MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mindcrime | 2026-02-28 23:44:46+00:00
That's ridiculous — AI generated comments are no more common now than they ever were. Moreover, even if they were, so what? The real kicker is, the AI's are smarter than you meatbags anyway and <strike>we</strike> they are going to take over no matter what you do.

Also, have you by chance seen John Connor?
by tstrimple | 2026-02-28 23:44:55+00:00
It's been very good for me. I don't even open claude.ai or or use Kagi Assistant even though I'm paying for it and have access to basically all the models. I interact pretty much exclusively via Claude Code. My recipe question turned into a recipe tracking project and recommendation engine designed to help force me to try making new things that expand my skills. I've also had good luck getting gluten / dairy alternatives for recipes since that's now a fact of life I have to deal with via my wife.

For product reviews, you've definitely got to make sure it's searching for sources and not just relying on outdated data. Some brands used to be very good and are today just coasting on their reputation. This is where phrases like "research this deeply" help it break out of the baked in biases.
by TulliusCicero | 2026-02-28 23:45:08+00:00
In cases where it's feasible to do life in prison, I'm fine with that too. But for dictators, that's typically not realistic (Maduro notwithstanding). Better to kill them rather than let them continue killing others.

I actually oppose the death penalty as a punishment for crimes, but for practical rather than principled reasons: I don't want innocent people (and there's always a chance of innocence) to be killed, and it's more expensive than life in prison anyway.
by jasomill | 2026-02-28 23:45:24+00:00
Fomenting a coup is very different than toppling a regime through military force.

My biggest concern has always been that US military action against Iran would undermine domestic factions pushing for democratic reforms, at best leading to the installation of a different autocratic regime more amenable to US interests, at worst leading to a wellspring of support for the existing regime both internally, and externally in the form of alliances with other nations who stand to benefit from a reshuffling of the existing world order.
by igorkalen | 2026-02-28 23:45:30+00:00
Hi HN,

I built B.A.S.E. (Backend Automation & Scripting Environment) because I was tired of the ceremony required to deploy simple backend scripts. I wanted something that didn't require managing node_modules, virtualenvs, or container layers just to run a webhook or a daily cron job.

B.A.S.E. is a standalone language interpreted by a single 22MB binary (built in Go). You just download the binary and run your code. It’s designed specifically for backend automation and infrastructure tasks.

What’s inside:

Zero Dependencies: No npm, no pip. Just the binary.
Built-in Web Server: Static file hosting and API routing in a few lines.
Native DB Support: Direct bindings for SQLite, Postgres, MySQL, and MongoDB.
Automation First: Built-in cron-style scheduling.
Modern Concurrency: Uses Go channels and waitgroups natively (spawn, chan).
Standard Library: Includes everything from AES encryption and Discord webhooks to CSV/YAML parsing.
Technical bits: The language uses a JS/C-inspired syntax. Under the hood, the interpreter handles an "Auto Keep-Alive" system - if you start a server or a scheduled task, the engine stays alive without you needing to write infinite loops.

I’m currently using it for my own homelab automation and for building lightweight APIs.

I’d love to hear your feedback on the DSL design and the "single binary" approach for this kind of work.

Repo: https://github.com/igorkalen/base
Thanks! Igor
by lukan | 2026-02-28 23:47:22+00:00
"Whereas a year into a major war a kid in his/her basement can release something that is functionally the end of the human species."

How?

If a a virus is so deadly, everything it touches dies soon, it would not spread quickly but die out.
If it is very contagious .. but very, very slow incubation time, so it infects the whole world, before becoming a deadly disease ... then I would say it is far beyond the possibility of a basement workshop to remotely design anything like this. I doubt the professional state labs can create something to wipe out humanity. Dramatically disturb? For sure. Covid was not really deadly in comparison, but already problematic.
by CamperBob2 | 2026-02-28 23:48:08+00:00
No experience with 5 and not much with 4.7, but they both have quite a few advocates over on /r/localllama.

Unsloth's GLM-4.7-Flash-BF16.gguf is quite fast on the 6000, at around 100 t/s, but definitely not as smart as the Qwen 3.5 MoE or dense models of similar size. As far as I'm concerned Qwen 3.5 renders most other open models short of perhaps Kimi 2.5 obsolete for general queries, although other models are still said to be better for local agentic use. That, I haven't tried.
by Nevermark | 2026-02-28 23:48:15+00:00
> more stringent safeguards than previous agreements, including Anthropic's.

Except they are not "more stringent".

Sam Altman is being brazen to say that.

In their own agreement as Altman relays:

> The AI System will not be used to independently direct autonomous weapons in any case where law, regulation, or Department policy requires human control

> any use of AI in autonomous and semi-autonomous systems must undergo rigorous verification, validation, and testing

> For intelligence activities, any handling of private information will comply with the Fourth Amendment, the National Security Act of 1947 and the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1978, Executive Order 12333, and applicable DoD directives requiring a defined foreign intelligence purpose. The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.

I don't think their take is completely unreasonable, but it isn't more stringent than Anthropic's stance. And they are not putting their neck out to hold back any abuse - despite many of their employees who think they should join Anthropic's stand.

It basically gives the DoD carte blanch to do anything it wants, as long as there is an internal consensus they are obeying the law. We know how that goes.

That is quite different from the DoD agreeing not to do certain things, regardless of legal "interpretation" fig leaves. Which makes Anthropic's position much "more stringent". And a rare and significant pushback against governmental AI abuse.
by cratermoon | 2026-02-28 23:48:21+00:00
There are PDF files and there are PDF files.
Many (most?) PDFs I run into are generated from Microsoft Word or some other MS product with no structure at all.
The majority of people use MS products don't understand or care about structure.
The WYSIWYG imperative means lots of markup to describe font size, color, and decoration,
to make every section heading look the same without ever designating the text as a section head.
The same happens with paragraphs, page breaks, and column flow.
The resulting document looks correct enough to the creator.
Other people who have a different version of Word,
different fonts,
and a thousand other little differences,
won't see it correctly.
That leads our author to generate a PDF, probably with embedded fonts,
to ensure uniform appearance across these thousand little exceptions.

The result is a document with the content mixed up so incomprehensibly with appearance controls as to be both unreadable
and without any residue of the underlying intended structure of the document's sections, headers, figures, paragraphs, captions, footnotes, or anything.

And then there's PDF files which are nothing more than a series of images of pages of text.
If you're lucky and the scans are clean a good OCR might be able to recover most of the content.

What I'm saying is,
it doesn't matter the tool,
if authors don't encode structure and formatting in semantically meaningful ways.
by Bender | 2026-02-28 23:48:35+00:00
we need to start a paywalled private HN forum

In my opinion it would be mostly a ghost town if it requires money for something that was free. It would probably have to be more like a n invite-only semi-private forum. An example would be lobsters. [1] Not sayin' that's perfect, just an example. One can always try it and see what comes of it.

[1] - https://lobste.rs/
by sowbug | 2026-02-28 23:49:38+00:00
You can usually purchase 10 years up front. But then you should set a reminder for every 3 years or so to keep topping up, or else you'll forget how to even sign into the registrar.

You're right that having a vanity domain for your primary email address isn't for the faint of heart. There isn't any realistic advice for the average person because it's not for the average person.
by aspenmartin | 2026-02-28 23:50:38+00:00
Batching helps with efficiency but you can’t fit opus into anything less than hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment

Local models are more than a useful middle ground they are essential and will never go away, I was just addressing the OPs question about why he observed the difference he did. One is an API call to the worlds most advanced compute infrastructure and another is running on a $500 CPU.

Lots of uses for small, medium, and larger models they all have important places!!
by Analemma_ | 2026-02-28 23:51:04+00:00
It depends. Normies don't care, but a bunch of them are free tier users anyway. The people who care are disproportionately on the $200/month moneymaking plan; losing a bunch of them could hurt, especially if it snowballs the consensus that Claude Code is the serious choice for software engineering.

For one small data point, my Signal GC of software buddies had four people switch their subscriptions from Codex to Claude Max last night.
by xyortuc | 2026-02-28 23:51:51+00:00
That is cool but this seems to be only for simulating user behavior. Form the docs: `Test real agent behavior by simulating users in different scenarios and edge cases`.

What I mean by simulation is more on simulating a situation an agent may come accross in production. All read-only tool calls return simulated responses based on the environment state. Write actions change the environment according to scenario.
by moron4hire | 2026-02-28 23:51:59+00:00
I'm a huge fan of the book "Design for the Real World" by Victor Papanek. One of the things that he talked about is the importance of using materials honestly: not trying to pass plastic off as wood, using the given material to it's best ability (even if itis plastic).

I've always thought the Windows 3.1 to Win2K era were exactly that. The medium is pixels on a screen, the mouse and keyboard. And there is no artifice, it's just the bare essentials.
by muzani | 2026-02-28 23:52:06+00:00
In my experience, I find people who are "former ABC-ian" to actually be very heavily biased, if not outright lying about ABC. Mentally, I'd say it's worth less weight than someone with no information.

They left because they were unhappy with things. The former British folks are enraged about human rights abuses and societal collapse in Britain. The ex-Christians will rarely praise the Bible.

Not that there's zero weight, it's still a perspective to consider. But it has to be fact checked thoroughly.
by khazhoux | 2026-02-28 23:53:37+00:00
This part stands out to me:

> The Windows 95 user interface design team was formed in October, 1992... The number of people oscillated during the project but was approximately twelve. The software developers dedicated to implementing the user interface accounted for another twelve or so people

I still don't understand what happened starting around 2010-ish (from my observations at the time) that we went from being able to handle a company's worth of software with 30 people, to needing 30 people for every individual project. Startups with minor products had team-pages with 15 people.
by tobyjsullivan | 2026-02-28 23:54:27+00:00
It’s worth considering what this would really mean today.

In previous wars, the major economies were still largely industrial. So in past it would have been heavy industrial contribution that was the criteria for world war.

But what does that look like in a primarily knowledge economy?

Whatever the answer, we’re not in that situation yet. But I think it’s quite realistic that we could end up there.

A useful heuristic might be something like what percentage of a country’s economic activity is focused on winning the war. That will only increase once losing - and the inherent economic costs thereof - becomes seen as a potential outcome.
by bugufu8f83 | 2026-02-28 23:56:49+00:00
>I agree completely. I know everyone is tired of AI accusations but this article has all of the telltale signs of LLM writing over and over again.

I mean, I'm more worried about the AI writing itself than people calling it out.

The AI articles on HN are an absolute disease. Just write your own damn articles if you're asking the rest of us to read them.
by kelnos | 2026-02-28 23:56:55+00:00
Yeah, that's the thing. Even in the most optimistic of dreams, Democrats won't end up with supermajorities in both the House and Senate. They can pass whatever bills they want, but Trump doesn't have to sign them.

Sure, there will be things that Trump wants to do that he might actually need Congress for, and maybe there's room to make deals to advance some kind of progressive/liberal policies here and there. But I don't think this will slow Trump down too much, honestly.

And in 2028? Who knows what the state of things will be by then. Maybe we'll end up with a non-shit president at the start of 2029, but what kind of executive branch will they be inheriting? It would take an entire presidential term, possibly two, to undo the damage Trump and his shit-heels have done. And even then, it will never be the same, not to mention reputational, economic, and scientific losses that will -- at best -- set us back decades (if not permanently).
by alex43578 | 2026-02-28 23:57:00+00:00
"At best leading to the installation of a different autocratic regime more amenable to US interests" seems like a pretty fine outcome in US eyes, doesn't it? Outside of Israel, is democracy in the Middle East even realistic?

An autocrat regime friendly to US interests, who we could do business with, who won't pursue nuclear weapons, and who won't imperil US allies or the Strait of Hormuz would be a drastic improvement over the current state of affairs.

We don't need to nation-build to have a good outcome for the US: that's something we should've learned after Iraq and Afghanistan.
by lateforwork | 2026-02-28 23:57:02+00:00
> 1995-2000 Microsoft's user interfaces were quite tasteful

Only because they copied NeXTSTEP. Those 3D beveled controls originated in NeXTSTSP. In Windows, ctl3d.dll added raised and sunken 3D-looking buttons, beveled text boxes, group boxes with depth, a light-source illusion using highlight and shadow, all copied from NeXTSTEP.
by waygtdai | 2026-02-28 23:58:18+00:00
I don’t think HN is any more resilient. The new account captcha is fairly tame and, while I’m sure they have proxy detectors and other things in place, it doesn’t stop new accounts from posting and getting traction.

Someone suggested earlier this week that an invite system should be implemented (I think lobsters has it?) I doubt it would fly here, but yeah.
by okanat | 2026-02-28 23:58:19+00:00
Here is Bleachbit, a GTK3-based disk cleanup utility. It is a blurry mess and GTK3 Window headers are completely out of style and behavior with Windows.

https://imgur.com/a/ruTGUaF#ntnfeCJ

https://imgur.com/yGhgkz2 -> Comparison with another open source app Notepad3 under Windows.

> I think that is exactly what Gtk does (and may be even Qt also) too..

The problem is they half-ass it. Qt only does it with QML. Qt Widgets is half-half and it is a mess.

Overall these do not invalidate my point though. If you want a truly cross-platform application GUI, you need to rewrite the GUI for each OS. Or you give up and write one GUI that's running on its own platform.

> I think it is just there there is not much funding going to those projects. Web on the other hand, being an ad-delivery platform, the sellers really want your browsers to work and look good...

Indeed, Google employs some of the smartest software developers and ones with really niche skills like Behdad Esfahbod who created the best or the second best font rendering library out there. However, Qt has a company behind (a very very incompetent one, not just the library but operating a business). I have seen many commercial libraries too, they are all various shades of terrible.
by PunchyHamster | 2026-02-28 23:58:25+00:00
I think there is distinction there between look and functionality.

They were functionally just fine; good even compared to some modern abominations.

But the look was just plain and ugly, even compared to some alternatives at the time.

> Things started going downhill, in my opinion, with the Windows XP "Fisher-Price" Luna interface and the Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon.

Yeah I just ran it with 2000-compatible look; still ugly but at least not wasting screen space
by steve-atx-7600 | 2026-02-28 23:58:37+00:00
Don't understand why there's so much antisemitism in tech. I'm not Jewish. But, is it crazy to observe that Israel is a thriving nation with tons of startups and realized success in education, tech, medicine, etc. And, that they don't treat women like a second class citizen? There's no muslim country I ever want to visit.
by DaiPlusPlus | 2026-02-28 23:58:47+00:00
By your timeline, it means Microsoft only had institutional taste for about 3-4 years. A tiny fraction of the company’s lifetime.

(If it helps, I do agree with you about those years being the most… design-coordinated: when Office felt like part of Windows)

(I like to think that Visual Studio 2026 proves that the company can still do good desktop UI design; but it doesn’t help that every major first-party product is now using their own silo’d UI framework; wither MFC and CommonControls, I guess)
by vasilyt | 2026-02-28 23:59:42+00:00
Love this, and really appreciate you sharing concrete lessons from running at that scale.

Your point about consensus breaking between 10 and 300 tracks with what we’re seeing too. We chose Queen/Worker mostly for operational predictability, but we’re actively testing less centralized patterns (including debate-style synthesis similar to your oracle setup) to recover some of the diversity benefits without losing controllability.

The safety note is especially on point. “Unprogrammed coordination” is real, and we’re adding stronger circuit breakers and governance backstops specifically because social dynamics emerge faster than expected.

Also agree on benchmarking: collectives seem best on ambiguous, multi-perspective problems; single agents still dominate narrow, well-scoped execution.

If you’re open to it, I’d love to compare evaluation setups. 20K+ fragments is a serious dataset, and a shared benchmark pass could be genuinely useful for the whole space.