MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bobsomers | 2026-02-27 04:32:53+00:00
> I used to be friends with Jack back in the day, before this AI stuff even all kicked off, once you know who people really are inside, it's easy to know how they will act when the going gets rough.

This sounds quite backwards to me. It's been abundantly clear in today's times that, in fact, you only really know who somebody really is when they're under stress. Most people, it seems, prefer a different facade when there is nothing at stake.
by mikestorrent | 2026-02-27 04:33:04+00:00
There is only self regulation, ultimately, at the top. I think it's still progress to see these groups specifically call out their moral hesitations, even if it doesn't go anywhere - it gives people ground to realize that others share their concerns. All movements, all progress starts from people putting their stance out there and getting a conversation going around the topic; that builds mindshare and eventually a demand for change.
by moomoo11 | 2026-02-27 04:33:24+00:00
Here's the thing though, and with all due respect I say this as someone who has worked with offshore teams.

They were only as good as the input they were given. They rarely went above and beyond, and most of the time getting something "good enough" was challenging. Yes, time zones, cultural differences/attitudes, and their exposure/opportunities play a big role.

What I'm saying is that teams who had bad onshore employees got horrible results. Teams that had actual systems engineers and people who could architect systems usually got great results.

For example, we were building a bleeding edge (at the time) e commerce site for one of the largest companies in the entertainment space. I made sure to work with the best people I knew at the company to design the system from the ground up. Then, we made sure the actual "functional" pieces were digestible and written plainly that we didn't need to clarify words. Nor did we write a fucking 300 page technical document. We kept things simple and effective, and all the work was broken down into as atomic pieces as possible.

The end result was that we used a team distributed between Ukraine and India to build this in about 4 months. We'd do weekly sprints, and the team had great spirits too because we actually gave a fuck about them and ensuring their success. I'm sure they're used to being scapegoats because of some lazy fucks onshore.

Now I use agents daily and have great success. However, the whole "write a sentence and AI will do it for you" is obviously bullshit. I even asked HN why I got wrong results to test what people would respond (sorry for playing you) and as I predicted they blamed me thus proving that this broader sentiment that's so prominent by "thought leaders" is stupid as fuck. So, that's where we are.

People who can actually build great systems know that it requires careful planning, deep understanding, and ability to fill in the gaps.
by pi-netizen | 2026-02-27 04:34:27+00:00
Claude Code stores every conversation as JSONL files under ~/.claude/projects/. I kept wanting to find old sessions, "where did I debug that Redis issue?" - so I built a CLI that searches across all of them.

It supports filtering by date (--since "2 weeks ago"), extracting only code blocks (--code-only), scoping to a specific project (--project myapp), and jumping directly back into a session (--open). It also surfaces extended thinking blocks if you want to see the reasoning behind an answer.

No server, no API calls, no sync. It reads the files Claude Code already writes locally.
by lebovic | 2026-02-27 04:34:47+00:00
> What are those values that you're defending?

I think they're driven by values more than many folks on HN assume. The goal of my comment was to explain this, not to defend individual values.

Actions like this carry substantial personal risk. It's enheartening to see a group of people make a decision like this in that context.

> Which one of the following scenarios do you think results in higher X-risk [...] There are no meaningful AI risks in such a world

I think there's high existential risk in any of these situations when the AI is sufficiently powerful.
by jackbventures | 2026-02-27 04:35:04+00:00
Both points are valid and I appreciate the direct feedback.

The before/after comparison is an obvious gap - I didn't include any example output on the page at all, which makes it near impossible to evaluate. That's being fixed today.

The free preview / watermarked trial is a good idea I hadn't fully thought through. The hesitation was cost (each generation costs real money to run) but a low-res watermarked preview before payment is a reasonable middle ground. Worth testing.

Thanks for taking the time to look.
by _wire_ | 2026-02-27 04:35:22+00:00
If you've studied color perception even at the most superficial, the idea of a count of seeable colors is ludicrous. Colors aren't countable in any detailed sense. A common misunderstanding by those who are aware that colors aren't countable is that reproduction systems inappropriately claim resolution of more "colors" than can be seen, but this is another form of the fallacy: color difference artifacts are a common hazard in reproduction systems that can express large numbers of discrete stimuli, so there's something like a quantitative notion of different colors, but proven reproduction techniques, such as dither, can transcend such limits.

A saner way to consider exceptional color sensitivity is via a N-primary visual response, where N=3 in the CIE's titular tri-stimulus model, which guides all modern reproduction systems, but where N can be regarded as 4 in certain humans, and increases incrementally for "vision" of other species.

The key to understanding color sensitivity is that it's a qualia of an organism, not a direct physical trait of the world, just as the sense of hearing or touch is not a direct physical trait of the world.
by no-dr-onboard | 2026-02-27 04:36:02+00:00
A lot of your argument presupposes a distinct lack of parental authority in the education of a child.

The way that it appears to be playing out is that parents were repulsed by perverted and strange worldviews being taught to their children on their dime. They called their legislators to make the changes and, in a rare event, the legislators listened and are acting upon it.

The system, for once, seems to be working. Both sides should see the objective value in at least that.
by pm90 | 2026-02-27 04:36:49+00:00
13%!!! This should be a code red level event for … the world? I … don’t understand how world leaders are just standing by? Smartphone growth/adoption has been the bedrock of a LOT of economic growth. I would have expected massive Government intervention to avoid this.

Where are the China hawks? The argument for protecting Taiwan was that without their chips the smartphone market would contract, right? Thats whats happening now?!
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-27 04:37:11+00:00
>I'm convinced that these "AI Layoffs" are these companies trying to save face from the absurd overhiring that they did in 2022 and 2023

This keeps coming up, but the numbers at these companies don't add up. Any given FAANG you can think of (outside of maybe Apple) has had at least 5 rounds of layoffs over the years. But can you point to any of them having a lower headcount? I doubt all those engineers are being redirected towards AI development.

And despite that similar hearcount, it seems all have decrease initiatives over the years too. Meta stepped back from the verse it re-branded under, for instance.

I'm fairly convinced that what's happening is outsourcing initiatives disguides as layoffs for AI efficiencies.
by ai-christianson | 2026-02-27 04:37:32+00:00
It's honestly wild to see this happening again so soon after the El Paso incident. You'd think with a budget that massive, 'not lasering our own hardware' (or party balloons) would be a higher priority. The coordination gap between the Pentagon and the FAA/CBP seems deeper than just a 'communication lapse' if these high-energy systems are being fired off without a heads-up. That El Paso detail about the Locust system and the airport shutdown still feels like something out of a satire.
by murphyslaw | 2026-02-27 04:38:19+00:00
> You can use /dev/stdin, /dev/stdout, /dev/stderr in most cases

Never ever write code that assumes this. These dev shorthands are Linux specific, and you'll even need a certain minimum Linux version.

I cringe at the amount of shell scripts that assume bash is the system interpreter, and not sh or ksh.

Always assume sh, it's the most portable.

Linux != Unix.
by Luseniik | 2026-02-27 04:38:20+00:00
AI coding agents are stateless. Every new session, they re-scan your entire codebase to figure out where they are. That burns thousands of tokens before writing a single line of code.
I hit this building my own products. So I built HAM.
HAM gives agents scoped memory files at every directory level. Instead of re-reading everything, the agent reads a small file that says what's here, what decisions were made, and what happened last session.
by CSSer | 2026-02-27 04:38:23+00:00
Tailwind didn't win for either of these reasons (setting aside any personal positive/negative feelings I have about it). It won (in LLMs) because that's how the ML model works. The training data places the HTML and the styling info together. There's an extremely high signal to noise ratio because of that. You're going to get much fewer tokens that have random styles in it and require several fewer (or maybe even no) thought loops to get working styles. The surface API of selectors is also large and complex. Tailwind utility classes are not. They're either present on an element or not, and it's often the case that supporting classnames for the UI goal are present in close proximity on sibling, parent, or child elements. Even with vast amounts and multiple decades of more CSS to compare against in the training data, I suspect this is the case. Plus, the information is just spread more thinly and more flexible in terms of organization in a stylesheet. The result is you get lots of extra style rules that you didn't need/want and it's harder to one-shot or even few-shot any style implementation. If I'm even remotely right about this, it worth considering this impact in many other languages and applications. I've found the adverse effect to be reduced slightly as models/agents have improved but I feel it's still very much present. It's not totally possible to structure data in a way that makes it easier to train on.
by JackFr | 2026-02-27 04:39:09+00:00
This article doesn't do it justice, but the Womelette at the short-lived Royal Canadian Pancake House in NYC lived in the dark abyss.

https://www.eater.com/2015/1/26/7860903/amanda-cohen-royal-c...

It wasn't just an omelette on top of a waffle (and both of them the size of a medium pizza). As you strayed from the edges toward the center it became difficult to see where the waffle ended and the omelette began.

Such a shame they went out of business.
by Spivak | 2026-02-27 04:41:10+00:00
And we're finally here on the national stage.

1. Ban exposing minors to "sexual material." Who would be against that? Surely only weirdos would push to expose kids to sex and pornography. Make sure this gets challenged in court and that it's found constitutional under 1A.

2. Define things we don't like as sexual material. Obviously being gay is entirely about sex, just like being trans is about genitals. You don't even have to speculate that this is the motive—it's defined explicitly in the bill.

3. Boom, you found a legal way to ban what would otherwise be a pretty obvious 1A violation.

This is the public institutions half, it's harder to swing a bill like this for private institutions which is why that's handled with age verification bills. That way it's not technically a ban.
by dheera | 2026-02-27 04:41:59+00:00
> American employees refuse to build this, but China's don't.

It's not American employees vs. China employees. No need to villainize China at every opportunity. Most Chinese employees are more similar to American employees than you think.

It's {top candidates who have their pick of employers} have the luxury to refuse to build this.

Mid-tier dude who can't land a job at any of the top AI companies and can code with Cursor and trying to pay their rent or medical bills will absolutely build AI for the military in return for having their rent paid.

This is regardless of whether it is in the US or China.
by ahonhn | 2026-02-27 04:43:00+00:00
A HN audience is so sure to parse "WA" as Washington state that leaving it in the title would be misleading with every second response along the lines of "I only clicked because I thought it was Washington".

Should it be expanded to "Aussie"? (since "West Australian", "Australian", "Sandgroper", or "Doubleyooalien drivers" doesn't fit the title field).

I reckon the location is secondary and the interesting part is about technology enabling universal and intrusive enforcement of easy to break rules that were previously difficult to enforce absolutely.

Such rules tend to have rather draconian 'example making' penalties attached to them because of that.

Is AI camera enforcement 'not a problem' in Honduras or Washington State because they don't use them there yet? Is seeing how it pans out somewhere else first of no interest to them?
by ramoz | 2026-02-27 04:43:07+00:00
I struggle with the federal government's power over all this. Let the states and local jurisdictions decide. Put in guardrails so that those local jurisdictions don't become corrupted, but at the same time we should empower people to place their children in education systems that don't ultimately falter to who's empowered in the fed.

You may be okay with your children reading some books. That's great, and you should be able to find the right school districts for them, and I should be able to do the same to ensure my children don't read through explicit material without any form of parental oversight.
by gjsman-1000 | 2026-02-27 04:44:25+00:00
I do not believe I am a pattern of linear algebra. I believe like the majority of humanity historically that I have a soul, a spiritual and non-physical reality, my personhood comes from my soul, and that as such, AI is fundamentally incapable of consciousness.

I also believe, as a result, it will be great fun watching researchers burn the next 30 years trying to understand what is missing. We’re going to find out very soon if the soul is real, when for all our progress we can’t create one.

Only those completely embedded in materialism need fear a conscious AI.
by card_zero | 2026-02-27 04:44:35+00:00
Is that what it's about?

> identify quality authors and filter out obnoxious commenters

> not about hiding writers you disagree with

> It's also fun to read the writers you disagree with

[But] > to reinforce your opinion of them. [Did you misspeak here?]

> this reduces the time I spent on Hacker News

> find the good stuff based on people you trust

This is very confused.

* Do we want to avoid ideas that we disagree with?

* Do we want to avoid authors we've labelled as annoying? (This is about meta-level bad ideas, about how to interact.)

* Do we want to avoid meta-level ideas that we disagree with?

* What if your friends disagree about who their friends and enemies are?

* What it they don't disagree, isn't that creepy? Echo chamber much?

* Is it right to pre-empt your own interest by labelling material before reading it? I don't know!

Seems to me that rational pre-filtering should be along subtle, personal, ever-changing lines, and you should constantly be deciding on the spot based on complex information including your current mood and dyspepsia. How should interest work? You may start reading a thing and decide "this is not for me" (or "this is a troll or a bot"). Or with a tool like this one you may carry out the same process faster, and more crudely, using less information and less serendipity. So you're encouraging people to be in a rush and make more superficial choices instead of mining for the gold. On the other hand, maybe they are in a rush and need to be like that.
by klodolph | 2026-02-27 04:45:17+00:00
So… this has been happening for a long time now. The baseline set of tools is a lot better than it used to be. Back in 2010, jQuery was the divine ruler of JSlandia. Nowadays, you would probably just throw your jQuery in the woodchipper and replace it with raw, unfinished, quartersawn JS straight from the mill.

I also used to have these massive sets of packages pieced together with RequireJS or Rollup or WebPack or whatever. Now it’s unnecessary.

(I wouldn’t dare swap out a JWT implementation with something Claude wrote, though.)
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-27 04:45:55+00:00
>After the massive X/Twitter layoffs (60-70% headcount culled) with X/Twitter still standing, this assumption was clearly proven false.

I agree with your sentiment, but this example is awful. Twitter cut engineering staffed, pissed off advertisers that caused an exodus, had its stock steadily declining under Musk, and eventually decided to go private again. Only to be "aquired" by Musk's AI wing. Maybe there was a large cut that can happen, but Musk explicitly mentions how his plan was always to "over fire" and rehire later. Clearly 60% was too far, and he overestimated his charisma to get people back.

It'd be a stretch to call Twitter a "well oiled machine", but clearly these moves proceeded to chug the gears down to a near halt. It hasn't seen a major collapse only because Musk is playing Hollywood accounting with all his businesses these days.

>1. Move to a Tier 1 tech hub like the Bay and NYC. If you get laid off, you will probably find another job in a couple of weeks due to the density of employers.

I think I'm just screwed in that case. At least for my industry. There's "some" games scene in SF, but not much more than some other hubs like LA, Austin, nor Seattle. That's not really where gaming startups pop up these days, either.

>We live in a competitive world and complaining on HN does nothing to help your material condition.

Waiting to hear on job apps gives plenty of time to vent, though.

I'm doing portfolio projects, but it feels like that only gets you so far unless you have a very specific domain in mine you want to showcase. Especially for someone who already has professional experience to point to.
by gormen | 2026-02-27 04:46:15+00:00
Assessing "AI capabilities" only makes sense if we stop viewing it as a technical skill. The real measure is a person's ability to structure their intentions, constrain their model, and evaluate results without relying on others' judgment. AI doesn't replace thinking—it enhances existing structure or chaos. AI is also like an exoskeleton for real intelligence. Don't you agree?
by 01100011 | 2026-02-27 04:46:42+00:00
The recipe at the end sounds a lot like the crepes I'd make in college. It was pre-WWW and I had no idea what I was doing but it seemed to work. The one thing I had going for me in college was a Costco membership. 25lb bags of flour, gallons of milk, and flats of eggs.. all cheap. I'd barter with roommates for crepe toppings (sour cream and jelly usually).
by mh2266 | 2026-02-27 04:47:01+00:00
ymmv of course, but 2023 was a low point for tech stocks that have exploded since then, and at companies with four-year grants it's going very well for people that got good refreshers, or even better an initial grant, in 2023. well, if they haven't been fired, but statistically most haven't.

it's a casual point of discussion at my company because people expect a spike in attrition next year when those grants run out, everyone is holding onto the golden handcuffs.
by NSPG911 | 2026-02-27 04:48:00+00:00
That is the issue. It's why Xcode development is really bad with AI models[0] -- because there are barely any text-based tutorials for it, so the models have to make a lot of assumptions and whatnot. Hence, they are really good at Python, JavaScript, and increasingly, Rust.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8-CdK4215Y
by ytoawwhra92 | 2026-02-27 04:48:03+00:00
> adversarial AI reviewers, runtime tests (also by AI), or something else?

And spec management, change previews, feedback capture at runtime, skill libraries, project scaffolding, task scoping analysis, etc.

Right now this stuff is all rudimentary, DIY, or non-existent. As the more effective ways to use LLMs becomes clearer I expect we'll see far more polished, tightly-integrated tooling built to use LLMs in those ways.
by ninjagoo | 2026-02-27 04:48:30+00:00
> Brigadier General S. L. A. Marshall’s 1947 book Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command stated that only about 10-15% of men would actually take the opportunity to fire directly at exposed enemies. The rest would typically fire in the air to merely scare off the men on the opposing force.

Having been identified back then, this issue has been systematically stamped out in modern militaries through training methods. Cue high levels of PTSD in modern frontline troops after they absorb what they actually did.
by senordevnyc | 2026-02-27 04:48:33+00:00
I actually was laid off by Block, about eleven months ago. I got slightly less severance than these folks.

I wasn’t at all upset that they chose to lay me off. I wouldn’t have felt any guilt about leaving that job when it was no longer economically beneficial to me, so why would I expect anything different from them? This is a business transaction, I’m selling labor, I’m not entitled to a buyer. The outrage over layoffs seems so bizarre to me.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-02-27 04:48:54+00:00
Anyone who wants can look on archive.org to see a copy of Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer book, often cited as one of the "most banned" books out there. It is apparently intended for minors.

And it is pornographic, check page 168. Just far enough into the book so that any adult checking it first might not notice and permit it.

Finally, if I check the House bill, will I discover that instead of "banning books" it just insists that such books are restricted to adults at public libraries and only insofar as that public library receives grants from the feds?
by karmasimida | 2026-02-27 04:49:53+00:00
Safely in what way? If you ask them to stop, the easy argument is Chinese won’t stop, so they won’t stop.

Essentially they will not stop at all, because even they know no one can stop the competition from happening.

So they ask more control in the name of safety while eliminating millions of jobs in span of a few years.

If I have to ask, how come a biggest risk of potential collapse of our ecosystem being trusted as the one to do it safely? They will do it anyway, and blame capitalism for it
by peteforde | 2026-02-27 04:50:02+00:00
I'm glad that you brought that up, because I actually hovered on my response precisely because of those words. Specifically, I wondered if I could reliably count on someone showing up to say something patronizing and unnecessary.

This particular combination of snark, faux-concern and pedantry doesn't help the point you're trying to make about my loving AI wife.
by rudhdb773b | 2026-02-27 04:50:18+00:00
That will definitely be a problem, but I suspect and hope that there will be governing AI models that can be "prompted" with clear and concise instructions that will be demonstrably free of bias towards any group, either by a direct reading or by evaluation with trusted 3rd party models.

If the public does not trust the fairness of the AI prompt, that will hopefully lead to revolution and replacement of the prompt with something more principled, similar to how rigged elections (sometimes) trigger revolutions.
by MakeAJiraTicket | 2026-02-27 04:50:21+00:00
Thank you! Gemini has consistently been the best performer that I've tried, but they always require the connection to be made explicit. The point of the test is that it is very low complexity and is very targeted toward what can be considered reasoning and these models can't produce the connection without prodding.

In the ideal case of reasoning you would simply present the methods and they'd bridge the gap independently when it is brought to the forefront of their context together, but it doesn't happen.