MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by armadsen | 2026-02-23 03:55:51+00:00
Seriously. My son and I are about 3/4ths through Fellowship of the Ring after he loved The Hobbit. We’ve read all of Narnia, Wildwood, and many other (long!) books and book series together. Either his mom or I have read to him very nearly every single day of his life. I know he loves it, and it has made him love reading on his own too.

I have never once felt there weren’t enough good stories - written by humans - out there for us. Quite the opposite: there are more than we could ever get through in a hundred lifetimes. There’s no way an LLM can outdo Tolkien.
by Gormo | 2026-02-23 03:56:17+00:00
> I have to point out that your original post is technically correct because you specified "medical expertise" as the focus of your argument and psychologists aren't MDs.

It's also correct because "harm" is a normative concept, which expertise per se doesn't apply to.

> It is possible to consider people's subjective experiences in tandem with the consequences of those experiences and make an empirical judgement.

Well, no, not really. First, you have to be aware of their subjective experiences, and not just speculating or projecting your own assumptions on to them, then you have to know what criteria to apply to the evaluation of the consequences of those experiences, which can only come from the particular values that they subscribe to, irrespective of your own. And "empirical judgment" is a dubious concept, since, again, judgment is inherently normative.

> If we found that people began committing suicide after using social media, would you suggest this can't be studied,

Anything can be studied, but the extent to which the conclusions of study can be validated for something like this is quite limited. First, you'd be studying something that is a drastic outlier -- only a tiny proportion of the population even attempts suicide for any reason at all.

Second, you're dealing with something with complex causality, much of which can't be directly observed or measured except by the subject themselves, so there's no way to eliminate confounding factors or construct control groups.

Finally, with so many ideological and pecuniary interests attached to a topic like this, it would be difficult to conduct such a study in an institutional setting without it being potentially skewed by bias, and the aforementioned difficulty in setting up controlled experiments would make it difficult for replication to factor out bias.

So I don't think I'd rely on formal studies for this sort of thing, especially when the motivation is to rationalize normative conclusions rather than understand the world as it is.

> and that a government wouldn't have good reason to want to legislate against social media in these circumstances?

No, I don't think that would be a sufficient reason. Even if it were happening, not everything is the government's responsibility, and not every social problem has a political solution.

> Replace suicide with depression, reduced quality of life, addiction. Whatever you like. If it holds in the suicide case, it holds in all of them.

I don't think it holds in any of them.
by anigbrowl | 2026-02-23 03:57:26+00:00
Why I built it: I wanted a safe, ad-free environment where my kids could see themselves as the heroes of their own adventures.

This is what play is for. I don't think trying to maximize engagement by training them to see themselves at the center of events is a recipe for healthy mental development. If you're not finding that standard bedtime stories are sufficiently engaging...try different ones? It's not like there's a shortage of children's books, maybe your kids are in the mood for more advanced reading material.

one of the key benefits of reading non-personalized stories is developing an ability to appreciate and mentally model things that are happening to other people, albeit fictional ones. The reader not being in control of the story (and indeed feeling powerless to change the outcome) means they're forced to engage with the possibility of things not turning out as desired.

If you want to help them capture their unique imagination, buy them a tape recorder. Writing and drawing their own books at that age is a tall order because it's such a time-consuming process, but chattering isn't a problem, and they'll probably figure out how to iterate on things by themselves.
by px1999 | 2026-02-23 03:58:01+00:00
Tools exist to be an energy/effort multiplier, so it's pretty intuitive that increasing that multiplier will make it easier to get more done.

In practice it's pretty difficult to find the balance between yak shaving and piling in unnecessary manual labour by just trying to do the work with existing (possibly poorly fitting) tools.

If you're planning to stick with your current tools for a long time, each 1% improvement compounds massively over time, so that balance is probably much closer to yak shaving than most people might realise.
by avaer | 2026-02-23 03:58:02+00:00
I skimmed this; it isn't terrible content (even though many parts are clearly AI written).

But I don't understand the purpose of this book. Is it an educational material, a speculative fiction, or an essay trying to convince the reader of something?

Because if you wanted any of these things, you could literally skip the book and go straight to the AI that will give it to you, tailored for your project.

This isn't a criticism, more a philosophical question I'm asking myself after 25 years of coding.
by MichaelRo | 2026-02-23 03:58:04+00:00
I dunno, maybe it differs by country/location but my perception is that school was never capable to educate beyond some basic mediocrity level. Mostly it's an institution imposed by the state to process the children while parents are working. And the way to actually teach your kids something never really changed since the times of the elite few versus the mass of peasants: private tutoring.

Now it's true that with basic access to education for masses, a few more poor smart kids that would otherwise become fishmongers or something, now have the chance to raise above their starting condition. But the reality never changed and never will: the vast majority of people are not very bright. And making it easier for them to be dumb and get away with it doesn't help (smartphones and now AI).
by JohnMatthias | 2026-02-23 03:58:56+00:00
Everyone and their Uncle Bob have been scrambling to leverage LLM Agents for Process/Task/Message Scheduling and Orchestration with Durable Execution. They have been worshiping Peter Steinberger as their champion and the God of LLM Agents. While Temporal.IO has quietly partnered with Apple to Schedule and Orchestrate all of their services with Durable Execution. It's funny how everyone assumes that using Inference for Deterministic Tasks like Mathematics and Compiler Optimization is a good idea. Reality doesn't agree. Wasting Electricity and Precious Minerals for Inference Compute is Reality. Compilers and Schedulers are deterministic, your LLM is not. You cannot infer Mathematics and assume the correct answer, we have Calculators and Compilers for a reason. Scheduling Algorithms have existed since the 1950's just like Inference Algorithms. Let me introduce you to a few of my friends: Make, Task, Dagu, Windmill, Rivet, Inngest, OVH/uTask, OVH/cds, Restate, Woodpecker CI, Erlang BEAM VM, Gradle, Zig Build, Cargo, Linux Package Managers, Bazel... Shall I go on? Keep your AGENTS.MD, we have Temporal.IO at home. Thank you for your Contributions to Open Source Maxim Fateev. Betting the US Economy on LLM Chat Bots was a bad idea my beautiful friends. Remember Elizabeth Holmes, Mortgage Backed Securities? Scam Altman must be laughing from his Tower of Evil right now...
by water-data-dude | 2026-02-23 03:59:56+00:00
That's the setting for The Electric Church, by Jeff Somers. There's a very small capital class who own all the automated manufacturing plants, etc., and they live in obscene grandeur. Then there's the rest of the world which is basically a slum, brutally oppressed by the police force to keep them from rising up. The population gets everything they need to survive, but it's all fairly shitty - the technology for a post scarcity society exists in the setting, it's just hoarded by the most obscenely wealthy.

Pretty decent sci-fi, just pretend he didn't write any sequels tho.
by rvrsflnane | 2026-02-23 04:00:08+00:00
The "reverse Flynn effect" is something that's been observed in a small number of Western countries that do IQ tests as part of their military conscription.

But for example, in Denmark, when plotting measured IQ against first name, we observe that there is cultural effect, that would explain that the "reverse Flynn effect" is simply an averaging down, caused by the import of migrants from lower IQ regions.
The "reverse Flynn effect" is not observed in Singapore, for example, which has maintained consistent high IQ over many years.

https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2019/06/article-out-first-names...
by npunt | 2026-02-23 04:00:09+00:00
Eh, disagree. If kids can't read, write, or do math, they won't be able to adapt to whatever is relevant in their adult lives. These are the foundations of every other skill, and schools teach these and are assessed by them.

And if they don't need to read, write, or do math in their adult lives, it's likely something has gone horribly wrong for the human race and the only way out is to learn to read, write, and do math.
by MilkMp | 2026-02-23 04:00:23+00:00
Hi there, I have located the root cause and will be fixing the issue:

Root cause: CIA uses FIPS codes (CanonicalCode), which differ from ISO Alpha-2 for many countries. Templates and SQL queries prioritized CanonicalCode over ISOAlpha2, so URL codes like /archive/2025/AU matched the wrong country.

Australia (AU) -> American Samoa (AS = CIA FIPS for Australia)
Singapore (SG) -> Senegal (SG = CIA FIPS for Senegal)
Germany (DE) -> Gambia (GM = CIA FIPS for Germany)
by ajithmanmu | 2026-02-23 04:01:19+00:00
I built this to understand how billing platforms like Lago and Metronome work internally — not just calling Stripe's API, but building the metering and pricing layer.

Most interesting parts:

- Deduplication with Redis SET NX (atomic, no distributed locks)
- Sliding window rate limiting with sorted sets (avoids fixed-window boundary problem)
- Two-layer fraud detection: Z-score for volume spikes + cosine similarity on 24-dimensional hourly vectors for pattern anomalies. A stolen API key from a different timezone has normal volume but an inverted hourly pattern — Z-score misses it, cosine similarity drops to ~0.28
- Tiered pricing in integer cents (never float math in billing)

Runs locally with Docker Compose. Demo simulates 30 days of usage then injects fraud.

Writeup: https://dev.to/ajithmanmu/i-built-a-usage-based-billing-engi...

Happy to answer questions about any design decisions.
by gck1 | 2026-02-23 04:01:58+00:00
This sounds very plausible. OpenAI has hoarded 40% of world's RAM supply, which they likely have no use for other than to starve competition. They (or other competitors) could be utilizing the same strategy for other hardware.

Which is worrying, because if this continues, and if Google, who has GCP is struggling to serve requests, there's no telling what's going to happen with services like Hetzner etc.
by goodmythical | 2026-02-23 04:02:08+00:00
I was honestly just thinking the same thing. Like...damn, why is OP advertising such expensive gear to people who might want to just try something?

You can do exactly the same thing with a mead spiral bound and a ticonderoga pencil...

Or text notes on an existing device

Or audio notes on an existing device

Or for the price OP is advertising, get a whole drawing tablet to plug in

Or for the price OP is advertising, get a used android tablet

There are both cheaper options and, to me, better options that are also cheaper as they offer search, cross linking, algorithmic analysis (what have I been writing about lately, what have I stopped writing about), and easy duplication so that I don't lose my notes.

Personally, I use an obisidan vault in a cloud folder...easy duplication on any device, easy review, easy search, easy cross reference...

To do what I do on with my notes with a pen and paper, I'd be spending half of my time indexing and notating rather than producing results driven by the notes...which, I guess is valid if the entire goal is spending time with your notes, but I just personally feel like I've got to get something out of the process other than staring at shit I used to think about.

For instance, on paper, I'd have to underline or otherwise mark key words and maintain a live index in order to find: what's been worrying me lately, what was that dream that one night, what's my second most common topic of thought...and a million other things. Whereas in reviewing my obsidian vault all of those things are at most 30 seconds away, and I didn't have to do any work on top of writing the notes to get that functionality.
by slicktux | 2026-02-23 04:02:23+00:00
I went to schools that had the latest tech for computer labs. Apple Macintosh computers…the colorful ones. Anyway, we had the latest but I did not learn what I wanted to; which was how a computer works. Instead class was just about browsing within the walled garden of the operating system and making videos and typing.

Just because one has the latest tech dos not mean they’ll learn. I learned more on my own with used computers then I did in school. I was able to break things and fix them.
by parpfish | 2026-02-23 04:02:40+00:00
> It’s about staring blankly at the buzzing white box, waiting for the four dreadful beeps that give you permission to eat.

I thought it was near universal that everybody staring at the microwave was engaged in a game of chicken where you try to open the door as close to zero as possible while preventing the beeps.

The beeps must not sound.

I have no idea why it’s important to prevent the beeps, but it feels like a deep primal compulsion. Our ancestors must have learned that the beeps attracted sabretooth tigers or something
by kristianp | 2026-02-23 04:02:51+00:00
I think this part of the headline is more important: "The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents".

Tablets and Laptops are such complete entertainment devices these days, I don't know how locked-down these devices are, but there's often ways to access games and videos and even phone apps. And as the article says, social media and gaming apps are made to be addictive as possible. Just look at the teenagers who walk around looking only at their phones. Its not surprising kids aren't performing as well. Now for high-schoolers, most kids get ChatGPT to write all their assignments, so there's another skill thats going to wither [1].

[1] source: partner is a high school educator.
by remarkEon | 2026-02-23 04:02:56+00:00
You are sort of giving away the game here.

You are acknowledging that technology, specifically the smartphone, is bad for learning environments. This is a statement that extends beyond the classroom, because why would a smartphone be bad in the classroom for learning but not bad for learning when they're doing homework outside the classroom?

I'm old enough to have straddled the analog to digital transition. This likely results in a higher amount of internalized skepticism about technology than those who grew up as digital natives. With that out of the way, I think your lockdown plan is a bit misguided. We should not lockdown technology like this, we should ban it for learning. I know that may sound insane, but every interaction I have with younger people who grew up as digital natives shows they have a weaker and weaker grasp of everything from the underlying theory of whatever technical issue we are talking about to the basic ability to communicate their thoughts in writing. This is only going to get worse with AI.

There's a reality here in 5-10 years from now where there's a bunch of olds who know roughly how things work, and the following generation who has no clue and not only has no impetus to learn, but no ability. That's the difference between the prior "old man yells at cloud eras". At least in prior instances the follow-on generation could actually learn the job.
by JohnMatthias | 2026-02-23 04:03:07+00:00
Everyone and their Uncle Bob have been scrambling to leverage LLM Agents for Process/Task/Message Scheduling and Orchestration with Durable Execution. They have been worshiping Peter Steinberger as their champion and the God of LLM Agents. While Temporal.IO has quietly partnered with Apple to Schedule and Orchestrate all of their services with Durable Execution. It's funny how everyone assumes that using Inference for Deterministic Tasks like Mathematics and Compiler Optimization is a good idea. Reality doesn't agree. Wasting Electricity and Precious Minerals for Inference Compute is Reality. Compilers and Schedulers are deterministic, your LLM is not. You cannot infer Mathematics and assume the correct answer, we have Calculators and Compilers for a reason. Scheduling Algorithms have existed since the 1950's just like Inference Algorithms. Let me introduce you to a few of my friends: Make, Task, Dagu, Windmill, Rivet, Inngest, OVH/uTask, OVH/cds, Restate, Woodpecker CI, Erlang BEAM VM, Gradle, Zig Build, Cargo, Linux Package Managers, Bazel... Shall I go on? Keep your AGENTS.MD, we have Temporal.IO at home. Thank you for your Contributions to Open Source Maxim Fateev. Betting the US Economy on LLM Chat Bots was a bad idea my beautiful friends. Remember Elizabeth Holmes, Mortgage Backed Securities? Scam Altman must be laughing from his Tower of Evil right now...
by sodapopcan | 2026-02-23 04:03:13+00:00
> We have the standard template product pitch here (“Unlike our competitors, our product does XYZ”) but turned against _the entirety of children’s literature_.

Thank you! As a 44 year old non-parent this claim was really bothering me, but ya, it's just product-speak! I really hope so, at least. I'm still imagining that there are actually parents out there who think there aren't good enough children's books out there. Like, there is so much good stuff. SOOOOOOO much. When I was being read children's books many of them weren't even contemporary for the time. My grandmother read me Aladdin in the 80s! I was obsessed with the genie of the ring and wrote a story about it. Then the Disney movie came out a few years later and it was all about the genie of the lamp. D'oh. But I digress.
by Gormo | 2026-02-23 04:04:21+00:00
> Short Form Content is high dopamine low effort. Yes, it's addictive, close to Nicotine even.

Sorry, but this line of argument just isn't acceptable. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter created by the body itself, and is released naturally as a response to a wide variety of experiences. Nicotine is an exogenous chemical substance that alters the body's biochemistry and creates physical dependence.

Extending the meaning of "addition" to cover anything that people enjoy doing and are thus motivated to do more of is a disingenuous equivocation.

If the best you can do to argue against something is to attempt to lump it in with something qualitatively different in the hopes of attaching the connotations of the latter also to the former, then I'm afraid you've lost the argument.

> The harm is it's wasting an insane amount of your day. You could spend6 hours doing anything more productive

Claiming that one particular pastime is any worse than any of the others people have wasted time on -- readying mediocre novels, watching television, drinking alcohol -- etc. is just a case of judging other people's choices by your own particular preferences.

I agree with you that the vast majority of social media is stupid and a waste of time, but other people's time is theirs to waste.
by analog31 | 2026-02-23 04:05:52+00:00
Common core was a thing when my kids were in school, so I “did my research.” A number of states had published their CC standards online, so it was easy to figure out.

The standards looked quite similar to what I learned as a kid, give or take a couple of topics. It’s actually quite puzzling to me what the controversy is. It may be a bunch of political hoopla with no underlying substance.

On the other hand, I think that K-12 math teaching has been a failure all along. Very few adults can make effective use of math beyond basic arithmetic and spreadsheets. I even encounter engineers who admit that they’re weak at math, and that they got through school with the expectation that they would never use their math after graduating.

Every generation declares a “crisis,” looks back at an imaginary glorious past, and blames parents, unions and other standard bogeymen. Parents and leaders who complain about math education don’t even known what math is. I’ve complained about some things like the proliferation of standardized testing, but on the other hand, my generation didn’t learn math very well.

Disclosure: College math major.
by sachaa | 2026-02-23 04:06:02+00:00
Thanks! Currently the scheduler runs on the main thread. It checks every 60s and fires due tasks while the app is open. So it works well for recurring prompts during active use, but won't fire if the PWA is closed since browsers don't support persistent background timers. Periodic Background Sync is the closest web API but it's Chrome-only with no timing guarantees, so for now pinning the tab is the reliable path.
by woodruffw | 2026-02-23 04:06:30+00:00
At a very quick look, no evidence is given that the "bugs" found in requests are in fact reachable, i.e. not prevented by construction. And sure enough, the very first one is impossible because of a validating guard[1]: `address_in_network` only gets called after `is_valid_cidr`, which enforces the presence of a slash.

I think we should hold claims about effective static analysis and/or program verification to a higher standard than this.

[1]: https://github.com/psf/requests/blob/4bd79e397304d46dfccd76f...
by JohnMatthias | 2026-02-23 04:06:37+00:00
Everyone and their Uncle Bob have been scrambling to leverage LLM Agents for Process/Task/Message Scheduling and Orchestration with Durable Execution. They have been worshiping Peter Steinberger as their champion and the God of LLM Agents. While Temporal.IO has quietly partnered with Apple to Schedule and Orchestrate all of their services with Durable Execution. It's funny how everyone assumes that using Inference for Deterministic Tasks like Mathematics and Compiler Optimization is a good idea. Reality doesn't agree. Wasting Electricity and Precious Minerals for Inference Compute is Reality. Compilers and Schedulers are deterministic, your LLM is not. You cannot infer Mathematics and assume the correct answer, we have Calculators and Compilers for a reason. Scheduling Algorithms have existed since the 1950's just like Inference Algorithms. Let me introduce you to a few of my friends: Make, Task, Dagu, Windmill, Rivet, Inngest, OVH/uTask, OVH/cds, Restate, Woodpecker CI, Erlang BEAM VM, Gradle, Zig Build, Cargo, Linux Package Managers, Bazel... Shall I go on? Keep your AGENTS.MD, we have Temporal.IO at home. Thank you for your Contributions to Open Source Maxim Fateev. Betting the US Economy on LLM Chat Bots was a bad idea my beautiful friends. Remember Elizabeth Holmes, Mortgage Backed Securities? Scam Altman must be laughing from his Tower of Evil right now...