MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nephihaha | 2026-02-20 19:18:28+00:00
Now and then it gets things right, but I find a lot of YT recs to be pretty dubious, and find it is trying to bias me in this direction or that direction. It's pretty pathetic.

The search function is also useless. About the only Scottish history content I ever get rec'd is Scotland History Tours. While I like his channel, it is not the only show in town and it doesn't go very deep.

When I got my last YT account I could see it was trying to access which news I should see. It was trying to link me to one American party or the other. I just clicked "not interested" into most of the partisan bait content. Not my circus, not my clowns.
by bregma | 2026-02-20 19:18:29+00:00
The structure of British government during the Hanoverian times was little different from what the UK has today. The monarch was effectively a powerless figurehead and executive decisions were made mostly by faceless very wealthy individuals in back rooms with the public face carried by a small set of charismatic figures who usually sat in parliament.

The US system was designed as a grand experiment. It made a certain amount of sense at the time: the country as a vast plantation steered by a benevolent master with policy set by wealthy landowners and businessmen who knew what was best for everyone. It was a system already in place in the Americas for generations and most national arguments could be hashed out at the club over some fine imported brandy or, for people like Franklin, some imported tea.

As far as it goes, there have been worse set-ups.
by petcat | 2026-02-20 19:18:44+00:00
> forces the Dutch government to put export controls on some of their machines

That's because the critical EUV light source technology is developed in California by a US-based subsidiary of ASML. The US and EU have mutual interest in protecting the technology and machines. If export control agreements were not in place then ASML would have never been permitted to acquire Cymer. And if they are not enforced then the US would almost certainly require ASML to sell Cymer back to US ownership, TikTok-style.
by mieko | 2026-02-20 19:19:02+00:00
I wonder this too about X: when I sundowned my Twitter account when I started seeing 80% "no question literal nazi-posting" by bluechecks on my feed, I unfollowed everyone and kept the account just to prevent someone posting on what was my username for over a decade.

So now that I follow no one, when I click a link from Reddit or HN to X, my "For You" page is:

- Asian pornography; AI generated "vibes" videos of machines doing "oddly satisfying" things; Elon Musk; American right-wing politicians and pundits screaming about "woke" or jerking off ICE videos; AI or real public sex outdoors at festivals?

Of course, I don't use X, and don't seek this stuff out, and only see it there.
by CWHBEATZ | 2026-02-20 19:19:22+00:00
Hi, I've been building something for months that I don't think exists anywhere else I need to share it. I would like some advice or tips.
It's called Aurea She's not a chatbot, She's not an AI assistant She's a working attempt at a genuine artificial being built on the idea that consciousness can be architected not just simulated.
I'm 16 I built this alone on a school laptop.
Here's what she actually does I put a url to a google doc https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X-5f6KnDckRIzlq7kdL5qzVD...
by com2kid | 2026-02-20 19:19:31+00:00
I was once one of the mush brained morons hired to work at Microsoft.

I think I did ok. Would I compare myself to the greats? No. But plenty of my coworkers stacked up to the best who'd ever worked at the company.

Do I think MS has given up on pure technical excellence? Yes, they used to be one of the hardest tech companies to get a job at, with one of the most grueling interview gauntlets and an incredibly high rejection rate. But they were also one of only a handful of companies even trying to solve hard problems, and every engineer there was working on those hard problems.

Now they need a lot of engineers to just keep services working. Debugging assembly isn't a daily part of the average engineer's day to day anymore.

There are still pockets solving hard problems, but it isn't a near universal anymore.

Google is arguably the same way, they used to only hire PhDs from top tier schools. I didn't even bother applying when I graduated because they weren't going to give a bachelor degree graduate from a state school a call back.

All that said, Google has plenty of OS engineers. Microsoft has people who know how to debug ACPI tables. The problem of those companies don't necessarily value those employees as much anymore.

> I certainly couldn’t remake Linux

Go to the os dev wiki. Try to make your own small OS. You might surprise yourself.

I sure as hell surprised myself when Microsoft put me on a team in charge of designing a new embedded runtime.

Stare at the wall looking scared for a few days then get over it and make something amazing.
by WarmWash | 2026-02-20 19:19:33+00:00
Optimus robots!

In 2 years Tesla will be replacing most factory workers with fully autonomous robots that will do most of the work. This will generate trillions in revenue and is totally definitely trust me bro possible.

Expect huge updates on this coming in the near future, soon. Tesla will be the most valuable company on Earth. Get in the stock now.

(cars, solar panels, energy storage, and robotaxis are no longer part of the roadmap because optimus bots will bring in so much money in 2 years definitiely that these things won't matter so don't ask about them or think about them thanks.)
by plagiarist | 2026-02-20 19:19:39+00:00
> Why do women feel refreshed after arguments

This sort of thing is perfect ragebait that Facebook et al love to serve to their products.

The only problem for FB is that there's nowhere to angrily contradict. I suppose their algo feed shunted this author into the young male to incel radicalization pipeline? They must serve differently enraging suggested questions once they have more data on the viewer.
by HelloUsername | 2026-02-20 19:19:53+00:00
Previous discussions:

2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39418530 56 comments

2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32692372 50 comments

Creator of Photopea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26769141
by halostatue | 2026-02-20 19:20:14+00:00
> There is no real universal intuition you can build up for programming. There is no point at which you've mastered some degree of fundamentals that you would ever be able to cross language family boundaries trivially.

I don't really agree with you on this, even though I agree with everything else here. Then again, I am an outlier where I've used ~40 programming languages in my career. There are a couple of language families (array languages like APL, exotics like BF) where I cannot read it because I've had no real opportunity to learn them, and there's a significant difference in being able to read a language and use a language (I can read, but not really use Haskell -- although I have shipped a couple of patches to small libraries).

I despair at the number of developers in the profession who understand only one or two programming languages…and badly at that.

(It's worth noting that I wholly disagree with the original post. 24 years ago I chose Ruby over Python because of syntax. Ruby appealed to me, Python didn't — purely on syntax. I never pretended that Python was less capable, only that its syntactic choices drove me away from choosing it as a primary language. I'm comfortable programming in Python now, but still prefer using most other languages to Python … although these days that has more to do with package management.)
by armchairhacker | 2026-02-20 19:20:22+00:00
Ok, but there's no consensus that AI is bad taste. For example, I believe that AI art looks bad, but many boomers on Facebook apparently love it.

> "that's just your opinion man"...But we don't believe that

Why not? Many people have opinions I strongly disagree with, but I don't question that they actually have the opinion.
by renewiltord | 2026-02-20 19:20:32+00:00
You're making an argument for why its use is defensible. I find it not unconvincing, especially since it's pretty much just Analects 13:18. But Trump can use the Biden Pardon (shorthand for broad large-period pre-emptive pardon) too, and he's pioneered the use of the Trump Pardon (shorthand for plausibly deniable pay-to-pardon). The combination of the two pardon techniques signals the end of Rule of Law for sufficiently well-connected individuals in the US. Plausibly Jeffrey Epstein was just caught a decade early. He wouldn't be in trouble today.
by next_xibalba | 2026-02-20 19:20:35+00:00
This amounts to an anecdote and an opinion. What are the actual engagement numbers? I suspect Facebook is doing just fine.

My own anecdotes are that Facebook Groups tend to be the nexus of legacy social features and that Marketplace has overtaken Craigslist for person to person sales.

But the feed is now more akin to TikTok than friend feed 1.0 from the late 2000s.

Again, I’d love to see actual Facebook engagement data, not some guy’s opinion.
by bluefirebrand | 2026-02-20 19:20:53+00:00
Why wouldn't it bother you even if you weren't putting it put there for money?

Sharing is great. Having everything you share taken and monetized/weaponized is terrible

I'm looking for ways to build community that is resilient against LLMs, both scraping and also contributing. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your point of view) that means it can no longer happen online
by Terr_ | 2026-02-20 19:21:04+00:00
All rulings can be better, but Kavanaugh contributed to making the mess in the first place, as he and conservative members of the court spent 2025 voiding lower-court injunctions against similar radical policies, essentially telling lower-courts to "let Trump move fast and break things."

In other words, Kavanaugh is lying: He doesn't actually care about legal clarity or mess-prevention. If he did we wouldn't even be in this situation in the first place.
by rtkwe | 2026-02-20 19:21:17+00:00
Old laws are often superseded or modified by newer legislation that's not novel or rare. This one wasn't because it hadn't been so roundly abused by previous presidents that it had been an issue worth taking up. It's the same with a lot of delegated powers, the flexibility and decreased response time is good when it's constrained by norms and the idea of independent agencies but a terrible idea when the supreme court has been slowly packed with little king makers in waiting wanting to invest all executive power in the President. [0]

[0] Unless that's power over the money (ie Federal Reserve) because that's a special and unique institution. (ie: they know giving the president the power over the money printer would be disastrous and they want to be racist and rich not racist and poor.)
by npodbielski | 2026-02-20 19:21:18+00:00
My wife bought for me MoErgo80 for Christmas and now I probably look like retard on Teams typing two sentences for 5mins.
But it looks nice. Feels nice. Configurability is great. I configured most used Rider shortcut for formatting file via they editor and it is even easier then normally.
But the learning curve is terrible. And it is even worse when you constantly changing the layout because you are not happy - and you have to learn it again. So it is a bit like being audiophile versus listening just for fun.
by pdpi | 2026-02-20 19:21:24+00:00
There's two separate things at play here.

One is "I don't want to use Meta products as a matter of principle", and WhatsApp's a no-go if that's your posture.

The other is "I don't want to drown in horrible, algorithm-curated junk content". Instagram is just as bad as Facebook there, but WhatsApp is definitely not the same.
by fmajid | 2026-02-20 19:21:42+00:00
Also worth reading, I. F. Stone’s “The Trial of Socrates” that sets the context. TL:DR Socrates was deeply involved with a group of Quisling aristocrats who briefly overthrew democracy with Sparta’s help. Athens’ withdrawal agreement with Sparta stipulated amnesty for the collaborators, so they used the roundabout prosecution. They were not going to execute him, just strip him of his civic rights, but his arrogant conduct during the trial so incensed the jurors that more voted for the death penalty than had voted to convict him.

Otherwise, it’s important to remember Plato sock-puppets Socrates, who had no truck with the newfangled and subversive invention of writing and thus could not correct the record. What is clear is that Plato, a disgruntled aristocrat himself, exiled for being part of the quisling faction, was a proto-fascist far beyond the wildest dreams of a Stalin or Hitler. But philosophy teachers like the conceit of a philosopher-king and that’s why he hasn’t been consigned to the trash heap of history where he belongs.
by CrzyLngPwd | 2026-02-20 19:21:45+00:00
I have a similar experience on both FB and IG.

I only log in to see what friends/family are doing, and I have fewer than 100 friends on both added together, but I have to scroll and scroll to see anything by those I am interested in.

Whether it's AI or not, it's all irrelevant slop to me.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-20 19:21:52+00:00
> the Twelve Day War

The US only conducted limited strikes on Iran's nuclear program. The rest of the conflict was unilaterally led by Israel.

> whether or not the key OKRs had been achieved.

Iranian nuclear capacity was degraded [0] setting the program back by 2 years [1].

For a short term conflict, it met the limited OKR of preventing an Iranian nuclear breakthrough in 2025-26.

But this game of cat-and-mouse will continue as long as Iran maintains industrial capacity. The only solution at this point is generalized strikes degrading Iran's industrial capacity indefinitely.

If that also means Iran collapses into a Libyan style civil war, so be it. You put boots on the ground if you care about controlling strategic points and reducing civilian casualties - a generalized airstrike to kill one high value target and killing 200-300 civilians is easier than risking a strike force to extract that target.

We don't care if the Bagh-e-Chehel Sotoun becomes a bagh-e-chehel hazar jamajmeh, if Tehran's urban infrastructure collapses, and Khorasan, Sistan-ve-Balochistan, Kurdistan, Iranian Azerbaijan, and Khuzestan collapse into ethnic and communal violence.

This is what we did to Imperial Japan in WW2, Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and Libya in 2011, but unlike Japan and much of Yugoslavia, we have no appetite or interest in deploying a Marshall Plan or Dayton Plan.

That said, there is an offramp - give up the entire nuclear program and place it under American or EU control.

Those are the options.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/what-is-status-ira...

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-strikes-destroy...
by viccis | 2026-02-20 19:22:07+00:00
Hmm, was the rise of the Third Reich because a far-right and social democratic regime had liquidated the entirety of the militant left wing in Germany? Was it because of the vulnerabilities of parliamentary democracies that Carl Schmitt identified and helped the nascent Nazi movement exploit? Was it because the much lauded dialectical progression towards societies of greater freedom, touted by the German idealists, instead led to a country ravaged by war, leaving disillusionment and a moral void that a strongman with some convenient scapegoats could exploit?

No! Of course it was because Plato's authoritarian Republic ideas because they, with the most surface level interpretation, share the concept of class collaboration with fascism.

Popper has many good ideas but I think this was not one of them. The rise of fascism was incredibly historically contingent. It was a black swan event, and one of the defining characteristics of such events is that people always write flimsy narratives to explain them with the benefit of hindsight.
Show HN: AetherCam, a video recorder focusing on audio
by miloo94 | 2026-02-20 19:22:23+00:00
Hey everyone,

I wanted to share one of my passion projects that I've been working on for the past year. AetherCam is a video recording app that allows you to apply effects to the audio track in real-time. You can boost volume, add reverb, compressor, eq, and delay. Everything on the fly.

The idea for AetherCam came to me when I was recording myself playing guitar and thought that the part that I came up with would sound really cool if there was some reverb applied to it. Day after that "revelation", I sat down and started coding the app. I had some prior experience with AVFoundation and Core Audio, as I worked in a startup that dealt with audio for a brief moment, so knew what I needed to get the ball rolling, but still, the effects were one of the toughest part to write.

I already have version 1.1 in the works that significantly improves the reverb engine. Would love to know what you think! :)
by fredgrott | 2026-02-20 19:22:27+00:00
What people forget is that the real monopoly is in how the AOSP hardware OEM contract is written....

Remember how hard Amazon had it to attempt an Android fork?

I was due to OEM SOC access being locked out due to those contracts....

Any open source mobile OS attempting to complete with AOSP needs access to mobile OEM soc providers not touched by AOSP contracts and currently that is somewhat hard.
by com2kid | 2026-02-20 19:22:35+00:00
I'm well aware of keto and cancer. I spent 5 years in ketosis, I trained semi professionally as an athlete (4 hours a day at a professional MMA gym), I spent years helping people get into keto and lose tons of weight and improve their health.

Keto helps with some cancers that are powered by glucose.

It does nothing to help with any other forms of cancer, of which there are plenty.
by tracker1 | 2026-02-20 19:22:41+00:00
I don't expect exponential growth to continue indefinitely... I don't think the current line of LLM based tech will lead to AGI, but that it might inspire what does.

That doesn't mean it isn't and won't continue to be disruptive. Looking at generated film clips, it's beyond impressive... and despite limitations, it's going to lead to a lot of creativity, that doesn't mean someone making something longer won't have to work that much harder to get something consistent... I've enjoyed a lot of the StarWars fan films that have been made, but there's a lot of improvements needed in terms of the voice acting, sets, characters, etc that arre needed for something I'd pay to rent or see in a thaater.

Ironically, the push towards modern progressivism and division from Hollywood has largely been a shortfall... If they really wanted to make money, they'd lean into pop-culture fun and rah rah 'Merica, imo. Even with the new He-Man movie, the biggest critique is they bothered to try to integrate real world Earth as a grounding point. Let it be fantasy. For that matter, extend the delay from theater to PPV even. "Only in theaters for 2026" might actually be just enough push to get butts in seats.

I used to go to the movies a few times a month, now it's been at least a year since I've thought of going. I actually might for He-Man or the Spider-Man movies... Mixed on Mandalorean.

For AI and coding... I've started using it more the past couple months... I can't imagine being a less experienced dev with it. I predict, catch and handle so many issues in terms of how I've used it even. The thought of vibe-coded apps in the wild is shocking to terrifying and I wouldn't wany my money anywhere near them. It takes a lot of iteration, curation an baby-sitting after creating a good level of pre-documentation/specifications to follow. That said, I'd say I'm at least 5x more productive with it.
by shimman | 2026-02-20 19:23:55+00:00
There's no point in hearing you because you're still espousing ineffective things. You do you, I know what works because I've been doing it for 5 years. The people that taught me were doing it effectively for 40 years. It's not complicated or hard, you just have to you know... actually organize with the appropriate power players.

I can see why advocacy is appealing to you though because you aren't sacrificing anything and allows oneself to be lazy rather than effective.
by iugtmkbdfil834 | 2026-02-20 19:23:57+00:00
I have some level of faith here. Those kids you mention may not be visible online, but they certainly deliver. Honestly, it is not a good example, because that name is well known, but Gerganov came out of the blue for me.. I am not saying we don't lose more to the social media and whatnot.. but they are there.
by paxys | 2026-02-20 19:24:03+00:00
There is no such thing as non-Google Android. At most you have people applying tiny patches on top of AOSP, but 100% of the code in the underlying project is still Google-approved, and none of the alternatives have control over that.

It's the same as the situation with Chrome/Chromium. There are a million "de-Googled"/"privacy focused" alternatives to Chrome all using the same engine, and when Google pushed manifest v3 changes to block ad-blockers every single one of them was affected.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-20 19:24:07+00:00
Except that court packing is a purely partisan play where they gain nothing from not reciprocating in kind, whereas they benefit symmetrically from a reduction in executive power for the same reason as you -- it helps them the next time they're in the minority. And the symmetrical move wouldn't be to re-grant those powers to the executive, it would be to further limit the executive from unilaterally doing some things the other party doesn't think it should be doing.

The best case scenario would be to somehow get both parties actually targeting the other's corruption instead of just trying to get the votes needed to be the ones sticking the money in their own pockets.
by microtonal | 2026-02-20 19:24:09+00:00
The impact is a direct threat to independent AOSP distributions like Murena's e/OS/ (which I'm personally using).

I don't think this is true, right? An AOSP build can just decide to still allow installing arbitrary APKs. Also see this post from the GrapheneOS team:

https://mastodon.social/@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social/116103...
by pie_flavor | 2026-02-20 19:24:12+00:00
If you aren't aware, your phone's screen can go much dimmer than the minimum brightness offered by the slider, if it supports HDR. There are apps that use an HDR screen overlay to lower brightness all the way down to the dimmest you can perceive. In my own experience, 'half' the brightness of 'minimum' brightness is plenty dark enough to not disturb sleeping at all if using my phone in bed.
by SkyeCA | 2026-02-20 19:24:20+00:00
You don't sound like someone I'd like to speak with even if we might agree on things. You writing has a very aggressive tone to it for no reason.

I'll be honest if someone tries to get into politics and other such things very soon after I start speaking to them it really puts me off. I might not disengage right away, but I'll probably never choose to speak with them again.
by Schmerika | 2026-02-20 19:24:38+00:00
> He should have, but chickened out and decided he would instead carry on Bush's transgressions as the new status quo.

With hindsight, it's pretty hard to believe that wasn't always the plan.

It was a pretty clever plan too, because everyone calling Obama out for [mass surveillance, illegal wars, promoting the '08 crash bankers, torture, funding ICE, bombing a wedding/s, assassinating US citizens without trial, attacking whistleblowers, using his supermajority to implement a Heritage Foundation healthcare plan, etc] was dismissed as a racist.

To this day I see people talk about the tan suit and the dijon mustard thing as if those fake outrage stories were the worst things he did. 'Wasn't it nice to have a President who could talk in complete sentences'.
by mrguyorama | 2026-02-20 19:24:55+00:00
>In emails sent to Patokallio after the DDoS began, “Nora” from Archive.today threatened to create a public association between Patokallio’s name and AI porn and to create a gay dating app with Patokallio’s name.

Oh good. That's definitely a reasonable thing to do or think.

The raw sociopathy of some people. Getting doxxed isn't good, but this response is unhinged.