every milestone. However you can make progress if you have years of experience in that project and the company is willing to invest in the needed time to make things better (they rarely are)
by Aurornis | 2026-02-06 14:06:47+00:00
The headline overstates what actually happened. Ironic that they’re using clickbait headlines on an article about a service using tricks to get people to engage with something.

They haven’t concluded anything yet. It’s early in the process and they’re opening the process of having TikTok engage and respond.

The article starts with a headline the makes it sound like the conclusion was already made, then the more you read the more it becomes clear that this is the early part of an investigation, not an actual decision.

> Now European Union regulators say those same features that made TikTok so successful are likely illegal.

> No timeline was given on when authorities will make a final decision in the case.
by JKCalhoun | 2026-02-06 14:06:47+00:00
None bulbs are kind of fascinating— in part due to their ability to act as relaxation oscillators [1]. I found an old electronics hobbyist magazine going into details [2] (Man, I love the linked site, BTW, so many awesome old electronic projects to pore over.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxation_oscillator

[2] (Starts page 21—as printed in the corners of the pages) https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Elementary-Electro...
by mayukh | 2026-02-06 14:06:50+00:00
Im with you... to some extent. I come from parts of the world where there is real material poverty and so this is tangible food on the table and a better life in some sense...at least for her family if not for her.

The question though is why that material poverty exists in so many parts of the world that were once pretty advanced civilizations.... Colonialism def had a part to play there. So the irony isn't lost that western powers exploited and extracted from civilizations and cultures that were different from theirs..all in the name of progress of course..and now those parts of the world are dependent on the breadcrumbs thrown their way by different western powers.
by benterix | 2026-02-06 14:07:30+00:00
I'd generalize it to "I assume all ads on major platforms are scam." This includes especially channels owned by Google and Meta.

I remember back in 2010 I had to wait a week and correct my ad before it was approved and now they basically stream all kinds of scams without checking. They do have quite a few people, they could build a better scam detection system but it's against their interests.
by rayiner | 2026-02-06 14:07:44+00:00
High skill immigration still brings cultural change. My parents came here from Bangladesh, and while they superficially assimilated, they’re still culturally Bangladeshi. They, like virtually all the Bangladeshis and Indians I know, still overvalue formal education, undervalue risk taking, elevate familial over civic obligation, don’t value economic modesty, believe elites should rule over “the common people,” etc. And this was despite spending 35 years almost completely isolated from other Bangladeshis. Culture is very deep and not easily changed.

Libertarians assign culture zero substantive value, viewing people as fungible economic actors. Like many libertarian assumptions, that one isn’t grounded in empirical observation.
by Terretta | 2026-02-06 14:08:15+00:00
This sounds brilliant, makes too much sense, and suggests a new kind of ad blocker to escalate and reflect retribution back.

Unrelated: Once upon a time it was believed ads should pair with content, not with users. It's been proven to still be more effective. Problem (for advertisers) is reach vs. cost of producing ads that content-align. In any case, Apple has enough reach they could easily bring ad sales in-house. Plenty TV shows, the show owner retains rights to ad slots partly to ensure no brand damage to show and partly to make more money per slot.
by sammyyyyyyy | 2026-02-06 14:08:23+00:00
Today, I'm releasing a new version of my side project: SoproTTS

A 135M parameter TTS model trained for ~$100 on 1 GPU, running ~20× real-time on a base MacBook M3 CPU.

v1.5 highlights (on CPU):

• 250 ms TTFA streaming latency

• 0.05 RTF (~20× real-time)

• Zero-shot voice cloning

• Smaller, faster, more stable

Still not perfect (OOD voices can be tricky, and there are still some artifacts), but a decent upgrade.

Repo: https://github.com/samuel-vitorino/sopro
by CuriouslyC | 2026-02-06 14:08:35+00:00
It's clear what's gonna play out. Chinese open source labs are slowly closing the gap, and as American frontier labs hit diminishing return on various tasks, the Chinese models are going to be good enough for the vast majority of use cases. This is going to strip American labs ability to do monopoly plays, and force them into open behavior.

The only place frontier labs will be able to profit take is niche models for specific purposes where they can control who has access to traces tightly. Any general pupose LLM with highly available traces is gonna get distilled down instantly.
by alpaylan | 2026-02-06 14:09:04+00:00
I think the point I wanted to make was that even if it was deterministic (which you can technically make it to be I guess?) you still shouldn’t live in a world where you’re guided by the “guesses” that the model makes when solidifying your intent into concrete code. Discounting hallucinations (I know this a is a big preconception, I’m trying to make the argument from a disadvantaged point again), I think you need a stronger argument than determinism in the discussion against someone who claims they can write in English, no reason for code anymore; which is what I tried to make here. I get your point that I might be taking the discussion to seriously though.
by matthewaveryusa | 2026-02-06 14:09:16+00:00
I have a rolodex of quirky contrarian facts I like to whip out at dinner parties and this one is definitely a new one I'm adding to the stack. I'm still shocked at the mental gymnastics needed to make it sound rational, but from an economist's perspective it's the "rational actor" argument. "Surely they must love the service, why else would someone settle for less?"
by c-linkage | 2026-02-06 14:09:25+00:00
That's crazy to me. At this point, I don't even know if the git commit log would be useful to me as a human.

Maybe it's just me, but I like to be able to do both incremental testing and integration testing as I develop. This means I would start with the lexer and parser and get them tested (separately and together) before moving on to generating and validating IR.

It looks like the AI is dumping an entire compiler in one commit. I'm not even sure where I would begin to look if I were doing a bug hunt.

YMMV. I've been a solo developer for too many years. Not that I avoided working on a team, but my teams have been so small that everything gets siloed pretty quickly. Maybe life is different when more than one person works on the same application.
by wduquette | 2026-02-06 14:09:46+00:00
Grady Booch said that any large system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a smaller system that worked. I've seen this cited as Gall's Law, from John Gall's 2012 book Systemantics, but I read it in a book by Booch back in the late 80's/early 90's. At that time the "waterfall model" was the conventional wisdom: to the extent possible, gather all the requirements, then do all the design, then do all the coding, then do all the testing, doing the minimum of rework at each step.

It didn't work, even for the "large" systems of that time: and Booch had worked on more than a few. The kind of "system" the OP is describing is vastly larger, and vastly more complex. Even if you could successfully apply the waterfall model to a system built over two or three years, you certainly can't for a system of systems built over 50 years: the needs of the enterprise are evolving, the software environment is evolving, the hardware platform is evolving.

What you can do, if you're willing to pay for it, is ruthlessly attack technical debt across your system of systems as a disciplined, on-going activity. Good luck with that.
by vee-kay | 2026-02-06 14:09:49+00:00
So you think "clinical trials of unproven vaccines on thousands of poor minor tribal girls, without consent of them and their parents" and "deaths and hospitalizations of many girls who were unsuspecting innocent victims of unproven vaccine as deceitful evil experiment" is "blowing things out of proportion".
Why? Because your fave billionaire bankrolled such evil unethical experiments?

So answer me honestly:
Did that same billionaire (Bill Gates) and his organisation (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) do the same exact trials in his home country (USA)? "clinical trials of unproven vaccines on thousands of poor minor girls, without consent of then and their parents"

If yes, show me the evidence, I'll wait.

[And oh do note that "FDA Approval" doesn't count as "proving a drug", because FDA are in the pockets of (funded by) Big Pharma.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is...]

If not, you are defending a child murderer.
by swores | 2026-02-06 14:10:13+00:00
> "It's also not a coincidence, IMO, that drug addicts are also called "users" since "user" implies a one way dependent relationship and that's what all the tech companies have been trying to create."

You're drawing a connection that's not there. It's indeed not a coincidence, but just because both situations fit the definition of the word "user" (and "to use").

People use drugs, whether they're addicted or whether they're taking a one-off dose given to them by a doctor. They are a customer in that situation if they're buying the drug from somebody (illegal dealer, pharmacy), but they're a user whether they paid or not.

Likewise, someone is a customer if Apple's if they paid for, or are expected to pay in the future, a device or service. But they're a user regardless of whether they're using a phone they bought, or a service that's being provided for free.

People can use services provided by charities, they can use skis on a mountain... there's absolutely no negative connotation to its general definition, it just happens that some things people use are bad and some are good.
by carlosjobim | 2026-02-06 14:10:15+00:00
I see things the same way as you do. Human behaviour and conflict can never be solved, and especially not by any kind of "system", which is just thin air of imagination.

The closest we can get is striving to elevate our cultural and spiritual level as individuals, family, friends, neighbours and strangers.

The entire power of the psychopaths in charge all stem from corrupting normal people, and the more that can be avoided, the less power they have.

But it is difficult, because they corrupt our strongest feelings: fear, greed, pride, laziness, desire, community.

Millions of young men have died in senseless wars because they didn't want to be seen as "cowards", they thought of their "honour". Who remembers them now?

Who even thinks about the thousands of young soldiers dying in the battlefields in Ukraine? Why is Trump the only leader who talks about their deaths?

Billions of people are paying taxes to support their psychopath rulers, because of simple fear. If everybody stopped tomorrow, the world would be liberated. But people are held in fear.
by thrance | 2026-02-06 14:10:18+00:00
Weak public servants mean strong private actors: that's what's currently eating the US republic from the inside. You have a few billionaires (Trump, Musk, Bezos, Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg...) able to buy their way into power and keeping the opposition down. Reducing taxation only makes these people even more powerful, and worsen the situation. You can't have democracy when some people are able to get this much richer and more powerful than the rest, it's as simple as that.
by addicted | 2026-02-06 14:10:23+00:00
> Corruption within private companies is irrelevant, as the main ones to suffer from it are usually shareholders.

And a few millions of people suffering because they're being misled into buying "wellness" solutions.

And a few hundreds of millions of people around the world suffering the effects of local pollution and clean water laws being skirted.

And a few billion folks who are gonna suffer the effects of climate change.

etc...

Other than the 6-7 billion humans who suffer due to private company corruption, it's basically only the shareholders.
by netdevphoenix | 2026-02-06 14:11:04+00:00
> I'm struggling to think of any scenario that doesn't also put most white collar professions out of work alongside me

You don't need to be out of a job to struggle. Just for your pay to remain the same (or lower), for your work conditions to degrade (you think jQuery spaguetti was a mess? good luck with AI spaguetti slop) or for competition to increase because now most of the devving involves tedious fixing of AI code and the actual programming heavy jobs are as fought for as dev roles at Google/Jane Street/etc.

Devving isn't going anywhere but just like you don't punch cards anymore, you shouldn't expect your role in the coming decades to be the same as the 90s-25s period.
by bluGill | 2026-02-06 14:11:15+00:00
2000 page specification documents are rarely useful (if ever?).

You need smaller documents - this is the core technology we are using. This is how one subsystem is designed - often this should be on a whiteboard because once you get into the implementation details you need to change the plan, but the planning was useful. This is how to use core parts of the system so new comers can start working quick.

You need disciple to accept that sometimes libfoo is the best way to solve a problem in isolation, but since libbar is used elsewhere and can solve the problem your local problem will use libbar despite making your local problem uglier. Have a small set of core technologies that everyone knows and uses is sometimes more valuable than using the best tool for the job - but only sometimes.
by emots_dev | 2026-02-06 14:11:28+00:00
Location: Brazil

Remote: Yes

Wiling to relocate: Open to discuss

Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript, React, Node.js and Next.js

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MTCaUpPaayV2_QoyQbkwu00OipA...

Email: me@emots.dev
by meltyness | 2026-02-06 14:11:39+00:00
You can try and squeeze a free speech absolutism story out of it, but the reality is that this has been a story since Microsoft got into cable news.

At that point it was a game of "I'm not slandering you" to chip away at every other valuation, that could have easily have just been called antitrust because they didn't build it. That was 1996-2005 and went completely unchecked.

This is similar but the stack was even cheaper, and closer to more people's faces.

Even if governments take no recourse, I don't see an issue with government using it's position to put a food pyramid in citizen's faces to say like, "this can be harmful." The church probably would have if this were long ago, except, instead of fire and brimstone, some sort of epic story of social isolation, permanent dissatisfaction, and self-imposed constraints, alien abduction, transformation into a pig by a wizard?

There's probably a lot of visceral fears that would be worthy analogs to the harms of the feed.

I don't think that this narrative has been explored enough, honestly. Corps keep building crap like this, even amazon has (had?) an influencer feed.

People who are in play/leisure should probably practice tolerating more choices than "express mild, momentary dissatisfaction and receive an instantaneous reward"... that's probably not a life everyone should be trained to live
by galsapir | 2026-02-06 14:11:40+00:00
opus 4.6 came out yesterday so I tried it and built two things. i think the model is smoother: picks up intent faster, better questions in interview-style flows, more willing to loop for 8+ minutes. the tools: an interview command for claude code with depth checkpoints, and a markdown annotator for actually reviewing what comes back instead of staying in the "fix it plz" loop.
by SigmundA | 2026-02-06 14:12:20+00:00
This is great, I have harped on PG's aversion to plan hints quite a bit in the past (and also lack of plan caching and reuse).

One of the biggest issues I run into operationally with relational db's is lack of plan stability and inability as a developer to tell it what I know is the right thing to do always in my application.

I use MS SQL Server more than PG currently and if it did not have plan hinting it would have been catastrophic for our customers.

Its still not perfect and over the years I am starting to think that having smart optimizers that use live statistics may be more of a detriment than help due to constantly fighting bad plan generation at typically the worst times (late at night in production). At least with compiler optimization it happens at build time and the results can be reasoned about and is stable. SQL is like some insane runtime JIT system like a javascript engine that de-optimizes but not deterministically based on the data in the system at the time.

Using various tricks and writing the query in slightly different ways while praying to the planner god to pick the correct plan is well infuriating due to lack of control over the system.

I much prefer systems like Linq or Kusto where it's still declarative but the pipeline execution order follows the order as written in the code. One of the most helpful and typical hints that solves issues is simply forcing join order and subquery / where order such that I want it to do this filter first then this other one second, then typically the optimizer picks the obviously correct indexes to use. Bad plans typically try and rewrite the order do much less selective thing first destroying performance. I as the developer normally know the correct order of operations for my applications use and write the query that way.
by roenxi | 2026-02-06 14:12:44+00:00
So just circling back to the Korea example, does this imply that in the Cold & Korean wars, South Korea was exploiting the US to become rich? What exactly does the word "exploit" mean to you here if the US had to cross an ocean and to get themselves exploited by some minor power?

> The US kind of exploits Korea, Taiwan for cheap labor.and goods.

So we had a period where Korea was exploiting the US, then the US somehow broke their chokehold and started exploiting them? And if the Koreans improve their standard of living that mean they've regained exploitation dominance over the US? Or is Korea exploiting someone like the Chinese (a nation that I, naively, feel is a bit stronger than Korea)? Or who are they exploiting?

I'm not sure how this plays out to be internally consistent. It seems like being wealthy has more to do with internal policy than external exploitation or even resource availability.