MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robtherobber | 2026-02-26 15:55:20+00:00
> Firms are just other people. They take on more and more risk.

I have to disagree with that, I think it's a very American interpretation on the situation.

A business is an organised legal/economic entity with capital, reserves, insurance, legal advice, hiring processes, and the ability to spread risk across many workers and time periods. It can come into (legal) existence and dissolve without anyone automatically becoming destitute or actually dying. In contrast, a worker has but one body, real health to care for, and far less financial buffer. I think that equating businesses and people not only hides the actual power imbalance, but ignores how reality works.

In terms of risks, sure, hiring involves uncertainty, of the financial order, not a life-or-death kind of thing. And it doesn't justify transferring the cost of that uncertainty onto the least protected party. Like I say above, we allow businesses to operate on the premise that the society benefits from their activities; there are risks associated with running businesses, but there's no point to have them if society stands more to lose than to gain by having them. No one is forcing businesses to ever increase their profits (and shift the risks) once they become stable, but it would be hard to argue that people can afford not eating, having a place to live in, or stop rearing children. We simply can't conflate these two entities here and blur the line between life ontology and legal (that is, made up) concepts.

The risk to the employer is that a bad hire can cost money, time, management effort. To the worker that can mean arrears, debt, eviction risk, food insecurity, etc., including death. In fact the very idea of labour law emerged on the basis of unequal bargaining power, which makes "freedom of contract" a fiction in many cases.

As for probation, from what I know is mostly a contractual/process tool in UK practice, not a magic legal lock-in. ACAS guidance does not say "you cannot dismiss in probation"; it says employers should have a valid reason and follow a fair procedure: https://www.acas.org.uk/dismissals

I see no reason to assume that a business model is entitled to be low-commitment; if it depends on labour, then the cost of employing people decently is part of the model. They are forced to accept it in order to be allowed to operate in society. Conversely, if the model only works by making labour disposable, that in itself works as evidence against the model, not against protections.

We should also try not to fall for the false symmetry between quitting and firing, in my view, because "easy to quit" is irrelevant to whether employers should have obligations or not. For the worker quitting a bad job still bears real costs (income gap, search time, stress, potential destitution), whereas when the employer fires someone it continues to retain the enterprise, assets, and ongoing revenue capacity.

This paper presents some useful details as well: https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp2039.pdf
Show HN: I'm building TaskWeave, a task orchestrator
by spicypoke | 2026-02-26 15:55:43+00:00
Hi, I'm building a task orchestrator library with the ability to specify dependencies between task and with an ability to pass return value into the next task.
So something like following is possible:

1. Task1 executes its operation and returns 5
2. Task2 depends on Task1 and retrieve the value returned by Task1, that is 5.
3. Task2 executes its operation and uses the value from Task1.

The tasks also type safe, so there's no need for runtime type casting.

I'm looking for feedback and ideas, I was thinking to add branching and loop, but I would love to hear your thoughts.
You can find it here: https://github.com/spicyPoke/TaskWeave
by parineum | 2026-02-26 15:55:53+00:00
> Your average industrial assembly-line worker is _not_ middle class. They are horrible jobs no-one really wants back, or at least not for themselves.

That's incorrect. Factory work is a ramp from low to middle class. It's low skill on entry but teaches on the job. Long term employees are valuable because they have expertise on the process and are, therefore, more valuable.

Ask Detroit if they want the Auto Industry's manufacturing back.
by john_strinlai | 2026-02-26 15:56:17+00:00
ah, okay. so the hypothetical company may potentially be doing something illegal (the "investigative consumer report" part). good to know! that makes sense, and i was unaware of that.

i stand corrected in the hypothetical "bad reference aggregator company" scenario.

>YCombinator partners are on the record[3] supporting the idea of their startups sometimes doing illegal things.

interesting, thanks for surfacing that up! i wont pretend to be surprised, though.
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-26 15:56:27+00:00
> The USA being richer, can afford to do it right and safer, not through regulation, but through process.

If you don't have regulation, for profit industry won't do it right “through process”, because that would be throwig away money. Regulation is how you do it right through process.

> So what would you do if you ACTUALLY cared about the people and environment? Put high tariffs on dangerous process products, reduce regulation (permits, etc), increase standardization and final safety measurements. Then the products we use, we make, safely.

Standardization and final safety measurements are literally regulations (and permitting is just a means of enforcing standardization.) So, basically, you “cut regulations” plan is actually to pair regulations doing exactly what the regulations you claim to cut do, call them a different thing, and add tariffs on top.

Which, is a long winded way of just saying “add tariffs”, which of course, a US state can’t do.
by martinwoodward | 2026-02-26 15:56:48+00:00
I kinda wish I had that much power. There would certainly be less people in the world listening to their phones without headphones..

Usually starts with contacting them over email reminding them of the terms of service and warning them to stop. Then their account might get deactivated and they need to write and promise to not be naughty again. If they ignore that then the account gets removed.

There are a bunch of automated checks that are running all the time as well and will take automated action that then gets later reviewed by humans. At lot of times the process is fast-tracked.

The off-platform 'let's scrape a bunch of data and then spam nice people' is the hardest to police. Linking those mails to an offending GitHub account is hard and very manual, also anyone can send emails saying they are someone they are not and because of that anyone can deny they sent the mail and they'll usually blame a rogue agency they where working with etc.

I probably shouldn't say it, but the public shame that comes from being mentioned on social, in hacker news etc. That stops people who want to be treated as legitimate from doing that sort of thing and helps educate the wider community around what is and isn't acceptable behaviour - that is why it's good to see this thread and see the issue getting attention.
by mcv | 2026-02-26 15:56:50+00:00
Nothing about this addresses NJB's argument that self-driving cars take up more space than regular cars, because there will now be cars with 0 people in them.

Ultimately the thing you want to transport is not cars, it's people. Walking fits the most people in a limited amount of space, then bikes, buses and other forms of public transport, then cars with 4 people in them, then cars with 3 people in them, then cars with 2 people in them, then cars with only 1 person in them, and finally empty cars. More cars will never reduce congestion.

But to address your point: A bus in a dedicated lane takes up more space than a bus that's stuck in car traffic, you are right about that. On the other hand, when congestion is so bad that cars simply don't move, no matter how many lanes they have, getting people out of cars into more efficient forms of transport, will also help cars. And a bus that actually goes, can do that. If you look in cities with good public transport, more people go by public transport than by car. In cities with good bicycle infrastructure, more people go by bike than by car. That means even cars are less likely to get stuck in traffic in those cities. Even if you take away a car lane.

I don't know where you got the idea that a bus needs 3 drivers.
by youknownothing | 2026-02-26 15:57:39+00:00
As someone who ran his own business for over eight years paying close to 30% tax (and is soon going to do it again), I have very mixed feelings about companies using tricks to reduce their tax burden. I mean, I like it when I do it, and I feel justified because there isn't that much that I can claim tax relief from, but seeing a big company paying such low tax rate feels wrong (even though it may be completely legal).

Having said that, there is something to be said of all the tax that is indirectly being generated by Meta: they pay high salaries, and the people receiving those high salaries will pay a significant amount of income tax. Same for all the dividends that they pay out. Maybe just being a big money-mover is their excuse?
by taeshdas | 2026-02-26 15:57:47+00:00
One interesting bug I ran into:

My initial validator enforced “exactly one root span” per trace. That worked locally, but completely broke when continuing traces from another service via traceparent.

Fixing that required changing the invariant to allow:

One root span (local trace), OR

One span whose parent is external (distributed continuation)

That was the moment I realized how subtle distributed tracing actually is.
by mikestew | 2026-02-26 15:58:28+00:00
Our camper van (which is a tall sail) compensates for sidewinds. Other RVs can have this feature as well, though often as aftermarket fitment. Pretty neat when it works, “man, sure is windy today, but this van is a lot easier drive in the crosswind than our old RV. Oh…”

But an RV is not a semi tractor-trailer setup. In fact, crosswind compensation is something I’ve only seen on RVs that don’t involve a trailer (Class A, Class C). And for a semi, how much is in the trailer? Seems a compensation system would need to know that.
by tzs | 2026-02-26 15:58:41+00:00
> My main concern is that there is a large lithium ion battery in a machine that is designed to get things hot. You do not want thermal runaway to happen with a battery that large inside your kitchen.

It's an induction stovetop. It doesn't itself get hot, other than whatever heat gets transferred to the top of the stove because it is in contact with the hot pot or pan sitting on top. I don't know about this one specifically but with most induction stovetops that just makes it warm to the touch in the area right under the pot or pan.

That's not going to be hot enough to be a problem for the battery even if for some reason they mounted it in contact with the bottom of the top surface, which I doubt they did.
by bArray | 2026-02-26 15:59:05+00:00
Does anybody know of a 3D generation model that can be run locally? I would be very interested to try this. There's quite a few models out there [1] and (to me) it is unclear which is the most suitable and in what scenario.

[1] https://huggingface.co/models?pipeline_tag=image-to-3d
by bmitch3020 | 2026-02-26 15:59:32+00:00
I don't use buildkit for artifacts, but I do like to output images to an OCI Layout so that I can finish some local checks and updates before pushing the image to a registry.

But the real hidden power of buildkit is the ability to swap out the Dockerfile parser. If you want to see that in action, look at this Dockerfile (yes, that's yaml) used for one of their hardened images: https://github.com/docker-hardened-images/catalog/blob/main/...
by iamnothere | 2026-02-26 15:59:33+00:00
Oh if you’re talking about O9A and the like, those groups are absolutely real and also terrifying. They are like a worse version of Kiwi Farms. KF are actually saints compared to them, as KF seems to have a vague goal of bullying bad people (in their view) off the internet rather than pushing them to terrorism.

My problem with the NVE label is the scope creep, some would like to apply that label to anyone who has a strong opinion and doesn’t fit in a neat box.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-02-26 15:59:45+00:00
We all made fun of Blake Lemoine and others for spending too many late nights up chatting with (ridiculously primitive by this year's standards) LLM chat bots and deciding they were sentient and trapped.

But frankly I feel like the founders of Anthropic and others are victim of the same hallucination.

LLMs are amazing tools. They play back what we want them to play back, and more.

Anybody who mistakes this for SkyNet -- an independent consciousness with instant, permanent, learning and adaptation and self-awareness, is just huffing the fumes and just as delusional as Lemoine was 4 years ago.

Everyone of of us spend some time writing an agentic tool and managing context and the agentic conversation loop. These things are primitive as hell still. I still have to "compact my context" every N tokens and "thinking" is repeating the same conversational chain over and over and jamming words in.

Turns out this is useful stuff. In some domains.

It ain't SkyNet.

I don't know if Anthropic is truly high on their own supply or just taking us all for fools so that they can pilfer investor money and regulatory capture?

There's also a bad trait among engineers, deeply reinforced by survivor bias, to assume that every technological trend follows Moore's law and exponential growth. But that applie[s|d] to transistors, not everything.
by Mumps | 2026-02-26 16:00:14+00:00
Yes, if OP did a full vocabulary comparison and took just those sub-threshold, it would be hacking. I'm not sure that's the case here, though? Given that (the post) OP started with em-dash, and probably didn't do repeated sampling, then it should be a pretty fair hypothesis that em-dash usage is a marker.

Your comment about p<0.05, feels out of place to me. The p-values here are << 0.05. Like waaaaay lower.

Perhaps Fisher's exact is more appropriate, on the per-word basis?
by ProllyInfamous | 2026-02-26 16:00:22+00:00
What was your final motivator to depart? Were ya'll's companies already established, or created in the moving process?

Lastly: is living in Maastricht similar to living in a US state panhandle (e.g. benefits of: border shopping; tax reasons). What drew ya'll south (V.e.g: Amsterdam)?

Any suggestions/websites for a single electrician that's been thinking about DAFT for over a decade?
by heliumtera | 2026-02-26 16:00:34+00:00
What is the significance of a company making a promise?

"We promise are not going to do __, except if our customers ask us to do, then we absolutely will".

What is the point? Company makes a statement public, so what?

Not the first time this company puts some words in the wind, see Claude Constitution.
It's almost like this company is built, from ground up, upon bullshit and slop
by electroly | 2026-02-26 16:00:35+00:00
I think I finally nailed it? I needed to update JULIA_DEPOT_PATH. I was already doing that, but I didn't do it right: I needed a trailing semicolon so it would have an empty entry at the end! The documentation talks about this but I didn't understand it at the time: https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/environment-variable...
by hsiudh | 2026-02-26 16:00:49+00:00
That is not a `good reason`, that is `convenience` and it shouldn't be used to push to install an app from increasingly hostile nations/corporations.

> It's not like they are getting some long term benefit of having the app on your phone. It's just because WebNFC can't read passports.

The same way we complain that Facebook, Tiktok, etc gather too much data from app install, so can a government agency.
by tossandthrow | 2026-02-26 16:01:08+00:00
It is easy to excuse paying taxes.

The issue that that taxes fundamentally bind two moralities: and individual and social one.

Societies generally thrive better when there is a certain level of equality. Not a hundred percent, but enough for social mobility and for people to be aspirational.

No or low taxes remove that opportunity. It bears people from taking an education and forces them in poverty.
by squidbeak | 2026-02-26 16:01:19+00:00
Oh really? You think an entity that knows everything, oversees its own development and upgrades itself, understands human psychology perfectly and knows its users intimately, but isn't aligned with human interest wouldn't be 'much of a threat'?

Or to be more optimistic, that the same entity directed 24/7 in unlimited instances at intractable problems in any field, delivering a rush of breakthroughs and advances wouldn't be a type of 'salvation'?

Yes neither of these outcomes nor the self-updating omniscient genius itself is certain. Perhaps there's some wall imminent we can't see right now (though it doesn't look like it). But the rate of advance in AI is so extreme, it's only responsible to try to avoid the darker outcome.
by brookst | 2026-02-26 16:01:19+00:00
You’ve described a naive MCP implementation but it really doesn’t work that way IRL.

I have an MCP server with ~120 functions and probably 500k tokens worth of help and documentation that models download.

But not all at once, that would be crazy. A good MCP tool is hierarchical, with a very short intro, links to well-structured docs that the model can request small pieces of, groups of functions with `—-help` params that explain how to use each one, and agent-friendly hints for grouping often-sequential calls together.

It’s a similar optimization to what you’re talking about with CLI; I’d argue that transport doesn’t really matter.

There are bad MCP serves that dump 150k tokens of instructions at init, but that’s a bad implementation, not intrinsic to the interface.
by golson_kindmind | 2026-02-26 16:01:38+00:00
Respect: that's a beautiful pack.

I'm a total sucker for ebikes and built my first ebike around 2006, powered by 40lbs of lead acid motorcycle batteries.

I recently outfitted a trailer with a large battery made for an efoil (my other obsession) where the non-battery components went bad, the company went out of business, and "Hey, this would make a bitchin' ebike battery.

Here's me cruising around the Oregon back country with said setup last summer: https://imgur.com/a/lmvJSBW
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-26 16:01:41+00:00
> $5000 can get you a reliable but unsexy used car.

$5000 can get you a 10+ year old used car with 100,000+ miles on it and no warranty. That's fine if you know how to do repairs and maintenance yourself, because then you're buying a part from the internet with a low markup and installing it yourself instead of paying four times as much for someone else to do it. But not every knows how to do that, or has time, or knows how to tell if a used car with no warranty will be reliable before buying it. And if you plop $5000 down on something with no warranty and then have to scrap it after the first year because your $5000 car needs a $5500 new engine, you're not saving money.

There is also the matter of where used cars come from. You can get one for $5000 because someone paid $30,000 to buy it new ten years ago. If more people did that, fewer new cars are sold and then fewer enter the used market and used car prices go up. So you can buy a used car for $5000, but it's not possible for "most people" to do that because if they tried to, they would no longer be available for $5000.

> I also think there's a problem with fixed spend (e.g. car payment, insurance) vs per-trip spend. Per-trip costs are felt more.

Which is the problem with mass transit. You get in your car and it feels like it costs nothing, the only thing that changed is the gas gauge went down by half a tank and the odometer went up. Meanwhile the amortized cost was actually over $100. Then you go to get on the train and you immediately have to swipe your card and get a bill for $40, which feels like a lot for one trip.

Worse, the car is $100+ per trip only if you're amortizing the fixed costs, i.e. comparing to the alternative of not having a car at all. If the fixed costs of having the car are sunk, the incremental cost of the trip is maybe $15, and then when the train is $40, nobody with a car is saving money to take the train when they can.

Whereas if the train is $0, then it's "hey that goes right where I'm going this time and I don't have to buy gas". Which, if it happens often enough, means more people don't need a car to begin with.

> A reason that public transport is often more popular in European cities because driving isn't even an option.

Obviously if you make something unavailable then people use alternatives. But in the US it's the other way around -- half the population lives in the suburbs and there is no public transport, nor can there be because the density is too low.

And then you need to find ways to make public transit more attractive rather than making cars less attractive, because making cars less attractive is going to encounter major opposition from the people who have no available option other than to use cars.
by ninalanyon | 2026-02-26 16:01:53+00:00
> doing it at city bus speeds of under 10mph would be a catastrophic collapse in your standard of living.

LA average vehicle speed during rush hour is 27.6km/h (17 mph) according to Tom Tom [1]. So a 10 mph bus would turn that 27 minute journey into 46 minutes which I'll admit is more than desirable, hardly catastrophic though.

But remember that each bus can carry about fifty people which would remove close to fifty cars from the road resulting in less congestion and faster buses. Fifty cars need 400 m of road, one bus needs only 20 m.

And on your way home you can doze in your seat without causing an accident.

[1] https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/city/los-angeles-ca
by chasd00 | 2026-02-26 16:01:53+00:00
I don't see OpenAI being too big to fail happening, the public is already very skeptical of AI. Also, there are other options available and therefore not a national security issue. Finally, OpenAI failing has no impact on employment or like societal disruption. In fact, it may increase employment if OpenAI fails.

The only other way to reach too big too fail status is if allied countries risk collapse if it goes under ( like the big banks in the financial crisis ) which I don't see happening either.
by bilbo0s | 2026-02-26 16:01:54+00:00
This.

You could also say that this is what the people have wanted for decades.

Remember the PATRIOT Act. Voted in 99 to 1 in the senate. (And the 1 who voted against it? Yeah, we got rid of him for a more "law and order" guy.)

It's just the people getting more of what they're demanding. You get the government you deserve. And you deserve to get that government good and hard.
by temp0826 | 2026-02-26 16:01:54+00:00
I mean I guess it depends on the level of use? Do you need to be nodding off, drooling on the verge of respiratory collapse to cope with the dread of your situation? (I feel like people are mostly only considering the physical reasons for starting opiates in this post btw). Or is it a more reasonable dose that allows you to participate in society unencumbered by your pains? (Which in any case is a slippery slope with long term use)
by palmotea | 2026-02-26 16:02:30+00:00
> Conventional conservative/capitalist wisdom is that corporations "don't pay taxes" because they just "pass it along to consumers as higher prices".

I'm with you, but a couple things: 1) Do you mean "shouldn't pay taxes"? Because I'm pretty sure their thing is getting corporations (and the wealthy) to pay less taxes than they already do. 2) That's not wisdom, it's a propaganda-meme. It's a misleading little story (mainly through omission) meant to get people to support a policy that's bad for them.