MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rstuart4133 | 2026-02-14 01:20:48+00:00
> its too much of a coincidence for me that mrna was not viable until the very moment that it was needed.

Shrug. Such things do happen. The history of development of mRNA crosses decades, with many wrong turns. The final tweaks needed to make it work did happen not long before COVID happened on the scene, but as COVID had not been heard of at the time I can't see how that could be have been artificially orchestrated. The mRNA developers did get extraordinarily lucky when a pandemic generate a healthy return on their decades of investment just as it became viable. Having read the history of mRNA, I don't begrudge them their luck. Individuals invested huge amounts of time, took large personal risks (to the extend of being fired for their persistence) in making it happen. Such efforts usually aren't rewarded.

> i vehemently disagree that further testing would have been redundant.

There was one recorded death to due mRNA COVID vaccines in Australia. Nearly everyone who was vaccinated in the early stages got several doses mRNA. So at the absolute best, more testing could have prevented one death there. But maybe not. Given that, your vehemently disagreement is difficult to understand.

> therefore the world could have waited a year, locked down

I don't know where you live, but in liberal Western democracies lock downs are problematic. The USA mostly failed at it as did most places. Australia did better, but babies going without food when parents weren't allowed to leave apartments effected with COVID caused a lot of angst even with people who broadly agreed with the direction the government took. Such mistakes are entirely avoidable of course, but when sudden drastic action happens fubar's are inevitable. (And it wasn't that serious because locals who weren't in a locked down zone purchased food out of their own pockets and dropped it off.)

The reality is, the enforced of vaccination for some groups of people was much easier for most Australians to swallow than those lock downs, mask mandates, enforced distancing, mandatory tracking apps on your phone, and enforced hand washing. You are in a small minority that thinks otherwise. When you look at the social and economic costs of lock downs vs mRNA vaccines (which history has shown to be very safe), the choice looks to be a no-brainer to me. China did for example did go the lock down route, and were able to enforce it because they aren't a liberal democracy. The outcome by every metric was far worse that Australia, who abandoned lock downs as soon as enough vaccines became available.
by helterskelter | 2026-02-14 01:20:53+00:00
I had an account at the time! He gave the govt the key, handwritten on paper, to stall for time so he could delete everything. I wish every admin had that sort of integrity.

He had a followup project, magma (https://github.com/lavabit/magma), that was supposed to be a secure email alternative. It's a shame it never took off.
by gucduck | 2026-02-14 01:21:05+00:00
Totally fair to question it. I did ask a couple friends to go through the workflow of reading the post, trying the beta, and optionally commenting.

Astroturfing is actually one of the problems I’m trying to solve. Civie has optional identity verification (via Persona), and anonymous responses can be filtered down to verified-only. The idea is to make participation easier while still giving people a way to look at results that are harder to game, with everything aggregated and publicly inspectable.

On the “influence campaign” part, I’m honestly just trying to get feedback during an early beta, not shape anyone’s opinions. And for trust more broadly, you probably shouldn’t just take my word for it. The only real answer is transparency over time. That’s why I’m attempting to build this in public and gather as much feedback as I can.
by riazrizvi | 2026-02-14 01:21:42+00:00
I spent ten years on reddit looking closely at the evolution of manipulation patterns from its early days to what it has become. The current anti-Trump admin positions are maintained far beyond the subtle techniques, the moderators on mainstream subreddits like /r/news will permanently ban you for not towing the line on left positions in your commenting.

I don't assume it's astro-turfed, I assess it is, and I want answers to confirm or refute it.
by Springtime | 2026-02-14 01:22:36+00:00
I've seen it used in non-addictive ways for search results (both specialized[1] and generic global search engines) and portfolios (for showcasing work progressively not merely constantly appending content to the end of singularly viewed work like say news sites do now), off the top of my head.

[1] Eg: printables.com (for open source, 3D print files)
by GaryBluto | 2026-02-14 01:22:38+00:00
The concept of "both-sidesism" is a thought-terminating cliché that attempts to be a more reasonable sounding way of saying that one side is holy and the other is sinful that was invented on social media platforms for propaganda purposes.

> What the republicans have been doing is nothing at all like what the democrats have done. All of the work of making Americans distrust their government from the executive in the last 60 years have come from Republicans

Many examples have been given in this post's comments alone and are already well-known by the average HN user, such as:

1. The Snowden Leaks (Obama)

2. The Pentagon Papers (exposed under Nixon, describes actions under Kennedy and Johnson administration)

3. The IRS Targeting Controversy (Obama)

4. DOJ Surveillance of Journalists (Obama)
by coldtea | 2026-02-14 01:22:38+00:00
It's 2026.

We can have word of mouth, genuine, in forums and social media. We can have

We can have reviews, genuine, in websites.

We can have websites which present new products and business, not as paid sponsorships.

We can search on our own initiative and go to their website.

We can have online catalogs.

And tons of other ways.
by shimman | 2026-02-14 01:22:48+00:00
If it's so easy to do this, then it should also be easy to not make addictive apps right? Why are multi billion dollar companies unable to make a compliant app? They clearly have no issues paying for labor and since this is software, the labor is the true cost for compliance. Are they unable to hire devs that are unethical or what?

Shesh, maybe we should start fining individual developers too if companies aren't able to do it themselves.
by Morromist | 2026-02-14 01:22:56+00:00
It would be fun to know what the oldest autotiles game is. DigDug from 1982 had them I think. diggerfrom 1980 might have used them.

There has to be some ancient ascii game that uses them. I'm sure they go back further than 1980.

Edit: now that I look at Digger & digdug I'm not sure either of those used autotiles. But I do think you'll find some games that used them in the very early 80s.
by zer00eyz | 2026-02-14 01:23:16+00:00
Do I feel bad for the above person.

I do. Deeply.

But having lived through the 80's and 90's, the satanic panic I gotta say this is dangerous ground to tread. If this was a forum user, rather than a LLM, who had done all the same things, and not reached out, it would have been a tragedy but the story would just have been one among many.

The only reason we're talking about this is because anything related to AI gets eyeballs right now. And our youth suicides epidemic outweighs other issues that get lots more attention and money at the moment.
by apothegm | 2026-02-14 01:23:18+00:00
It’s different at each place. Current is unmetered, and they claim to encourage taking a minimum of 20 days/yr but I haven’t been here long enough to gauge how true that is.

I’ve had anything from 10 days combined vacation / sick to 4 weeks vacation plus two weeks sick. To startups where PTO is unmetered but nobody feels they can more than about 7 days per year.

Thats always on top of holidays, which vary from about 7/yr to 12/yr.
by worldsayshi | 2026-02-14 01:23:19+00:00
I think I see your point. I've had it in the back of my head too.

Guess it's like the separation between backend and front-end. When the logic is neatly wrapped in a nice API you can potentially get a lot of reusability from that since the API can be integrated into other things with other use cases.

But a TUI probably doesn't naturally come with a separate backend. However, if a cli is built in a non TUI way it is about as flexible as a backend. Output can be streamed into pipes etc.

I can't stream k9s output into a pipe or variable but I can with kubectl.

Would be nice if we could have the cake and eat it here. Can TUI frameworks encourage having it both ways?
by MisterTea | 2026-02-14 01:23:34+00:00
> the "wonder" of drywall is entangled with the fossil fuel economy in a way that makes earth-based construction methods look increasingly attractive as that supply chain unwinds.

I keep thinking of that scene in Brazil where the hero, Harry Tuttle, opens a modular wall panel in Sam's apartment.

We standardized on 16 inch stud spacing here in the US a long time ago when we likely still used cement with a plaster skim coat on wood lath. Cutting up a board of nearly the same stuff feels primitive. You have to break open the wall to fix things.

To me the next logical step is a standard for modular walls that are laid out on a grid structure. I get that no one wants exposed screw holes but I can think of ways to hide them or make them part of a decorative pattern to blend them in. The coverings would be made to be cut to size as well. Wall panels would have to be environmentally friendly so wood is a first choice in natural and/or composite forms.

If you think this will look boxy then look up the passive house and notes on home building. Homes with a winding structure are difficult to seal reliably and roof so a boxy home is actually more economically friendly in terms of insulation to reduce HVAC energy consumption.
by ddtaylor | 2026-02-14 01:23:39+00:00
That's like saying we shouldn't push the space exploration boundary because people are so used to staying within it.

If you want to make the argument that singularity has occurred and that knowledge oracles are no longer needed, that's a bold claim.

If you want to make the argument it would escape our control, etc. that's a valid argument for proper controls.

If you want to make the argument that LLMs are sentient and that it's not ethical to "enslave" them, that's also a pretty bold stance currently.

Humans have been inventing technology and improving the quality of life (of our species!) for a very long time and that strategy hasn't changed IMO
by subjectsigma | 2026-02-14 01:23:44+00:00
I was thinking about this the other day - I watched a video about the acme editor and it was showing off text editing in a shell buffer, much like M-x shell. I realized I haven’t yet found a terminal emulator that will let you select text with a mouse while you’re editing in the shell. It’s such a simple thing that would be so useful, especially on a Mac where CUA bindings don’t conflict with terminal escape codes. iTerm lets you Option+click to position the cursor but you can’t select a word with the mouse and press ‘delete’. Why? It seems like such a simple thing to do.
by crossroadsguy | 2026-02-14 01:24:20+00:00
That's the thing. Android is equally bad in their own idiosyncratic ways. Or actually worse if you factor in stuff like Google tracks everything you do or don't do on the phone or while having the phone on you and sells/exposes those trackings to advertisers, even when you explicitly ask it to not do that. Its distractive design is by design.

If you are going to change the iOS just for the keyboard (and yeah it's keyboard is bad; but that's not even a mild atrocious design and implementation decision they have made) then I guess your intention is just a big rant and a this post and a little discourse and that's it. Esp. the 120 days timeline. To be honest if you had to switch you'd have switched you know if Apple even does such "fixings" they will take decades (not years) because 1). yes, they are that incompetent when it comes to software, 2). they wouldn't want to mix the opportunity to say even something silly like For the First Time on an iPhone™ you have TrueAutocorrect™ (which will stick suck and will be at least 2 decades behind the 20th worst Android keyboard)

So yeah, good luck.
by throwaway173738 | 2026-02-14 01:24:43+00:00
Because for all of the issues I take with Obama over Snowden, there were also attempts to keep promises and maintain stability and order within the country. Say what you will but there were no literal masked thugs kidnapping people at gunpoint under Obama. With many things you have to weigh a person’s actions in balance, and in balance Trump is way way way way way way worse than Obama.
by coldtea | 2026-02-14 01:24:53+00:00
>Suppose you sell insulation and replacing the insulation in an existing house could save $2 in heating and cooling for each $1 the insulation costs. Most people know that insulation exists, but what causes them to realize that they should be in the market for it when they "already have it"?

The same legit things that can cause them to realize it today. Word of mouth, a product review, a personal search that landed them on a new company website, a curated catalog (as long as those things are not selling their placements).

An ad is the worse thing to find such things out - the huge majority ranges from misleading to criminally misleading to bullshit.
by godelski | 2026-02-14 01:24:57+00:00
> To be clear, I don't think coming up with relativity was "in distribution" based on the results of the time.

This is difficult to infer from the context of the conversation.

> only believe that (1) if it hadn't been Einstein, it would very soon have been someone else

I also agree, but am unsure of your point.

> (2) "completely novel idea" is a stricter criterion than "not in distribution,"

Sorry, I used a looser word. If you have a strong definition of what "in distribution" means I'll be happy to adapt.

> (3) better examples of completely novel ideas from history exist

Sure. Maybe? I can't judge. I think determining how novel something is really requires domain expertise. I only have an undergraduate degree in physics so I am not really qualified on determining the novelty of relativity, but it appears fairly novel to me fwiw. (And I am an enjoyer of scientific history. I'd really recommend Cropper's The Quantum Physicists: And an Introduction to Their Physics as it teaches QM in a more historical progression. I'd also recommend the An Opinionated History of Mathematics podcast which goes through a lot of interesting stuff, including Galileo)

> I think ancestor worship is also an impediment to understanding our intellectual and cultural heritage

I'm in full agreement here (I have past comments on HN to support this too tbh. Probably best to search for things related to Schmidhuber since that's when ancestor worship frequently happens in those topics). It's good to recognize people, but we over emphasize some and entirely forget most. I don't think this is malicious but more logistical. Even Cropper's work misses many people but I think it is still a good balance considering the audience.

I think the best way to avoid the problem is to remember "my understanding is limited" and always will be. At least until we somehow become omniscient, but I'm not counting on that ever happening.
by lippihom | 2026-02-14 01:25:05+00:00
I don't understand why people are such huge fans of iMessage / iOS. I have both an iPhone and an Android and the iPhone texting experience is worse in almost every way, including getting way more spam.

Why doesn't a keyword filter exist? Any time someone tries to send me a recruiting message, just let me flag it for auto-deletion please. Jfc.
by initramfs2 | 2026-02-14 01:25:24+00:00
How did you arrive at that conclusion? Dividing infinity by 1m or 1b doesn't matter if it's really infinite. Just make more machines to make the machines. The existential crisis happens afterwards, and people will kill themselves off without the need for any class warfare at all. In fact the owner class will die first since there will be no more conception of ownership, since everything is supposedly abundant and at your fingertips.
by phoronixrly | 2026-02-14 01:25:45+00:00
Unless you're paying you are not entitled to anything apart from forking and fixing it yourself.

You are especially not entitled to bullying maintainers as has been unfortunately the standard in infosec.

Open source is not about you.

https://gist.github.com/richhickey/1563cddea1002958f96e7ba95...

IMO more projects have to explicitly state this for example in a terms document, like this: https://github.com/mhoye/maintenance-terms/blob/main/MAINTEN...
by peptideunlock | 2026-02-14 01:25:51+00:00
We've compiled research on the 'Wolverine' stack (BPC-157 for local healing + TB-500 for systemic repair) — dosages, mechanisms, and animal/human data from 2025–2026 studies. Not medical advice, just for discussion: What's the real-world efficacy vs risks in biohacking? Thoughts on regulatory hurdles?
by coldtea | 2026-02-14 01:26:18+00:00
>Suppose a company wants to write some product documentation so customers and prospective customers know what features their product has and how to use them. They hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it. Is there a good way to distinguish this from advertising?

Yes. You self host it as a company, and it can only be reproduced (if they wish) in outlets (say review sites) when there's no payment or compensation of any kind involved for that.
by palata | 2026-02-14 01:26:23+00:00
> Plenty of open source projects consider themselves

I don't think that the article is incompatible with that. If you benefit from an open source project, that's good. If you benefit from more (a community, documentation, support, ...), that's even better! But you are not entitled to any of that.

> And this "us experts vs. entitled users" mentality is cultural poison.

I can't say what the author's mentality is, but after a lot of open source, my opinion is this: users of open source code tend to not understand that they are not entitled to anything at all. I don't say it in a bad way: they just aren't.

If you read the discussions here, it's obvious: many users of open source genuinely believe that it is not enough to share work for free: if one feels like sharing their work for free, they somehow "should have the decency to share even more work for free" (like documentation, support, reviews). But that is wrong! Again:

- If someone shares code for free, it's nice.

- If someone shares code for free, and documents it for free, and reviews PRs for free, and offers support for free, it's even nicer.

That's all there is. Maybe that someone is an asshole. You don't have to like them, you don't have to use their code, you don't have to engage with them. It's not a good thing to be an asshole. But still, you are not entitled to anything. Just take whatever you want from what is offered to you, and don't complain about not receiving even more.
by mindslight | 2026-02-14 01:26:35+00:00
I lost faith that the government represents my interests with Binney, Klein, and Snowden. I then lost faith that the government won't go out of its way to deliberately harm me with Turmp. A pattern of escalation is still escalation.

But to anybody only just waking up to this unaccountable surveillance-industrial complex now: Welcome! While I wish you had been with us after Snowden, I am glad you are here now.
by BadBadJellyBean | 2026-02-14 01:26:49+00:00
Stein auf Stein, Brick on Brick. It's what makes the German feel safe. It will last forever. I will break everything but the walls if I hit them. I need heavy machinery to put a screw into the wall. It feels right for the German. Wooden houses are for eccentric people with too much money for a disposable house.

As much as I don't want to be a stereotypical German thick walls feel right to me. But I honestly don't think that our building style is the true one. It is just what I am used to.
by lysace | 2026-02-14 01:26:50+00:00
None of the quotes were damning enough to fit the narrative they at some point decided to go with.

Wired has devolved into pure outrage reporting with like 80% political focus. Just have a look at their front page: https://www.wired.com/

Kind of funny, since it was known for the opposite (fluff pieces) during it's first and only influential decade. Yes, the first few years had some great writing. But so much fluff, too.
by deaux | 2026-02-14 01:26:52+00:00
Wrong. Stop being so brainwashed by party politics.

Corporate dems - which are all of them in the last two decades - doing little for the average citizen, protecting megacorps, accelerating wealth concentration, protecting the billionaires, have also played a big role in maling the average citizen distrust their government.

Do you really think not a single one of them knew about the Epstein files? You can't be taken seriously if you do. And if you don't, their participation in keeping it hidden too builds distrust, even if 20 times more reps were involved. The dem candidate of only 10 years ago must have known. The chance she didn't is so small.

Snowden's revelations built distrust. Everything he revealed was absolutely "both sides". You can say "one side has been much worse", and sure, that's fair. But pretending that the other has been squeaky clean and that their own actions haven't played a huge role in the current situation is just sticking your hand in the sand.

People are tired of having to choose between "awful A" and "even worse B". If the dems stopped nominating "awful A" and replaced then with "decent A" then it'd be a landslide. But they won't. They haven't changed one bit. Mamdani, finally an example of "decent A", was hindered. They didn't want to see him win at all, and only started cheering for him when he finally did. By a huge margin, because he's a "decent A".

Until this changes, until the day that decent candidates of Mamdani are universally cheered on and given the full first choice backing by that party, not a single thing will get better, and it will only get worse, because it means the inevitable next rep winner will be even worse.

I'm not sure how you got this mindset, but it's not great, and I'm sure deep down you're smarter than this. These aren't football teams to cheer for.
by malcolmgreaves | 2026-02-14 01:26:54+00:00
Wrong. They are kidnapping American citizens and exiling them. They’re imprisoning people that criticize the government.

It’s a totalitarian regime. With enough time, will come after all dissenters.

> popular hotbed of political activism

First, it is unbelievably illegal for the government to do this.

Second, pain is their objective. Republicans have had no principles since they elected Trump in 2016. Their only objective is to hurt whomever they consider the enemy.

And everyone that isn’t screaming “I love the orange dictator!” is an enemy.
by ddtaylor | 2026-02-14 01:27:32+00:00
> Okay so the job of "cook" just became "grease disposal engineer"?

That is the current way the job works. The idea that even the most basic "burger flipper" job is isolated into a single dimension (flipping a burger) is false. That worker has to get supplies, prepare ingredients, stage them between cooking, dispose of waste product, etc.

> Literally I've said something to the person behind the counter who pointed to the iPad and when I said I wanted something else, shrugged and said we can't do that.

That's because corporate told them to maximize kiosk usage or because the employee was lazy. That's always going to happen. The McDonalds in Union Station DC has broken glass on the floor, because it's a shithole and the employees don't care, but it means not much else IMO