MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xnx | 2026-02-27 20:22:28+00:00
> Then SEO made Google defensive, then websites catered to Google and not users,

Google was created in response to simple proto-SEO techniques (e.g. keyword stuffing) that already ruined Alta Vista.

Google has been combating adversarial information retrieval since inception.

Google's background with that is one of the reasons to expect they will stay on top of the AI race. The recipe is: lots of good/novel data x careful weighting of trust x algorithm.
by giobox | 2026-02-27 20:22:54+00:00
The amount of people here discussing this who didn't bother to read the terms of this deal and have just assumed there is an automatic re-bill dark pattern is incredible. There is no need to put a reminder to cancel, because taking advantage of the free six months DOES NOT lead to automatic renewal at 200 dollars a month.

If you had a free account, it reverts back to free after six months. If you had a paid account, it reverts back to whatever tier of sub you had _before_ you took this six months free. If you were on the 20 buck a month plan before, you go back to the 20 buck a month plan. You paid nothing before, you go back to paying nothing.

There is no path through this agreement that results in you suddenly being charged an unexpected 200 dollars in six months time, unless you were already paying 200 bucks a month before you took the deal, in which case you are just back where you were, but with an extra 1200 dollars in your pocket.
by PaulHoule | 2026-02-27 20:22:56+00:00
The moon is not that far away in terms of miles but it is far away in terms of momentum, particularly if you want to go there and return.

The mission plan used for Apollo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_orbit_rendezvous

has a bit of the character of a stunt, like going over Niagara falls in a barrel, but it is much easier than all the alternative plans. If you were a science fiction fan growing up in the 1980s you might have read editorials in Analog Science Fiction Magazine that suggested we were sold an inferior plan to get to the moon but anything better is a lot more difficult. Whether it is the star-crossed SLS-Orion complex, the comically bloated and tippy Starship-derived lander [1] or the plan to meet those up in a parking orbit and have astronaut climb out one hatch and into the other, there's no realistic plan at all.

[1] if you had a pair of those chopsticks and methane-oxygen fuel from ISRU boy it would be sweet but without that...
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-27 20:23:12+00:00
> Sadly the reality is that most other Android devices are simply not secure enough.

This seems like a bad reason for not supporting a device. If the device doesn't have a hardware feature then the OS it came with can't be doing it either, and then all you're doing is leaving the user with all of the other security problems in the OEM OS that otherwise could have been improved by replacing it.
by jcrosbz | 2026-02-27 20:23:24+00:00
I’ve spent the last few years helping people grow their social media, monetize their content, and turn attention into real income. Creators, small businesses, service brands — once they figured out what the algorithm wanted, results followed. That work is what led to the offer in the first place.

The company I built from that experience is Viralize.

The $1M offer came because the product wasn’t just theory — it was already helping people grow and get monetized more consistently. Viralize uses AI to score content before it’s posted by analyzing hooks, retention likelihood, engagement signals, and algorithm alignment. It’s basically SEO logic applied to social media.

But I didn’t start this to sell it off early. I wanted to own the company and keep building something that actually helps creators and businesses win, not just feed another platform’s data pipeline.

Maybe I should’ve taken the money. A million dollars isn’t small. But I care more about the long-term impact than a fast exit. I want to see how far this goes if it’s built with creators in mind.
by bentley | 2026-02-27 20:24:07+00:00
> The law could be poorly written, or it could be poorly and over-cautiously interpreted by F-Droid maintainers. But I didn't get the feeling they were acting on any kind of moral judgement or own belief about what's appropriate for children.

If F-Droid were being overcautious, they would have blocked social media apps too. Social media is explicitly the single biggest target of these “think of the children” app store laws after outright porn sites. F-Droid left Reddit and Mastodon clients unmarked. Am I supposed to believe that F-Droid honestly thought the law applied to apps containing only ancient religious texts, and not to social media? Has any other app store interpreted the regulations the same way? And if they truly believed that was a legal requirement, why did they reverse the policy after only a couple days of user complaints?
by bee_rider | 2026-02-27 20:24:12+00:00
Processing power is my second favorite explanation.

My first favorite would have been: they don’t use the humans for anything, the pods are just the most efficient way to store humans. The machines think they are being benevolent, just want peace and quiet and for humans to stop doing dramatic things like scorching the sky. But I don’t know where the plot would go from there.
by RandallBrown | 2026-02-27 20:24:19+00:00
So let's say you want to check something like a new fuel nozzle.

SpaceX might design and build the nozzle, then put it in the rocket and launch it. It might work how they intended, or it might not, but they'll find out immediately. They'll make changes, build a new nozzle, launch another rocket, and continue until it works like they want.

NASA will do a lot more testing, simulation, redesigning, etc. until they KNOW that the nozzle will perform perfectly on the first try.

On the surface, NASA's approach sounds cheaper because you aren't wasting rockets. In reality it looks like SpaceX's approach might be better.
by dang | 2026-02-27 20:24:25+00:00
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you did it more than once in this thread - the other case was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47183957. Can you please stop posting like this? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
by dpc_01234 | 2026-02-27 20:24:37+00:00
> In my experience, the most natural way to write things in Rust is usually the fastest (or close enough) as well.

Well, a lot of C/Odin/Zig people will point out that Rust's stdlib encourages heap allocations. For actually best performance you typically want to store your data in some data-oriented data model, avoid allocations and so on, which is not exactly against idiomatic Rust, but more than just a typical straighforward Rust just throwing allocations around.
by afandian | 2026-02-27 20:25:21+00:00
Maybe it was written by:

> Grant Naylor is a gestalt entity occupying two bodies, one of which lives in north London, the other in south London. The product of a horribly botched genetic-engineering experiment, which took place in Manchester in the late fifties, they try to eke out two existences with only one mind. They attended the same school and the same university, but, for tax reasons, have completely different wives.

> The first body is called Rob Grant, the second Doug Naylor. Among other things, they spent three years in the mid-eighties as head writers of Spitting Image; wrote Radio Four's award-winning series Son of Cliche; penned the lyrics to a number one single; and created and wrote Red Dwarf for BBC television.

> They have made a living variously by being ice-cream salesmen, shoe-shop assistants and by attempting to sell dodgy life-assurance policies to close friends. They also spent almost two years on the night shift loading paper into computer printers at a mail-order factory in Ardwick. They can still taste the cheese 'n' onion toasties.

> Their favourite colour is orange.
by pavel_lishin | 2026-02-27 20:25:24+00:00
> I always thought I loved Gmail. Turns out I just had the habit of typing in “gmail.com” in my search bar. I honestly can’t tell you a single feature of Gmail that I miss.

> Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene. I no longer give my primary email to fly-by-night sites, and I'm deliberate with what things I'm signing up for.

I also do this, but with my own custom domain - still in gmail.

Gmail is fine, imo. I also don't let them algorithmically sort my email - I use filters & such.
by Bender | 2026-02-27 20:25:24+00:00
Ah. So what they are saying is that their 500TB CSAM was removed but they recovered 400TB. They were using it to build hashes. Yeah I would not expect them to share that with the world. It would not surprise me if automation removed it because it is CSAM.

Perhaps they should store such things on hardened secured servers in NSA data-centers (yes, related) instead of Google servers unless the plan is to integrate the CSAM into Google. Otherwise generate the signatures on hardened infrastructure that Google employees do not have access to and then share the signatures with all the hosting providers. (Checksums, Microsoft PhotoDNA, etc...)
by beloch | 2026-02-27 20:25:30+00:00
Red Dwarf is an absolute classic, but I think people of all nations can agree that the American version was better off cancelled.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mlnntKi2no

Even the second attempt at it, with Star Trek DS9's Terry Farrell (as Cat), was a bad idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfJsViD9SjM

The original was lightning in a bottle.
by leonflexo | 2026-02-27 20:25:40+00:00
Similar to how we are seeing LLMs shoved into spaces where existing ML was already doing well and better suited.

Not to dismiss the value of LLMs in those cases as an interface/interpretation layer.

If grandma goes into the windowless surgery factory, I just want the best bots working on her. There is value in having Dr. Bot the replicant give me the face-to-face status updates. We are not breaking out those layers as much, anymore, as the focus becomes minimizing FOMO.
by elmerfud | 2026-02-27 20:25:48+00:00
This is very sad news. I realize there is a lot of criticism to be said around the Artemis program. Those who criticize it aren't wrong. Like a lot of NASA projects following the Saturn V It turned into an overly politicized thing. Instead of just giving them a goal and giving them money and letting them do what was necessary to achieve it.

The space shuttle was an interesting thing but ultimately was a patchwork of politically motivated parts that in hindsight wasn't that successful of a space program. Artemis having to build on some of this just carried forward the same problems.

What makes me sad about this is that roughly 50% of the population was not alive the last time people stepped on the moon. I count myself among those I missed it by one year. Although I would not have remembered it at the time. Even at the time of the shuttle NASA should have been working to test interesting and non-financially viable technologies to release into the commercial market. Now launching rockets into space is fully a commercial endeavor. I think there's still a great role for NASA. Because there are some plausible technologies that will never be financially viable to research and develop without them. Let NASA partner with some of these places but develop things like aerospike engines and other technologies that have promise but are too far away from a commercial realization to be viable at this point.

I want to see people go to the moon again. Artemis was a big waste of money but I wanted it to send people back to the moon even if it was just to remind people that as a nation and as a world we should aspire to great and impossible things. That we should look up instead of looking down and inward all of the time. I wanted Artemis to prove out some of these technologies and then on the next trip it can go on a a SpaceX rocket or someone else's.
by simonw | 2026-02-27 20:26:08+00:00
I disagree with this section about WebAssembly:

> But the practical limitation is language support. You cannot run arbitrary Python scripts in WASM today without compiling the Python interpreter itself to WASM along with all its C extensions. For sandboxing arbitrary code in arbitrary languages, WASM is not yet viable.

There are several versions of the Python interpreter that are compiled to WASM already - Pyodide has one, and WASM is a "Tier 2" supported target for CPython: https://peps.python.org/pep-0011/#tier-2 - unofficial builds here: https://github.com/brettcannon/cpython-wasi-build/releases

Likewise I've experimented with running various JavaScript interpreters compiled to WASM, the most popular of those is probably QuickJS. Here's one of my many demos: https://tools.simonwillison.net/quickjs (I have one for MicroQuickJS too https://tools.simonwillison.net/microquickjs )

So don't rule out WASM as a target for running non-compiled languages, it can work pretty well!
by numpad0 | 2026-02-27 20:26:12+00:00
I think we're all misunderstanding SpaceX. I think it's more of an engine factory disguised as a general space company that managed to borrow the dad's card.

The only thing SpaceX truly has an edge is its engines.

They have perfected the engine for a ship like a giant Mars class rockets. And that engine has been in full scale series production for years, while the actual Starship keeps blowing up. The reason they developed their hoverslam landing technology, also, was because they wanted their precious engines back.

It's as if they handed groups of gamers a credit card and they went onto plunder stocks of RTX cards from 20 miles around with some Roombas bought on reward points. It's just inches below the threshold for typical BS detector if it weren't specifically tuned for the relevant topics.

All makes sense if everything was an elaborate ploy to get someone to pay for specifically the engines.
by program_whiz | 2026-02-27 20:26:18+00:00
I think one major draw to human-like for factors is the reuse of existing ecosystems and tools. If you have human-like grasping, you can reuse tools and utensils for human hands, otherwise, you need custom attachments. If you have human-like legs you can navigate stairs, wear pants for customization, and possibly operate a car or bike.

Its a bit like choosing JS / python -- of course performance is inferior to a compiled language with highly tailored code, but they are flexible and have an ecosystem that might do 99% of the lifting for you.

But in isolation, I agree with your idea that specialized robots with form fitted specifically to task will likely outperform a more generalized solution in a specific domain of behavior, the more generalized will likely outperform in flexibility and reusability (e.g. capable of reusing the human ecosystem).
by adampunk | 2026-02-27 20:26:35+00:00
So the problem I'm having is I don't know what I'm doing vis a vis security, so I can't audit my own understanding by just sitting in a chair, but here's what I've been doing.

I'm building a desktop app that has has authentication needs because we need to connect our internal agents and also allow the user to connect theirs. We pay for our agents, the user pays for theirs (or pays us to use ours etc.). These are, relatively speaking, VERY SIMPLE PROBLEMS, nevertheless agents are happy to consume and leak secrets, or break things in much stranger ways, like hooking the wrong agent up to the wrong auth which would have charged a user for our API calls. That seemed very unlikely to me until I saw it.

So far what has "worked" (made me feel less anxious, aside from the niggling worry that this is theater) is:
1. Having a really strong and correct understanding of our data flows. That's not about security per se so at least that I can be ok at it. This allows me to...
2. Be aggressive and paranoid about not doing it at all, if it can be helped. Where I actually handle authentication is as minimal as possible (one should have some reasonable way to prove that to yourself). Done right the space is small enough to reason about.

How do I do 1 & 2 while not knowing anything? Painfully and slowly and by reading. The web agents are good if you're honest about your level of knowledge and you ask for help in terms of sources to read. It's much more effective than googling. Ask, read what the agents say, press them for good recommendations for YOU to read, not anyone. Then go out and read those sources. Have I learned enough to supervise a frontier model? No. Absolutely not.
by jonchurch_ | 2026-02-27 20:27:01+00:00
Folks saying this offer is in bad faith or not generous enough dont seem to understand how low the bar is here for rewarding maintainers.

I maintain Express.js and Lodash, as well as a number of express direct deps (as a TC member of both Express and Lodash).

OSS has been my fulltime focus for over a year (aka Im unemployed). In 2025 I made $10 from open source, in the form of an amazon gift card for fixing a bug in another random open source project (I think they have VC money).

Call it skill issue on my part, sure valid. But having a form that says “give us your email and handle, we can easily verify your contributions, and in exchange you get $200/month of value and we ask nothing of you” is the most generous gift Ive seen.

Is it enough to fix the well known power dynamics of OSS? Of course not. Is it cheap PR for Anthropic? Yes, as is every other corporate OSS fund initiative. Im not going to give them a standing ovation and a key to the city bc they cleared the extremely low bar.

My point is that, regardless of motives, from this maintainer’s perspective this is a kind offer which is respectful of me and my time. If you fall into the camp that training on OSS is stealing, I can see why youd think that this is a slap in the face. I personally do not see it that way, as my work is a conduit for me to serve millions Ill never meet, and what they do with my labor is not a personal concern. I do what I do because the process itself has value to me.
by Aurornis | 2026-02-27 20:27:27+00:00
> After giving them a fair shot, I think I can now honestly say that Brave and DuckDuckGo are better than Google for >90% of searches

I've had DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for years and I couldn't disagree with this more. DuckDuckGo is fine for quickly getting to well known sites where I can't remember the URL, but it's objectively worse for trying to find everything from Reddit threads to Recipes. Their depth of indexing sites like Reddit feels dramatically worse lately and recipe search will predictably give me the same list of SEO spam blogs regardless of what I type in.

DuckDuckGo also seems to be doing the YouTube search thing that everyone hates where after the first several results it just starts throwing semi-related things at you instead.

I still add "!g" to my DuckDuckGo queries when I don't have time to mess around or if the first page of results is obvious SEO spam.

The other main point in this blog post isn't really about Google at all, it's just what happened when the author set up a a new e-mail address and didn't sign up for a lot of sites with it:

> Leaving Gmail also gave me the opportunity to start implementing better digital hygiene. I no longer give my primary email to fly-by-night sites, and I'm deliberate with what things I'm signing up for.

I thought there was going to be some substance to this post but it reads like someone congratulating themselves for a choice they made and then trying to backwards justify it.
by avazhi | 2026-02-27 20:27:41+00:00
Not a fan of Google but I always find Gmail criticisms so weird.

Like, what does this guy even mean about the algorithm sorting his inbox? Legit what the fuck is he talking about? Non junk mail goes to my inbox. Spam goes to spam. What am I missing?

And speaking of spam, I have a bunch of proton mail accounts and outlook accounts and iCloud mail accounts and Gmail’s spam filter is easily the best. Like, it’s not even close. Protonmail is nearly as bad as outlook at dealing with spam. It’s impossible to overstate how bad both of them are at filtering spam vs Gmail.

I legit feel like I’m either being actively gaslit or I’m genuinely missing something big here.

As for search alternatives, I’d love to use Kagi full time but the cost is just unreasonably high for now IMO.
by pdonis | 2026-02-27 20:27:41+00:00
I don't think so, because both losses were due to bad management decisions under irrational political pressure, not any lack of engineering knowledge that more unmanned testing could have provided.

Challenger was lost because NASA ignored a critical flight risk with the SRB joint O-rings. And by "ignored", I mean "documented that the risk existed, that it could result in loss of vehicle and loss of lives of the crew, and then waived the risk so the Shuttle could keep flying instead of being grounded until the issue was fixed". They didn't need more unmanned testing to find the issue; they needed to stop ignoring it. But that was politically unacceptable since it would have meant grounding the Shuttle until the issue was fixed.

Columbia was lost because NASA ignored the risks of tile damage due to their belief that it couldn't be fixed anyway once the Shuttle was in orbit. But that meant NASA also devoted no effort to eliminating the risk of tile damage by fixing the issue that caused it. Which again would have been politically unacceptable since it would have meant grounding the Shuttle until the issue was fixed.
by makeramen | 2026-02-27 20:28:18+00:00
I see it as trying to apply the bitter lesson to robotics. Specialized robots will always have their place, but humanoid ones can take advantage of all the design interfaces that already exist in the world for humans.

Similar to how claude code gained so much traction in terminal by just leveraging the command line interface that already exists for humans, no need to invent a domain specific MCP to just run shell commands.

I agree with you that it's far from the most efficient approach for specific tasks. But the analogy would be that you also generally don't want to use LLMs to do something you can "just" write a script for... that doesn't make LLMs useless though.
by bachmeier | 2026-02-27 20:28:30+00:00
> I could see a company setting a 6-month timeline initially, so they can reevaluate the program and choose how to evolve their support for open source.

There's nothing about this "for open source". This is for the celebrities of the open source world. "Use our product and let us advertise that you're using it." Nice try, but this is a pretty common marketing strategy, so no point pretending it's about supporting open source. A big name open source project adopting their products provides massive value to the company. Actual support would be giving access to the non-celebrities of the open source world.
by goku12 | 2026-02-27 20:29:11+00:00
> The "Redirections" section of the manual [0] is just seven US Letter pages.

"Just" seven US Letter pages? You're talking about redirections alone, right? How many such features exist in Bash? I find Python, Perl and even Lisps easier to understand. Some of those languages wouldn't have been even conceived if shell languages were good enough.

There is another shell language called 'execline' (to be precise, it's a replacement for a shell). The redirections in its commands are done using a program named 'fdmove' [1]. It doesn't leave any confusion as to what it's actually doing. fdmove doesn't mention the fact that it resorts to FD inheritance to achieve this. However, the entire 'shell' is based on chain loading of programs (fork, exec, FD inheritance, environment inheritance, etc). So fdmove's behavior doesn't really create any confusion to begin with. Despite execline needing some clever thinking from the coder, I find it easier to understand what it's actually doing, compared to bash. This is where bash and other POSIX shell languages went wrong with abstractions. They got carried away with them.

[1] https://www.skarnet.org/software/execline/fdmove.html