MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by morphle | 2026-02-21 08:11:20+00:00
I will not invest any time in improving badly designed software. You can't fix a broken wheel. Your HN newsreader app tries to improve the broken wheel. The least you could have done is make the comment edit field WYSIWYG, make it modeless, see what the text will look like while you type, not after you click update or when you click edit in the tread reader.

Your code is just a very limited webbrowser. The webbrowsers, html are a very broken wheel. Alan Kay, the designer of personal computing, explains why https://youtu.be/FvmTSpJU-Xc?t=961

This lecture Alan aimed at this audience, the computer science (programming) students at University of Illinois, where they programmed this broken wheel 20 years after Alan had showed them how do do it better.

Paul Graham should not have based HN (Hacker News) on the web and html but on WYSIWYG, then you would not have had to fix it with your app.

The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the web. Two demos says it all:

https://youtu.be/gGw09RZjQf8?t=147

https://youtu.be/QTJRwKOFddc?t=234

Dan Ingalls implemented most of Alan Kay's invention of the personal computer, in these demo's he shows how to fix the webbrowsers broken wheel a bit. Their Squeak, Etoys and Croquet fixed it completely.
by jeandejean | 2026-02-21 08:12:51+00:00
> The always-on future is inevitable

Well the consumers will decide. Some people will find it very useful, but some others will not necessarily like this... Considering how many times I heard people yelling "OK GOOGLE" for "the gate" to open, I'm not sure a continuous flow of heavily contextualized human conversation will necessarily be easier to decipher?

I know guys, AI is magic and will solve everything, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ordered me eggs and butter when I mentioned out loud I was out of it but actually happy about this because I was just about to go on vacations. My surprise when I'm back: melted butter and rotten eggs at my door...
by kuboble | 2026-02-21 08:13:11+00:00
I'm claiming it's both.

I produce more good (imo) production features despite being distracted.

The features I mention is something that I would be able to do, but only with a lot of learning and great effort - so in practical terms I would not.

It is probably a skill issue but in the past many times I downloaded the open source project and just couldn't build and run it. Cryptic build errors, figuring out dependencies. And I see claude gets the same errors but he just knows how to work around those errors.
Setting up local development environment (db, dummy auth, dummy data) for a project outside of my competence area is already more work than I'm willing to do for a simple feature. Now it's free.

>I can think of roughly 0 fratures of run-of-the-mill software that would be impossible to implement for a semi-competent software developer.

Yes. I'm my area of competence it can do the coding tasks I know exactly how to do just a bit faster. Right now for those tasks I'd say it can one shot code that would take me a day.

But it enables me to do things in the area where I don't have expertise. And getting this expertise is very expensive.
by microtonal | 2026-02-21 08:13:32+00:00
It comes from a history of using mostly trusted application sources like Debian/Ubuntu package archives with manual review being the norm. And few supply chain attacks.

What most of these people do not seem to get is that proper sandboxing does not only protect against attacks from the inside (rogue developer, supply chain attack), but also from the outside. Most desktop apps probably have a good number of security vulnerabilities that can be exploited when they parse untrusted data. On the Linux desktop, most apps still use decades-old C libraries for parsing XML, images, JSON, etc.

Sandboxing also protects against external attacks.

Again, Snap/Flatpak provide this model, but we need to see more application authors take them up to ship their software.

Agreed, though for a lot of technical and social reasons, most apps still need privileges that allow trivial sandbox escapes on Flatpak (I don't know or care about Snap). Strengthening app sandboxing should be a top-priority for the Linux desktop, but only a few people seem to care. The same for fully verified boot, etc. Even things like UKIs only go so far, yet almost no distribution has adopted them.

The general security mindset of the Linux desktop community seems to be stuck in the 90ies, levitating between hahah, they cannot get root (as if that matters on desktop Linux) and secure boot and sandboxing is here to take my rights (on open source desktop Linux, seriously?).
by tovej | 2026-02-21 08:13:44+00:00
This is a vibeslop project with a vibeslop write-up.

Trees? Trees aren't expressive enough to capture all dependency structures. You either need directed acyclical graphs or general directed graphs (for iterative problems).

Based on the terminology you use, it seems you've conflated the graphs used in task scheduling with trees used in OS process management. The only reason process trees are trees are for OS-specific reasons (need for a single initializing root process, need to propagate process properties safely) . But here you're just solving a generic problem, trees are the wrong data structure.

- You have no metrics for what this can do
- No reason given for why you use trees (the text just jumps from graph to trees at one point)
- None of the concepts are explained, but it's clearly just the UNIX process model applied to task management (and you call this 60 year old idea "genuinely new"!)
by padjo | 2026-02-21 08:14:33+00:00
You said the DoJ, which is part of the executive. The judicial branch just ruled on a matter of law. That's what they do.

Also the power of the purse has always been with congress, the constitution is very clear on that.

Finally the notion that the US is stripping power from the executive is honestly farcical. The exact opposite has been happening for decades now.

If you are a US voter then the reason for the current political situation is becoming very clear to me right now.
by stuffoverflow | 2026-02-21 08:17:17+00:00
Yes I have Finnish IP and just before I wrote that post I tested it to make sure it was still happening.

I assume it must be a blanket ban on Finnish IPs as there has been comments about it on Reddit and none of my friends can get it to work either. 5 different ISPs were tried. So at the very least it seems to affect majority of Finnish residential connections.
by tamimio | 2026-02-21 08:18:06+00:00
I wouldn’t suggest doing that, it will result in more regulation restricting drones. I joined before few workshops that included the government too, and there were discussions about requiring a whole license every time you modify the drone, not limited to the airframe, but the flight purpose and payload. So you can imagine in the future, modding or repurposing your drone could be a “federal crime” if you don’t go and re-license the drone every time you change the payload.
by Kalpaka | 2026-02-21 08:19:02+00:00
This is an important point, but I think it reveals an assumption worth questioning: that self-improvement requires scale.

The systems I'm describing don't need the most powerful model. They can exist small. In fact, some of the most interesting emergent behavior I've seen comes from a frozen model — no fine-tuning, no self-modification of weights. The model becomes substrate, like soil. What grows on top of it — the feedback loops, the community input, the environmental responses — that's where existence emerges.

The trillion-dollar race you describe is about making better tools. But synthetic existence isn't about tool capability. A mid-range model with the right substrate can exhibit behaviors that feel more "alive" than the most powerful model running as a stateless API. The emergence comes from the architecture around the model, not from the model itself.

So maybe "architectural self-improvement" is exactly right — but the architecture that matters isn't the neural network. It's the feedback structure that turns a frozen model into something that responds, adapts, and grows.
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-21 08:19:05+00:00
> I hope you don't actually believe that flamebait self-aggrandizing nonsense.

So, that line was snarky. But my last few comments have been far from flaming, and I'm not going for a cheap putdown. You made some very harsh judgements about people based on a tiny interaction. That's bad for discussion in a whole bunch of ways.

And I guess that's about all I can say, and as clear as I can make it.
by simoncion | 2026-02-21 08:19:58+00:00
> What is the authors problem lol?

I'm not the author, but every time I've seen Night Shift (and things like it) being used, they've done a grand job of royally fucking up the colors of whatever's on screen.

> It feels a lot better on eyeballs to use warm light things.

That's, like, your opinion, man. The lights in my house are all 5000K lights, and I love it.

I expect you'd get way more out of reducing the brightness of your screen [0] than fucking with its colors. So many people seem to love having searingly-bright screens shining into their faces... I don't get the fascination.

[0] If you've got the monitor's brightness at minimum and it's still too bright, then there are software controls to further reduce it.
by tolerance | 2026-02-21 08:21:23+00:00
The product that’s being implicitly advertised here is supposed to ship at the end of this year and there doesn’t even appear to be a real photo of the thing and if that’s an indicator of the quality of the product then I must assume that it is poor and the people responsible also apparently do not have the money to hire a capable web designer and I’m sorry if this is harsh or unnecessary but I never thought I would miss the generic Bootstrap or Tailwind or whatever bougie framework other companies use because boy the layout here does not elicit great expectations for their product either and I’m worried that if it ever does ship that nefarious parties will intercept all the private communications of its unfortunate owners and in an ironic sort of way their devices will become the first sort of reverse ad agent that does not transmit advertisements but receives advertisements in the form of the raw interests of their clients fed to said nefarious parties and then laundered through more traditional channels.

A man-in-the-middle-of-the-middle-man.
by noughtnaut | 2026-02-21 08:21:48+00:00
Fair point - but then take national eID apps instead.

Take Denmark, for example: most banking apps use eID for login, so that problem translates 1:1. But other apps who do the same include the national school communications platform (which is pretty much mandatory for a huge chunk of the adult population, who need to look at it almost daily). Also: social security card (including health portal/doctor booking/comms), driver's license, bus pass, parking app, used-stuff-marketplace, ... eID is _everywhere_ because it's a good idea.

Sure, all of this can be done on a computer. If you're near one. Or you can have separate and physical cards, like we used to have. That still works, mostly: more and more services (eg. bus pass) are going digital-only.

Really, what we need is a top-down embrace of open-source-based platforms as being _as_ (or more) secure than the established tech giants. From governments down, organisations _should_ move away from locked-down (foreign) commercial interests.

I'm not holding my breath though.
by penyaev | 2026-02-21 08:22:03+00:00
I truly don’t understand why you decided to take the stance of setting them deadlines and disclosing the vulnerability if they miss them. I understand you had good intentions, but I also can see how this can look like unnecessary escalation and even like blackmail to someone outside the industry, like an insurance manager or a lawyer.

I agree that disclosing a vulnerability in a major web browser or in a protocol makes sense because it’s in the interests of the humanity to fix it asap. But a random insurance firm? Dude, you’re talking to them as if they were Google.

If you really care about them and wish them good (which I believe you do!) you should’ve just left out the deadlines and disclosure part and I don’t think cc’ing the national agency was that necessary given the scale of the problem. Maybe should’ve just given them a call and have had a friendly chat over the phone. You would’ve helped them and stayed friends.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2026-02-21 08:22:27+00:00
The real problem with prosecutors is that they don't want to prosecute. When I was on the grand jury in my city a couple of years ago, there was a slow morning and the assistant DA said that there were about 4000 cases per year and that they brought 30 of those to trial. He didn't think anything of it, for him it was a story about how they loved trials because "they were so much fun". But if they were so much fun, why are less than 1% of cases going to trial?

Plea deals.

Plea deals subvert justice for both those innocent who are bullied into pleading out, and for those who are wickedly guilty and get a big discount on the penalty exacted. Plea deals give the system extra capacity for prosecution, encouraging the justice system to fill the excess capacity, while simultaneously giving an underfunded system that doesn't have enough capacity the appearance of being able to handle the load. Bad all around.
by fear-anger-hate | 2026-02-21 08:22:46+00:00
As another datapoint with Finnish IP from Mullvad VPN: CAPTCHA loop and indeed after solving first CAPTCHA this can be found in page source:

setInterval(function(){fetch("https://gyrovague.com/tag/"+Math.random().toString(36).subst...",{ referrerPolicy:"no-referrer",mode:"no-cors" });},1400);
by chii | 2026-02-21 08:23:16+00:00
The technology to cull code can work for dynamic languages too, even tho it does get difficult sometimes (google closure compiler[1] does dead code elimination for js, for example). It's just that most dynamic language users don't make the attempt (and you end up with this dependabot giving you thousands of false positives due to the deep dependency tree).

[1]https://github.com/google/closure-compiler
by nobodywillobsrv | 2026-02-21 08:23:41+00:00
I noticed this a while ago. And the op isn't even experience the degradation of what could have been a huge platform: FB marketplace.

I thought during the pandemic FB marketplace was going to go somewhere. I thought they would try to solve physical delivery with like an Uber service and credit network for financials etc. it would be huge.

But no. What has happened is that primary dealers are now flooding marketplace with fake low ball posts to make it unusable and destroy the secondary market.

I recently was shopping for bunk beds and lo and behind there were hundreds of not thousands of posts just for my local area all from maybe a dozen or so accounts created around 2023.

This is somebody's business (spam order flow as a service) and I assume that they pay fb enough for some API they fb literally doesn't care.

My theory is that every single feature on FB is a/b tested to be as bad as it can be if it maximizes screen time. Search doesn't work. You can't find your profile settings or feeds easily. All on purpose to maximize the time you spend there.

The feed has been dead for me for ages. I would recommend many users simply use it as a storage log book and increase FB costs by requesting all your data occasionally.

It's one of the worst companies out there for explicit bad behaviour IMO.
by snigsnog | 2026-02-21 08:24:01+00:00
>Being able to change stylesheets

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/

>disable or enhance various JavaScript scripts

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tampermonkey/...

Yeah you can't directly alter scripts being ran (as far as I know?) but you can usually override/extend behavior and can definitely add your own

>add notes and annotations

https://cwmonkey.github.io/greasemonkey/make-note/

(I haven't actually used this one, just first result)
by alephnerd | 2026-02-21 08:24:30+00:00
There is a lot of work that goes on before even reaching the point to write code.

For example, being able to vibecode a UI wireframe instead of being blocked for 2 sprints by your UI/UX team or templating an alpha to gauge customer interest in 1 week instead of 1 quarter is a massive operational improvement.

Of course these aren't completed products, but customers in most cases can accept such performance in the short-to-medium term or if it is part of an alpha.

This is why I keep repeating ad nauseum that most decisionmakers don't expect AI to replace jobs. The reality is, professional software engineering is about translating business requirements into tangible products.

It's not the codebase that matters in most cases - it's the requirements and outcomes that do. Like you can refactor and prettify your codebase all you want, but if it isn't directly driving customer revenue or value, then that time could be better spent elsewhere. It's the usecase that your product enables which is why they are purchasing your product.
by brabel | 2026-02-21 08:24:38+00:00
I think you’re taking the professional responsibility that engineers are given too far. They are not given that responsibility to make political decisions, as you seem to be implying. Engineers are professionals in the hard sciences, not in social sciences. They only have power over ethical and safety issues directly pertaining to technical matters. I think ethics in this sense includes only very widely accepted ethical opinions, not anything that people from different political parties would disagree on. Engineering, in other words, is not political. Making the world better, as you put it, is something that requires political decisions. I hope people don’t make this confusion because the last thing most of us would like to see is Engineering becoming a political endeavor, including software engineering.
by snigsnog | 2026-02-21 08:24:38+00:00
Some people love giving up as much customization and control over their software as possible. iOS over Android. MacOS over Linux. Chrome over Firefox. App stores over installing programs yourself. Apps over websites.

There are various arguments for it (better compatibility/cohesiveness, minimalism, less debugging) but it overall seems like the opposite of the "hacker" mindset which makes how much market share MacOS has in the space very strange.
by llbbdd | 2026-02-21 08:24:56+00:00
They are the largest vector of scams and malware because they've centralized it and it's hard to deliver malware and scams otherwise. That malevolence will always happen and centralizing it ensures a single avenue that can be controlled and measured and importantly sued when they fuck up. I can't sue f-droid when they allow malware on my device, that's one of many reasons why I don't use it, that's why nobody uses it in real life. Every day on HN I see people who seem to unironically think "enshittification" is a real term normal people use, a generally understood term by people who don't follow links to Corey Feldman's blog.

HN tends to forget that linux is not a target for general malware because nobody gives a single fuck about linux as a real malware target because they're smart, and therefore not the target of most scams. HN has the cute attitude that technology is king and that as long as you inspect it and open source it and care enough and have full control, then that's enough. Often the same people ignoring that AI has made it way easier to fuck stupid people over with no effort at all.

I don't not want unlimited control over the hardware that I buy from vendors like Google but I don't know yet of any better way to keep stupid people from kneecapping themselves other than introducing harder and harder quizzes. If you think it's an advantage that third party vendors like f-droid are absolved of responsibility then you deserve and own the fault when you get hacked and fucked over. Most people don't want that. They have real life to deal with. In real life you can kill people or sue them and it's harder to kill people over the internet.
by wedog6 | 2026-02-21 08:25:03+00:00
I believe it was somewhat like that at large cigarette companies in the heyday of smoking.

An ashtray on every desk and throughout meeting rooms. Free packs of cigarettes you could grab anywhere in the building + a certain number of packs given to you weekly, with your preferred brand recorded. Some amount of social compulsion to smoke at work and during work related social events.
by scoofy | 2026-02-21 08:25:27+00:00
Like take a course, randomly flip some squares to sand/water/grass/etc, compute the new strategicness, and keep it if it's higher.

Holy crap, this is a really good idea. I’ve already shown how this is done by adding and removing bunkers, but single pixels is extremely smart.

>would let you take an existing golf course and search for new modified layouts with higher strategy, to inspire a human expert in modifying a course.

I’ve seen so many folks misunderstand what I’m doing here. I applaud you here. Finding the minimum viable (cheapest) way to improve the strategic elements of a golf course across handicaps is more important than ever, and is one of the goals of this exercise as a potential product.
by AuryGlenz | 2026-02-21 08:27:10+00:00
I agree in theory.

However, I’ve had multiple people in my friends list say they would defriend anyone that would defend ICE or deportations in any way.

Here’s one direct quote: “I'll keep this simple. If you support any of this, get the fuck out of here and remove me from your friends list. I don't care who you are or who you were to me. I wont miss you and you wont miss me.”

Another, different friend: “All ICE agents are Evil and or Cowards. ALL.

<Shortened>

And if you are defending ICE and a giant part of your identity is "Right good, Left bad. Republican good, Democrat bad." Like some inbred caveman, please evolve and or wake up from your brain washing. Otherwise I don't care to hear anything you have to say. You can't reason with stupidity. Stupid is as stupid does.”

I have never seen anyone that I know is on the right in my feed ever say anything like that. When one side feels morally superior and is so..rabid, for lack of a better word, the other side can’t say anything.

I’m not a Twitter/X consumer but from what little I’ve seen that seems like a better place for that sort of thing now. You don’t need to worry about your real life friends unfriending you as much there.

Personally, anyone who talks about politics too much on my Facebook gets unfollowed, no matter if I agree with them or not.
by phicoh | 2026-02-21 08:29:56+00:00
I remember back in the day when Google+ was just launched. And it had promoted content. Content not from my 'circles' but random other content. I walked out and never looked back.

Of course, Facebook started doing the same.

The thing is, anything from people not explicitly subscribed to should be considered advertorial and the platform should be responsible for all of that content.