MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ramses0 | 2026-02-23 16:30:57+00:00
For a while I really dug in to multiple player (and teams-of-players) ELO calculations. I got into an argument with my friend about whether second place was any better than last place... specifically in poker, but applicable to multiple games (imagine chinese checkers [race to finish], or carcassonne/ticket-to-ride [semi-hidden scoring until the end]).

His POV was that "if you don't win, you lose" and my POV was "second place is better than last place". His response was: "if I play poker to get first place it's wildly different than playing for second or third place [and I may end up in last place wildly more often due to risk % or bad beats]"

I've been more used to "climbing" type performance games (ie: last place => mid-field => second place => first place) and in my gut I wanted my ELO to reflect that (top-half players are better than bottom-half players), however his very valid point was that different games have different payout matrices (eg: poker is often "top-3 payout", and first may be 10x second or third).

I think in my mind I've settled on EV-payout for multiplayer games should match the "game payout", and that maybe my gut is telling me the difference between "Casual ELO" (aka: top-half > bottom-half), and "Competitive ELO" (aka: only the winner gets paid).
by koolba | 2026-02-23 16:30:58+00:00
> You shouldn't be able to borrow money to buy a company, then transfer the debt used to buy the company on to the company itself.

Why not and how would you stop? It’s no different than a company issuing bonds to buy back its own equity.

I agree that it’s contributing to the enshitification of many end consumer industries, but I’m not sure what such a “ban” would look like it practice.
by jelder | 2026-02-23 16:31:03+00:00
DuckDB had the right idea: just allow some flexibility in the relative order of the `select` and `from` clauses, and make a few other concessions for ergonomics. This then becomes valid:

from events -- table is first, which enables autocomplete
select
count(), -- * is implied, easier to type
customer_id, -- trailing commas allowed everywhere
group by all -- automatically groups by all non-aggregate columns
order by all -- orders rows by all columns in selected order

https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/sql/dialect/friendly_sql
by lucianbr | 2026-02-23 16:31:04+00:00
What makes it manipulation? If 5 companies want to buy a quadrilion ram chips to build datacenters, why is this manipulation moreso than a million companies each wanting to buy 100 ram chips?

I think the problem is that both the buyers and producers are too large. Governments should not allow companies to become this big, because... <gestures broadly at everything>. If there were a thousand ram makers and a thousand datacenter builders, this particular problem would not exist.

But you can't just label any price evolution you dislike as "price manipulation".
by TZubiri | 2026-02-23 16:31:17+00:00
Not only it is mentioned, but it's mentioned that it was mentioned as early as 1950, by none other than Claude Shannon:

>""under perfect play all chess games be a the same single one outcome of the following (we just currently don’t know which one, “A” playing the white pieces):
Mr. A says, “I resign” or Mr. B says, “I resign” or Mr. A says, “I offer a draw,” and Mr. B replies, “I accept"
by nzach | 2026-02-23 16:31:33+00:00
Has anyone ever tried to have a SMTP server to receive e-mails and have an integration with third-party services to send e-mails (aws ses, sendgrid, ...) ?

In my experience receiving e-mails is easy, you just need to deal with some spam. But reliable e-mail delivery can be tricky, especially if you don't send a lot of e-mails regularly.
by hablary | 2026-02-23 16:32:30+00:00
Just look how sloppy and unethical these people are. Not only is the company that conducted this sham "report" partnered with Cardi B's agent, they're literally buddy-buddy with David Wander, the chief digital officer at Jay-Z's Roc Nation. This is clearly a targeted opposition research dressed up as "analysis"

Why would Nicki Minaj (someone with more than 300 million followers across all social media platforms, 26 million on Twitter alone) ever need a bot farm to boost her content?

Really disgraceful that Politico would publish something like this without scrutiny of the source's biases
by sowbug | 2026-02-23 16:32:53+00:00
A trademark sets your brand apart from competitors. If your competitors are other brands of mushrooms, then "Mushroom" is too broad. But if you're trying to distinguish yourself from other brands of packaging, it might work.

If it got litigated and I were the judge, I'd be concerned they were trying to abuse trademark to get patent-like protection. In the narrow packaging market, another mushroom packaging competitor would have trouble talking about its product without mentioning the word "mushroom" and drawing the ire of Mushroom™ lawyers.

Disclaimer: lawyer law blah blah
Show HN: Free ecommerce platform for link-in-bio people
by arajnoha | 2026-02-23 16:32:55+00:00
Current generation lives in apps that evolve around the profile. That one link there is their gateway to the well curated life. Here is a minimalistic and phone-first online store platform that is actually free to start and run. Only fee applied is on successful sale.
I tried to balance the customization options and settigns with simplicity in one single dashboard. Take a look!
by peter94 | 2026-02-23 16:33:06+00:00
Personally, I think Claude Code played it a little too safe here, so that's why we didn't put more emphasis on its precision.
Note that 100% precision is also easy to achieve in this case: Only match trials with papers that explicitly mention said trials via regex. So clearly we have to pay attention to both precision and recall. We just happened to go with F1 as the more or less canonical measure to take both into account, but I agree that, depending on your use case, you may be interested in other measures of accuracy.
by Ensorceled | 2026-02-23 16:33:18+00:00
People also starved to death if there was a late frost or potato blight.

When I was a kid we had an half acre potato patch a quarter acre vegetable garden. It was a fuck ton of work. It was only possible to keep up because my brother and I did most of the weeding, watering and assorted up keep during our summer "holidays"

I wouldn't wish a subsistence farming lifestyle on anyone.
by greggoB | 2026-02-23 16:33:57+00:00
> It’s not “unfounded”. Wikipedia is biased and saying that’s “propaganda” or a result of propaganda is a nonsense non-argument.

It specifically is unfounded if you have no credible sources to back it up. "Trust me bro" doesn't qualify.

> What’s with this nitpicky stuff

This is HN, you should be prepared to validate what you're saying, or accept you'll be challenged to do so.

> It’s research. Sure there’s no guarantee but given progress in LLM, I would be optimistic rather than pessimistic.

This is a really poor argument when advocating it (AI) as a viable replacement for the status quo.
by gbalduzzi | 2026-02-23 16:34:08+00:00
Yes, but it's the kind of information you need once a day on average and you are good to go.

Instead you find it placed on your smartphone homescreen, on the smartwatch, on the home dashboard, on a notification you receive every morning, on your car screen, on your computer, ... I don't need to see it constantly.

Personally I believe it is something that it is easy to integrate and that users don't perceive as useless, but 99% of the time doesn't add any value
by zamadatix | 2026-02-23 16:34:20+00:00
Are the eyes really "no better" in this scenario? From the above article it seems we tuned the behavior to the eye specifically (but not necessarily image sensors):

> Moving to a longer wavelength that does not penetrate the human eye allows new lidars to fire more powerful pulses and stretch their range beyond 200 meters, far enough for stopping faster cars. Now a claim of lidar damage to the charge-coupled-device (CCD) sensor on a photographer's electronic camera has raised concern that new eye-safe long-wavelength lidars might endanger electronic eyes.

> Producers of laser light shows are well aware that laser beams can damage electronic eyes. “Camera sensors are, in general, more susceptible to damage than the human eye,” warns the International Laser Display Association

"doesn't penetrate the human eye" seems a bit hand wavy, but I take it to mean "these length pulses in this wavelength are tuned to have the power not be enough to damage the eye". Camera lenses may not have the same level of IR filtering/gathering area or, if they do, there is nothing implying the image sensor has the exact same tolerances as the inside of the eye. From the above:

> Sensor vulnerability to infrared damage would depend on the design of the infrared filters

A heater usually damages the eyes through drying out/heating up the outside layer with constant high intensity, not by causing damage to the retina (post filtering). https://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q12691/ Enough intensity of any wavelength is enough to damage any camera or eye of course, but the scenario here seems to build that in. Similarly, I've heard of Waymo's causing 6 mph accidents but no mass reports of eye damage.

> Furthermore, since the eye blocks the IRR, the eye begins to overheat leading to eye damage and possible blindness. Because of this, you should not look at the heater for an extended period of time.
by JohnMakin | 2026-02-23 16:34:23+00:00
We'll try everything, it seems, other than holding parents accountable for what their children consume.

In the United States, you can get in trouble if you recklessly leave around or provide alcohol/guns/cigarettes for a minor to start using, yet somehow, the same social responsibility seems thrown out the window for parents and the web.

Yes, children are clever - I was one once. If you want to actually protect children and not create the surveillance state nightmare scenario we all know is going to happen (using protecting children as the guise, which is ironic, because often these systems are completely ineffective at doing so anyway) - then give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools and empower them to protect their children. They are in a much better and informed position to do so than a creepy surveillance nanny state.

That is, after all, the primary responsibility of a parent to begin with.
by schlauerfox | 2026-02-23 16:34:44+00:00
Not that you are casting shade, but to clarify in defense of a former professor of mine who worked on the FPGA avionics at Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the helicopter was designed for 5 test flights, and completed 72 before the rotor damage. https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance/inge...
by Gracana | 2026-02-23 16:34:48+00:00
Huh, interesting. Do you know if the government sees the identity of the company and the person being verified?

[edit] I did a little reading and it sounds like the company does not query the government with your ID. You get the cryptographic ID from the government, and present it to a company who is able to verify its validity directly. My source is mostly this: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/age-verification-europ...
Show HN: A self-evolving trading system with transparent orchestration
by sunnynagra | 2026-02-23 16:34:59+00:00
https://trading.snagra.com

It’s an autonomous trading system that does more than signal generation. It runs an end-to-end loop:

- market/news scanning
- opportunity discovery
- risk checks (position concentration + stop logic)
- execution through Alpaca
- rationale logging for each decision
- daily/weekly strategy evolution

The part I think HN might find interesting: the orchestration page

The orchestration page is where you can see the system as a pipeline, not a black box. It shows:

- scheduled jobs (pre-market, open, intraday monitor, close, weekly review)
- which stage is running and what each stage does
- escalation flow (scout → deeper orchestrator)
- status + outputs of each run
- links between analysis, action, and logged rationale

I built this because most “AI trading bots” show entries/exits, but not the decision process.

Core design choices

- Adaptive strategy layer (not locked to one style)

- Two-stage orchestration: fast scout + deeper decision pass
- Deterministic guardrails for risk/mechanical actions

- Public audit trail in activity feed (analysis + rationale + evolution logs)

- Suggestion workflow: people can submit ideas; system reviews before adoption

Tech stack (current)

- OpenClaw agent orchestration
- GPT-5.3 Codex for active model workflows
- Alpaca for broker/data execution
- Python scripts for screening/intel/risk/execution
- FastAPI + React site for visibility

What I’d love feedback on
1. Orchestration UX: what would make the pipeline easier to inspect/debug?
2. Failure mode design: what should be surfaced more clearly?
3. Governance: how would you structure safe community suggestions for a system like this?
by bastawhiz | 2026-02-23 16:35:00+00:00
I'm not sure anyone today really thinks self driving hinges on the hardware. Comma does a surprisingly good job with very minimal hardware (in the form factor of an old Tom Tom!). The advantage is really the device's processing power (cramming enough compute in without making it crazy expensive) and the data that the manufacturer has about the environment and training data to handle edge cases. You can't just buy those things, because the people that have them would be your competitors.
by dataflow | 2026-02-23 16:35:04+00:00
> You say that in USA there are no good teachers

No, that is not remotely what I'm saying. It's both entirely factually false and also a ridiculous extrapolation to make to a country of hundreds of millions of people.

> because any that are good will find better-paying professions?

What I am saying is that to the extent the parent may have encountered bad teachers (taking what they said at face value, whether it's accurate or not), this could be a big part of the explanation. i.e. I find it dubious that the budget would be unrelated to whatever they believe the teacher quality is. That's all I'm saying.
by ceejayoz | 2026-02-23 16:35:22+00:00
I think it's already clear (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47093049) that you struggle a bit with causality.

https://www.citizensforethics.org/news/analysis/harlan-crows...

> Harlan Crow is more than Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s secret patron—he’s also deeply intertwined with the shadowy world of Republican dark money. In fact, Crow personally took part in the creation of the post-Citizens United dark money system and secretly helped bankroll some of the new groups.
by ap99 | 2026-02-23 16:35:56+00:00
This is why UBI should scare everyone.

People see UBI and think, "Oh everyone will get basically what I have and I'm happy so they'll be happy too."

Humanity or economics don't work like that.

With capitalism we have the power to control our economic outcomes (to a large extent). Work more; earn more. This isn't perfect or always fair but life is never 100% fair.

With UBI, who do you think decides how much income you get?

And how do you think those people get that power?

And what happens when some resource is scarce and can't be given to everyone? Be it oil, medicine, medical services, food, clean water, a birth permit, etc.

Life isn't fair now - but it took a lot of blood and effort to get to this point and life can get A LOT more unfair if we're not careful.
by alephnerd | 2026-02-23 16:35:57+00:00
We warned everyone that this would happen [0] but HN fell for the populism trap.

And no one on the Hill will do anything to impact services exports, especially for voters who work in maligned industries like Tech [1], Big Oil [2], and Wall Street [3] that are overwhelmingly concentrated in single party states like California, Washington, Texas, and New York and as such can't swing elections the same way an Autoworker, Healthcare Worker, or Farmworker can.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45308408

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-11/india-dra...

[2] - https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/big-oil-is-offshorin...

[3] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-11-11/trump-s-h...
by zer00eyz | 2026-02-23 16:36:07+00:00
> Simple to use software that empowers us to both read and write hypertext4 and syndicated content

Simple to use software... this would be grand!

> Raspberry Pi OS (a Linux distribution based on Debian GNU Linux)

Is this simple? I would contend that it is not. Why do I tell people "buy apple products" as a matter of course? Because they have decent security, great ease of use, and support is an Apple Store away.

They still manage to screw things up.

Look at the emergence of docker as an install method for software on linux. We sing the praises of this as means of software distribution and installation... and yet it's functionally un-usable by normal (read: non technical) people.

Usability needs to make a comeback.
by dewey | 2026-02-23 16:36:19+00:00
I'm in a similar boat and getting customers to whitelist IPs is always a big ask. In the best case they call their "tech guy", in the worst case it's a department far away and it has to go through 3 layers of reviews for someone to adapt some Cloudflare / Akamai rules.

And then you better make sure your IP is stable and a cloud provider isn't changing any IP assignments in the future, where you'll then have to contact all your clients again with that ask.
by graypegg | 2026-02-23 16:36:22+00:00
I think the point the author is trying to make is more so about these mini networks on their own LAN, which their family uses. (And maybe dreaming of a neighbourhood utility LAN as a middle ground between LAN in your house and WAN as a just a trunk to a big ISP node) The full quote is

- A Raspberry Pi 3B+ with a 3 gigabyte hard drive setup as a "server" (makes this site available on my home network[9])
- I publish this site via GitHub Pages service for public Internet access (I have the least expensive subscription for this)
...
[9] I can view my personal web on my home network from my phone, tablet and computers. So can the rest of my family.
by armchairhacker | 2026-02-23 16:36:23+00:00
I'm saying that, in today's culture, age-gating the internet is likely to be much less effective than age-gating alcohol or tobacco. Most kids spend an appalling amount of time on social media (think, 5 hours/day*); most kids didn't spend this much time or invest this much of their lives into drugs.

* according to this survey from over 2 years ago: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2024/04/teen-social-use-mental-h...
by mapt | 2026-02-23 16:36:42+00:00
This system sounds like one of the many pieces of science equipment whose costs are >98% in one-off R&D engineering & mission ops, and <2% in marginal cost of construction/launch.

Imagine a hundred of these exploring Mars semi-autonomously, maybe with LoRa mesh networking, for not a whole lot more money than it cost to send one.
by nevon | 2026-02-23 16:36:53+00:00
There's zero percent chance that I would proxy all my LLM calls with my API key through some third party service. However, if it was self-hostable, so that I can ensure it is only able to reach the LLM providers, I could see deploying this behind an LLM provider router. If it actually achieves the kind of token use reduction that is advertised, that would be worth paying for - especially in the enterprise. I'm skeptical of using it for product integrations, where prompts are tuned for effectiveness and efficiency, but for ad-hoc usage it probably doesn't matter too much if the phrasing affects the results a bit.
by HardCodedBias | 2026-02-23 16:36:57+00:00
I upvoted you right off reading the first line.

But then you drifted.

I have no idea what you mean by "AGI, however, is mathematically impossible."

Further, your point about political pushback is short sighted. As AI becomes more lucrative there will be more impetuous to "pay" locations to have data centers, and as that becomes too expensive space is clearly the next answer.
by infecto | 2026-02-23 16:37:26+00:00
I just fail to see your argument. You are paying for Claude code or Antigravity. Not for the raw underlying compute. It’s not about reading T&Cs but the expectation is just because you are paying for a service does not give you the right to freely use the API however you want. Hence why I said it really reminds me of a private vs public API. Don’t be surprised if you get shutout of the private API. All subscriptions are bound by acceptable use.

Maybe I am out of touch but I struggle why folks are surprised by this. I would argue that banning accounts is probably too harsh but we will see if that is a short term remedy.

There is a reason that in general the cost of a token via API is more expensive than when using the consumer tool.
by kstrauser | 2026-02-23 16:37:30+00:00
That’s fundamentally different, and I think you know that.

It’s one thing to ask an algorithm how to build an A* driving map from point A to point B. It’s another to ask one how to be a better person and go to Heaven.

I’m not religious, and I’m not arguing this from a pro-religion POV. I happily work in AI, and I’m not arguing this from an anti-AI POV. I am highly technical. I love computers. I’m excited about the future. I rely on deterministic algorithms to make my days better. And yet, I do not want to trust the words of an LLM to counsel me on how to be a better husband or father. At this stage, the AI does not know me in the way a counselor or advisor, or even pastor or priest would. And yes, I think that’s a crucial difference.
by mullingitover | 2026-02-23 16:37:43+00:00
I don't think this is about tariffs (or rather, 'loans' which are inevitably going to be forcibly disgorged by the courts).

The crypto market plunged yesterday right as news came out that the OpenAI 'Stargate' project was dead in the water[1]. I think this is a continuation of that crash, and it's the realization that, while everyone was busy partying, the AI bubble hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
by hsaliak | 2026-02-23 16:38:17+00:00
This is the way. This exact workflow is my sweet spot.

In my coding agent std::slop I've optimized for this workflow
https://github.com/hsaliak/std_slop/blob/main/docs/mail_mode... basically the idea is that you are the 'maintainer' and you get bisect safe, git patches that you review (or ask a code reviewer skill or another agent to review). Any change re-rolls the whole stack. Git already supports such a flow and I added it to the agent. A simple markdown skill does not work because it 'forgets'. A 'github' based PR flow felt too externally dependent. This workflow is enforced by a 'patcher' skill, and once that's active, tools do not work unless they follow the enforced flow.

I think a lot of people are going to feel comfortable using agents this way rather than going full blast. I do all my development this way.
by herbturbo | 2026-02-23 16:38:17+00:00
Never understood this about Amazon. Alexa is a perfect example. When the Echo devices came out around 10 years ago they blew people away with voice UI, and yet the Alexa app was and is a poorly made web wrapper with car infotainment levels of menu-driven UX.
Any chance they had of making Alexa a real consumer product died with that piss poor app and the clumsy way they implemented Skills.
by tshaddox | 2026-02-23 16:38:30+00:00
Well, if each unit leaves its own scent trail, that’s a lot of per-unit state, and little to nothing that you can pre-compute for the entire map. You could have all units trails on a global “scent layer” that all units read from, but then you’re basically just building up a graph of common paths that could have been precomputed for the entire map.

It also doesn’t at all address inter-unit collisions, which is a big topic in RTS pathfinding.