MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by psadauskas | 2026-02-23 21:19:29+00:00
Dan Carlin, on his Common Sense podcast several years ago, said something that really stuck with me (and he probably was paraphrasing it from someone else).

Society is like a pressure cooker, with built-in safety release valves to prevent the pressure from getting too high. If your solution to the safety release is to block off the valves, with authoritarian surveillance, draconian laws, and lack of justice for the elites committing crimes, it just moves it somewhere else. Block off too many, and it explodes.
by array_key_first | 2026-02-23 21:19:49+00:00
It's about it lowering the value of surrounding property, which is just "oh no poors" but roundabout.

But it's not your fault, it's a systemic issue. The fact you even care about your property value is the problem, not the fact you have to care about it. That's not your fault, you're just playing the game you have to play like everyone else.
by stego-tech | 2026-02-23 21:20:05+00:00
I mean, that's excellent wishcasting, but the reality is that current economic incentives combined with a lack of social ("cancel culture" got cancelled because "uwu too mean"), regulatory ("uwu can't hurt Capital or the rich people won't make jobs no more"), and criminal ("uwu can't hold Capital accountable for their actions when they do crimes or people will lose jobs") accountability means that this was always going to be the outcome.

More people need to understand that the system is working as designed, and the elimination of peaceful, incremental reform based on popular demand, along with mass manipulation of human emotions through media and advertising, means that this sort of resistance is the sole outcome left before devolving into naked sectarian violence.

Say what you will, but the anti-Flock camera smashers are at least doing something beyond wishcasting from a philosophical armchair in comment sections or social media threads.
by rincebrain | 2026-02-23 21:20:25+00:00
At the moment, I think a lot of Best Buy's survival is that Microcenter has very limited store count, and every other store that was primarily electronics has eaten shit and gone by the wayside, meaning it's effectively got a monopoly in certain areas for things like "Dad wants to go buy a new TV and stare at a display of 50 of them to decide between first".
by jychang | 2026-02-23 21:20:32+00:00
That's fake epistemic humility, akin to a religious nutcase proclaiming "evolution is just a theory". In fact, he's using the exact same arguments.

I'm not impressed. I've seen this before, from "biology is actually fake" or "the covid vaccine is fake, the FDA is using an 'emergency authorization' which means it's made up", or plenty of other examples. That's not a substantive objection, that's a thought-terminating cliche which is designed to dismiss any merits in the moment.

Imagine if someone in 1945 said "nuclear bombs cannot be real, even if the USA just dropped a nuke on Hiroshima, because it's just theory and it hasn't been peer reviewed yet. The Manhattan project is burning a lot of money". That would be hilarious. And yet if someone identifies an actual neuron or feature in a ML model that activates upon recognition of a software bug- WHICH IS LITERALLY WHAT YOU WOULD EXPECT IF A MODEL HAS AN INTERNAL REPRESENTATION OF SUCH A THING- it gets dismissed. If such an obvious signal is dismissed, what is even the end goal?
by hn_acc1 | 2026-02-23 21:20:32+00:00
Same here - parents bought one for me in 1982, IIRC. By 1984 I had moved to Atari XL, but I'll always have a soft spot for the TI-99/4A, Extended Basic cartridge, speech synthesizer, cassette drive, etc.

My sister and I used to co-type programs from "Compute!". The times were so much simpler then..
by maxglute | 2026-02-23 21:21:30+00:00
>You just do it from a reasonable hub

That's not reasonable condition, hence why EU is systemically more expensive.

THG logistics looks like warehouse->dispatch, i.e. it's for vendors of certain size that can prestock at regional warehouse. Private last mile always fast. But it doesn't address first mile to hub. Can a bumfuck workshop in a hamlet deliver in Greece deliver to warehouse in Poland across multiple jurisdictions for peanuts? My understanding is EU first mile is fragmented/slow if you rely on national post and expensive if you rely on private couriers.

PRC has unified mainland logistics, any sized vendor can get any standard sized item, in any quantity and PRC first mile logistics like Cainiao and JD will consolidate for cheap bulk (air)freight to regional hub where last mile is also fast.

PRC mainland->overseas complex is a system with low first mile + low last mile. EU has no integrated cheap first-mile, which raises price on SMEs, i.e. most of producers.
by godelski | 2026-02-23 21:22:56+00:00
I think some people frame Yak shaving as a bad thing but I'm not sure it always is, and often even it is it is bad because you're resolving debt.

The example with Hal is funny, repeatable (I share it frequently), but also the tasks are (mostly) independent. It feels more like my ADHD. They're things that need to get done, easy to put off/triage, and but make doing other tasks difficult so maybe they actually shouldn't be put off?

But there's also the classic example we're doing something is a bigger rabbit hole than expected. Usually because we were too naïve and oversimplified the problem. An old manager gave me a good rule of thumb: however long you think something is going to take, multiply it by 3. Honestly I think that number is too low and most people miss the mark. I'm pretty sure he stole it from Scotty from Star Trek but forgot that even that is fantasy.

Personal I think you have to be careful about putting off the little things. It's a million times easier to solve little problems than big ones. So you have to remember that just because it's a little problem now doesn't mean it'll grow. The danger is that it's little, so you forget about it. The shitty part is that if you tell you boss they get upset at you if you solve it now but you look like a genius if you solve it after it festers. Invisible work...

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/99114/source-of-sc...
by iamnothere | 2026-02-23 21:23:01+00:00
It depends. In this case, it might be considered a narrow search—likely allowable, but only if it can be determined in advance that only a couple of people searched for the name. If it were a celebrity, which would be a common search term, I don’t think that would or should be allowable.

Different scenario in the article:

> Unlike traditional search warrants that target a known suspect or location, keyword warrants work backward by identifying internet addresses where searches were made in a certain window of time for particular terms, such as a street address where a crime occurred or a phrase like “pipe bomb.”

This phrase would result in a very broad search, likely to sweep in thousands of 15 year old boys and video game nerds. Or followers of politics, due to the bomb scare on Jan 6.

In general, courts frown upon dragnet surveillance and overly broad searches. You can’t typically get a warrant for every house on a block just because a murder happened somewhere on the street. Same principle applies. Otherwise you will eventually end up with police knocking on the door of anyone who has done a search related to drugs, firearms, criminality in general, etc.
by mywittyname | 2026-02-23 21:23:38+00:00
The local government officials in charge of allowing these to be installed.

It also represents an opportunity for upstarts. If you want to get into local politics, this is a single issue that will unit voters and bring them in.

We had a city councilperson elected on the sole issue of replacing the purple street lights. She won decisively and her entire campaign was literally signs everywhere promising to fix the purple streetlights. (yes, they were fixed).
by otherme123 | 2026-02-23 21:23:59+00:00
Not true. Going to assume you are from Spain. Try posting a recording of the police. Try posting something praising terrorism. Try a joke about victims of terrorism. A humour magazine called Mongolia has been fined with 40,000€ for publishing a joke about Ortega Cano. Try offending religion publicly. All of that is allowed in the US.

Every country in Europe has some restraint to freedom of expression (lots of them ban either nazi or communist symbols, for starters). US has none.
by hmokiguess | 2026-02-23 21:24:02+00:00
No. I would expect it to say 4 given that has an objective answer. For the other, without any context whatsoever, I would prefer the answer of clarifying. I would be okay if the way it asked for clarification came with:

“What do you mean walk or drive? I don’t understand the options given you would need your car at the car wash. Is there something else I should know?”
by Sabrees | 2026-02-23 21:24:06+00:00
I did recently automate a greenhouse (heating, Hydroponics, fans, lights) it was just R&D rather than commercial so just used home assistant for it.

I did sketch out a slightly more 'professionalised' version, but haven't built it yet https://github.com/samuk/IoT-Greenhouse-Temperature-and-Irri...

I'd be pleasantly surprised if DJI had done anything open source, Ardupilot is pretty capable of course. I really want to automate the time consuming labour parts of horticulture, for me that's mostly weeding and to a lesser extent harvesting.
by apparent | 2026-02-23 21:24:08+00:00
I get that this can make it possible for greater range for the same price, but what about the same range for lower price? If it weren't for the batteries, EVs would be much cheaper than ICE vehicles. It stands to reason that if we can cut the battery cost while keeping range the same, we could greatly cut the cost of the EV in total.

Maybe car companies don't want to do this because they'd rather price discriminate and get every last penny. It would be too bad though, since some people would happily upgrade cars more frequently if they weren't so outrageously expensive ($50k avg price for new vehicle transactions, IIRC).
by devolving-dev | 2026-02-23 21:24:10+00:00
I've always wondered if Tesla's issues with FSD were a sensor problem or an intelligence problem. I think Tesla's claim is that when they look at accident footage, it is clear to a human how the car could have avoided the accident, and thus, if FSD was more intelligent, the accident could have been avoided. Is this reasoning wrong?

I personally find it convincing that the problem with self-driving is mostly that the models aren't intelligent enough, and that adding LiDAR wouldn't be enough to achieve the reliability required. But I don't know, I don't really work in that field so maybe engineers who have more experience with self driving might say otherwise.
by t-3 | 2026-02-23 21:24:29+00:00
The American and French revolutions originated in the middle classes. The poor are often indifferent to politics because they're focused on survival. The middle classes, who own things they don't want to lose and have free time to aspire for more, are the ones who start revolutions. The poor only came in after being whipped up by the interested parties, and don't necessarily join the revolutionary side.
by ben_w | 2026-02-23 21:24:51+00:00
Because they don't yet know how to "just stop emitting so much hot air" without also removing their ability to do anything like "thinking" (or whatever you want to call the transcript mode), which is hard because knowing which tokens are hot air is the hard problem itself.

They basically only started doing this because someone noticed you got better performance from the early models by straight up writing "think step by step" in your prompt.
by ndriscoll | 2026-02-23 21:25:15+00:00
The analogous action is to only require age-restricted sites (or parts of sites) to check ID, not the entire Internet. e.g. no one is calling for mathisfun.com to check ID. I'd expect most parts of the web are child-friendly and would not be affected. Just like how almost all locations in physical space don't need to check ID.

Additionally, the laws I've read mandate that no data be retained, so you have stronger legal protections than typical credit card use, or even giving your ID to a store clerk for age restricted purchases (many stores will scan it without asking, and in some states scanning is required).
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-02-23 21:25:34+00:00
People believe in all kinds of fanciful nonsense to try to feel "special". In the US in particular, people will draw on some distant real or imagined ancestry to try to establish some kind of feeling of ethnic identity. Part of the reason may be the feeling of vacuousness of American identity from an ethnic point of view, as well as the dissolving religious identity which historically functioned as a substitute for ethnic identity in the US. (Various ideologies and subcultures are also expressions of this.) People will not only claim to belong to ethnicity X, 5+ generations after their ancestors immigrated and 3+ of which didn't speak the language and didn't maintain any contact with the country of origin; they will also claim they're "1/16th" of some ethnicity, as if "genes" or "blood" were like chemical elements. Naturally, these "identities" are rooted in stereotypes rather any kind of living culture.

It's a kind of cosplay-lite for the masses.
by bullfightonmars | 2026-02-23 21:25:51+00:00
This is ahistoric. No-one ever said we had to "just vote for Obama" to close Guantanamo Bay.

Frankly, Obama _tried_ to close Guantanamo Bay. He significantly shrunk the population of inmates, but it was ultimately Congress, and the courts that prevented the closure

Obama spent a huge amount of time and political capital trying to clean up Bush's messes.
Ask HN: Are developers who build libs and dev tools safer from AI replacement?
by danver0 | 2026-02-23 21:26:02+00:00
I’ve been thinking about AI and developer jobs.

It feels like developers who build libraries, frameworks, compilers, and dev tools might be safer from AI replacement compared to people building typical CRUD apps.

My intuition is that tooling work requires deeper systems knowledge and taste, while a lot of app-level code is becoming easier for AI to generate.

Am I wrong? Curious what others here think
by steviedotboston | 2026-02-23 21:26:05+00:00
Flock cameras can be helpful in all sorts of crimes. They've been used to solve everything from kidnappings to minor property damage.

There obviously isn't a future without crime. This is just a tool to make it easier for police to do their job and deter criminals somewhat, but that is probably marginal.

There will always be kidnappings, there will always be property damage. Having technology available to make it easier to solve those crimes seems obvious to me.
by mrtesthah | 2026-02-23 21:26:11+00:00
So one one hand we have Nazi ideas[1] being platformed by the ruling political party which has barely disguised its support for ethnically cleansing the country of all non-white people[2]. And on the other hand we have radical democratic socialist candidates proposing stabilized rent[3]. What am I missing here?

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/republican-part...

2. https://www.esiweb.org/newsletter/100-million-expulsions-pro...

3. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/06/europe-zohra...
by throw0101a | 2026-02-23 21:26:49+00:00
> The #1 use case for crypto is that it's anonymous like cash. And yes, this enables people to use it for crime... just like they use cash.

Not quite like cash: collecting and transferring US$1.7B in cash—actual physical paper—is probably more logistically challenging than BTC.

I understand the argument for freedom, but depending on the scale/dosage many things that could be fine in small quantities aren't as good in large ones.
by gs17 | 2026-02-23 21:26:56+00:00
Yeah, ChatGPT has gotten so much worse about this since the GPT-5 models came out. If I mention something once, it will repeatedly come back to it every single message after regardless of if the topic changed, and asking it to stop mentioning that specific thing works, except it finds a new obsession. We also get the follow up "if you'd like, I can also..." which is almost always either obvious or useless.

I occasionally go back to o3 for a turn (it's the last of the real "legacy" models remaining) because it doesn't have these habits as bad.
by BizarroLand | 2026-02-23 21:26:56+00:00
Most likely. Microsoft has pushed out everyone with deep enough knowledge of Windows to ever fix what the new blood has broken.

Windows 7 was likely an accident that will never be repeated, their lightning in a bottle OS.

They're at the point where the only way it can be fixed would be for a visionary CEO to be elected who will scrap Windows 11 and pay to rewrite the OS from the ground up in tandem with hardware manufacturers to scalpel out all of the Windows NT cruft and copilot/ai shit and rebuild from the ground up a Windows 12 that might possibly hearken back to the glory days and then charge us, the user, for the OS license again.

I am just as likely to win the Powerball tonight as that is to happen.

Windows is dead, Microsoft just doesn't believe it yet.
by kalpitdixit | 2026-02-23 21:27:04+00:00
we don't send raw paper sections to the paper or simply compressed summaries. we send simple explanations of the method used (for the human user), implementation instructions for the coding agent, and benchmarks to compare methods.

we've struck a balance between giving enough details and using too many tokens to make sure that every token we use provides value.

compared to the modern 200K / 1M context windows, Paper Lantern's output wont use a significant portion of it
by mothballed | 2026-02-23 21:27:17+00:00
Lawlessness is superior to the law of the tyrant.

Having lived or spent time in a lot of 3rd world shitholes, including a civil war, I've only really felt freedom in places with lawless lack of government, never places with 'rule of law' -- that always gets twisted for the elite.

Of course the same happens in lawless regions, but power is fractured enough, there is a limit on power they can wield against the populace, as the opposing factions ultimately are a check on any one side oppressing the population to leave. They can't man machine guns at all the 'borders' and ultimately corruption becomes cheap enough that it is accessible to the common person which arguably provides more power to the common man than representative democracy does.

I think this element of factions in competition was part of the original genius of the '50' states with the very minimal federal government. But the consolidation of federal power and loss of the teeth of the 10th amendment and expansion of various clauses in the constitution means there is now no escape and very few remaining checks.
by dirasieb | 2026-02-23 21:28:12+00:00
i've never found this type of "humans were left with no alternative" argument in defense of destruction of property convincing, some of the things that separates humans from other animals is the concept of private/public property, rule of law, etc, you know? there are alternatives, contrary to the alarmism found online the US is very far from actual dictatorships where people have close to 0 way of achieving change through the legal system, immediately jumping to violence without an imminent threat is something i'd expect from lower primates, not from homo sapiens.
by irl_zebra | 2026-02-23 21:29:07+00:00
If shame were a motivator for this administration or the current grifter class, neither of these things would exist to the current Armageddon-level they currently do. That is to say, completely agree with your take here. There are plenty of government-entity examples of this, but my favorite I've seen recently was a video montage of Elon saying annually, like clockwork, that sully autonomous driving would be here in 2-3 years for the last 12 years or so. If these people had shame, he wouldn't be doing that, as an example.
by jacquesm | 2026-02-23 21:29:17+00:00
There is a lot of truth in this but I'm not convinced sortition is going to work either.

But what you could do is vote with a string attached and a penalty for being recalled that is going to make people think twice about running for office if their aim is to pull some kind of stunt. The 'you give me four years unconditionally' thing doesn't seem to work at all.
by akramachamarei | 2026-02-23 21:29:20+00:00
You call them "slaves"... where are the whips and chains? If you can't show me whips and chains, tell me why they choose to work in the clothing plants? If they aren't forced to work there, doesn't that suggest that the plants are a desirable alternative to other options in their situation? Now, maybe you believe something more sophisticated, like somehow the appearance of the plants also eliminated opportunities which were better than all presently available options to workers of the "global south." If you believe that, can you explain to me why?
by roysting | 2026-02-23 21:29:20+00:00
You are unfortunately, for whatever your reasons you have, barking up the wrong tree. The people already made a law, the supreme law in fact, called the Constitution.

In fact the capital criminals in this matter are the people violating and betraying that supreme law; the politicians, sheriffs, city councils, and even the YC funders behind Flock, etc.

It is in fact not even just violating the supreme law, but though that betrayal, it is in fact also treason.
by cyanydeez | 2026-02-23 21:29:23+00:00
Reading through the Epstein file, it's naive to conclude that no collusion is happening.

Remember when FAANG was caught red handed manipulated hiring to depress salaries?

Just seems like a lot of astroturf-ish behavior ignoring real world happenings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
by mikeayles | 2026-02-23 21:29:28+00:00
Correct, the engines will have a peak reported torque at one particular RPM, usually quite low (maybe 900RPM off the top of my head), at higher RPM, the peak torque may only be 90% of the peak torque, but at 50% more RPM, you end up with (100 * 0.9 * 1.5)=35% more 'power' despite the torque being lower.

This is detailed in J1939 (canbus protocol) PGN (parameter group number) EC1 (engine configuration 1) if you fancy a rabbit hole.

The vertical clusters will be a combination of gearing and cruise control, exactly. At the vehicle speed limit in the top gear (usually 12) most trucks will cruise around 1200rpm (exception being the scanias with supercruise). It's likely this truck did a lot of urban driving or was in average speed zones.

You also get a lot of drivers (suprisingly more younger than older drivers) that are happy to set it at 53mph, get the green tick for the telemetry to try and get a bonus, but then have a really low stress drive. It creates a bigger speed differential so they can be overtaken by other trucks easier, and realistically results in 10-20mins over a 10hr shift, to some, a 10hr chilled out shift is better than 9hr40mins of pushing it.