MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SlinkyOnStairs | 2026-02-25 12:32:21+00:00
> I VERY LARGELY prefer an AI like grok that doesn't pretend and let the onus of interpretation to the user rather than a bunch of anonymous "researchers" that may be equally biased, at the extreme, may tell you that America's founding father were black women

Setting aside for a moment that Grok is manipulated and biased to a hilarious extent. ("Elon is world champion at everything, including drinking piss")

There is no such thing as "unbiased". There will always be bias in these systems, whether picked up from the training data, or the choices made by the AI's developers/researchers, even if the latter doesn't "intend" to add any bias.

Ignoring this problem doesn't magically create a bias-free AI that "speaks the truth about the founding fathers". The bias in the training data, the implicit unconcious bias in the design decisions, that didn't come out of thin air. It's just somebody else's bias.

All the existing texts on the founding fathers are filled with 250 years of bias, propaganda, and agenda pushing from all sorts of authors.

There is no way to have no bias, no propaganda, no "agenda pushing" in the AI. The only thing that can be done is to acknowledge this problem, and try to steer the system to a neutral position. That will be "agenda pushing" of one's own, but that's the reality of all history and all historians since Herodotus. You just have to be honest about it.

And you will observe that current AI companies are excessively lazy about this. They do not put in the work, but instead slap on a prompt begging the system to "pls be diverse" and try to call it a day. This does not work.

> Of course saying to someone to go kill himslef is a prety sure 'no-no' but so many things are up to interpretation.

Bear in mind that the context of Anthropic's pivot here are the Pentagon's dollars.

This isn't just about "anti-woke AI", it's about killbots.

Sure, Hegseth wants his robots to not do thoughtcrime about, say, trans people or the role of women in the military.

But above all he wants to do a lot of murder.

Antrophic dropping their position of "We shouldn't turn this technology we can barely control into murder machines" because they're running out of money is damnable.
by nineteen999 | 2026-02-25 12:32:27+00:00
Worth noting that this is currently broken for a number of users, I'm on a Max plan and I get the message "Error: Remote Control is not enabled for your account. Contact your administrator" which isn't helpful since I'm my administrator and ... this gets recursive quickly.

There's an open issue on github for it:

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/28098
by ben_w | 2026-02-25 12:32:36+00:00
> We are far far away from a sort of world where turning AI off is a problem. There isnt going to be a HAL or Terminator style situation when the world is still "I, Pencil".

You have to stop the thing before the damage is done.

There are many potential chains of events where the AI has caused enormous damage, and even many where it can destroy us, before the power to its own systems fails.

At this point, with Grok in the Pentagon, just ask what the dumbest military equivalent to vibe-coding is, and imagine the US following that plan.

Like, I dunno, invading Greenland or giving ICE direct control over tactical nukes or something.

And that's just government use. Right now, I'm fairly confident LLMs aren't competent enough to help with anything world-ending unless they get used for war planning by major nuclear powers (oh hey look at the topic of discussion), but it's certainly plausible they'll get good enough at tool use to run someone else's protein folding software etc. to design custom pathogens, and I really hope all the DNA printing companies have good multi-layer defences (all the way from KYC or similar to analysing what they've been asked to make and content-filtering it) by that point.
by invalidusernam3 | 2026-02-25 12:33:05+00:00
If the compound words all have single word entries in the dictionary that when combined mean the same thing what is the point?

Water: transparent, odorless, tasteless liquid

Boiling: having reached the boiling point

Boiling Water: transparent, odorless, tasteless liquid which has reached the boiling point

If Boiling Water had some other completely different meaning that has nothing to do with the individual words then sure, maybe, otherwise this is completely redundant and opinionated.
by deltoidmaximus | 2026-02-25 12:33:20+00:00
See the Mattel lead painted toy scandal. The end result was congress passed regulations that manufacturers had to have their toys tested for lead and then made large companies like Mattel exempt from it because they were deemed large enough to handle it on their own. Even though they were the reason for the legislation because they weren't handling it on their own. Mattel sells lead painted toys and congress responds by hobbling their competitors.
by ndespres | 2026-02-25 12:33:33+00:00
>>It's hard to describe but it almost feels to me like media today - this applies to games and films and everything - is often created at a meta level, a simulacrum of the real thing.

Miyazaki had a line in a documentary I watched a couple years ago which is now only a vague echo in my mind and I am struggling to search for it, but the gist of it was that early animators had an appreciation and an eye for people, the world, real movement of real bodies, whether reflected in cinema or just in everyday life, while later, he said, were raised on animation, so the product is a second-order imitation.

The same must be true with software. Early painting/desktop publishing/presentation software retains a link to how those things were done with your hands and scissors and paint brushes, trying to fit them into the screen for the first time, to be used by someone who might not have used a computer before. Now it’s a foregone conclusion that you’ll be working on the computer, and nobody involved had ever flipped through a literal book of clip art or made a slideshow on transparent paper.
by acrump | 2026-02-25 12:34:21+00:00
> If Amazon finds your product on another website for lower than its own website, it'll just hide your listing from the search -- this is meant to be pro-consumer (when you go to Amazon, you'll get the lowest price).

This is a funny idea of pro-consumer, as we all know that the result of this is increased prices.

The seller can not afford to reduce the Amazon price to match other channels and still pay Amazon's margin, or afford to have the product hidden and lose the channel - and so is forced to increase the price elsewhere.

The net result is prices increase across the board, and Amazon gets to tell customers they are getting the 'lowest price', but they did it by increasing the price across the whole market.

This is pro-Amazon both in terms of margin and market share. In many ways, it is also pro-competitor/seller/distributor/agency... but it is very much anti-consumer.

And, as I hope we will soon see proven, illegal.
by robtherobber | 2026-02-25 12:34:43+00:00
That's not legally correct in the US, EU, or the UK. Private ownership gives Amazon a lot of discretion over its own site design, messaging and whatnot, but not unlimited freedom to do or say whatever they please.

In the US major firms do not get a free pass simply because they own the platform and the idea that a website constitute "private property" doesn't work as a defence to anticompetitive conduct or to display a political banner expressing support for a political party of candidate without triggering additional rules / limits.

In the EU this is even less the case, as it effectively treats some platform conduct as capable of creating societal/systemic risks and thus needs to be kept in check. Whether is happens like that all the time in reality is subject of another discussion, I think; the point is that the mechanisms exist.

Political spending/advertising is a regulated activity that goes beyond rules that apply to private property. In the UK, for example, spending, donation, reporting etc. if the activity is intended to influence voters, falls under specific regulations: https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/our-guidance/campaign...
by mhalle | 2026-02-25 12:35:24+00:00
I would definitely disagree.

Claude Code and similar agents help me execute experiments, prototypes and full designs based on ideas that I have been refining in my head for years, but never had the time or resources to implement.

They also help get me past design paralysis driven by overthinking.

Perhaps the difference between acceleration and slop is the experience to know what to keep, what to throw away, and what to keep refining.
by jmclnx | 2026-02-25 12:35:53+00:00
This is why unions use to exist. If tech workers were in a union, they to stop this in its track.

But sadly over the years, some unions became very corrupt and others were allowed to be killed of by Companies and the US Gov.

Again I am glad I am at the age I am at. With that, I feel real bad for the young. From what I am seeing, between Climate Change, Living Costs and now AI, the young seems really screwed :(

My generation allowed these oligarchs to take over the US, it is not like no one knew that started happening in the 80s. So here we are.
by berkes | 2026-02-25 12:36:02+00:00
I strongly disagree.

Environment variables are -by far- the securest AND most practical way to provide configuration and secrets to apps.

Any other way is less secure: files on disk, (cli)arguments, a database, etc. Or about as secure but far more complex and convoluted. I've seen enterprise hosting with a (virtual) mount (nfs, etc) that provides config files - read only - tight permissions, served from a secure vault. A lot of indirection for getting secrets into an app that will still just read them plain text. More secure than env vars? how?

Or some encrypted database/vault that the app can read from using - a shared secret provided as env var or on-disk config file.
by tpm | 2026-02-25 12:36:28+00:00
> employers make termination decisions based on family structure

There might be a misunderstanding. The employer usually does not know about your family structure; the only place that really has to know about that is the wage department to calculate your taxes etc. (even though in some countries you can do that yourself if you are a very private person, but in that case you are more likely to be self-employed anyway). Of course if you want to claim days out of work, paid or not, to care for the children or a parent, the employer might want to know if the children are real.

> costs (medical bills? caring for a parent?)

Medical bills?
by lpcvoid | 2026-02-25 12:37:07+00:00
There's Nextcloud/OCIS/Owncloud for Sharepoint (god I fucking hate Sharepoint) and Onedrive, there's Libreoffice/Collabora (and Onlyoffice, but that's russian...), there's Thunderbird for Email. Windows is absolutely replaceable also, of course, maybe even easier than the Office365 subscription mentioned above.

The lock in only exists in brains of (old) people that can't adapt. MS products can all be replaced, and should be in the EU. You simply cannot trust an American company anymore after Trump.
by Huppie | 2026-02-25 12:37:14+00:00
To be honest I'm mostly fine with the price increase (it hasn't been adjusted for inflation in ages), the thing I do take issue with is that for over a year now (with the 'upgrade' to a new web interface) you can't easily create a password etc. anymore straight from the browser extension.

You click the button in the browser, choose what to create 'I want to create a password (or a note, or whatever)' and then get redirected to their web-app and be presented with a pop-up asking what you want to create (I just told you, didn't I?)

I get it, when you move to a new web-app some things can break. But after using stored passwords creating new ones is pretty much the only other thing you do in the app, it seems to be core functionality that's been broken for over a year now, it's kinda madness tbh.

Edit: To be fair they offered a 'solution' when I reported it: "Don't use the web-app, install our desktop app instead."
by ZoomZoomZoom | 2026-02-25 12:37:14+00:00
It's not polite to deny a country the agency to backslide on their own.

The corrupt class is, of course, following the oppression guide, so graciously provided and field-tested by their northern neighbour, rather diligently.

It would be unwise to overstate their (elite's) autonomy, considering economical and cultural ties on all levels, though.
by agavava | 2026-02-25 12:37:14+00:00
Construction is not an easy field. Projects are super long-term, budgets are huge, and they keep changing, so it’s super important to have clear systems for planning, budgeting, and visualizing all ongoing projects https://hacker9.com/selecting-a-reliable-erp-solution-provid... . On top of that, there are permits, land issues, and all that stuff that takes forever to sort before you can even start building.
by SR2Z | 2026-02-25 12:38:28+00:00
I personally like using AI at my job and would resent being forced to join a union which opposed it.

The way that I guarantee my job treats me well is by being willing to quit whenever it stops working for me. Despite everyone panicking about AI layoffs, I still consistently get messages from recruiters trying to fill AI-related jobs. In your ideal world where the union is supposed to represent me but oppose AI, do those jobs still exist?
by eXpl0it3r | 2026-02-25 12:38:40+00:00
OnlyOffice, Nextcloud OPffice, Collabora might all have free offerings to a degree, but you'll end up at the mercy of the companies behind those tools and OnlyOffice comes with Enterprise offering that does also cost money.

Costing money isn't necessarily bad, but it's also hard to beat free & libre.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-02-25 12:39:08+00:00
As an English native, I'd rather see proper nouns in a dictionary before seeing "compound words".

Personally, I don't agree that "boiling water" is a word (with a space) - I would refer to it as a phrase if it had specific meaning, but it just seems like an ordinary pairing of adjective and noun. Also, if a word can contain a space, then what is the meaning of "words" as there doesn't seem an easy way to distinguish between a "compound word" and a common phrase. Is "barking dog" a pair of words, a compound word or a phrase? (It's a pair of words in my mind)
by ot | 2026-02-25 12:39:30+00:00
This is drawing broad conclusions from a specific RW mutex implementation. Other implementations adopt techniques to make the readers scale linearly in the read-mostly case by using per-core state (the drawback is that write locks need to scan it).

One example is folly::SharedMutex, which is very battle-tested: https://uvdn7.github.io/shared-mutex/

There are more sophisticated techniques such as RCU or hazard pointers that make synchronization overhead almost negligible for readers, but they generally require to design the algorithms around them and are not drop-in replacements for a simple mutex, so a good RW mutex implementation is a reasonable default.
by LatencyKills | 2026-02-25 12:39:40+00:00
> You would say that because otherwise you'd be afraid as being seen as "too old for this job"

Um... I am still an active reverse engineer of both ring-0 and ring0 applications on both macOS and Windows (I worked on both the VS and Xcode teams). I'm developing a new tool for macOS that allows users to "see behind" active windows without the constant need for cmd/alt+tabbing. My age has zero bearing on my skill set or ability to understand technology. https://imgur.com/a/seymour-r9whXO5

> let's just cut the crap about it all and let's tell it how it is

The reality is, as I said, that this technology exists and it isn't going anywhere. Young people are going to use it as a tool just like we did when GUI operating systems first became prevalent.

I don't even remotely buy into the AI hype but I'm not going put the blinders on either. There is utility in this technology.
by jclulow | 2026-02-25 12:39:48+00:00
You can absolutely start regulating behaviour after the fact. Australia famously bought a bunch of guns back from people who had previously legally bought and owned them, and melted them down. There's no reason you couldn't offer people money in exchange for the surrender of their previously legally purchased surveillance racket goods. You can also frankly just regulate the central service/company out of existence in the case of, say, Ring.
by berkes | 2026-02-25 12:39:52+00:00
I'm not familiar with all current ongoing projects. Because of the situation mentioned above.

Currently I'm involved in projects surrounding https://developer.overheid.nl/kennisbank/security/standaarde... . Have a look there. It's not FLOSS in the way that you can just provide PRs of things you'd like different, but FLOSS in the way that you can get in touch and with enough expertise, have people listen to you.
by thierrydamiba | 2026-02-25 12:39:53+00:00
I actually look at this another way. I think we’re going to see a lot more open source. Before you had to get your pr merged into main. Now people will just ask ai to build the tool they need and then open source it.

Maintainers won’t have to deal with an endless stream of PRs. Now people will just clone your library the second it has traction and make it perfect for their specific use case.

Cherry pick the best features and build something perfect for them. They’ll be able to do things your product can’t, and individual users will probably find a better fit in these spinoffs than in the original app.
by kelipso | 2026-02-25 12:40:05+00:00
I was using pipenv for a while…I think it was useful because I was using different python versions maybe. Then I discovered python -m venv, put all my venvs in a directory in a fast hard drive, along with a venv.sh script that activates the environment with whatever custom stuff I want and I never could find use for any of these environment managers after that. Replication is pyproject.toml and activating the environment is “. venv.sh” what’s hard about that.
by chriswarbo | 2026-02-25 12:40:17+00:00
I've pushed the extension to GitHub at https://github.com/Warbo/pi-extensions/tree/master/extension...

The implementation is pretty terrible: a giant string of vibe-coded Emacs Lisp is sent to emacsclient, which performs the actions and sends back a string of JSON.

It's been interesting to iterate on the approach: watching the LLM (in my case Claude) attempting to use the tools; noticing when it struggles or makes incorrect assumptions; and updating the tool, documentation and defaults to better match those expectations.

I've also written some Emacs Lisp which opens Pi and tells it to "Action the request/issue/problem at point in buffer '<current-buffer>'" https://github.com/Warbo/warbo-emacs-d/blob/a13a1e02f5203476...

It feels similar to the file-watching provided by Aider (which uses inotify to spot files containing `# AI!` or `# AI?`), which I've previously used with FIXME and TODO comments in code; but it also works well in non-file things, e.g. error messages and test failures in `shell-mode`, and issues listed in the Emacs UI I wrote for the Artemis bug tracker (Claude just gets the issue number from the current line, and plugs that into a Pi extension I made for Artemis :-) )
by hagbard_c | 2026-02-25 12:40:34+00:00
I fixed a similar long-scale bug in... my parent's kitchen extractor fan about a year ago. They had a fancy custom-designed stainless steel extractor fan installed in their new kitchen about 12 years ago. The fan worked but it had one nasty habit: sometimes the controls would freeze up when the halogen lights in the hood were switched off. To get the thing to work again the power needed to be disconnected by either pulling the plug - in the topmost kitchen cupboard behind a hardboard shield, i.e. not really feasible - or by turning off the power to the whole kitchen for a few seconds. This became a regular thing: start cooking, press the button on the hood to switch the lights off, notice that the display got scrambled again and that it no longer responds to button presses, walk to the fuse box, switch off the power to the kitchen, switch it on again, continue cooking while cursing the damned thing. The installer came by and replaced the control board to no effect, the thing still kept on freezing every now and then. I had my suspicions about the cause - halogen transformers can produce nasty spikes when turned off, surely they put some protection in place? - but my father did not want me to pull apart the thing because the 'experts' had already looked at it. OK, fine, it is your problem after all - I live about 1300 km to the north of where they live and came by some 4-5 times per year - so I won't.

In 2019 my father died. My mother was quickly diagnosed with Parkinsons disease and could not really cook for herself any more so I increased the frequency of my visits and cooked enough food in a week to last her a month, freezing everything in portions. This meant I got to spend more time with the extractor fan and I decided to pull it down to see if my hunch was correct. Well, it was, more or less. The installer had installed a ferrite bead but he clearly did not understand why and where that bead was to be installed so he put it on the incoming power line. That's fine if the interference is expected to come from the outside or if the locally produced interference is to be kept from travelling down the line to the network but it does nothing to protect the control circuit from the interference coming from that big transformer which is connected directly to it. Swapping the ferrite bead from the incoming power line to the transformer power line took maybe a few minutes. The thing never locked up again, unfortunately my father never got to see the thing working as intended.
by llm_nerd | 2026-02-25 12:40:38+00:00
>That must be unacceptable to any sovereign government

The US recently doubled down on using US corporations as vehicles of coercion, sanctioning ICC judges for judging against Israel.

https://www.state.gov/icc-sanctions

This is beyond insane, and every American company causing grief for the staff of a criminal court in which every single civilized nation but the US and Israel (I guess I didn't have to add that but) belongs needs to see enormous fines, and to be marginalized and removed. Microsoft, Google, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal...either they can domesticate in another nation, or get relegated to provincial US operations.

It is absolutely untenable, and every single nation needs to purge all American operations as rapidly as possible.

And...it's happening. This criminal US administration filled with pedophiles and self-dealing garbage overextended. They overplayed their hand, and the result is not only the rapidly accelerated decline of the American empire, it invariably has redoubled China's influence.

I keep seeing prophesying about China invading Taiwan on here. Surely HN knows that won't be necessary, right? Taiwan recently re-engaged in diplomatic unification talks with China, and they're going to make that choice themselves. Now that the US is relegated to worldwide joke/idiocracy, and it really is rapidly becoming a unipolar world, it's really the only rational choice.

But I guess the US has the pathetic joke of the Board of Peace, or their close allies El Salvador and new puppet state Venezuela. What a disgrace.
by titzer | 2026-02-25 12:40:52+00:00
Seeing a JSON configuration file that stores environment variables makes me want to cry. Just to think that somewhere, somehow, it's going to launch an entire JavaScript VM (tens of megabytes) just to parse a file with 12 lines in it, then extract from a JavaScript the fields, munge it, eventually turn into more or less an array of VAR=val C strings which get passed to a forked shell....